Atomic Bombs and Audiences

LFC points to an article by Ward Wilson suggesting that the Japanese did not surrender in WWII because of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but because the USSR dropped its neutrality with Japan. This argument presumes that the USSR's policy change was independent of the US's decision to drop the bombs, and the US's decision to drop the bombs when it did was independent of any consideration other than motivating Japanese surrender. Given what was going on in Europe (and China) at the time this seems exceptionally unlikely. Stalin had bigger fish to fry than securing marginally better terms of surrender for the Japanese Emperor, and he had agreed at Yalta to declare war on Japan within three months. The US had already conceded half of Europe but was determined to keep the USSR out of Asia. Given the rapidly-expanding US/USSR rivalry and the US's technological advantage it was in Stalin's interest to mollify the US at least until the USSR could also develop atomic weaponry.

I.e., just move the question back a step: why did the USSR pick precisely that moment to revisit their position as a potential intermediary between the US and Japan? There are two candidates. First is the Yalta agreement. Second is the deployment of the atomic bombs. Here the timing of the US dropping the bombs becomes important. The US could have dropped the bomb at any time from July 15th forward. August 8th was the deadline for the Soviets to enter the Pacific theater per the Yalta agreement. Hiroshima was August 6th. The USSR entered on August 8th by invading Manchuria (it was still the 7th in Moscow, but the time difference meant it was the 8th in Tokyo). Nagasaki was August 9th.

There is quite a lot of evidence that Stalin did not recognize the significance of atomic weaponry until it was used, and some good reasons to think that the bombs were in fact dropped primarily for the benefit of Soviet audiences, not Japanese. Stalin believed this anyway. The bombs -- or at least the second one -- were probably dropped to keep the Soviets out of E. Asia. There is no other good explanation for why the first bomb was dropped just before the deadline for Soviet intervention on the terms agreed at Yalta, or for why the second bomb was dropped at all.

From hindsight this makes the use of atomic weapons less justifiable on strategic as well as moral grounds. The Soviets obviously took from this experience that the Americans were quite dangerous and were in fact imperial. The dropping of the bombs hardened Stalin and perhaps made the Cold War more dangerous than it needed to be. This was made clear by the Bolshoi speech in 1946. Whether or not the bombings had any deterrent effect from 1945-1949 (the period before the USSR successfully detonated a bomb) is difficult to discern, but once the Soviets had achieved nuclear parity (or close enough to it) competitive brinksmanship was probably inevitable. It may have been anyway, but the U.S. took the first step by bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Any other possible paths of history were cut off at that moment.

Another example of why we should be wary of Ceteris Paribus Theories of International Relations.

Cultural Amnesia: We Must Invest in STEM or We Will Lose the Future!

[E]ven in the lower grades I found evidence of a much stronger emphasis on science than we give in the US. It is quite probable that within a generation Russia may have twice as many well-trained scientist as we. Russian resources are separated by vast distances. Her climate is exceedingly difficult. Transportation problems will always be most serious. But much of her soil is rich in the elements which when combined with a severe climate produce a most vital type of human being.

This could have be said by almost any politician in the US today, with the possible substitution of China for Russia. But, via Brad DeLong, it was actually said by Henry Wallace in 1952. There was a lot of threat inflation concerning the USSR in the 1950s and 1960s, and much of it was related to the knowledge economy and how that translated into national security ("missile gap", etc) combined with a sense that the US had underestimated the USSR in the 1940s. Not all of this was unreasonable, as Tony Judt recounted in a wonderful 1997 essay in The New Republic on the Chambers/Hiss affair (it's collected in Reappraisals but I can't find it online), but it got blown out of all proportion: without Hiss (and Chambers' special pumpkin) there wouldn't have been McCarthyism, and in the end McCarthyism mostly served McCarthy. In a similar, now we know that many of the principles that dominated US foreign policy from 1960-1990 -- brinksmanship, domino theory, MAD -- were simply unnecessary dangers, as the Soviet Union was not nearly as capable as the US leadership imagined it was.

Is there a lesson to be learnt? Towards the end of the Cold War we heard a lot about institutional superiority -- "end of history" and all that. Some of it was hyperbole, but there is some shred of truth in it as well. We genuinely believe that some form of democratic capitalism produces better outcomes than other systems, and we genuinely believe that societies which have norms of liberté, égalité, et fraternité, even if they are imperfectly applied, fare better than those which do not. Maybe we should take our own rhetoric seriously, for once: maybe we should worry a lot less about scores on science exams of 13 year old Chinese, and focus instead on translating the principles of liberté, égalité, et fraternité into practice.

P.S. the whole speech by Henry Wallace linked above is well worth reading, and could possibly be useful in an Introduction to International Relations course. There's a lot packed into a short document: commitment problems, asymmetric information, perception/misperception, etc.

UPDATE: Thanks to Noah Smith for driving traffic here. For new readers I should note that, contrary to what Smith wrote, as a quantitative social scientist I have nothing against math and science education. To say the least. I do have an issue with politicizing math and science education as a national security imperative, however, particular when done in a zero-sum "either we win the future or the Russians Chinese win the future" way. I thought I'd made that clear, but perhaps not.