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I also find it quite interesting that in 2007 Fumio Kyuma, a resident of Nagasaki, resigned from his second tenure as Japans defence Minster after he stated that he believed the atomic bombing of the city was ‘something that couldn’t be helped’ and initially publicly refused to apologies for the remarks. He has been elected nine times to Japans house of representatives for Nagasaki and continues to hold that office.

hongi wrote:2. This may sound absurd, but is there a reason why they just couldn't have dropped the bombs off the coast or warned them about the new weapons?

In addition to the strategic reasons, dropping bombs into the ocean doesn't demonstrate their capability as weapons of total war, and without doing that the people who decided to funnel many millions of dollars to the Manhattan Project may very well have faced Congressional investigations and inquiries for the rest of their lives, so they pushed for the most "demonstrative" use possible of these weapons.

Believe it or not, many people back then didn't believe in the mighty Nuke, and dropping them off the coast or something might have made some think that there was some technical problem with them, that they were just big fireworks, or that the MH people were just generally unable to develop a usable product.

Holistically, I think you have to take our war aims into consideration 1st and run from there:

* Unconditional Surrender is the only tolerable end to the war for America, because we say so and because that's clearly the best resolution to the war. The "War to end all wars" precisely WASN'T that because it simply drew up over a dozen treaties, erected a worthless international body to mediate conflicts and the US turned isolationist. Sea Skimmer put it best in a related post elsewhere: the military parity of WWI belligerents and later in WWII meant they could all risk defeat and gamble on another war. That's why WWII was inevitable and that's why only unconditional surrender was tolerable at the end of the Second World War.

* There exists to my knowledge NO sterling example that continued conventional bombing and naval blockade could compel unconditional surrender. Oh it would kill and starve by the millions and bring them to some sort of negotiation table, but everything's predicated off our war aims, which were quite justified. Germany had it's factories bombed, it's cities occupied and it's leader killed before she surrendered unconditionally. We know it takes AT LEAST that and we don't have a Red Army connected by land to do it for us.

* Okinawa was a "dry run" for what an invasion might have looked like. That was real Japanese territory, not some rock or defensive island-chain ill-gotten in the Pearl Harbor blitz across the Dutch East Indies. As we pushed closer to the home islands, we met with stiffening resistance in the quality of foot soldiers (Japanese Naval Infantry fought at Okinawa IIRC, and not just regular Army troop) and kamikaze attacks. What they lacked now in a Navy did not mean they couldn't re-double their resistance.

* Any invasion therefore would be intolerably costly in men, money and material.

So the A-Bombs are a go.

edit: added "best" in 1st paragraph

Okinawa was a "dry run" for what an invasion might have looked like. That was real Japanese territory, not some rock or defensive island-chain ill-gotten in the Pearl Harbor blitz across the Dutch East Indies. As we pushed closer to the home islands, we met with stiffening resistance in the quality of foot soldiers (Japanese Naval Infantry fought at Okinawa IIRC, and not just regular Army troop) and kamikaze attacks. What they lacked now in a Navy did not mean they couldn't re-double their resistance.

That they did, but the Japanese Special Naval Landing Forces fought in a number of battles including 9,000 men on Okinawa, and were the sole defenders of Tarawa for example. If anything they are a bit less tough, not so well trained and certainly not as well equipped as the best formations in the regular Japanese Army.

Okinawa was really bad not because the Japanese had high quality troops persay, it was a very mixed bag they deployed in reality including 40,000 ill trained militia, but because for the first time the Japanese actually got to deploy lots of heavy equipment and especially artillery (over 300 pieces) in a battle. They also for the first time had really large numbers of troops able to deploy for a defence in depth (about 120,000, they had 250,000 men on Luzon but spread over a much bigger area, and with generally poor preparations and equipment that made them easy to isolate in irrelevant areas, we never did destroy them), and lots and lots of civilian labor to help build fortifications.

This made the battle much more conventional then anything previously encountered… and like you say we had every reason to expect every aspect to get worse in Japan. Indeed Kyushu was defended by more Japanese soldiers then the US had had fought in ALL its previous Pacific fighting put together!

Indeed the US had a huge fear that even after it conquered Japan by invasion, outlaying Japanese garrisons and especially the Japanese army in China might still refuse to surrender. The worst fear was we’d reach the Tokyo Plain (this is as far as formal invasion planning went) and not even be able to find a government to surrender the place to us, they might all suicide or else flee and hide in the mountains. It might then take several years to actually conquer the country and eliminate surviving Japanese forces in the worst case scenario. Not realistic in hindsight maybe, but for the time it was awful scenarios like that US leadership had to contemplate if it didn’t use the atomic bomb, or used it in such a manner that the Japanese were not shocked into surrender.

Darksider wrote:My question is this: How important were those to cities to the Japanese war effort? I know they must have had some relevance since I sincerely doubt Truman would have vaporize two cities just for the hell of it.

The bomb was developed under Roosevelt, and the targets probably picked under him as well. Truman obviously authorized the bombing, but he inherited the program, he didn't have much if anything to do with it under Roosevelt died.

