As a citizen they cannot block you from returning to the country. What they can do however is seize your devices (and briefly your person) and other property.
So the main argument is that in the time that was written and immediately afterwards we can look to see what they mean by that by how it was implemented. At the time it was understood that the government could and would search goods as they enter the country without warrants to enforce things like tariffs. I think that's a fairly reasonable interpretation of the meaning. Where I think this goes wrong (and maybe deviates from history?) is the conflation of papers and other digital records now with physical goods, historically were people's papers searched as they entered the country (beyond say looking through them to find hidden goods, I mean reading and examining letters and records)?
The problem when you rely on unclear laws that haven’t been modified for 250 years is they haven’t been modified for 250 years.
The scale of surveillance now wasn’t even thinkable back then. The ability to encrypt. The bandwidth and latency of communication. The sheer nunber of people, the research into manipulating minds. Does the second ammendment apply to an f35 or a tank? Well it doesn’t really matter, they clearly weren’t in scope when it was written. There were no wiretapping laws in the constitution because there was no wires. unreasonable in 1780 was different to unreasonable today.
The US has famously failed to update its legal framework via the legislative branch, so
It’s upto the judicial branch which seeks to be about interpreting what some wealthy farmers from 250 years ago thought, rather than asking what laws make sense today.
>>The problem when you rely on unclear laws that haven’t been modified for 250 years is they haven’t been modified for 250 years.
The Constitution gives you some rights but maybe not this one (to not be searched without warrant at a border). The problem is not The Constitution but the legislative branch that didn't make laws to ban it.
>>what some wealthy farmers from 250 years ago thought, rather than asking what laws make sense today
It's not the job of judges to invent laws or ponder what laws make sense. That would be legislative branch.
> The US has famously failed to update its legal framework via the legislative branch, so It’s upto the judicial branch which seeks to be about interpreting…
Our judicial system is modeled after Judaic precepts (shoftim/shotrim/shomrim) outlined in Deuteronomy 16:18.
There, shoftim refers to judges who interpret and apply the law, requiring deep literacy in the Torah to ensure righteous judgment without favoritism or bribery. Shotrim are the enforcers of the court (sheriffs, etc.).
I don't know where people get the idea that the role of a judge is not to interpret the law. This is literally the only thing SCOTUS does.
It's their job to interpret but not to invent new laws or ponder which laws "make sense".
In particular just because it "makes sense" to extend 4th amendment reading doesn't justify judges just going for it. That would be legislating from the bench.
Every time SCOTUS makes a decision they invent new laws or nullify existing laws. Every case they take is a question about whether certain laws "make sense," and that determination is based entirely on learned, but subjective, personal opinion.
Take for example laws which depended on Roe V. Wade being a Constitutional right no longer existing, and laws created after that right was repealed, because said right didn't make sense to the current Justices (despite being established law for nearly 50 years.) Did the wording of the Constitution change over those intervening years? No. Justices who agreed that Roe was a right died or retired, and were replaced by justices who disagreed, and the Constitution means whatever a majority of Justices say it does. Or the Supreme Court deciding that the 2nd Amendment's definition of "militia" included every American citizen, thus creating a right to personal firearm ownership where none existed before.
Or more accurately, the Constitution means whatever a majority of Justices decide that the hypothetical ghosts of the Founding Fathers, if summoned into a pentagram, would themselves decide. It just happens to be the case that the original intent of the Founding Fathers always correlates to the political bias of the majority. Crazy how that works.
And of course the Supreme Court's power of judicial review itself was never granted by the Constitution. They just made it up because it made sense to them.
But the 100 mile rule? That covers damn near everybody in the US (>200 million, or 66%, give or take) subject to warrantless searches on the whim of whatever the police want?
It's more than that, it's being "close" to a border (you can argue if 100 miles is "close") and not on a whim but reason to believe you recently crossed it.
Sure, but if you're driving in NM or TX or AZ, what constitutes that reasonable basis for a stop? As long as the car is legal, there can't be any, yet they still do roving patrols. The also stop buses and trains mid-transit (not at stations), which again, hard to conceive of why that would be necessary - if they know an illegal is on a bus/train, sure stop it and get the person, but asking everybody onboard - should be illegal.
I don't see many maps that include them in the visuals of border so I'm not sure of the status of that and if the feds are arguing it would count and I think they would if there was an indication they were. I do remember that that was part of the discussion when the policy/rule first got a lot of attention a few years ago but it's not showing up in the visuals now. Maybe there was a clarification or restriction added either by courts or by the executive?
Because you can't exactly sneak on/off of an international airplane. It should be pretty trivial for customs to funnel travelers through a checkpoint where they can search at the time of the actual border crossing.
