Marshall argues that exploding a bomb over the sea has never been tested and its behavior was unpredictable. No one knew how the atomic bomb would behave, it could be a dud, in which case the Japanese would laugh in the faces of the Americans, or it could get out of control. The truth about the situation is that there was only enough plutonium to produce two bombs, and the Americans could not afford to squander one bomb, which costs ten millions to produce, on a demonstration.
There is really no way the Americans could have known what the Japanese would have done. No one knew for sure what would have happened had the bomb not been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, only assumptions have been made about what would have happened. For all anyone at all knew, the Japanese could have kept on fighting until the last Japanese was killed. Defending the decision to use the atomic bomb, Marshall states, “we had to assume that a force of 2.5 million Japanese would fight to the death…” kind of like how they did on the small islands that the U.S. troops attacked, “we figured that in their homeland, they would fight even harder” (Alperovitz 361). What could have possibly led Marshall to believe this is the fact that the Japanese were very resourceful. After they were blocked in, and food lines were blocked, the Japanese started to promote the substitution of acorns for rice, over one hundred and fifty millions acorns were processed for distribution across Japan as a rice substitute. Not only that, but the Japanese also discovered that the pine tree root could be processed for a small quantity of oil, so the Japanese started to vigorously cut down pine trees for processing.
As far as the issue of awaiting the entry of the Russians into the war as an Allied force, the Americans were cautious. The Russian option was somewhat overlooked because of the fear of communist influence in Asia. The Allies did not really wish to exercise the option of ending the war with a Soviet attack if they could avoid doing so, only as the last possibly means (Alperovitz 84). The Americans were fearful that the Russian influence would possibly lead to widespread communism in Asia.
Despite the arguments put forth by Marshal and many others who advocated the use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the author of this paper still maintains that the use of the atomic as a quick end to the war was a poor choice considering the lives lost, the people killed, and the amount of damages that it caused. Close to half the population of the area that the bomb was dropped on was completely and totally wiped out. Not only did the atomic bomb kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people, but it also devastated an entire country. Due to the fact that the bomb was dropped on Japan’s two industrial cities, Japan went into a total economic and traditional decline. Japan’s economy was devastated, and due to the fact that the Americans had to step in and help the Japanese economy to build back up, most of the American values and traditions were incorporated into the Japanese culture. The Americans had good intentions when they decided to use the atomic bomb, they merely wanted to stop the bloodshed and did what they thought was possibly best.
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