Given that American intelligence found out that the japanese were amassing forces for a final showdown in Kyushu, I’ve always wondered why it wasn’t really in the equation, other than morality concerns and Truman’s advisor’s unwillingness to touch a cultural city with rich history within Kyushu (Kyoto). Let’s say, hypothetically, they wanted to end the war as quickly as possible with as minimal American deaths possible. Having a nuclear parade where the Japanese were holding out in preparation for their last stand seems pretty logical. It would have crippled both the majority of the army’s remaining forces, kamikaze squads, and materials.
Before you up and tell me “how many bombs did you think the US had”, they had enough, didn’t they? Three in total in August, 7 more by October, projected 10 more by the end of 1945. They had enough to spare to turn a few other cities in Japan into hell on earth, and cleanup forces could clear whatever stragglers that escaped.
Comments
Welcome to /r/AskHistorians. Please Read Our Rules before you comment in this community. Understand that rule breaking comments get removed.
Please consider Clicking Here for RemindMeBot as it takes time for an answer to be written. Additionally, for weekly content summaries, Click Here to Subscribe to our Weekly Roundup.
We thank you for your interest in this question, and your patience in waiting for an in-depth and comprehensive answer to show up. In addition to the Weekly Roundup and RemindMeBot, consider using our Browser Extension. In the meantime our Bluesky, and Sunday Digest feature excellent content that has already been written!
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
There is always more to say, but the reasons the US had for selecting the targets it did for nuclear bombing have been discussed here before. You might like to review some of those threads while waiting for fresh responses to your query – the best can be found in the “Atomic bomb targeting” section of our FAQ and are led by u/restricteddata
[removed]
The people who planned out the actual targets for the atomic bomb were a combination of the Interim Committee and the Target Committee, who were made up of various officials in the military, scientists, and some statesmen (but not Truman). The consensus they came to in May 1945 was that the most effective use of the atomic bomb would be as a psychological weapon. The early May 1945 meeting of the Target Committee is an excellent document for seeing how they approached the bomb: a weapon that would destroy a city and in doing so “(1) obtaining the greatest psychological effect against Japan and (2) making the initial use sufficiently spectacular for the importance of the weapon to be internationally recognized when publicity on it is released.”
At the same meeting, they also concluded that: “A. It was agreed that for the initial use of the weapon any small and strictly military objective should be located in a much larger area subject to blast damage in order to avoid undue risks of the weapon being lost due to bad placing of the bomb.” Which is to say, they deliberately ruled out anything that would be a purely “tactical” target, because they feared that if they missed with the bomb (which would be easy to do) the bomb would not appear effective, and the psychological value would be lost. One might be surprised to hear you can “miss” with an atomic bomb, but while powerful, they are not omni-powerful. The Nagasaki bomb missed its intended aiming point by over a mile, and did not destroy the half of the city it was supposed to as a result (it destroyed the other half, but the military basically covered up the mistake and claimed it was on purpose, after the fact).
This is not to say that tactical uses were never considered. They were, in fact, studied by the scientists, and some of the military men. But the “psychological” use of the bomb overshadowed this completely for everyone involved. The military wanted to show off a tremendous, new weapon that would allow them to threaten the total destruction of Japan, even more so than the firebombing raids. The statesmen wanted a diplomatic shock that might cause the deadlocked Japanese high command to finally accept they had been defeated. Some of the scientists, and some of the statesmen, hoped that if the first uses of the atomic bomb were sufficiently horrible, it would never be used again. All of this mitigated against treating it as a “normal” military weapon.
And so the two committees concluded, by the end of May, that the ideal targets would be cities that contained military installations or factories, surrounded by urban areas and workers’ housing that would show off the effect of the bomb. So they planned along that basis, surveying possible targets, finally coming up with various lists that included Kyoto (which is on Honshu, not Kyushu) and Hiroshima as their top targets.
Stimson objected to Kyoto being on the list at all, and eventually took the matter to Truman, who agreed with him, which made Hiroshima the target. There is a lot of story to this (which my new book, coming out this fall, spends about half of the book talking about), but the interesting thing of relevant to your question is that for Truman, Hiroshima was a “military” target, even if not a “tactical” target. At no point were “tactical” targets discussed with him; it was never raised as a possible option on the table. The decision to back Stimson’s prohibition of bombing Kyoto was the only direct decision that Truman made regarding the use or targeting of the atomic bombs in World War II (other than his order to stop using them on August 10th). (Both of these decisions are, again, a major subject of my next book. The general but commonly-held idea that Truman was otherwise closely involved in the “decision to use the atomic bomb” is incorrect.)
After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but obviously before the surrender agreement, General George C. Marshall did consider “saving up” the next available bombs and using them against “tactical” targets as part of the invasion forces. I have written a little about this in the past. (It is of note that Marshall was one of the only people involved in these discussions who was not that enthusiastic about using the atomic bombs on cities. But once it was clear that everyone else was assuming that was going to be how they were used, he basically kept his mouth shut on the matter and went along with the group. It did not add up to much of anything, but I like mentioning it as a counter-example to the idea that destroying cities was taken entirely for granted by these people.)
Keep in mind that the invasion of Kyushu was not scheduled to begin until November 1945, so it was not yet urgent. It was hoped, of course, that the invasion would be unnecessary, due to a combination of atomic bombings, conventional bombings and minings, diplomacy, Soviet intervention, the Potsdam Declaration, and so on. The atomic bombs would only have been part of the invasion planning if all of that had failed to bring about a surrender (which was not at all seen as impossible).
Would the third atomic bomb have been also used on a city, or would it have been used tactically? We cannot say — the planning never got to that stage, although what little we have suggests they were thinking about using it against a city, had it been authorized. But it is indeed possible that in another timeline they would have shifted their approach to it to a more tactical one after that point.
For more on how these discussions took place, along with my forthcoming book (!), I would recommend:
Barton J. Bernstein, “Eclipsed by Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Early Thinking about Tactical Nuclear Weapons,” International Security 15, no. 4 (Spring 1991), 149–173.
Michael Gordin, Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War (Princeton University Press, 2015).
Both of which discuss the history of thinking “tactically” about the atomic bomb during World War II and the eventual push towards regarding it as a “special” weapon whose primary value was psychological/strategic.
And my book is: Alex Wellerstein, The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age (HarperCollins, forthcoming 2025). The question of the military/civilian nature of the first use of the bomb, what Truman thought about it, and how that ultimately impacted the trajectory of the early atomic age (1945-1953), is the subject of the book.
Other comments directed you to some more detailed answers, but I feel its important to cover a basic geographical mistake in your question. Kyushu is Japan’s southwestern major island. Kyoto is not on the island of Kyushu, but Nagasaki is. So, the US did target Kyushu. According to what I learned at the museum in Nagasaki, it was not the original target for the bomb, which was Kitakyushu, a different major industrial area also in Kyushu. Weather on the day directed them to Nagasaki instead.