Likewise we now have the technology to automatically surveil the border 24/7 (maybe modulo tunnels, though I wouldn't be surprised if we could detect those too?), so a 100-mile exception only ever becomes more and more dubious. We could've built the wall and lined it with a surveillance system for less than the cost of this Iran war (never mind all the m̶o̶n̶e̶y̶ ̶p̶r̶i̶n̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ stimulus this decade), shutting up the whole border debate once and for all, and ending justifications for internal surveillance for trafficking.
> Because you can't exactly sneak on/off of an international airplane.
I'm actually pretty curious about this. You can't easily sneak on/off a commercial international airplane, but that's because they've got the gates set up in the airport to funnel you through a specific path that leads to customs. Showing up on an international charter or GA flight seems squishier. http://www.canada.eaachapter.org/FLYING%20TO%20and%20FROM%20... The process seems to be that you schedule an ETA, taxi to a CBP station and wait there until a CBP officer arrives.
On the other side of it, it looks like CANPASS would let you land in Canada even if the CBSA station is closed...
If you fly up from countries south of the US you have a tight list of airports you can clear customs at. Wilmington NC is the odd one on the eastern seaboard. Its about 520 miles north of the nearest one. For flights coming up from the Caribbean headed to New England its a lucrative place to be.
It's still quite hard to sneakily fly into the US in a GA or charter plane and land unexpectedly at an international airport which is why they seem to not count. I say that because places like the SBCC don't include 100 mile bubbles around international airports on their maps of the issue.
On the other hand all aircraft are tracked (we are surely not trying to account for the possibility of a stealth aircraft transporting illicit goods across the border and secretly landing somewhere), and they can decide what they're going to demand from international flights. They might be somewhat lax on runway security, maybe? But it's a pretty constrained problem and easy to keep it localized if they want to tighten it.
That's a separate issue I don't support outside of situations where they can reasonably prove/show you crossed without alrady going through the search. Luckily, at least so far afaik, it hasn't really been deployed in the maximalist way that turns the whole country into that zone. It's a lot easier to justify near physical land borders like Canada and Mexico than it is if it's being used within 100 miles of very controlled impermiable borders like international airports. Has it been used outside of the land borders?
Well intentioned laws today can be used by illintentioned actors in the future, and mild legal exceptions can become significant ones with a couple additions.
The 100 mile zone is a good example - that 100 mile zone assumes the entirety of the great lakes is international waters, even though Lake Michigan is 100% American Territory and over 300 miles long. So, you could be in a landlocked county of Indiana, and be harassed by the federal government for being in a border zone.
Whats to stop someone from saying, the entire Mississippi river and its tributaries are a border zone? With that you could get 80% of the US population into the border zone.
By enabling some "rule based" decisions that skirt the constitution, you enable a legal mechanism for constitutional rights to be violated without any legislation.
Two main cases and the interpretation there-of [0]. The most expansive interpretation of the 100 mile zone that includes all coastal areas hasn't really been tested and AFAIK CBP mostly uses it in a more justifiable area around land borders so far relying on other justifications for more inland operations.
I think they should have to pass a new amendment to fix or clarify when the Constitution seems to say something contradictory. Court shouldn't be able to just decide the 4th Amendment means something weaker than what it plainly says.
There are other backers to that as well. The main ones being oil trades being settled largely in USD and the need to acquire USD to pay for US goods/services. It's not all military might there's a lot of economic might in there too.
This is the important point. Oil was/is settled in dollars. The world is rapidly moving away from oil. China has already hit peak oil. China is 1/3rd of global manufacturing capacity. If you're leaving oil behind, and buying solar, batteries, and EVs from China, your need for dollars declines, and need for yuan goes up. Also, stocks vs flows. You have to keep buying oil every day from petrostates, while the clean tech you buy is yours for its entire service life (a decade or more for EVs, decades for solar and stationary battery storage).
The US did well when the Saudis required dollars for oil as part of the US-Saudi security and military arrangement, and that arrangement is declining in value over time as the value of oil to the global economy declines. The US loses investors in US treasuries when folks who sold oil for dollars do not have dollars from oil sales. Shades of theta decay.
> "The petrodollar loop requires two moving parts: dollars earned and dollars invested. Both have stopped."
> The standard reassurance is that there is no alternative to Treasuries — no other market offers the depth, liquidity and legal infrastructure that central banks require. This remains true. Foreign central banks will not abandon Treasuries wholesale. But “no realistic alternative” and “unquestioned safe haven” are not the same thing, and the Iran war is clarifying the difference.
> As the world’s largest manufacturer of clean technologies, data on China’s cleantech exports provide an important early insight into the pace and scale of the energy transition. In 2024, China produced around 80% of the world’s solar PV modules and battery cells, and 70% of electric vehicles.
(as of this comment, China is exporting EVs at a 12M unit/year annualized run rate, with the capacity to build 50M EVs/year; they are only constrained by not enough marine vessels to keep up with export demand; every 24 months of EV production destroys ~1M barrels/day of oil demand at current run rates, which continue to increase)
Oil being settled in dollars is completely unimportant.
It makes no difference in what currency a trade is conducted.