If Truman had decided against dropping the big one, would the two cities have been subjected to strategic bombing on the same scale as German cities during operation downfall?

Absolutely.

Absent the atomic bombs, the plan was to fire bomb every city in Japan down to some very small settlements. Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have been leveled by napalm if they hadn't been leveled by atomic bombs.

Frankly, Unconditional Surrender was a bit undermined by the fact that we let the entire imperial family get off scot free after the war. I can sort of understand keeping Hirohito around, though preferably temporarily, but why let his second cousins and there about get away too?

"Unconditional Surrender" means surrender without restriction - it's not in any way a promise of punishment to any particular party(s).

I think the insistence with regard to Hirohito was that he surrender any powers outside of figurehead-ness, and that he renounce any claim to divinity on the part of the Imperial family. Keeping the Imperial family around might have had a beneficial stabilizing effect, post-war.

From what I have read, Truman was not even aware of the Manhattan project until he received an Army briefing post-oath-of-office.

The rationalization for not trying Hirohito as a war criminal (because he was, which started the myth that he was sidelined during the war) was that he could provide a valuable force to keep the country pacified during the occupation.

Of course, that ignores his rather glaring unpopularity and things like the Japanese communists telling everyone to cooperate to the fullest with the United States.

I really don't think there was a good way to end the way. Either way, hordes of people will end up dead, be it through conventional bombs, nuclear ones, or a land invasion. Best to pick the option that will end the war the fastest.

The decision to let Hirohito and the Imperial family off the hook was made by MacArthur; despite members of the Imperial family themselves advising him to have the Emperor abdicate the throne. MacArthur went so far as to see that other top war criminals like Tojo were given time to spin stories that would protect the Emperor from even the slightest responsibility, and he also found time to grant immunity to members of Unit 731 on his own authority as well. MacArthur was an idiot and an incompetence who by any sane right should have been relieved of command on December 9th 1941 after he allowed his entire air force to be blown up on the ground despite hours and hours of warning. As it was he’d go on to be allowed to cause a full scale war with China in 1950, killing about another million people, before finally being relieved.

I’ve had a quote as my signature for a while now that shows the opinion of one Japanese officer on the matter, Saburo Sakai, senior surviving ace pilot of the Imperial Navy who took a pair of .50cal bullets in the head for the Emperor and still flew 400 miles home almost blinded by his own blood.

Not letting the Emperor abdicate simply allowed a prominent war time symbol to continue to exist and gave the Japanese war apologists a symbol to cling to. MacArthur let his damn bloody warrior's pride get in the way of what should have been done to at least force the Japanese rethink the war.

TC Pilot wrote:The rationalization for not trying Hirohito as a war criminal (because he was, which started the myth that he was sidelined during the war) was that he could provide a valuable force to keep the country pacified during the occupation.

Of course, that ignores his rather glaring unpopularity and things like the Japanese communists telling everyone to cooperate to the fullest with the United States.

...uh buh? I had never heard of this before. I knew that the military government had lost its legitimacy by the time Japanese cities were being firebombed into shit, but I had thought that the people had had an "if only the Fuhrer knew" attitude about the Emperor himself. At least one coup was attempted by soldiers who opposed surrendering based on that very logic, if I remember correctly.

How exactly was it determined that Hirohito was unpopular? Was an opinion poll collected or something?

Not letting the Emperor abdicate simply allowed a prominent war time symbol to continue to exist and gave the Japanese war apologists a symbol to cling to. MacArthur let his damn bloody warrior's pride get in the way of what should have been done to at least force the Japanese rethink the war.

Maybe what should have happened was that Hirohito himself abdicates, and a sufficiently-close relative who had as little to do with the war as possible been sent to the throne in his place. It might have pacified the "a bloo bloo imperial house" crowd without at least making it seem like the man gets off scot-free.

Morilore wrote:...uh buh? I had never heard of this before. I knew that the military government had lost its legitimacy by the time Japanese cities were being firebombed into shit, but I had thought that the people had had an "if only the Fuhrer knew" attitude about the Emperor himself. At least one coup was attempted by soldiers who opposed surrendering based on that very logic, if I remember correctly.

It's nonsense. The Emperor was involved in nearly every stage of planning the war, from the ABCD surprise attacks to the surrender, and recorded a direct broadcast to the Japanese people announcing their surrender. Anyone that really mattered understood the Emperor knew full well what was going on (how couldn't he? Tokyo had just been firebombed practically to rubble. He even toured the city afterwards).

How exactly was it determined that Hirohito was unpopular? Was an opinion poll collected or something?

Nothing so direct. I unfortunately don't have many sources with me on the matter (Herbert Bix's Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan and Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II by John Dower being stand-out books on the issue), but suffice to say, there were quite a few riots and demonstrations calling for Hirohito to abdicate. He was, naturally, tied by association to the many advisors and privy councilmen who led the country into this unmitigated disaster and were later tried as war criminals. He was all too happily stripped of all his real power by the new constitution and the cult of divinity he'd enshrouded himself in was torn down.

