Quick Take: Japan Didn't Surrender Because of the Nukes, and Ukraine Wouldn't Either

Nukes didn't impress Japan's high command all that much, which is a terrible omen as we find ourselves on the brink of WW3

The World War II era has produced much mythological history, notably around events such as the Munich 1938 conference in which Neville Chamberlain allegedly missed an early chance to crush Nazi Germany once and for all.

However, the biggest myth of all produced by that conflict may be the most influential and the most dangerous going forward: that it was the use of nuclear power against Japan that ended the war itself.

The myth created around Munich 1938 was an accretion of misunderstandings, Churchillian manipulations and sheer laziness on the part of op-ed writers and opinion makers: a private sector myth. Many people found it convenient to argue that negotiating with Sadam Hussein, Muammar Gadafi, Viktor Orban, Slobodan Milosevic, Elon Musk or whoever the writer dislikes can be quickly made into a disgraceful surrender by calling such talks a reenactment of Munich 1938, so the notion has become popular. It’s simple, it’s basic, it’s well-known and debunking it takes some explanation, so it’s become the stuff of which columns and podcasts are made of.

Remarkably, the idea that the US bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki forced the Japanese Empire to surrender was created and spread by US officials, so it’s exactly the opposite: a government-sponsored myth.

The myth took some time to develop, because early on the American public was so glad that the war was over and their boys had won it, that most (understandably) were in no mood to object. Everybody in government and everybody who has read books about the Manhattan Project since (or watched the movie “Oppenheimer”) knows that the nukes were created to defeat Nazi Germany, seen as by far the greatest enemy in the war and the focus of the American war effort.

Japan was an absolute sideshow, and the fact that the Japanese never seriously attacked or even threatened American territory (Hawaii was not a state until 1959) meant that resources for the War in the Pacific were relatively scarce. The people who took part in the Manhattan Project were thus pretty ambivalent about using their superweapons on the Japanese, who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

These misgivings didn’t permeate into the public consciousness at first. An oft-cited Gallup Poll conducted shortly after the atomic attacks found that 85% of the U.S. public approved of the decision to use the new weapon. Only 10% disapproved.

However, by July 1946 the US Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that, with a destroyed economy and a comprehensive blockade, “in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped.”¹ The fact was well-reported and, combined with the evidence that the Japanese were model former enemies who gave no trouble to the American occupation forces whatsoever, made many reassess the need to burn their civilians with atomic weapons.

This is what made American officials work overtime to find arguments to justify the nuclear bombings and create the post-facto idea that they had been instrumental in Japan’s decision to surrender.

Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of War during the bombings, made the case for the nukes in an article published under his name in the February 1947 issue of Harper’s, famously arguing that, without nuclear bombs, an American invasion of the Japanese home islands would have been unavoidable and “cost over a million casualties to the American forces alone.”

The efforts of Stimson and others to explain that, actually, Hiroshima and Nagasaki had saved human lives (American and Japanese) by shocking the Japanese into realizing they had to stop the war have made it possible for the argument to survive and be rehashed endlessly for decades. The argument has been so successful that, among the exhibits at the US Air Force’s enormous museum in Dayton, Ohio, is the B-29 that dropped the Nagasaki bomb. It is proudly identified as “the aircraft that ended World War Two.”

For decades, Allied historians and propagandists explained that the strategy of carpet-bombing German cities for maximum destruction and loss of civilian lives was simply the result of applying the Nazi precedent of air strikes against civilians, on a larger scale. This is at least inexact, given that neither the Luftwaffe was designed for the task nor Adolf Hitler ever expressed much enthusiasm for the idea, and Allied strategists did, well before the war, which is the reason why they had the tools for the task (huge, four-engine bombers that Germany never utilized) before the first shot was fired.

Interestingly, the very same argument is applied against Japan, even though no Japanese bombers never even came close to an American city.

The decision to mass carpet bombing Japan was adopted by General Curtis LeMay, as the application of earlier tests for bombing military targets from a high altitude with great precision, an expensive pet project of the air force. The B-29 bomber was developed at a cost that may have surpassed that of the Manhattan Project, but proved fairly imprecise.

Tactics were adjusted so that, just as during the Doolittle Raid of 1942, anything and anyone could be bombed, burned or otherwise attacked from the air, in disregard of the laws of war. In March 1945, a fire raid on Tokyo was conducted by B-29s flying so low that their crews could smell burning flesh². It destroyed much of the city and killed upwards of a hundred thousand people, doing nothing to facilitate Japan’s surrender.

