Alex WellersteinVerified account

The library has listed the date as "August 6, 1945," though the leaflet they have on there is undated. It was neither created NOR DROPPED on August 6, 1945 (the Hiroshima attack date). The fact that it is post-Hiroshima is clear if you read it—it talks about the Hiroshima attack.

But — and this is a very nice exercise in what historians have to do to make sense of primary sources — there is more story to this than the document itself can reveal. When was it made? Was it actually dropped? And where? are questions that the library does not answer.

So they weren't warned with leaflets. The last refuge of the "they were warned" crowd is "well, didn't Truman warn them in the Potsdam Declaration?" Not really — it said, we want unconditional surrender, and the alternative was "prompt and utter destruction."

Is that a veiled reference to the atomic bomb? Probably. But it is one that only makes sense after you know the atomic bomb exists — which was kept a secret. It's not a warning if you can't understand it until AFTER the event you are being warned against.

The US planners HAD considered warning Japan about the atomic bomb, and had rejected the idea. They deliberately kept it secret for reasons both tactical (avoid the bombing planes being targeted) and psychological (they hoped the "shock" would dislodge Japan's high command).

Which is to say, the idea that the cities were warned doesn't even make much sense of the face of it. It's not something that Groves, Truman, Tibbets, or anyone else connected to the bombing program ever claimed. So why are do so many people claim it today?

The answer is pretty clear to me: they think it lessens the moral difficulty of defending the bombing. If we warned them, and they didn't surrender or evacuate, then it's really their fault they died, not ours, right?

This is bad reasoning on every front. If Bin Laden had said, "I'm going to attack major American cities," and then he did it — would we have said, "well, he warned us"? No, of course not. It's an absurd notion. Even if the warning was very specific, it still doesn't absolve.

The fact that there was no warning in the case of Hiroshima/Nagasaki just makes this argument all the more ridiculous. It'd bad reasoning even if it HAD happened — but it DIDN'T happen. Which makes it something of a farce.

I always tell people who spout this: look, one CAN make arguments in favor of the Hiroshima bombing (and Nagasaki, too, but it gets harder). All arguments for and against are contentious, but they can be made. But don't base your argument on something that 100% didn't happen!

(And before people get on me: I know there are other myths/spin/lies/misconceptions, including big ones. But this is the one that bugs me the most, because it 100% didn't happen. There's no real room for interpretive dispute here — it's just false.) /THREAD