Under what circumstances is it justifiable to use nuclear weapons against a civilian population?

[jeff47]

43. Which option should Truman have taken?

Option 1: Demonstration on uninhabited island

The premise is that the Japanese would agree to surrender if they knew the power of these weapons - the threat that we would use them against their cities would make them surrender.

The huge problem here is when we actually did use nuke against Hiroshima, they did not surrender. So why would they have surrendered due to a threat when carrying out that threat did not cause them to surrender?

Option 2: Invade

The invasion would have taken 2 years, and killed 1M allied troops, as well as 10-50M Japanese, mostly civilians. The wide range of that estimate is we don't really know what the civilians would have done. Virtually all the civilians on Okinawa either attacked US troops or committed suicide. It's reasonable to believe that a very large portion of the 78M Japanese in the home islands would do the same.

So that route would kill many, many more civilians than the nukes.

Option 3: Wait out the blockade

This option sounds nice and sterile. But that's due to careful word choice. This is really "win via famine". And that famine would again fall mostly on the civilian population. Making it a poor choice if your goal was to protect civilians. Unless you think it's somehow OK to cause civilians to starve do death, but not OK to directly kill them.

Option 4: Weren't the Japanese about to surrender anyway?

Nope. The "Big 6" were running the Japanese government and war effort. Before the Hiroshima blast, only 1 of the 6 was interested in surrender. The remaining 5 felt that they should engineer a massive number of casualties, on both sides, so that the US would give up on invading. It worked in the war with Russia 40 years earlier, so they felt they could do it again. Even after the two nukes, the "Big 6" were split 3-3 on surrender.

The problem here is the US wouldn't have just given up. We'd have gone with the "Invasion" option above and killed about 40M civilians.

So which option would you have used instead? And how is killing far more civilians via that option better than nukes?