Pro tip: if your enemy is really about to surrender, nuking them once will suffice. Even after the second bomb was dropped, the Emperor faced assassination threats from the military high command for running up the white flag.

More to the point, while Hiroshima and Nagasaki were horrible events, they were cheap lessons compared to what it would have cost humanity to establish the taboo of nuclear warfare later, in Korea or elsewhere, with bombs 10x to 1000x their size.

Like you're indirectly acknowledging, the nukes had no real impact on their decision. Half their way cabinet wanted to fight to the last Japanese, half wanted to surrender. This was both before and after the nukes. The Emperor wasn't like a super-politician - he was seen as a [literally] living deity who was above politics. So the cabinet called upon him to make the final decision, which he had made long before the nukes - which was to surrender. There was no danger to him. Even the plots to undermine his decision involved destroying his announcement of surrender and leaving him under house arrest. And that plot was stopped by a speech from another officer, leading to most of the plotters to commit suicide for their dishonor.

And I don't think there were any real lessons learned. We nearly nuked ourselves during the Cold War multiple times. And today, with bombs that make Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like primitive weapons, you have people acting like nuclear war isn't something 'that' fearful. We killed hundreds of thousands of people largely for the sake of trying to get a slight geopolitical edge over the USSR. And that's far better than the alternative of there being no reason at all. In no world are the arguments about it saving lives valid, even if you attach 0 value to the life of the Japanese for having audacity to be born in the wrong country.

----

Leo Szilard was a critical scientist in the story of the atomic bomb, and he's also full of just amazingly insightful quotes. [1]

- Suppose Germany had developed two bombs before we had any bombs. And suppose Germany had dropped one bomb, say, on Rochester and the other on Buffalo, and then having run out of bombs she would have lost the war. Can anyone doubt that we would then have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and that we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them?

- A great power imposes the obligation of exercising restraint, and we did not live up to this obligation. I think this affected many of the scientists in a subtle sense, and it diminished their desire to continue to work on the bomb.

- Even in times of war, you can see current events in their historical perspective, provided that your passion for the truth prevails over your bias in favor of your own nation.

[1] - https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Le%C3%B3_Szil%C3%A1rd

You're right, in that there's no reason to assume the bombs were entirely decisive by themselves. The truth is that from the target's POV, there was nothing particularly special or interesting about the atomic bombs of the day, except that they were dropped from a single plane.

So no, they wouldn't be considered war crimes, any more than the equally-destructive firebombing of Tokyo and Dresden would be considered war crimes. Meaning, of course they would be considered war crimes, but only if the victims had won the war. That's the idea behind war. War is about doing the worst stuff you can do to the other guys, then doing whatever you can to claim the moral high ground afterward. So it's best avoided when possible.

Szilard was a great guy, and in fact he was behind the original missive to FDR that kicked the program into gear. It's as impossible -- and as inappropriate -- for us to judge him and his motivations as it is for us to second-guess Truman's decision to drop the bombs. However, he's all wet with that particular argument. Unlike Germany there was never any question that the Allied side would win the war, bomb or no bomb. The question was, what would be the cost, and who should pay that cost. I'm fine with Japan paying it. They would certainly have done the same to us, and they would certainly have skipped the subsequent navel-gazing.

By the way, it's easy to argue that the 'slight geopolitical edge' that the Bomb gave us over the USSR saved millions of lives in the future. For instance, it's far from clear that North Korea wouldn't be better off today if MacArthur had been allowed to have his way.

Imagine that the Russians had either somehow beaten us to the Bomb, or had invaded Japan in the absence of our ability to deter them. Given a choice between suffering Hiroshima and Nagasaki at our hands, and suffering a half-century of Communist rule, do you really think Japan would be better off in the latter scenario?

I don't think war is at all about doing the worst stuff you can to the other guy. Different countries approach it in radically different ways. The war in Ukraine is one of the deadliest wars in modern times, but civilians have made up an extremely small percent of all casualties. On the other extreme, Israel's war against Gaza is just a complete slaughter of civilians. And I don't think we should simply lower ourselves to lowest common denominator regardless of whether or not Japan would have done the same. This isn't even necessarily about morality either - it's simply in our self interest. The era when the US was something to look up to was also the time when we behaved in a principled fashion, or at least were perceived to be doing so.

The history of Korea is another example of this stuff, and nothing like people think. After the Korean war South Korea was ruled by a series of US backed brutal dictators. When the first was overthrown, he lived out his final years in Hawaii, just to be replaced by another, and so on. South Korea only started to become what you think of today in the 6th Republic, which began in the late 80s. The only difference between North and South Korea is that we aimed to economically attack North Korea and economically support South Korea. And given South Korea is now having an extinction level fertility crisis, the final page of how things turned out is still yet to be written.

The Ukraine war has a better civilian casualty ratio for a bunch of reasons that are not "Israel is evil and trying to slaughter civilians":

- Soldiers on both sides wear uniforms.

- When they can, Ukraine defends from trenches away from civilians.

- When urban combat seems unavoidable, Ukraine evacuates their civilians.

