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Tamogami says he would nuke America

Former general Toshio Tamogami visited the foreign correspondent’s club yesterday, responding to questions about how he was sacked for publishing an essay declaring that Japan was not an aggressor nation in the Pacific War.

At one point, a British reporter asked Tamogami a “what if” question about Japan using nuclear weapons against America in the war:

Tamogami responded by stating that he might have considered using nuclear weapons against the United States had he been a general for a nuclear-capable Japan in 1945, especially if it was a case of nuking in response to the threat of American nuclear weapons.

(Sometimes dumb questions deserve dumb headlines.)

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25 comments - What do you think? Posted by James - December 2, 2008 at 6:22 am

Categories: Politics Tags:

christopher

I knew this would be an amusing article from the headline, and you didn’t disappoint! I was going to give you some flak for making it a tad misleading, but it looks like you already pointed that out yourself.

Honestly I wouldn’t expect a different answer or even disagree with what Tamogami said. My family was in America at the time and it would have been terrible, but WWII shaped the world and it would be hypocritical of me to support the use of nukes against Japan and say it would be somehow inappropriate for the reverse to happen.

Strange guy though, I wonder how many Japanese have this revisionist view of history? Not many I hope.

TofuUnion

Yeah, Tamogami sucks. Not many Japanese have this kind of revisionist view of history. However at the same time, I don’t think most of Japanese find those revisionists are very dangerous, either.

Jack Elliot

At the time, any country would have used nukes. That being said, those early gen thermonuclear weapons weren’t so impressive compared to today’s MIRV systems.
LB

Follow up question to Tamogami-san: how, exactly, would he have planned to use a nuke against the US? Even if Japan had been “nuclear capable” in 1945, their chance of delivering such a weapon against a US target would have been significantly less than zero. Even one of the scientists who was working on Japan’s nuke program said that if his team had been successful they expected a nuke to be used against Saipan to take out US B-29 capability. But realistically, even that would have been a one-way suicide mission with the plane crashing into the sea a long way short of Saipan.

Richard

By 1945, Japan’s A-bomb program was just a few months behind the U.S. A first-generation thermonuclear weapon could have been delivered via submarine, although it would be a suicide mission, which the Imperial Army had no qualms about. That sub could have gone to Honolulu, Los Angeles, San Diego, etc. without detection.

LB

“That sub could have gone to Honolulu, Los Angeles, San Diego, etc. without detection.”

And done… what? Blown itself up off the coast? Turn itself into a really impressive (but short-lived) fountain? Very, very unlikely they could have gotten it inside a harbor, and even if they did the effects of the blast would have been very greatly minimized by the bomb being on or under the surface of the water at the time of detonation.

Joshua Issac

Tsunami

Fremen72

Those what if questions are such a waste of time.
Here’s another “what if”:
What if Japan had the B2 stealth bomber full of nuclear bombs? Would it have bombed the USSR or the USA?

Trufax

I agree that “what if” questions are generally a waste of time. They do serve a purpose for highlighting hypocrisy and in that context, they’ve got a use.
http://inuz.wordpress.com/ inuZ

France!

Philip

Interesting…
I just got back from Hiroshima and visited the museum. The attack on civilians without warning is the worst act on humankind in modern history. However, I think every country involved in that war is the blame (some more than others, of course).

In 1945, they didn’t really know the effects of radiation. The what-if question is useless because you don’t know whether it’s a what-if that includes our current knowledge on A-bombs and the effects on radiation or not.

That said, I felt Tamogami answered it as a joke. Which is the only way you could answer that question–just like any question that starts off “what if you had a time machine and…”

Level3

Yes, Hiroshima was bad, but “the worst attack on humankind in modern history”? Victimhood leads to exaggeration.

6 million dead in the Holocaust.
Unknown millions in Stalinist purges (and similar purges in other Communist regimes)
Even the fire bombing of Tokyo killed more than Hiroshima, right?

And no, not every country involved in a war is to blame. The ones who started it are. And no, the US did not “cause the war” by taking part in the oil embargo on Japan in August 1941 just because they hated Japan or something. It was an international response to Japan’s agression in Asia, Rape of Nanking in 1937-38, etc. etc.

This kind of subtle revisionism is the heart of the problem.
This general may be one of those extremists, but how many Japanese seriously think that:

1.Japan is not entirely to blame for starting the Pacific War.
2.Hiroshima is the worst atrocity in all of history.

Neither is true. But these ideas are “politically correct” for many in Japan, especially in government, it seems.

The Overthinker

“Even the fire bombing of Tokyo killed more than Hiroshima, right?”