Robert McNamara, then a young military officer and eventually a Secretary of Defense who signed off on pretty tricky military strategies in Vietnam, noted in a late interview that LeMay was “totally intolerant of criticism.” When he questioned LeMay on his choice of weapon to exterminate “men, women and, children” from the air, LeMay’s answer was technical and not ethical; as McNamara put it:

“I think the issue is not so much incendiary bombs. I think the issue is: in order to win a war should you kill 100,000 people in one night, by firebombing or any other way? LeMay’s answer would be clearly “Yes.“³

Would I say that sounds very much like the rationale offered by Nazis when confronted with evidence of war crimes in Nuremberg? Yes.

LeMay progressively laid waste to more than sixty Japanese cities by early August. It’s in this context that the Japanese military command became accustomed to massive air raids with loss of lives and remained determined to reject unconditional surrender, seeing such a move as an opening for anarchy and Communism or worse.

An intercepted message to Tokyo’s ambassador in Moscow on 12 July 1945 stated: “His Majesty the Emperor... desires from his heart that [the war] may be quickly terminated, but so long as England and the United States insist upon unconditional surrender, the Japanese Empire has no alternative but to fight on.”

In response, Stimson supported an initiative to let the Japanese know that the emperor would be left unmolested on his throne. This was to be conveyed in an official message from the Allied leaders at a summit in Potsdam scheduled for mid-July; however, Stimson and likeminded officials were outmaneuvered by Secretary of State James Byrnes, a New Deal veteran who assessed that not using a weapon that had cost $2 billion to develop was plainly bad politics.

Stimson’s suggestion was removed from the official statement sent to Japan by the leaders met at Potsdam. Discussion among American officials focused on whether to give the Japanese warning of the impending nuclear attack, or to stage a demonstration of the bomb’s power. A decision was made to execute mass murder instead, mostly to impress the Soviets.

Many saw this clearly. “The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan,” Admiral William Leahy, wartime chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in his 1950 memoir. Eisenhower later said it had been his belief at the time that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary.

This opinion was voiced by most senior American commanders in the Pacific War. Among them was Carter Clarke, head of the Special Branch of the Military Intelligence Service, who declared to an interviewer in 1959 that “when we didn’t need to do it, and we knew we didn’t need to do it ... we used [Hiroshima and Nagasaki] as an experiment for two atomic bombs.”

In 1954, Vannevar Bush, wartime director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, gave the game away when he conceded – behind closed doors – that the bomb “was also delivered on time so that there was no necessity for any concessions to Russia at the end of the war. It was on time in the sense that after the war we had the principal deterrent that prevented Russia from sweeping over Europe after we demobilized. It is one of the most magnificent performances of history in any development to have that thing on time.”⁴

Historian Gar Alperovitz published in 1965 “Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam,” proving — on the basis of Stimson’s posthumously released diaries — that the true objective of the bombings had indeed been to intimidate the Soviet Union and render Stalin more amenable to American demands regarding Eastern Europe. Alperovitz’s later book “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth” in 1995 made the case that the bombings had been pointless when it came to the defeat of Japan but had marked the starting point of the Cold War⁵.

As compensation for his bureaucratic setbacks, just before the first attack Stimson was allowed by Truman to remove picturesque Kyoto, where Stimson and his wife had honeymooned, from the list of possible nuclear targets. Future generations of tourists remain in Stimson’s debt.

The first atomic bomb ever to be used on humans, “Little Boy,” exploded over Hiroshima at 8.15 AM on 6 August 1945, killing about 80,000 people instantly. Togo, Hirohito’s foreign minister, relayed Truman’s announcement of the event and his threats of more to come, but the Japanese high command merely registered a strong protest with the International Red Cross. Some were skeptical as to whether an atomic bomb had really been used, and demanded further investigation.

The emperor at this point appears to have leaned towards surrender, as Tsuyoshi Hasegawa explains in “Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan,” Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (2006). Hasegawa’s view, as expressed in the book, is that it eventually was the Soviet entry in the war, rather than the use of atomic bombs, that convinced Japanese leaders to surrender.

Before that happened, in a testament to Japanese ingenuity, despite the enormous loss of life and destruction of infrastructure power in Hiroshima was restored to some areas within a day, to 30% of homes within two weeks, and to all homes not destroyed by the blast within four months. Water services were restored within days and the local branch of the Bank of Japan, just 380 meters from the hypocenter of the blast, reopened within just two days.

