Intimidation factor...

I recently participated in a debate about the atomic bomb and World War II. We argued to wether the US used their actions in Japan to intimidate the USSR for the post-war era. The actions in Japan would be defined as dropping the two atomic bombs and the post-war era would be described as the spread of communism into Europe and the rest of the world. My teams argument was that they did not use the atomic bombs to intimidate Russia. I gave the opening statement and I brought up a couple of good key points against the other argument. 

I started by saying that the US ended the war for one reason, to end the war as quickly as possible. There had already been 2.5 million deaths between the US and Japan alone and the president didn't want any more. The US had two plans: to drop the atomic bomb or a plan of attack called operation downfall. Operation downfall was a military invasion that would have prolonged the war for a long time. It would have cost an estimated million casualties on the US side and tens of millions on the Japanese side. Dropping the atomic bomb may have killed 200,000 but this is no where near the amount that the invasion would have killed. Harry S. Truman, the president of the United States in 1945, even stated why he decided to drop the bombs. He said that it was to bring about a quick resolution of the war by inflicting destruction, and instilling fear of further destruction, that was sufficient to cause Japan to surrender. This clearly has nothing to do with intimidating the USSR.

Another point that I brought up was the fact that the US and the USSR were allies during World War II. They even had an agreement called the Lend-Lease act which was created in 1941 and was still active in 1945 when the bombs were dropped. Through the Lend-Lease program the US sent 11 billion dollars worth of war supplies to Russia. In 1945 Stalin of the USSR said "Lend-Lease is one of Roosevelts most remarkable and vital achievements in the formation of the anti-Hitler alliance." As you can see the two countries were in agreement during this time so we had no reason to need to intimidate the USSR. 

I had one last point that I did not have time to bring up in the opening statement. As I stated before the US had a plan called operation downfall just in case for some reason they could not use the atomic bombs. Why would they even need a back-up plan if their only reason for dropping the bombs was to intimidate Russia? Operation downfall would not have intimidated Russia at all so the US was obviously dropping the bomb to end the war as quickly as possible. 

Doing this debate was very interesting and it made you have to look at both perspectives. In the end both teams had very good arguments and the debate was very heated and exciting.