Not really. Only if you count the immediate deaths, and not the later (weeks, months, years) ones from radiation poisoning.

“1.Japan is not entirely to blame for starting the Pacific War.”

Well, to be silly, you could argue that it was the fault of China and the others for resisting….
Philip

“6 million dead in the Holocaust.
Unknown millions in Stalinist purges (and similar purges in other Communist regimes)
Even the fire bombing of Tokyo killed more than Hiroshima, right?”

Are the holocaust and the Stalinist purges considered a single act?
The fire bombing in Tokyo didn’t kill more than Hiroshima.

Well.. I still shouldn’t have used “the worst” since it’s open to opinion.

The Overthinker

“Are the holocaust and the Stalinist purges considered a single act?”

This is a very interesting question. I would tend to ‘yes’ given that the act in question was a single policy, at least for the Jews, but it’s a grey area.

Marc

I visited the museum also last year and I was shocked not really by the atrocity of the bomb, I expected that but more by the political and scientific aspect of it.

I m a physicist, I works in an institute. To have access to the instrument of the institute, scientists have to write a proposal of experiment describing what they want to measure, how, what kind of problem they expect and so on.

Its exactly what I read in the Hiroshima museum, a proposal of the experiment to test the effects of a nuclear bomb. A year before the bomb exploded, scientist and military selected a list of town not to destroy so that the day of the nuclear bomb, they could easily compare the result of damage. Hiroshima was a perfect sample : almost intact and surrounded by mountains to study effect of echoes and radiation.

I understand that military people have this kind of thinking, its their job. I was really shocked that some scientists see the explosion of nuclear bomb on civilians as an experiment. This was disgusting.

ダビ

Seems like a reasonable answer to an idiotic question to me…
tokyojesusfist

The only problem with this is that Japan would have had no moral right whatsoever to use a nuclear weapon (or any other kind of weapon for that matter). They willingly chose to go to war against the US, and they willingly chose to do all those things in China.

http://inuz.wordpress.com/ inuZ

you think people bother with morals in war?

The Overthinker

Yes.

Anonymous

“6 million dead in the Holocaust.”

6 million Jews. Approximately an equal number of non-Jews. But I realize the latter tends not to be emphasized.
tzvete

There was a material about japanese nuclear weapon sometime ago:
http://mayomo.com/#/id=11424/
Lee

there is nothing to blame. All is fair in love and war. Join the war, prepare to win all or lose everything. Besides, japan wouldn’t have stopped if not for the atomic bombs. Quite a small price to pay to end the pacific war don’t you think? Sacrifice two cities, save the entire asian continent
Kurlach

I think the question was pointless and provocative. Knowing the General’s revisionist mindset and right-wing views, anybody could’ve anticipated his answer.

In a war, the other side is almost always seen as the aggressor. I can’t imagine anyone answering “No, we would not use a weapon at our disposal to defeat the enemy”.

I think however, that comparing atrocities caused by genocide, an atomic blast or other means of death and destruction is entirely pointless. A comparison of pain and grief gets nobody anywhere, fast. At the end of the day, war is a horrible scenario, many die, many suffer, and nobody truly wins.

Let’s just hope that people like the General can stop reliving old battles and try to actually do something constructive, like working on making the world a better place.
The Overthinker

While there is some truth in the idea that the bombs were not needed, we will never really know. My personal feeling is that the war would have ended soon after the Soviets invaded anyway, but the bombs gave Japan an excuse to take the moral high ground in their surrender.

It is true that the USAAF Strategic Bombing Survey does conclude that they were not needed. However that was after they had access to Japan to make their survey in the months following the surrender, and thus cannot be used to argue what was known at the time of decision.

I also agree that the Japanese were near starvation – period newspapers mention how the rice ration was down to 2 bowls a day. The role played by the mining of Japanese harbours and shipping lanes in the war deserves a bigger mention.

The US, incidentally, felt that having demanded and got unconditional surrender from Germany, they could not get Japan set conditions. The American public might have accepted it the other way around, but leniency for the Yellow Peril?

I don’t know why you find such a dichotomy in Japan at the moment though. Despite being never more than centrist in its government, Japan has actually long been a friend to the US (which is the same), and in fact aside from a nasty few years in the middle of the last century, the relationship has been quite strong (yes, even in Ampo). Even in the late 1930s there were powerful commercial interests that desired peace, while at the same time the runwaway Emperor-worship and misguided patriotism worked to wreck their hopes. It wasn’t hard, when the US was refusing Japanese immigration and doing their best to screw over those that were there: this made very bad press back home.

Tamogami says he would nuke America

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