Why the US didn't Nuke Tokyo

On the 6th of August, 1945, six B-29 Stratofortress bombers took off from a tiny base in the Pacific Ocean. Three planes flew ahead to check weather conditions at the potential targets. Of the remaining three, one plane was filled with observers.

Another carried instruments. The last one, a payload that would change history forever. As they reached the designated target, the attack plane initiated the bombing run.

The plane, named after the pilot's mother, had a good view of the industrial city of Hiroshima. After the weather plane triggered an early morning air warning, people were now starting their day, waiting for the tram entering school. And then in one flash, it was over.

The bomb vaporized thousands of people on the spot, their organs boiling in their bodies. Many more died of burns from the initial fireball, falling debris and radiation. The bomb hit 50% of the population and it blasted humanity into the nuclear age.

Three days later, a second bombing run obliterated a residential neighborhood of Nagasaki. Estimates of casualties here ranged from 40- to 70. 000 dead.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki will be forever connected to the atomic bombings. It's the only time these bombs were actually used in a war. These bombs had a role in the end of the second World War.

But I've always wondered why did they choose these two cities? These cities were not big like Tokyo or Osaka. They also didn't have the most important war industry.

The reasoning behind it is actually really grim. It has to do with the deadliest air raid in history. I tell you, the fires were burning so bright you could almost read a paper in the cockpit.

This video is about allied bombing of civilians during World War Two. Before we start, I feel like a disclaimer is in order. Japan and the Axis powers Germany and Italy.

They slaughtered civilians on a scale never seen before. This is well documented and it also lives in people's minds, I think. But I also think that the image of Japan, bad and good is just too black and white.

The Allies were also involved in attacking cities and attacking civilians without any precision targeted sites. And today, I won't talk about that. So this is not just a history story.

It's also a story about history, how we write history, what parts of the past have remembered and what parts get forgotten. And to better understand all this, I had a chance to talk to Alex Wellerstein. He’s a professor at the Stevens INstitute of Technology and he specialses in the history of nuclear weapons.

And I'm also the guy who made the nuke map. You know, the two of you can play with see how much of your city is destroyed by an atomic bomb. Yeah, that's kind of like Alex's Wonderwall.

We'll get to Alex a bit later. But first, we have to talk about the context in which these bombs were dropped. So it's May 1945.

Germany has just surrendered in Europe. The war is over. Everyone is happy.

But it's also a bummer for some people in America, who have been working on a top secret project. This is a project to build a nuclear weapon that can end the war. They had done some tests and they kind of want to see if this would actually work in real life.

But no worries. They will see it in action very soon, because on the other side of the world, there is no peace. America is fighting Japan in a slow and costly war.

They have this tactic where they're hopping from island to island over two fronts. And the first big success is at Guadalcanal. You know, these iconic battles, Midway, Wake Island and Iwo Jima.

It's basically all the battles I played in Battlefield 1942 back in the day. In the end, the Americans land on Japanese soil. The battle for Okinawa will be the last mission before they plan on landing on Japan.

And it's a heavy fight. I mean, most of the time when people fight a battle and defeat is obvious, they surrender, right? But not here.

The Japanese defenders die before they let themselves be captured because the Japanese high command is thinking. They have this idea that, like democracies are wimpy, and if we make the costs very high, they will vote out the leaders or whatever, and they will go for anything. And so almost 99% of the Japanese defenders perish.

This is the bloodiest battle in the whole Pacific theater. And it kind of works. Okinawa really freaks Americans out.

If this is the defense they're up against, how many allied soldiers are going to die invading mainland Japan? They make some estimates, and really, it just varies wildly. On the one hand, people say it's tens of thousands of dead and then maybe it could be a quarter million dead and wounded.

So now this shiny new weapon suddenly becomes an interesting option and you get it. They just spent $2 billion in developing its. So they really want to just see it in action.

And if the bomb does work, maybe there will be no invasion, no American deaths. That would be perfect. But if you decide on using it, how do you show the power of this weapon?

In the end they decide to drop it on a city. The question then, of course, becomes which city? They decide to form this little committee.

These guys who get together and just literally start brainstorming. What criteria do we need to decide this? Well, we have their notes so we actually know what they were talking about.

They say it should have a large urban area, be somewhere between Tokyo and Nagasaki and have a high strategic value. And when you apply these criteria, you get a list of 17 areas. On the list you see big places like the capital, Tokyo, that has an arrow next to it, but also Kyoto, which maybe for us now is really insane to think about nuking it.

We think of Kyoto as this cultural center of Japan. It has all these historic shrines. But then they're like, Who cares about shrines?