What matters is the jurisdiction in which you store the proceeds.
That selection of jurisdiction drives everything else.
I can declare that all oil must be settled in blue seashells. Who cares? What matters is that I do not keep my profits from selling oil as a pile of blue seashells, I invest those profits in some country. As long as that country remains the US, disproportionately, then oil can be marked in British pounds, seashells, hollywood B-list handjobs, it really makes no difference at all.
But, you object, "Doesn't oil being priced in dollars mean that nations need to have dollars to buy oil?". Nope, there are forex markets. So let's look at a situation in which oil is priced in Euros but Saudi Arabia stores its surpluses in dollars.
Which currency sees an increase in demand?
Japan goes to buy oil, so it sells the Yen and buys Euros. Those Euros are handed over to Saudi Arabia, which immediately sells them to buy dollars.
So the net result is that the euro transactions cancel out and all that matters is the selling of Yen and the buying of dollars. The yen falls against the dollar and the euro goes nowhere. It's a literal null op, in terms of net demand for the currency. It means nothing. The jurisdiction in which the proceeds are stored - that is everything.
Now I would ask you, in which jurisdictions do you think Saudi Arabia can efficiently store the ten billion or so it earns each day from selling oil? Nepal? Where does it store a couple trillion dollars worth of financial assets each year? Argentina? Which nation allows such vast unrestricted capital inflows and outflows? Go ahead, make a list.
So you see, whereas one can literally invent anything in which oil is priced in, to find a jurisdiction that can accept those capital inflows, that limits you to basically a single choice. Now, given that Saudi Arabia needs (not wants, but needs) to store its proceeds in dollars, it makes sense that it would price the oil in dollars to save on transaction fees. But really it can price the oil in anything it wants, no one cares except people caught in dank youtube caverns where the ominous phrase "petrodollar" is scrawled on the walls by torchlight.
No France still needs X USD to send to Saudi Arabia for Y barrels of oil. The only way the USD becomes funny money is if SA buys X from France also denominated in USD so that the cycle is closed, otherwise France needs a continuous source of USD to send over to SA. [0]
[0] Simplifying to national here; yes it's not just one unit in France and one in SA but on net there's X trade between the major money movers in each country.
I am asking you to imagine a situation in which oil is priced in currency A but the proceeds are stored in currency B in order to determine whether it is A or B that matters, or both.
In your example, A and B are the same (dollars) and you demonstrate that there is a need for the common currency of A and B, but you are unable to distinguish between the demand caused by A and the demand caused by B, so I don't think you are groking the example. Suppose A and B were different. Oil is priced in dollars but the proceeds are stored in yen. So
1. France sells euros to buy dollars
2. France gives the dollars to KSA for oil
3. KSA sells the exact same number of dollars for Yen.
So now we see that 1 and 3 cancel the net demand for dollars to zero, and what remains is a transaction in which euros were sold for Yen, so the Yen rises against the euro and nothing at all happens to the dollar. No demand for the dollar due to oil being priced in dollars. All that matters is the currency in which you store the proceeds.
By the way, this used to be an adage of currency traders - it doesn't matter what currency a thing is priced in, what matters is the currency where you store the proceeds of the sale. This was shorthand for "the seller determines which currency gains from a trade, and the buyer determines which currency loses". So France, in selling euros for dollars, determines that euros will lose value, but does not determine that dollars will increase. It is Saudi Arabia, the seller, in choosing where to store the proceeds that determines which currency, in this case, the yen, will increase.
It's also entirely possible he's essentially competent at the job of being a board member which is a pretty do-little job if the CEO is doing a good job.
The issue on real faults is they span massive areas. The San Andreas fault system spans basically the entire coast of California.
Even if we could identify the right points there's a big liability shift both legal and political between doing nothing and intentionally setting off an earthquake that would be hard to predict the size of. It's part of why ~~proscribed~~ prescribed burns fell out of favor, it's way easier to do nothing and blame nature than defending damage caused by intentional acts. It gets into messy areas where it's hard to convince people that the damage was lesser than it otherwise would have been in the future.
The main reason is there are alternative paths where neither were required. Japan was already fishing around for diplomatic end to the war with the major sticking point being conditional vs unconditional surrender and their main condition iirc was protection for the Emperor which the US ended up not messing with significantly anyways (at least in terms of execution for various war crimes committed by Imperial Japanese forces). That's usually the main argument I see and honestly I see the points there, Japan really was putting out fairly significant feelers about a possible negotiated end to the war before the Soviet Union was able to pivot to the Far East theater.
We'll never /really/ know what the outcome of a negotiated peace would have looked like since it was obviated so soon after it started by the bombing and Japan's unconditional surrender afterwards. We don't really know how much that path would differ from the outcome of the unconditional surrender turned out to be. The main point is it's not an either or situation between bomb and the bloody full on land invasion scenarios as presented by the bomb apologist [0] camp.