- Ukraine is a vast country, with plenty of safer areas to move to.

- Other countries have also accepted large number of Ukrainian war refugees.

Gaza is the opposite: Hamas fighters disguise as civilians, they defend mostly from urban areas, they never attempt to evacuate civilians (sometimes the opposite), it's a small territory, and no countries are accepting Gazan war refugees in significant numbers.

There's no military on the planet that could fight Hamas in Gaza without causing significant civilian harm.

Third party observers have observed endless bad behavior from Ukrainian forces. Amnesty International even called them out, in spite of the inevitable blow back it would (and did) receive, for actively locating their military forces in residential areas, launching strikes from civilian areas, turning schools and hospitals into military bases, and more. [1] Ukraine's response was tantamount to saying that rules don't matter for them, because they're the defender and not the aggressor.

Given these behaviors Russian forces would be justified in just carpet bombing these sort of areas that Ukrainian forces are entrenching, but they have chosen not to. By contrast that is precisely what Israel does, and also what the US does not only in WW2 but e.g. in Iraq and Afghanistan where killing dozens of civilians to get somebody who might be an enemy is considered a justifiable engagement.

And again this gets back to what I just said about this not even necessarily being about morality or ethics. Israel is in a vastly worse place now than it was on October 8th 2023, and it's unlikely things will be improving for them in the foreseeable future. Behaving good in war is simply in one's own best interest on any sort of timescale beyond the immediate.

[1] - https://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/ukraine-military-e...

> but they have chosen not to

I disagree with this premise. There are many examples of Russia striking civilian gatherings or infrastructure.

For example their Hroza village strike killed 59. If we're trying to be charitable to Russia, it's possible they knew of some important off-duty officer present in Hroza. But with our limited public info, there were no signs of any valid military targets. Can you name any IDF strike that looks worse than that?

> Israel is in a vastly worse place now than it was on October 8th 2023

There was no way Israel could have fought Hamas without significant civilian harm and bad PR. The choice was to fight a very messy war against an enemy that disguises as civilians, or leave them alone to plan the next Oct 7.

As Golda Meir put it: "If we have to choose between being dead and pitied, and being alive with a bad image, we’d rather be alive and have the bad image."

Exceptions don't define the rule, the rule does. Israeli estimates put the military wing of Hamas at having up to 17,000 members before the war. They've killed people in the hundreds of thousands in Gaza now.

In WW2 partisans would intentionally induce brutal retaliations precisely because they thought it would expose the character of the occupier, garner support for themselves, radicalize the population, and generally further their interests. And they were right. It's paradoxical because those retaliations were intended to enforce control, yet they invariably achieve the exact opposite - a recurring theme throughout history. Again getting back to the point I'm making - the reason to behave good in war is because it's in your own best interest.

> Israeli estimates put the military wing of Hamas at having up to 17,000

Where did you see that estimate? Some estimates were ~40k, with many more recruits added during the war. And not everyone attacking the IDF was Hamas-affiliated. PIJ alone had thousands of fighters, and as we saw on Oct 7, sometimes random Gazans join in on fighting too.

> They've killed people in the hundreds of thousands in Gaza now.

Hamas themselves claim ~70k, which already includes fighters and non-combat deaths. There are a lot of questionable works trying to embellish the numbers. One of them used garbage data like WhatsApp chats. Another ended up with an estimate of 380k deaths for age 0-5, which is impossible since there were never that many in Gaza.

It's interesting to compare to Ukraine, because we don't see the same desperate attempts to embellish numbers there. Zelenskyy said "tens of thousands" were killed in Mariupol, which is one significant digit; he didn't pretend to have more precision than that. He didn't send out a Google form so that they could claim a specific (but dubious) count. We didn't see a bunch of Western academics desperately trying to justify higher death counts.

The exact sources and numbers one wants to use don't really matter. You're right that there's a high uncertainty, but only in details. The overall picture is quite clear and consistent. In Gaza, Israel is primarily killing civilians under the pretext of seeking out a relatively small number of Hamas militants. And they have killed a significant percent of the entire population of Gaza, which only had a total population of ~2 million.

For instance the Lancet carried out a study using a variety of sources for cross-referencing, including things like obituaries, and found ~70k deaths in the first 8 months of the war, a war that's now been going on for years. And those deaths they measured were also only those caused directly and immediately by Israel due to traumatic injury. Famine, disease, despair, an other such deaths are not counted and bring it up substantially higher.

Politics in the US waxes and wanes, increasingly between extremes. Israel has already alienated itself from one 'side' in America, and is gradually doing the same with the other. Consequently, the fate of Israel in the future is more uncertain than ever - imagine an Israel not only lacking US support, but with an antagonistic US government in charge. And they also aren't exactly making friends with Russia or China. Making enemies of the world as a micronation is generally not a wise path to go down.

As for Ukraine, there's similarly a clear picture. There's no doubt that civilians are being killed but there's also no doubt that the vastly overwhelming majority of all deaths are military. So the situations simply aren't comparable.