If we had a atomic bomb before Germany surrendered would we have used it against them?

Some people have said that we used the bomb on Japan and not Germany because of raceism. Japan is a non-white country. Were they seen as somhow lower in statice then Germans?

If we had a atomic bomb before Germany surrendered would we have used it against them?
No, we used the bomb on Japan because it was apparent that they were not going to surrender. When we looked at what it would cost in human lives to invade the Japanese home islands, we decided to use the bomb and see if that would induce Japan to surrender.





After using the first bomb, Japan held firm, and since we had two bombs available, we dropped the other. At this point, Japan surrendered.





As for Germany, we probably wouldn't have since we were invading from the west and Russia was invading from the east, it was pretty apparent that we could take Germany with acceptable losses.
Reply:so japan surrendered first? Report It

Reply:one word.....


YES!
Reply:The Germans certainly thought so! They had to give the Japanese a special exemption to be considered 'legally Aryan'!





However, the more likely explanation is that we simply were not able to prepare a weapon that fast. The technology was in its infancy back then, and we are lucky that it worked at all.





We certainly didn't hesitate to use other weapons of mass effect on the Germans. Consider Dresden, a beautiful city, bombed to saturation with incendiaries, causing even stone to reduce to powder, and people in sealed bomb shelters were killed from the heat and the lack of air. Ground Zero Dresden was described as ashes, like the surface of the moon. (by the noted author Kurt Vonnegut Jr., who was an eyewitness.)





What took several hundred planes hours to do to Dresden, we did to the Japanese cities with one plane each in a moment. But we would have used atomic weapons on Germany if we had had them in time.





Indeed, if we had had evidence of the concentration camps before we physically entered Germany, it would have been difficult to restrain ourselves from using atomic weapons against the German people.





So it doesn't seem that there was any significant racism involved. On the part of the Americans.
Reply:FDR received the letter written by Fermi (and others) and signed by Einstein warning what an atomic bomb could do and that Germany had an atomic program (which was headed by Heisenberg--the only Jewish scientist to not flee Germany when the Nazis took over; some say to make sure their atomic program did not succeed). FDR received this letter in the middle of 1941--i.e. before we even entered the war. One of the reasons Pearl Harbor was permitted to be bombed was so we could enter the war and make sure Germany did not develop the bomb. The Manhattan Project started at the beginning of the war in 1942. Had Germany not surrendered, our project was directed at them, not Japan. Truman had received word that the only way to get Japan to surrender was to invade. He did not want to commit to a sure loss of more casualties than had died up to that point in the Pacific theater, so Fat Man and Little Boy were dropped to shock Japan into surrender.


But, try this perspective: The US may be the only nation in history to use an atomic weapon against an enemy, but Japan is the only nation [known] to have used biological weapons on an enemy--Chinese POWs.
Reply:Well everyone seems to like to beat up on Americans. Let me remind you that the Japanese believed they were the master race. What they did in china and to the people in the islands they conquered was pure evil. Based on a racist belief the Japanese were worse. They invaded china raped and killed women and children enslaved prisoners and worked them to death. The united states stopped trading with them due to there actions in china. They then attacked us at pearl harbor. To turn that around and call us racist after the death marches in Philippines is totally offensive.
Reply:Using "the bomb" on the german forces would have killed more allies in the underground than it would have saved. We didn't have that problem w/ Japan. Besides, The firebombing raids were more effective anyway.
Reply:There's no easy 'yes' or 'no' answer to this question. While, yes, Japanese were viewed as inferior by most Americans (why else would we put Japanese American citizens in concentration camps?), Japan was the only country during WWII that actually attacked American soil. One could argue that the US had a personal grudge against Japan for Pearl Harbor and so decided to use the A-bomb on two major population centers. It was an incredible blow to morale for their country, which then helped to hasten their surrender to the US.





What many people forget is that German-American citizens were also treated very poorly during WWII. It seems that the only nationality that Americans haven't shown racism towards are white people of British decent - British meaning England, because the Irish and Scottish were both shown disdane in the US.





As far as dirty politics go and whether or not the US would have dropped the A-bomb on Germany to win the war: There were still enough voters in this country who had family in Eastern and Western Europe who would have been devastated by the A-bomb that, my guess is, the US would not have dropped the bomb on Germany. The politician who gave that go-ahead would not have stayed in office for very long.