[0] I mean this in the neutral dictionary sense of simply "one that defends a controversial position", just to clarify.
>The main reason is there are alternative paths where neither were required. Japan was already fishing around for diplomatic end to the war with the major sticking point being conditional vs unconditional surrender and their main condition iirc was protection for the Emperor ...
This is not true. While there were peace feelers put out by the civilian members of the Big 6, the military hardliners blocked each of them. (Most accounts also state that part of their conditions would be to be given the islands in the South Pacific that the allies had just conquered.)
Even AFTER an atomic bomb had been dropped, the military had unacceptable demands:
>...Three members held out for three additional terms: Army Minister General Korechika Anami and the Chiefs of Staff of the Army, General Yoshijiro Umezu, and Navy, Admiral Soemu Toyoda. These additional terms included: 1) Japan would disarm her own forces; 2) Japan would conduct any “so-called” war crimes trials of her own nationals; and 3) there would be no occupation of Japan. This last term would assure the continuance of the Imperial system and Hirohito’s seat on the throne. These positions would be referred to as the “one condition” and the “four condition” Japanese peace terms. Under the Japanese governing system, however, the Big Six could only act when unanimous. With a three to three split, they were deadlocked.
It was at this point that Hirohito intervened:
>...At the end of the theatrical demonstration of the deadlock, the emperor spoke. He stated he had given serious consideration to the situation at home and aboard. He then announced his support of the “one condition” offer. He and Japan must “bear the unbearable.” The Big Six and later the full cabinet made Hirohito’s decision official government policy.
The American and Allied reply accepted the Japanese surrender offer, except that it stated clearly that the emperor would be subordinate to the occupation commander. This produced another dispute as to whether Japan could accept these terms. The emperor intervened again to announce he was satisfied with the American cable.
Even after all this, hardline military officers attempted a violent military coup to destroy the Emperor's recorded surrender broadcast and keep the war going.
I talk in more (somewhat ramble-y) detail here [0], but I think I can put a more succinct version of the anti argument here, the main argument is that to morally justify the extreme act dropping atomic bombs on those cities requires an extreme set of justifications to the level of "it was the only option short of a bloody millions dead between both sides home island invasion" that history doesn't necessarily support.
The core thrust that undermines the this or that between bombs and traditional invasion justification for dropping the bombs is that a) the Emperor was already exploring possible peace deals and b) ultimately the Emperor was able to override the extreme militarists in the war council and accept the peace after the bombs. A lot of the pro-moral-bomb argument presupposes that the shock and awe of the atomic bombs were a prerequisite for the change in stance and that anything short of a full invasion of the home islands would not achieve shift large enough to get to a peace deal. (and that to achieve that impact required them to be used on a city)
Ultimately I think (and I know this is extremely hard to prove ahistorically) a naval blockade and shelling/arial campaign that devastated what little military might Japan had left would have lead to the same shift as the bombs and that the casualties from that would be lower or at least less morally weighted as the intentional atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When that shift would happen and how to weigh the deaths morally are going to vary a lot from person to person though and I accept that.
> Even after all this, hardline military officers attempted a violent military coup to destroy the Emperor's recorded surrender broadcast and keep the war going.
A coup that ultimately fails though. I don't think anyone really argues that there weren't fanatical elements remaining even after the bombs were dropped. Their existence doesn't mean peace required the bombs however, the big question is what were the conditions that would reduce their power to the point the peace could be accepted. We have one example in the bombing but that doesn't mean that was the only option.
I personally subscribe to the theory that nuking Japan (at least once) probably stopped the need for an invasion. Almost all of the archives that were sifted through pretty much answers the fact that the Japanese were never going to negotiate a peace that removed its militant aspects otherwise. There would likely have been another war and Japan wouldn't have become democratic.
The 2nd bomb? I can be convinced either way. Japan needed to know they had more than one, but it probably didn't have to be a city. That being said, this is a lot of presentism (looking at the past with modern ethics). World War Two was a brutal, total war and the long term effects of nuclear weapons were not fully understood. Remember that there was carpet bombing with incendiary bombs happening against Japan's wooden cities for the year leading up to this. A non-nuclear end the the war would almost certainly have involved a land invasion and many, many more deaths on all sides.
Japan (as a country) was also not innocent in all this. They started the war - both with China and the USA. The Japanese military IN COLD BLOOD slaughtered more civilians than the Allies did in all their strategic bombings, let alone just nuclear. Even the nuclear bombs had military targets in mind...
1) is a place where symbolic and actual authority are two very different things.
2) is a place where outward consensus is prioritized. Heavily.
After the fall of Tojo in the middle of 1944, the cabinet which regained a modest degree of civilian control was split between those who wanted to surrender with one condition (the kokutai gets preserved in some form-this is what Truman eventually agreed to) and those who wanted to surrender, but with several conditions-they handle their own war crimes trials, all kinds of unrealistic stuff.