Even though Yoshio Nishina, an atomic expert, flew down to the city and came back to Tokyo to report that an atomic bomb had indeed caused the damage, the generals said they could live with it. Their reasoning – which ignored the long-term effects of radiation – was that the bomb had not left so much destruction and loss of life behind as the March 9 fire raid on Tokyo; in addition, they estimated that the US could not have many more than one or two bombs, which wasn’t enough to bring Japan to its knees, as Edwin P. Hoyt notes in “Japan's War: The Great Pacific Conflict,” (Cooper Square Press, 2001, p. 401).

Japanese policy remained focused on using the Soviets as intermediaries for a negotiated peace, until on Aug. 9 the Soviets entered the war. The Japanese war cabinet was studying the event in horror when, mere hours later, the Nagasaki bombing was announced. This may explain why War Minister Korechika Anami blustered that “a hundred atomic bombs” would not make Japan cave in — in fact, the US didn’t have them yet and the production of more bombs could still take weeks if not months.

The Soviet threat was greater and immediate. When the matter was brought to the emperor, who for the first time in his reign was entrusted such a key decision, it came with the foreign affairs’ minister recommendation that Japan should surrender; Hirohito simply said “my opinion is the same as that of the foreign minister,” as Hoyt explains (Op. Cit., pp. 404- 405).

Remarkably, the emperor later gave his own reasoning to the heads of the armed forces, stressing that he lacked confidence that the home islands could be defended from invasion amid a general lack of weaponry; he didn’t cite neither the atomic bombs nor the Soviet offensive. Hoyt later adds (p. 420):

‘Out of the war also came one great myth, perpetuated by well-meaning people throughout the world who fear a atomic holocaust. That myth is that the atomic bomb caused the surrender of Japan. The fact is that as far as the Japanese militarists were concerned, the atomic bomb was just another weapon. The two atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were icing on the cake, and did not do as much damage as the firebombings of Japanese cities. The B-29 firebombing campaign had brought the destruction of 3,100,000 homes, leaving fifteen million people homeless, and killing about a million of them. It was the ruthless firebombing, and Emperor Hirohito’s realization that if necessary the Allies would completely destroy Japan and kill every Japanese to achieve “unconditional surrender” that persuaded him to the decision to end the war. The atomic bomb is indeed a fearsome weapon, but it was not the cause of Japan’s surrender, even though the myth persists even to this day.’

The message accepting the Potsdam terms was dispatched on 10 August, containing the proviso that it would not “comprise any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as a Sovereign Ruler.” After some back and forth and diplomatic finetuning, the surrender was accepted.

In the end, it wasn’t the atomic bombs or even the more dangerous Soviet invasion that made up the mind of the Japanese leaders, but fear of civil insurrection if a war with no prospect of victory whatsoever and massive loss of lives was to be continued.

When on 13 August, a week after Hiroshima, Hirohito told a sobbing cabinet that he would make a public announcement of surrender over the radio, a faction of fanatical army officers began a coup that petered out within hours when senior generals, including Anami, refused to support it.

Hirohito’s message did refer to the atomic attacks: “The enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives.” However, a second speech, broadcast to the Japanese armed forces two days later omitted any mention of the bomb: “Now that the Soviet Union has entered the war against us, to continue the war under the present internal and external conditions would be only to increase the ravages of war.”

Around this time, Navy Minister Admiral Yonai Mitsumasa openly said he was now in favor of accepting the American peace terms, “not because I am afraid... of the atomic bombs or Soviet participation in the war. The most important reason is my concern over the domestic situation.” Mitsumasa later wrote to Admiral Takagi Sokichi, on Aug. 12, 1945, making his point even more clearly: “The atomic bombs and the Soviet entry into the war are, in a sense, gifts from the gods. This way we don’t have to say that we quit the war because of domestic circumstances.” Almost eighty years after the fact, this view appears to be gaining ground among specialists, and is becoming the consensus⁶.

We thus arrive at modern Russia, 2024. As I argued in my post about Munich 1938, that myth reached peak perniciousness in 2022, when it became the intellectual rationale for fueling a massive war in Europe:

Western pundits who invoked Munich 1938 to compare the deals proposed by the Russians before their 2022 invasion of the Ukraine with the West’s deal to allow Germany control the Sudetenland are particularly wrongheaded.

In their armchair general fantasies, having spent decades deprecating Chamberlain, these pundits saw the Russian ultimatum in 2022 over the Ukraine’s accession to NATO and the status of the Sudetenland Germans Donbass Russians as the perfect chance to replay Munich 1938, only this time acting like tough, macho hombres, and not like that wimp Chamberlain.

