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Comment by jandrewrogers | Hacker News Reader

It wasn’t like they were sitting on a pile of nukes. They had to make the maximum concrete, visceral impact with the couple they had such that there would be minimal second-guessing on the part of Japan.

You are suggesting that they should have selected a target that was virtually guaranteed to have less impact and leverage with a very scarce resource. They couldn’t afford to take that risk with American lives.

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>They had to make the maximum concrete, visceral impact with the couple they had such that there would be minimal second-guessing on the part of Japan.

And yet they didn't decide to bomb Tokyo or Kyoto. There was clearly a calculus done in selecting the targets to find the right balance of all the various factors involved. I don't see the problem in questioning whether they came to the right decision. Too often the target selection decision is assumed to be right and the only decision that is questioned is the yes or no of actually going through with the bombing.

NTA but Tokyo is the worst place you could possibly drop an atom bomb if your goal is to minimize civilian casualties.

Yes, that was the point I was making. The bombs were not dropped on the largest cities which shows the argument that "maximum concrete, visceral impact" was not the only priority. There was some consideration for civilian casualties which opens up the discussion of whether the right balance was struck.

> The bombs were not dropped on the largest cities which shows the argument that "maximum concrete, visceral impact" was not the only priority.

The atomic bombs were not dropped on the largest cities because the largest cities were already levelled. Nothing would be demonstrable on an already-destroyed city.

They did decide to bomb Kyoto, for exactly that reason. The secretary of war, Henry Stimson, objected to it, due to cultural significance, and convinced Truman to choose an alternate, which was Nagasaki.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-33755182

Yes, I know this and it was part of my point. If "cultural significance" was part of determining bombing sites, then we know "maximum concrete, visceral impact" was clearly not the only goal.

Tokyo was (fire) bombed a few months earlier causing ~100k deaths.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo_(10_March_194...

Yes, and millions of people survived those bombings. If the only goal was "maximum concrete, visceral impact", a prior bombing would not have eliminated Tokyo from the list of targets for the nuclear bomb which goes to show that there were other factors in play.

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