The thing is: the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, the atomic bombings, the potential social unrest, it all happened within the space of a week. It's frankly a bit bizarre to suggest that one and only one of these played a role in the Japanese decision to surrender, especially given the structure of their government. It probably all combined together at once. And even this led to the Kyujo incident.
>The Japanese military IN COLD BLOOD slaughtered more civilians than the Allies did in all their strategic bombings, let alone just nuclear. Even the nuclear bombs had military targets in mind...
Operation Meetinghouse killed more than the atomic bombs did. And the Soviets-quite literally-raped, murdered, and looted their way through Manchuria to the point where anti-Soviet demonstrations in multiple Chinese cities became very difficult for the KMT regime to control. The Americans would pardon Shiro Ishii, the Soviets would put several Unit 731 goons to work on their own human experimentation program at Sverdlovsk. And these were the relative good guys. So, yeah: it was a dark time in human history.
Ultimately, the decision to use the atomic bombs can't be separated from the decision to press for unconditional surrender of some kind. You could genuinely make the argument that Roosevelt was careless in applying something meant for Germany and its history to a completely different country with different pathologies, and it is certainly true that a "placated" Stalin, a strong pro-US nationalist China, a demilitarized irrelevant Japan, and a decolonized Asia were four goals that were never going to be compatible. But it didn't really matter for Truman, one of the few American Presidents who knew what war actually was-WWI as well as being descended from the losers in the Civil War-and someone who barely had the legitimacy needed to agree to keeping the kokutai after the atomic bombings. I think their usage was inevitable by 1945. Those incandescent with rage from 80 years later miss the forest for the trees.
>...Ultimately I think (and I know this is extremely hard to prove ahistorically) a naval blockade and shelling/arial campaign that devastated what little military might Japan had left would have lead to the same shift as the bombs and that the casualties from that would be lower or at least less morally weighted as the intentional atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
A full blockade would have led to many more deaths due to famine, etc.
The last major battle before the dropping of the atomic bombs was the battle for Okinawa and it was the bloodiest and fiercest battle fought against the Japanese. Absolutely no one who knew about that battle would have claimed that Japan was already defeated.
>...When the guns fell silent, more than 240,000 people had lost their lives in the campaign for Okinawa. The American loss rate was 35 percent of the force, totaling 49,151 casualties.
>...So close to the home islands, most Japanese soldiers refused to surrender and fought to the death. Their fanaticism contributed to a dreadful toll. Some 110,000 Japanese and conscripted Okinawan defenders were killed in action.
Japan had every intention of defending the main islands just as strong, or stronger, starting with operation Ketsu-Go. One of the slogans in Japan in 1945 was "The sooner the Americans come, the better...One hundred million die proudly."
The proposed allied invasion was planned to have 42 aircraft carriers, 24 battleships, and 400 destroyers and destroyer escorts. Please take a moment to try and picture that armada... Yet even with an armada of that size, that wasn't considered enough!
>...Ken Nichols, the District Engineer of the Manhattan Engineer District, wrote that at the beginning of August 1945, "[p]lanning for the invasion of the main Japanese home islands had reached its final stages, and if the landings actually took place, we might supply about fifteen atomic bombs to support the troops."
One thing they would have been facing was a massive kamikaze force:
>...Estimates of how many would have been available vary, but range between 5,000 and 7,000; plans for waves of 1,000 planes were in place. Both sides planned for higher-than-normal success rates since the invasion would greatly reduce problems of finding targets ("fly to the shore, hang a right, find a transport") and the vulnerable transports would be concentrated near shore in order to offload troops.
These weren't the only suicide attackers. The navy had midget submarines and frogmen who would attack the landing craft with explosive charges. Civilians were formally "drafted" into defense units, most of which had no military weapons or uniform, and which had been instructed to attack with bamboo spears or hand tools. There's no way to tell whether such units would have had any positive effect - but their inclusion would almost guarantee that US troops would fire on civilians, with the potential for mass slaughter.
A Japanese military officer summed up the thinking by the Japanese military this way:
>...We will prepare 10,000 planes to meet the landing of the enemy. We will mobilize every aircraft possible, both training and "special attack" planes. We will smash one third of the enemy's war potential with this air force at sea. Another third will also be smashed at sea by our warships, human torpedoes and other special weapons. Furthermore, when the enemy actually lands, if we are ready to sacrifice a million men we will be able to inflict an equal number of casualties upon them. If the enemy loses a million men, then the public opinion in America will become inclined towards peace, and Japan will be able to gain peace with comparatively advantageous conditions.
> Estimates of how many would have been available vary, but range between 5,000 and 7,000; plans for waves of 1,000 planes were in place.
My problem with quotes like that from the Japanese side is I don't believe they could have actually fielded anywhere near that number or at least not for any sustained amount of time. The total number of aircraft counted during the disarmament efforts post war were something like 15k across the entire Japanese army and navy combined across all types of planes and Japan was having massive trouble building any more planes and training new pilots.
