Why did they not drop the Atomic bombs in rural areas as a warning/show of strength before using them on cities?
In: 2423
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The US didn’t have dozens more in reserve, there was only one more working build available if I recall correctly.
More generally, the US and Japan had been in a state of total war for nearly four years at that point and many other Japanese cities had already been razed by conventional bombing runs. Tokyo was completely destroyed in march of 1945 with similar casualties.
It was well past the point of warning shots, the two nations were already committed to obliterating eachother.
The Japanese had been indoctrinated into fanaticism and a ground landing would be devastating. America had already killed more in firebombing Tokyo then died in the atomic attacks but while fire bombing was the use of arms the Japanese had and used the Atom bomb was something new and presented a massive ideological blow in addition to the physical blow. One bomb crippled a city, how many did America have? Where did they get it? Then the second confirmed the reality to those who still held doubts it could have been an unintentional fluke, America can obliterate any city with a single weapon, no location was safe. The choice was ideological propaganda to crush Japanese spirits with a symbol of overwhelming force.
it’s important to remember that the entire Manhattan Project produced a total of **three** devices. One was used for the Trinity test. That mean that the entire US stockpile was two nuclear weapons. That did not give us a lot of options in terms of using them as a “warning” particularly when it was impossible to know for certain that they would actually work (each bomb was a different design, only one of which had been tested at Trinity)
The Japanese negotiating position towards the end of the war was “we are willing to sacrifice every last man, woman, and child to prevent a US invasion of the mainland.” And there is every reason to believe that a US invasion of the Japanese mainland would have resulted in that.
You cannot apply your viewpoint of the world to a WWII Japanese civilian. They were indoctrinated from birth to believe that the Japanese Emperor was a literal god and that dying for him was the highest honor one could achieve in life. Japanese kamikaze pilots didn’t come into existence because the government forced people to do that – it came into existence because people were volunteering in droves to turn themselves into suicide bombers and the government eventually relented and allowed them to do it.
The point of dropping the atomic bombs on Japan was to show the Japanese government that the US had an alternative to invading the mainland. The bombs showed that they *would* kill every last Japanese man, woman, and child – from the air and with minimal loss of American life.
That was what ultimately showed the Japanese government that there was no point in continued resistance – they wouldn’t get a glorious fight to the death in which the US was eventually forced to soften its negotiating stance when hundreds of thousands of US troops were killed by Japanese civilians performing suicide charges with old guns, farm equipment, and sticks. Rather, the US would just sit on Okinawa, cost-effectively annihilating the Japanese population from the air.
The *could* aspect of the bombs wasn’t particularly relevant. Although the Japanese government didn’t know about the progress of the Manhattan Project, they were aware of its existence as well as how powerful an atomic bomb was. So the Japanese didn’t know when atomic bombs were coming, but they did know that if the war went on for long enough, they would eventually come.
The important aspect of dropping the bombs was showing that the US *would* use them. The reason that the Japanese didn’t surrender after the first bomb was that the government thought that the US *wouldn’t* use another bomb on civilian targets because they didn’t think the US had the stomach for it. It took two bombs to prove to the Japanese government that the US government was *willing* to use them.
Dropping a bomb in a field somewhere wouldn’t have demonstrated that the US had the willpower to use the bombs. If anything, it would have demonstrated the opposite and hardened the Japanese opposition to unconditional surrender.
There actually was some discussion about dropping it above Tokyo Bay or in a remote forested region. Fundamentally they didn’t because they were at war with Japan. They had killed a hundred thousand people in a single day of aerial bombing of Tokyo (Operation Meetinghouse), so the idea that the atomic bombs would be a huge jump up doesn’t really make sense.
They did choose not to use it on Kyoto, the original target of the Nagasaki bomb. Kyoto is a cultural heart of Japan and also was much more populous than Nagasaki. So in some sense they actually were warnings – the damage could have been much worse.
They’d already killed thousands of japanese civilians. Over 100,000 died in the firebombing of tokyo. Industrial centers and the civilians in them were unofficial combatants for everyone back in the day.
For the same reason they didn’t firebomb a forest to cinders before [doing that to Tokyo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo_(10_March_1945)) five months before the first atomic bombing.
The US Army Air Forces spent the spring and summer of 1945 systematically burning to the ground every Japanese city of even middling significance within their range. And they finished the job, too, sparing only a few cities reserved as atomic bomb targets to allow the expected new weapon’s destructive power to be accurately assessed. The idea was that this rain of destruction would both disrupt the Japanese economy and demoralize the population, hopefully winning the war from the air or at least making invasion significantly easier.
While everyone recognized the atomic bombs were a revolutionary weapon technologically, they did not change the moral calculus of the ongoing city destruction campaign one bit.
There were people that favored a demonstration, but they were in the minority. [The Interim Commission Report](http://www.nuclearfiles.org/menu/key-issues/nuclear-weapons/history/pre-cold-war/interim-committee/interim-committee-recommendations_1945-06-16.htm) favored immediate use on a military target.
>(2) The opinions of our scientific colleagues on the initial use of these weapons are not unanimous: they range from the proposal of a purely technical demonstration to that of the military application best designed to induce surrender. Those who advocate a purely technical demonstration would wish to outlaw the use of atomic weapons, and have feared that if we use the weapons now our position in future negotiations will be prejudiced. Others emphasize the opportunity of saving American lives by immediate military use, and believe that such use will improve the international prospects, in that they are more concerned with the prevention of war than with the elimination of this specific weapon. We find ourselves closer to these latter views; we can propose no technical demonstration likely to bring an end to the war; we see no acceptable alternative to direct military use.
The atom bombs were partly asymmetrical warfare. The firestorms in Tokyo and some German cities were more destructive/deadly than 1945 atom bombs. You’ll hear the phrase “hearts and minds” in military history- either as something you need to win over or something you need to defeat. By 1945, the Japanese were very soundly defeated in a martial sense, but they still had willpower. The atom bombs were dropped to defeat willpower as much as they were dropped to kill and destroy resources.
Also, bear in mind, atom bombs of 1945 were FAR less powerful than the thermonuclear weapons of the Cold War and today. Fat Man was 21kt. While devastating, that’s only 1.8% as powerful as the biggest bombs currently in the US arsenal, 0.08% as powerful as the largest acknowledged American bombs ever made, and 0.04% as powerful as the largest known bomb ever by any country. So, while detonating fat man in a field would certainly be impressive, it wouldn’t be as impressive as what we have in our minds from Terminator 2, Independence Day, Dr Strangelove, Castle Bravo footage, etc.
Other ideas:
-we needed to show Stalin our hand so he wouldn’t get ideas about continuing west past Berlin
-we wanted to see what the bombs would do against actual cities, not props built for Trinity
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