Much like the Bourbons, these pundits knew nothing and wouldn’t forgive anything. They managed to combine ignorance with recklessness, thinking that Chamberlain’s only problem was a lack of balls, and their stance dangerously contaminated politicians who should have known better. Some of them, like the Churchill cosplayer Boris Johnson, maybe knew better but went ahead anyway.

In the 1938 analogy, NATO would have accepted a Finlandization of Ukraine as a buffer state, as Vladimir Putin requested. And then it would have been clear — not least to China, NATO’s one true peer competitor — whether Russia was prepared to be a respectable member of the international community, playing by the rules supposed to bind everyone equally.

The Biden administration made their Tough Chamberlain fantasies come true, and now we'll see how that works out for everyone involved. The West was given the chance between war and dishonor, it chose war, and its’s looking more and more likely that it will also have dishonor, as well as the strongest Russo-Chinese alliance in history. Also, I foresee a pretty clear reputation hit on all their super-expensive wunderwaffen that were supposed to have crushed the primitive Russian orcs.

Many critics of NATO actions have been stressing that the Tough Chamberlain scenario isn’t working, just like Chamberlain would have predicted.

In summary, Munich 1938 infected the West’s brains, like a dangerous parasite. I fear that the “nukes ended WW2” myth may be infecting Russian brains now. You see, earlier this week Putin-linked Russian billionaire tycoon Konstantin Malofeyev told the Financial Times that Putin stands to abruptly reject Donald Trump’s proposed offer for peace in the Ukraine.

Malofeyev is a guy whom Putin listens to, and he in fact was only allowed to talk to the FT (widely seen in Moscow as a NATO propaganda rag not better than the old Pravda) because the Kremlin wanted to convey approved views. These views are pretty scary.

This is not because Malofeyev refers back to Putin’s long-held requirement that any closure to the Ukrainian conflict must include a grander reconfiguration of the entire broader regional security architecture, a request that makes sense given that Russia is close to securing a full victory in the Ukraine. It’s because Malofeyev startlingly suggested that, if Trump wants to play hardball, Putin could nuke the future region between Russian Ukraine and whatever is left to prevent NATO troop deployment there:

Malofeyev, however, argued that if the US did not agree to roll back its support for Ukraine, Russia could fire a tactical nuclear weapon. “There will be a radiation zone nobody will ever go into in our lifetime,” he said. “And the war will be over.”

The Russians seem to have bought the American tale that the nukes made all the difference in 1945, scaring the Japanese generals and emperor into compliance. But this is the opposite of what really happened: the nukes by themselves (without huge domestic uproar, a lack of weapons and supplies to defend the home island, as well as a Soviet invasion of Korea and Manchuria) might even have emboldened the Japanese to resist further.

I wouldn’t be surprised if some Russians are now making a calculation like that publicized by the Americans after 1947, that killing 100k-200k people now with a few nukes and making a point that their enemies will understand, while securing a surrender and an end to the war is preferable to a drawn-out conflict which will kill many more over time, causing even more destruction. This is the risk right now.

In 1945, there was nobody else on the other side to laugh at your puny tactical nukes and say “fine, we can play this game too,” thus launching a Nuclear Armageddon. Now there are multiple sides with nukes. If you know any Russians, make sure to forward them this post. That’s all we can do.

1. US Strategic Bombing Survey, Japan’s Struggle to End the War (Government Printing Office, 1946), 13.

2. Cit. “Big Six v. Little Boy,” by Andrew Cockburn, Harper’s Magazine, 16.11.2023.

3. McNamara was interviewed for the 2003 documentary “The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara.”

4. V. Bush quoted in US Atomic Energy Commission, In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer: Transcript of Hearing Before Personnel Security Board, Washington, D.C., April 12, 1954 through May 6, 1954 (Government Printing Office, 1954; reprinted by MIT Press, 1971), 561

5. Here I am relying extensively on Cockburn’s reporting for Harper’s.

6. This is evident when one listens to modern specialists. For example, Richard B. Frank wrote in his 2001 book “Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire” (Penguin Books) that “none of (Japan’s wartime leaders), even as they faced potential death sentences in war-crimes trials, testified that Japan would have surrendered earlier upon an offer of modified terms, coupled to Soviet intervention or some other combination of events, excluding the use of atomic bombs.” This is a fairly hedged stance that appears to lean towards crediting the nukes with the final decision to end the war, but it markedly differs from Frank’s own views now, more than twenty years later. In his recent intervention in the podcast “School of War,” released Aug. 6, 2024, Frank endorses Mitsumasa’s view that Japan’s domestic situation, in every sense, had made the war untenable for the Japanese Empire.