Then ultimately the question is how much of that would have been required before the same shift that happened after the atomic bombs were dropped happened in the run up to blockade/invasion? How much of the remaining airforce could have been destroyed before it was really a threat to this alt-history force? etc.
> "The sooner the Americans come, the better...One hundred million die proudly."
Like if we take this quote and others about the defense of the home islands at face value and suppose that they wouldn't have broken soon any ways in the run up to an invasion or in the early days of that effort why are the 100-200k that died by the end of 1945 from the bombings enough when similar amounts wouldn't have been spread among military targets the US could more precisely hit? History already proves that the "One hundred million die proudly" is propaganda bluster.
A big part of the anti-moral-bomb does hinge on the supposition that Japan would not have held much longer and the feared invasion scenario was a case of prudent planning for a worst case that was unlikely to happen. Living as it does in the land of the counterfactual it's tough to really say when they might have broken in this alt-history scenario.
>...The total number of aircraft counted during the disarmament efforts post war were something like 15k across the entire Japanese army and navy combined across all types of planes
They were not planning on using those planes for dog-fighting. They planned to use everything they could for kamikaze attacks.
>...why are the 100-200k that died by the end of 1945 from the bombings enough when similar amounts wouldn't have been spread among military targets the US could more precisely hit?
The atomic bomb was the only reason Hirohito gave in his surrender speech to the Japanese people. There also was this:
>...Later in a private letter to the Crown Prince he did not expect to be made public, the emperor stressed Japan’s deficiency in “science”—a euphemism that encompassed atomic weapons—and an underestimation of the United States and Great Britain. He did not mention Soviet entry into the war.
>...History already proves that the "One hundred million die proudly" is propaganda bluster.
I am not sure why you say that "History already proves" - we really don't know what would have happened. For example, if in 1944 someone was saying that Japan would have over a thousand kamikaze attacks by the end of the war, you might have claimed that was propaganda bluster, but it turns out that is what happened. If someone had said that 90% of the Japanese defenders on Okinawa would fight to the death, you might claim that was propaganda bluster. Or that hundreds of civilians would commit suicide, etc, etc. This was total war.
>...A big part of the anti-moral-bomb does hinge on the supposition that Japan would not have held much longer and the feared invasion scenario was a case of prudent planning for a worst case that was unlikely to happen.
By the time of the fight for Okinawa, Japan was far past any hope of winning that war, yet it was the bloodiest campaign of the entire war. No one who knew about that battle would have claimed that Japan was defeated. Truman and others just hoped that the atomic bomb might be enough to convince Japan to give up.
I think very few people on the anti-bomb side would seriously argue there wasn't a split in the Imperial government and a lot of preparation going into defending against a potential US invasion attempt. At the same time however there were the beginning of diplomatic efforts to explore a negotiated peace from minority factions in the Japanese government partially backed by the Emperor, these (to me) undermine the "it was the only option" argument supporting the bombings morally. I found this article that talks a bit about the feelers (even though it gets side tracked about a supposed early-1945 prototypical peace "offer" that closely matched the eventual status post war, though that's an interesting read and an important bit of info about how to treat and examine reports of things like that). [0]
The main thrust of the anti-moral-bombing argument is essentially that the MAGIC intercepts we know happened for sure of their early diplomatic feelers indicate that the Emperor and some minority factions were beginning to develop the terms for a possible surrender and that combined with the main reasons for the US bombing not being directly oriented towards defeating Japan but were already looking to their next adversary, the USSR, weakens the argument that the bombing was ultimately more moral way of ending the war. We know for sure from Truman et al's own writings at the time show that their only concern wasn't the least bloody end of the war with Japan and they wanted to demonstrate the bomb to the USSR, I think that's pretty undisputed history even by the pro-moral-bombing side of the argument.
I tend to agree that it's unlikely Japan would have been able to stand up to a US blockade when we were already able to safely park battleships off their coast before the bombs were dropped and ultimately the Supreme War Council would have been overruled by the Emperor the same way they were after the atomic bombs were dropped. How quickly would the pro-negotiation side have gained power with a blockade of the home islands? That would have been a pretty safe operation for the US at the time.
The biggest question marks in the whole thing are largely impossible to answer how many more defeats would the militarist side have to suffer before accepting a surrender that looks like the eventual post war status. The insistence on unconditional surrender is also a thing that's difficult to weigh morally. If the US insists on a condition it knows is unacceptable how much does that shift the moral blame for Japan not accepting the ultimatum of an "unacceptable" condition or bomb?
Sorry if it's a bit jumbled, I'm bouncing between work and this and I'm not a great essayist to begin with.
Too long; You rambled too much there in the middle: the main argument of the antibomb remains that it's unlikely that a full or even partial invasion of the home islands would have been ultimately required and the atomic bombing of civilians is so morally bad that it requires an iron clad "there was no other option to end the war" (or the only alternatives were far bloodier; eg a full home island invasion) which the Japanese feelers about negotiating a peace undermines.
