Precursor
The warnings had been there. To name but two: The American Civil War and The Franco-Prussian War. The message being the machines of Industry and the advances of Science were being fully harnessed to the carriages of war. Be the conflict on land, sea and now air advances were made, and each one provoked another. The term Arms Race had come of age. Meanwhile in the relative background research was advancing in Atomic Physics and in turn the new field of Nuclear Physics, nothing to really interest the Military and International Political Minds. Meanwhile the delicate system of checks and balances in essentially European and Russian politics contained such events as Germanic expansion and union, Italian unity and Independence and Russia’s messianic mission to free and unite all the Slavs. Empires prevailed, nations prevailed and wars were mostly colonial in nature; events which happened outside of the European sphere were left to the diplomatic core to summon up governmental and some military assistance where and when.

The Seismic Event (WWI)
By the second decade of the 20th Century, the political system was being pressured by variables. National identities as we know them, a product of the 19th Century had by now been given strident voice, having been urged on in preceding years by polemic writers working in the fields of Identity, Race and the more aggressive Philosophies. The web of alliances all based upon deterrents through Military Defence or Defence through aggression gave way and World War I commenced, in which the full potential of the previous decades were released. From now on The Logic of War became mainstay. In this case the Logic had lain out the issues in simple terms. Break the enemy’s armies and break the enemy’s Will. It didn’t really matter in which order.
Although much military thought had gone into what to do with armies and weaponry, amongst the principal powers, of late there had been no practical experience against a similarly weaponised foe. No one truly appreciated the full potential of the Industrial Army when unleashed either in attack or defence. That going to have to be learnt; the hard way. But the Logic of War would continue, because the foe had to be defeated, this was not just a struggle over some portions of land, some king’s ambitions, some passing fervour; the concept of National Survival was there. Thus all means were justifiable. There was no place or times for ethics; there never had been before, why should there now?
Meanwhile in 1917 in Manchester UK, Ernest Rutherford experiments with the first artificial  nuclear reactions. No doubt some would have huffed that these ‘boffins’ should be putting their talents to better uses helping The War Effort.
The war would come to an end, there were a series of military victories by the Allies, but basically the German led Central powers collapsed, the brutal truth being they had collectively lost the will to continue, bled by casualties and of resources, from within they fell. The Logic of War had favoured one side, by a thin margin its Will had prevailed.

Old Lessons Applied With New Tools
There is a line of thought that runs when later centuries’ historians view the first half of the 20th Century, they will place the two wars together. The same issues and with two major changes of sides effectively the same war.
In the interim the nationalistic feelings were fired by ethnic and racial divides, one minority or another being blamed for failures. And losers or those who had minor gains resolved they would do things differently next time. Then there was the dangerous innocence which pretended that if you ignored War it would simply go away, like when dealing with other Human flaws there was much misplaced faith invested in Wishful Thinking.

Meanwhile 1932 Cambridge UK under guidance from Rutherford and others’ discoveries James Chadwick discovers the Neutron. Following on these advances in December 1938 Berlin Germany chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman in conjunction with physicists Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch enact the process now known as Nuclear Fission. The resultant energy is noted and considered a subject for later research into a cheap form of heating.

Elsewhere the inevitability of a stumbling to conflict continues. The steps, the errors, the hopes, the lies and the confusions need not to be repeated. September 1939 add December 1941 and the world is embraced in a war in which the full efforts of Industry and Science are marshalled into the Logic of War. Axis vs Allies. One aspect is not truly embraced by one Axis side which will have great fatal consequences for one of its allies.
In the USA during October 1939 Hungarian refugee physicists Eugene Wigner and Leo Szilard, while in the UK Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls German refugee physicists in March 1940 contact the respective governments alerting them to the potential destructive power of Nuclear Fission and concerns that the German Nazi government could also research this potential. Both governments take this matter seriously. Following the attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941 and the US entry into WWII the USA uses its industrial capacity to expand the research into a viable weapon. The logic of War has now embraced the nuclear field. No area of weaponry is ever left unexplored.
This is not the only development conducted by the Allies; the side which the Axis  considered decadent and weak, forgetting that Democracies can be as ruthless as any aggressive totalitarian regime. Amongst the many advances the Allies make is to construct vast strategic bomber fleets to take the war to the Axis’ homelands, while in their rush to quick victories the Axis only invested in air forces to support their armies on the ground, they made the mistake of not matching plane for plane the four engined heavy bombers. Germany will make advances in flying bomb and rocket missiles but too little too late for a war in which resources cannot be matched. The allies meanwhile direct resources to that age old target, the population and the foes’ resource’s, crippling Axis efforts to respond. And yet two Axis powers Germany and Japan calculate that the Will to Resist will prevail, as more ground is lost, the tighter is the grip to this belief held by those who have the final authority over their people.
Somewhere within the proliferation of the ideas that the Logic War calls upon, is that lessons are always being learnt and histories recalled. The Allies bear in mind Germany was not occupied or fought over at the end of WWI, and its later regimes made capital of this, Germany was not beaten, just tricked. The current coalition of Allies will not give this regime that wriggle room. Total War until the capacity to fight back is destroyed and surrender is the only option. On the other side of the World the Japanese regime holding to a warped version of a martial code demands and indoctrinates its armies and civilian populations into a fight to the death. And by now the Allies have the capacity to deliver just that.
Thus, there is the unavoidable fact that under the calculations of The Logic of War, if the foe will not surrender and you have the ability to prevail, you will prevail by ensuring the foe cannot continue to defy you. You will not turn your back on a foe which will not bow down in surrender. This is one Logic of War, for at its depths War reasons that death and destruction are the final arbiters.

