The merging of the Nazi ideology with the German Prussian hard core military code, which was the origin of a lot of Nazi Germany's similar atrocities, created a similar culture but the German code incorporated a very different code of honor when it came to treatment of captors and defeated enemies.
Both countries went through a period of collective insanity as their militaristic cultures adopted modern weapons of mass destruction but did not modify and moderate their militaristic cultures.
At some point, the leaders of countries that bring such unprovoked destruction and atrocities on other countries know that they will be executed if they surrender so they develop delusional attitudes and fight to the bitter end and take as many lives of their countrymen and those of the enemy with them.
These cultures needed to be eradicated and the atomic bombs shocked the world and convinced enough of the Japanese military leadership that it was time to throw in the towel The atomic bomb was developed by the United States in response to intel from European nuclear scientists that Germany and Japan were developing atomic weapons with the capability to wipe out entire cities with one bomb.
This was accurate intel. We were in a race with both Germany and Japan to develop nukes and they would not have hesitated to use those bombs of us. In fact, the German V1 and V2 missile programs were development projects for long range, precision guided delivery systems for nuclear weapons.
More importantly, they were viewed as such by the handful of military leaders who were in the know about our nuclear weapons development project. So much so, in fact, that they formed special teams to locate and acquire the technology and technicians to form the nucleus of our strategic nuclear forces. They felt that Germany must be very close to having a working nuclear device given the accelerated development of delivery systems.
The debate over the atomic bomb use is really quite revisionist. America expended a massive amount of it's industrial and technological strength to develop the tech and to build the weapons. Over one third of America's war time electrical power generation capability was being consumed by the Manhattan Project.
Given that expenditure of resources alone, it was a foregone conclusion that the US would use it's nuclear weapons as soon as they were developed to make sure that we used ours before the enemy used their atomic weapons on us. t was part of our military doctrine at the time.
Our military leadership was very concerned about Nazi Germany's ability to deliver nukes with their V Weapons and were equally concerned about the Japanese Kamikaze threat if they were given nuclear weapons.
We see WWII through the lenses of nearly a century of victory against a totally defeated enemy. But both Germany and Japan had decades of high tech weapons development both pre war and during the war and we had not idea of the state of readiness of their nuclear weapons programs.
The closer we got to realizing a working device, the more our leadership feared the enemy might get there first.
Excellent post. It states my own opinion better than I ever could!
[...] In fact, the German V1 and V2 missile programs were development projects for long-range, precision-guided delivery systems for nuclear weapons. [...]
America expended a massive amount of it's its industrial and technological strength to develop the tech and to build the weapons. [...]
Given that expenditure of resources alone, it was a foregone conclusion that the US would use it's its nuclear weapons as soon as they were developed to make sure that we used ours before the enemy used their atomic weapons on us. [...]
There's a lot to "unpack" there; but let me focus instead on just that one assertion, which I think represents a gross distortion of the truth:
1. Because of weight constraints, neither the V-1 nor the V-2 could ever have carried a 1940s-era nuke - and certainly not any hypothetical German nuke. No documentation exists indicating that the Nazis ever envisaged mounting a nuclear warhead on either the V-1 or the V-2. Nor did the Nazis ever deploy any aircraft capable of delivering such a bomb.
2. German scientists were much farther away from developing a workable A-Bomb than was generally believed at the time by the U.S. experts. One might assert that the U.S. experts were acting out of an "abundance of caution," and I won't criticize them for that. But over the years, in the collective mind of the American public, the specious belief that the Nazis had more than a snowflake's chance in Hell to develop any nuclear device - let alone a warhead capable of being delivered by air - has, sadly, taken root.
Regards,