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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.
I suspect it is because they don't know, and they just made assumptions. But we do know the answers, because there are records that explain the history of this leaflet! In early 1946 the person who ran the leaflet program wrote an internal memo describing the circumstances.pic.twitter.com/nimiCEKSmO
First: nobody was told to make a leaflet about the atomic bomb until August 7th, the day after the Hiroshima attack. There was never any intention of warning the Japanese ahead of time, as already noted. So warning Hiroshima is a definite "did not happen" situation.pic.twitter.com/QK5gRsLn9r
Second: making a million leaflets in 1945 could be done pretty quickly, but not instantly. They had all sorts of logistical issues in ordering up the paper, the leaflet "bombs" that dropped them, etc. This took time.pic.twitter.com/C4l68OtUrn
Third: The actual leaflets had to be written, approved, and translated (by Japanese POW officers). This was done on August 8th. By midnight August 8th, they had the text, the leaflet paper, and were ready to go...pic.twitter.com/AqGukhOO6e
Fourth: ...but then the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and invaded Manchuria. This caused a LOT of interest and attention — it was a big deal at the time (bigger for many than Nagasaki), though it is frequently omitted in modern US accounts of the end of WWII.pic.twitter.com/MPiTnINV5w
The people making the leaflet REWROTE the leaflet to include the info about the Soviet invasion, adding more time.pic.twitter.com/vUAW3ZsPu4
All of this added up to Nagasaki not receiving any warning leaflets until AFTER the atomic bomb had been dropped on it (early August 9th). In fact it got the leaflets *a day after it was bombed*.pic.twitter.com/t7L8JZKt2s
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.
(And being promised "destruction" would not have raised eyebrows in Japan — the US had already been engaged in a campaign of systematically firebombing Japanese cities, so "destruction" was already a way of life.)pic.twitter.com/SgmjZdUnN9
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
I meant to add this, too, but work internet went down: I've written all this up before, some time back. The psychological warfare document from 1946 is linked in the post as a PDF; I got it from the Manhattan Project files in the National Archives. See:http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/04/26/a-day-too-late/ …
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