We're trying to win a war here. I mean, the reason that he was famous for all these shrines nowadays is that all of them were bombed. But we'll get to that.

If you look at the list, you see Hiroshima and all the way down Nagasaki. I don't know if you have the same feeling, but this is just any other group project. If you've ever been in that kind of cooperation, you know, there's nothing set in stone here.

You're just spitballing about what criteria are important. Some get added, some get voted out. But then again, most of the group project I was in didn't have life or death impact for thousands of people.

After a few brainstorming session, the committee brings a list of 17 targets down to four. They settled on Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata and Nagasaki. From these four, two cities will be targeted in the end.

So why did they knock Tokyo off the list? Well, the reason that Tokyo's not on list is actually quite dark. And to show you why.

We have to talk about this city in Germany. Drsdeb in is an old city in the east of Germany. It's an important economic and cultural center and city center has all these buildings with a baroque design.

If you go there and take out your lonely Planet, you can find highlights such as the Frauenkirche, the Semperoper, and the Hochkirche. And it's also completely fake. They rebuilt the city from the rubble.

All these buildings are not old at all. You see, the allies targeted Drsden together with Hamburg in a terrifying way. They were firebombed.

This is basically dropping burn bombs and napalm to create firestorms in the city. The main component of the M69 bomb, when ignited the gel selling becomes a clinging, fiery mass, spreading more than a yard in diameter. And these fires can go on for days, creating pure hell on earth.

This bombardment at the end of the war destroyed the entire city and killed tens of thousands of people. And Drsden, it wasn't even an important military target. Drsden was one of the many cities in Germany bombed by the allies.

And if you look at this map of Germany, you can see the impact the bombing has. This map shows with black percentages how much of the cities are destroyed at the end of the war. This is what's left of Germany.

You have cities like Mainz, Frankfurt and Koln. They're almost completely leveled. Now you're thinking, of course, we were bombing Germany.

They needed to stop the war. So they're bombing factories that produce guns, aircraft and tanks, right? Well, at the start of the war, the British were shit at aiming.

Less than a quarter of the bombs fell within an eight kilometer radius of the intended targets. Wait, think about that for a second. 25% landed within eight kilometers of the intended targets.

You can understand that's not really effective. At the same time, they're losing insane amounts of men and planes. At one point, a pilot has a lower survival rate than a soldier in the trenches of the First World War.

And they were total meat grinders. So with this in mind, the British bomber command thinks well, we kind of have to change tactics. Instead of searching for specific targets by day.

Now we're just going to go for bombing general areas at night. Won't that really impact civilians? How do we feel about that?

Well, people are going to making up their minds about what it means to bomb civilians. Remember, airplanes are really, really new. So people are figuring out how to use them, when to use them, how it is okay to use them.

It's only a few years before the Second World War that it's the first time that a city is attacked by bombers. That was Guernica in Spain. You know, from that famous Picasso painting.

So with this new thing, people are still just developing theories about the use of airplanes. And there's one guy that says the following. Oh, my gosh, If you could attack a city and they couldn't do anything to defend themselves, then that would just collapse the population.

They would give up and the bomber would win. And British commanders that are bombing Germany, they kind of go along with this. One guy, Arthur Harris, a British commander.

He sees politicians as kind of tiptoeing around to subjects. And he just wants to be clear. So he says that the aim of the bombing is about destruction of cities, about killing of workers, about destruction of lives, creating an unprecedented refugee problem.

Well, his nickname was Bomber Harris. So fair enough, I guess. So civilian deaths at this time are not an unfortunate byproduct of bombing.

It's not collateral damage. It is policy. And this really hits home when you see how fire bombs are designed.

They were not developed to target factories. No, they were tested on mock German and Japanese houses. They're thinking about things like how furniture will impact the bombing that even discussing moisture levels of the wood of Japanese houses.

So did it achieve the goal of the bombardment, the surrender of the citizens? We'll get to that again. Yes, Germany, that awful things in the war.

They targeted civilians in London, Spain. In Poland, they indiscriminately slaughtered thousands and thousands of noncombatants, including women and children. And then, of course, if you talk about Second World War of the Holocaust hanging over all this, and I'm not saying that they didn't do these things, but I do think that when we talk about the Second World War, it always seems like the allies are just the good guys and Germany and Japan and just pure evil.

But life in history just isn't that black and white. The question becomes, what are the limits to achieve your goals in this war? So you might be wondering what all this German thing has to do with Tokyo.

Well firebombing has to do with its because the US Air Force also believed that dropping enough bombs would make Japan surrender. So they start with firebombing Japan. 2200 horsepower in each of four engines to.