I think ultimately if we could part the curtains of time for both sides and show the post war outcome to both sides Japan would have accepted a surrender that lead to that future.
>...We know for sure from Truman et al's own writings at the time show that their only concern wasn't the least bloody end of the war with Japan and they wanted to demonstrate the bomb to the USSR, I think that's pretty undisputed history even by the pro-moral-bombing side of the argument.
There is very little evidence of this. Truman's own writings at time (or later) never mention this idea.
This idea that Truman decided to drop the bomb to impress the Soviets was popularized later. It even has an analysis in the Reddit BadHistory subreddit:
Hmm ok that's new info to me thanks. I don't think it's fatal to the anti argument but I'll try to jettison that from my understanding of the decision to drop the bombs.
Nah, that whole thing is pure human. I originally had simple "tl;dr" but this felt more true and acknowledging of my poor self editing/thought organizing plus a little self deprecating. [0] Somethings that smell of llm speak are common in their output because the llms are mirroring human writing patterns after all.
The only LLM sourced thing in there is I found the nuclear secrecy blog post in a citation link but I then read it myself to try to avoid cherry picking a portion of an article that ultimately shut down my own argument.
[0] eta: Also I thought some people might take tl;dr offensively so softened it with the self deprication.
3-days is a pretty short time for such a major shift in politics for starters. Would a 3rd or 4th have been justified in the 6 day gap before their August 15th surrender announcement if the US had had them available?
Also the justification for the second bomb, that it was required to demonstrate it wasn't a one off doesn't require the that bomb be dropped on a second city either. The main thrust isn't that the bombs weren't effective it's that the extreme nature of the act requires extreme justification bordering on it being the only option but for a bloody home island invasion. See my other long posts about the anti-moral-bomb argument in this thread, I don't want to duplicate them here to avoid spamming the thread.
If the premise is that nuclear bombing was excessive compared to the firebombing and if the United States had waited a few more days between nuclear bombings they would have still continued with firebombing which was just as destructive as nuclear bombing and more people would have died.
The US wanted to end the war as quickly as possible and prevent the Soviets from invading and holding even a small piece of Japan for an indefinite period of time.
In doing so they probably prevented more deaths of Japanese civilians from continued firebombing and a Soviet occupation that would have been incredibly brutal.
And you can look at how the Soviets treated the people in the states that it occupied for decades after and compare it to how the US treated occupied Japan in the post war period.
The effects of both occupations still linger to this day, it's startling to look at economic differences in West Germany vs East Germany. It's doubtful that the USSR would have been able to prevent massive famines in Japan in a post war scenario where they occupied Japan or a portion of it.
A scenario where the US lacked nuclear weapons would have resulted in tremendous firebombing campaigns by both the Americans and the Soviets, as well as famine induced by a naval blockade and the war would have dragged on for much longer, drawing resources away from rebuilding both Europe and Asia, and the result would have been more civilian casualties from war and later famine that would have followed.
I don't think the blame for these civilian deaths in Hiroshima and Nagasaki falls on the shoulders of the Americans just like the deaths of civilians in the battle of Berlin were the responsibility of the European allies -- The blame lies squarely on the shoulders of the madmen who lead their countries to their doom for ultra nationalist reasons and a deranged sense of pride.
And that sense of pride thing there probably played into why the nuclear bombings were necessary -- The ultra-nationalist Japanese leadership needed to save face and it was easy to do so by surrendering to an enemy who had an unfathomably powerful new weapon.
Communications between Hiroshima and Tokyo had totally broken down. When input was received on what actually happened, it would have been so fantastic that it would have been hard to process. And this was at a time where the Bolsheviks-hard to understate the Imperial Japanese government's loathing and horror of Communism despite the pragmatic and often deeply mutually cynical relationship they had during the war-were about to go to war with them.
No this is apologizing for a fascist and suicidal regime. One day people will make this claim about Russia in their current Ukraine war even though it’s painfully obvious Russia is not seeking an actual diplomatic solution, and I will view them with the same distain as I view you now
> One day people will make this claim about Russia in their current Ukraine war
They might, it would be a sore excuse to nuke Russian territory or bomb Moscow a-la Dresden in 1945. The fact that Americans cannot imagine resolution to war without nuclear violence is exactly how Crimea was annexed and lost. If you ignore proportionality, then your adversary can test your patience and win every time.
This is why asymmetric warfare is so popular in Russia and China, and why it pisses off Americans so consistently. Nuclear weapons give nations a false sense of security, it doesn't protect you against subtle escalation like widespread corporate hacking, political blackmail, proxy conflicts, border harassment or industrial overmatch.
The complicating part to that is there's not the same Supreme War Council populated by militarists vs the Emperor split in modern Russia, there's just Putin. To match scenarios there would have to be an oligarch council in Russia pushing continuing the war while Putin put out feelers and that's not what's happening.
