Peter Simpson

What I Learned from Kevin Swanger’s Bombing of Hiroshima  

            One of the things I learned from this research project was the unnecessary use of the nuclear weapons. They weren’t necessary to win the war as evidence shows that Japan was already ready to surrender when we dropped the bombs. The main reason why we dropped them was we wanted an unconditional surrender from them because of the American public’s hatred for the Japanese. Another reason was to intimidate Russia which we considered a threat and we wanted to show them American power, which just ended up beginning an arms race that could have destroyed the world. Another interesting fact was that the number of American casualties that was estimated for an assault on Japan was skewed and said to much higher than the experts actually believed at the time. The targets themselves were also very poor. He said that the number of civilians to military personal at the targets was 5:1, with those numbers there was no way to say you were not intentionally hurting civilians. I agree with the scientists who said we should drop it on a remote region of Japan to scare them but not actually hurt anyone.