And it was an even better target for firebombing than Germany. Already in the twenties you have a pilot saying Japan is the wet dream of the bomber because the houses there are basically all made of wood and paper. And so when you throw a bomb, it's full of napalm, each carefully designed to destroy a single house dropped by the thousands and thousands.

Well, you know what's going to happen. Americans have been bombing Japanese cities a lot since 1944. The problem they faced is that the war industry wasn't really centralized.

They didn't have these big industrial cities like in Germany that they could target the war industry was closer to homes in smaller places, and so hundreds upon hundreds of B-29 were used to bomb cities all over Japan. And then in one raid in March, 45, B-29 swarmed over Tokyo, raining fire from hundreds and hundreds of bombers. 100,000 people died in this attack and it is actually the biggest number of casualties for an air raid ever.

To put this number in perspective, this is almost twice the number of American losses in the Vietnam War. It's bigger than the initial death toll of the individual atomic bombs. And by the summer of 1945, Tokyo practically didn't exist anymore.

And remember that targeting committee, the guys that were brainstorming about what cities to bomb well they know about this, Tokyo goes off the list because it's now practically all bombed and burned out. It's practically rubble with only the palace grounds left standing. There goes Tokyo.

But this group has an even bigger problem than that because they're talking about how the Air Force is systematically bombing out cities with the prime purpose in mind of not leaving one stone lying on the other. And this is a problem for the committee because they kind of need a city that's sort of intact to show Japan and the world how strong these bombs are. There's this conflict of interest.

The Air Force doesn't care about that. They would not like reserve targets just for the Manhattan Project. And so a city like Yokohama that was on the list first gets taken away because it gets firebombed at the end of May.

So now they're running out of targets. This leads to this really weird moment that the targeting committee has to beg the Air Force to stop bombing cities because there will be none left. And it even goes all the way to the top.

The US War secretary, Henry Stimson. He tells the president he's worried about these bombardments for two reasons. First, he's afraid that the allies will be seen as bad as the Germans.

But then again, he's also afraid that Japan has been bombed so much that a new weapon ‘Would not have a fair background to show its strength’. The reaction of the president. He laughs.

It's a funny joke. He probably didn't notice the contradiction between these two statements. And if you look at this map of Japan, you can understand Stimsons worry.

You get a scale of the destruction. The U. S.

firebombed a total of 69 cities. So you have major cities like Osaka, Nagoya and Tokyo that are heavily destroyed. And then you have some smaller cities like Fukuyama, Takeshima and Toyama that are basically wiped off the map.

Apart from estimates that this killed about half a million people, there are survivors are also not really easy of. At the end of the war, a total of 15 million people didn't have a home. So there it is.

The reason why Tokyo didn't get Nuke was because it was already firebombed off the face of the earth. And some people involved in this, they had some second thoughts about this. LeMay said If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals.

And I think he's right. We're behaving as war criminals. But what makes it immoral if you lose but not immoral if you win.

Talking about the morality of bombing civilians is like a can of worms, because that would lead a video of at least an hour. Is it justified aim of war or not? There's endless debate on both sides of this, so we're not going to finish that discussion.

Let's talk about one of the principal aims that justified this bombing. That's if you just drop enough bombs on civilians, they'll stop fighting. They will press the government to end the war.

And it turns out it's totally false. It doesn't work that way. Right.

It turns out if you bomb people, they don't become more compliant. They become more rigid in their opposition to you. So that's not the case.

That argument is off the table. You can still see it bombing as a justified policy or you can disagree. But there's actually an interesting reason why we don't talk about firebombing that much.

In some ways, it's not as glamorous, which is also part of it. You know, a bomb that shoots gasoline is not as exciting as nuclear physics. Right.

And apart from that, there is also a deeper thing lurking behind this. Firebombing is harder to deal with because there was more of it and it became sort of business as usual, which to me is actually more interesting moral question in some ways. Like if your business as usual is this horrible thing.

What does that. Say? After the war, the use of the nuclear bomb became this big talking point.

Was it morally justified or not? Should it have been one bomb instead of two? What if they had waited for the Soviet entry into the war?

There really a lot of different ways this could have ended. And if you like this video, I might cover that in the future. But for me, it's so weird how because of this new technological breakthrough, that firebombing becomes just less of a topic.

And I think it really shows you how history works, how we choose to focus on some events and not on others, how the narrative of victors is dominant, and that writing about history is not how things just happened, but also how we relate to it every single day. Whatever you think of the atomic bombs, they were a huge scientific breakthrough with thousands upon thousands of people working on designing this, and a lot of them had one thing in common They were really good in math. So if you want to make scientific breakthroughs of any kind today, sponsor billion dot org, we'll help you out.

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I've heard that name somewhere. Oh, yeah. It was about bombing Hiroshima.