Also nothing about the anti-moral-bomb argument hinges on apologetics for Japanese actions just arguments that the bombs were unnecessary to achieve the end to the war. The only assumption is that there was some set of conditions and peace deal short of the two bombs that would lead to the emperor overriding the war council and surrendering.
Yes there was. They didn’t surrender, and the US intended to make it look like they had an enormous number of bombs even though the next was going to be weeks away
Even with the first bomb I wonder if they could have handled it a bit differently. Maybe scuttle a ship with it in the middle of the Tokyo bay, then drop a dud bomb directly onto the imperial palace with a warning painted on it. Seems like immediately after the bombings in hiroshima and nagasaki there was still quite a fog of war going on initially about what even happened. Making the sun appear in the middle of the tokyo bay would have been indisputable however. You'd get the blinding flash, the shockwave, the awe of the cloud, and everyone including everyone in government would not only witness it (anywhere with a window would have gotten the at least the flash), but survive, and do something about having witnessed it.
Of course 1940s thinking of the world was a bit less restrained when it came to the question of wasting a quarter million people in an instant. One wonders if the US felt the bombs were necessary to use with the war already won by that point to have sort of established precedent to use them in future conflicts. The quickness between targets would say as much as well: this is just another bombing run no different than an incendiary run a few days apart from another. After all, that's exactly what MacArthur intended to do in Korea. They were probably desperate to ensure their miracle weapon, one that took so much investment and effort and had so many careers staked in its success, would not end up like chemical weapons where it was verbotten to use even by the nazis.
I think you’ve made reasonable points. I think of it like this: the US was already firebombing Tokyo which was actually much worse than the nukes, they did likely see it as a continuation of the existing firebombing campaign
Yeah I don't think that comes up too much in the defense because it requires admitting the the US was already doing some pretty horrendous things to civilians outside the atomic bombs which is a rough datum to raise when you're defending dropping the atomic bombs. "Well it's good we dropped them because among the alternatives was a continued firebombing campaign." Kind of feeds into the argument that the very least the US weren't the the unambiguous Good Guys just the Better Guys in a lot of ways. (And lets be clear it's not exactly hard to be better than Imperial Japan....)
Nothing nuclear is easy. People will want to make sure you are not going to contaminate the atmosphere, or the aquifers. Not just on the day of the explosion, but long term. They will want to know your plans about how you will contain the nuclear contamination for thousands of years.
And then everyone and their uncle will sue you for any property damage they think they suffered as a result of your engineering. Which can be everyone who owns real estate for hundreds of miles?
But apart from those things there are really no major legal problems with it.
Who said anything about engineering... Do it the American way -- mine the entire fault with nukes, set them off simultaneously, broadcast the entire thing live and sell ad time!
China is much more cagey about the exact levels and capacity of it's version of the SPR but there's a lot of evidence they're drawing pretty heavily from it to cut their oil imports which has had a big impact on reducing the impact of the whole illegal war in Iran situation.
Even with the existing spacing tank farms have a nasty habit of catching a large portion of their tanks on fire at once when a fire breaks out in one. It's really hard to contain and extinguish the amount of oil in one of those huge tanks.
Just looking at the tanks ignores the support and access areas around the tanks. Yes they wouldn't scale exactly linearly together but taking an existing farm and multiplying it up to get the capacity is better than just looking at the raw area taken up by the tanks. There's all sorts of pumping and piping that goes into these farms you'd have to route into the above ground mega tank farm version of the SPR.
We're decades away from the point we could have even possibly built 100 miles squared of solar farm much less the batteries to store it and replacing all the uses of fossil fuel that aren't just electrical generators. Even if we snapped our fingers and magically replaced every extant car, plane, truck and train with an electric equivalent and had all the infrastructure there's still industrial uses of petroleum that would drive a desire for strategic reserves of the stuff.
Depends a lot on how quickly it erodes the salt dome and the costs of using and storing the brine instead of using fresh water. Storing that much brine runs into the same space issues that storing the oil above ground would, slight ameliorated by the brine at least not being flammable.
Looking broadly at the costs to use brine instead of fresh water you'd need a combo of stored brine and a method to generate brine from freshwater (for withdrawals) and then desalinate the brine (for deposits). And that would require quite a bit of infrastructure to store and process the salt generated and used by the freshwater <-> brine process in both directions. Depending on how quickly you want to be able to draw down the SPR you'd need to store a significant amount of salt at the location.
At a maximum to be able to withdraw the entire reserve you'd need 1.3561 × 10^7 cubic meters of halite (this number uses the density of halite as a solid crystal not the density of a pile of ground up halite they'd actually use) weighing 2.94273 × 10^10 kg or 29.4273 Tg (teragrams, a rare treat to get to break out that unit). [0] That number gets smaller when you allow for receiving shipments of salt during the drawdown since they can't instantly pull out the full reserve so they have time to allow for receiving salt shipments.
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