I've seen a lot of commentary today about Hiroshima and Nagasaki that tries to tie them in some way to the flagrant anti-Japanese racism of the period. It feels intuitively appealing to people because it fits a need to somehow place human passion at the core of nuclear decision

But it's really a stretching of the culture of racialized violence at the tactical level in the Pacific War beyond the point of absurdity.

The rather cold and less appealing reality is that by 1945, the Allies had grown accustomed to two core ideas:

(1) The war was to be won via the massive application of firepower

(2) It was acceptable to devastate enemy rear areas with massive firepower

As Adam Tooze notes here, the logical combination of (1) and (2) is the belief, common up until the early 60s, that nuclear weapons were simply a more effective version of conventional explosives https://adamtooze.com/2017/08/27/blitzkrieg-manque-new-kind-war-interpreting-allied-victory-normandy-campaign/

The Manhattan Project -- one of the most massive mobilizations of scientific and industrial effort in military history -- was the antithesis of the brutal and hateful low-level combat that saw mutilation of dead Japanese combatants (and much more)

Not because it was *better* but because the industrial side of the war represented a vision of war distinguished by neither passion/hatred or any concept of proportionality or mercy

It is understandable that people would search for some trace of primal passion, if only to see a human face in an enterprise devoted to total and overwhelming annihilation.

Nonetheless, it's also still absurd to do so. It's not difficult to imagine scenarios in which German cities would have been devastated by nuclear weapons as well.

Which brings me back to Tooze. Tooze's point, which is rather hard to dispute, is that there is just as much continuity between World War I and World War II as change. And most military leaders that had experienced WWI took away the lesson that artillery conquers.

There were books published prior to WWII, in fact, in which the usage of poison gas against civilian populations in the rear area was portrayed as a humanitarian innovation that would lower the cost of war!

I am not underrating how much contemporaries in the 1940s and 50s came to fear and loathe the bomb. But much of the way we look at it today is colored by the culture of MAD, which only emerged once technical advances in weaponry altered the calculus of decision-makers.

That culture was not present in the immediate postwar period, a time when military leaders casually discussed infantry hopping over nuke craters Starship Troopers-style and deploying Davy Crockett infantry-operated nuke launchers

As I was telling a mutual in another context, I find the pre-1945 world and the immediate postwar period utterly terrifying. Because it is so, so, so deeply foreign to almost everything we take for granted about technology, freedom, and morality.

Eugenics? As obviously acceptable to any right-thinking fellow as putting actual cocaine in Coca-Cola. Democracy? Haven't you read the latest Le Bon psychology book? It's impossible! Economics? To be controlled by a managerial state like one in Berlin or Moscow.

Against all odds, this world nonetheless managed to defeat and destroy two genocidal empires that were very much intent on putting the world under their jackboots. And afterwards its statesmen laid the foundation for a postwar order that has enabled positive social change.

But you have to ultimately look at these places as they actually were. And they are not recognizable to modern eyes. Which is part of why we see attempts to somehow make their attitudes towards atomic weapons more legible to moderns in ways that are laughably anachronistic.