The Last Military Acts
By the spring of 1945 Germany had surrendered, beaten down by what we refer to as conventional means, and at a high price in both blood and treasure. Across the oceans WWII continued. The USA being the principal allied proponent. In the light of the casualty rate on Okinawa, of 49,000, the next stage being the landing on the main islands of Japan suggested another high casualty surge, particularly as the military government holding sway showed no sign of unconditional surrender.
We now move into an area which in terms of that long history of warfare is not new, and was mentioned earlier. How to force an enemy surrender. The USA had by other motivation now come into possession of a fearfully efficient weapon. The Atomic bomb. This allowed the possibility of one aircraft with one bomb to level an entire city. There was some debate on how to deploy this. Drop it as a demonstration on some isolated place? Suppose the regime did not give way? Half the arsenal would have been used, and only one shot left? Since there had been no testing of the weapons suppose they didn’t work as expected? The regime would be encouraged to continue resistance and the allied casualty rates continue to climb. Meanwhile as the war ran down the alliance naturally was fracturing, The USSR was taking up larger portion of Europe than expected. Had this war best  be finished quickly and as is the case in many a war, face up to the next foe – your previous ally? And above all, a conventional invasion of Japan suggested casualties into of possible 500,000 allied and at least 1,000,000 Japanese.
Finish the war as quickly and conveniently as possible – that was the decision taken. The die was cast. Hiroshima and Nagasaki would take their place in the history books of the 1930s to 1945 wars. Along with Nanking, Warsaw, Leningrad, Stalingrad, London, Tokyo, Hamburg, Berlin; to name but a few. Only in the case of those two cities the results came swiftly, dramatically, and with a new force that scared everyone with its potential. Two cities obliterated, swiftly but leaving an aftermath that unlike the others whose long drawn out suffering were by conventional means, this heralded a new era. Same result though. Same as it ever was,

Four photos named in alphabetical order but not placed so Hamburg (firebombed) Hiroshima (atom bomb), Stalingrad (sustained military action) Tokyo  (firebombed). When I saved these images to my laptop and blog I did not identify them by name, only by the title War, followed by a number to satisfy the computer record. To be honest I am not sure which is which, I think the fourth might be Stalingrad – I could be wrong, it might be the third one.
War- the great equaliser. It kills and destroys because that is what it is there for.
In the aftermath there would be much debate over the use of the atom bombs, military, ethically, politically, socially, eighty years on the debates still continue with intensity. Hamburg and Tokyo do not get the same attention as examples of the horror of war. There’s only one location that seems to generate the same kind (but not volume by any means) of debate that revolves around Hiroshima and Nagasaki and that is the German City of Dresden February 1945
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden

But this was by conventional means and has passed into the annals of the many other acts of WWII.

Nothing frightens or horrifies us so much as Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s bombings. Maybe because of that swiftness and efficiency. Maybe because  it showed no one was safe anymore, War could not just happen ‘somewhere else’. Maybe because we can see exactly where the Logic of War can lead.
Not that the lesson has been truly learnt, ask the millions who were and are in the wrong place and the time since 1945.

The subject of the last post. War Continues,

The War Posts – Part I .An Introduction to War

The War Posts Part II – The Logic of War