Even before the war ended, Japanese leaders began seriously worrying that the Emperor might be overthrown from within by a war-weary revolution, and nearly all actions during the occupation revolved around defending him. He was treated as a liability.

Morilore wrote: How exactly was it determined that Hirohito was unpopular? Was an opinion poll collected or something?

Essentially yes, the Japanese population was always in essence loyal, but a great deal of discontent and resentment had built up by 1945. Had a blockade strategy been invoked its likely Japan would have surrendered amid riots in the streets in 1946. Hirohito made himself unpopular not only because his name and authority was invoked at every turn to legitimize what even the common Japanese citizen knew was an aggressive war and its sacrifices, but also because he was a very vocal mouthpieces of propaganda.

Japanese Emperors had the ability to issue what was called an Imperial Rescript. These were supposed to be declarations of policy of the highest order, such as detailing the purpose of the education system, or the duties of a solider. The phrase ‘duty is heavier then a mountain, death is lighter then a feather’ that was the basis of Japanese suicidal tactics and thinking came from the Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors in 1882 for example. The Emperors surrender broadcast was also an Imperial Rescript.

Normally such Rescripts were made perhaps every 2-3 years, and sometimes much longer periods passed without one. During the war however, the Emperor reached the point of making more then one a month. He made them for such trivial things as encouraging greater production in the aeroengine factories, or to tell people to grow more pumpkins. This undermined the cult of divinity around him, made him look like a joke to a population that was already on near starvation rations in 1944.

One should also keep in mind that until the fall of Saipan, the Japanese population was not being informed on the course of the war in any realistic manner. As far as the knew the IJN was rampaging back and forth in the south pacific sinking fleet after fleet as the US was defeated by attrition. When Saipan fell, Japanese leadership realized that the situation was so grave, and the sacrifices needed would be so sever that the only way to do it would be to start telling something like the truth. As you can imagine going from hearing the war is being won, to Saipan has fallen, followed rapidly by the Philippine Islands is a pretty huge moral shock to a population that has already been in an all out war for seven years (1937-1944). Tends to undermine confidence in leadership, even divine leaders.

Maybe what should have happened was that Hirohito himself abdicates, and a sufficiently-close relative who had as little to do with the war as possible been sent to the throne in his place. It might have pacified the "a bloo bloo imperial house" crowd without at least making it seem like the man gets off scot-free.

All his close relatives are war criminals themselves. Distant relatives appointed under a US occupation would have lack legitimacy and could not have served the intended purpose MacArthur wanted of ensuring a peaceful transition of power.

Question, what exactly did Hirohito do to make him a war criminal? I'm asking because the only thing I can think of is "conspiracy to wage aggressive war" which I do not recognize as a valid charge, at least at the time, and was wondering if there is anything else.

Adrian Laguna wrote:Question, what exactly did Hirohito do to make him a war criminal? I'm asking because the only thing I can think of is "conspiracy to wage aggressive war" which I do not recognize as a valid charge, at least at the time, and was wondering if there is anything else.

Given the number of atrocities Japanese forces commited during their advance, that would be enough. I believe he was also involved with the Japanese version of Dr Death.

Adrian Laguna wrote:Question, what exactly did Hirohito do to make him a war criminal? I'm asking because the only thing I can think of is "conspiracy to wage aggressive war" which I do not recognize as a valid charge, at least at the time, and was wondering if there is anything else.

Actually that charge had some validity given japans ratification of the 1929 Kellogg-Briand Pact, and that’s the basis the charge was levied from. Hirohito in any case was supreme commander of the Japanese armed forces and head of the general headquarters. In fact he even took steps to increase his own presence and the flow of information to him within that headquarters following the outbreak of war in China.

He was personally briefed on and approved of all aspects of the war and the manner in which it was fought, including directly approving of decisions to treat Chinese prisoners like vermin and to use prisoners as forced labor. Many documents concerning the conduct of the were found with his notes and approvals written on them. He even personally decorated Prince Asaka, his uncle and commander of the Japanese Army in China right after the rape of Nanking was concluded. Hirohito damn well had the power to control the Japanese war machine, and far from attempting to control it he egged it on at every turn, even after the war was clearly hopeless her rejected talk of surrender before a ‘last victory’ had been won.

The fact is if Tojo was guilty of a thing, then by default Hirohito was guilty of the same. The Tokyo trials were the worst farce ever created of a judicial proceeding. Not only were many of the most guilty granted complete immunity, but only a fraction of those the US did intend to try ever stood trial, and only then after extensive coaching to protect the Imperial family and to deliberately place blame on lower ranking officers. Many charges were simply excluded, because the cases couldn’t be presented without involving the Imperial family.

While the US government back in Washington isn’t blameless, most of this was very specifically the work of MacArthur who was inexplicitly granted extraordinary power over the trials, including the ability to alter sentences. MacArthur was paranoid about the communists and wanted an ‘orderly’ occupation to seal his reputation (he’s thought to have had dreams of running for president since the middle of WW2) so he had his subordinates do everything they could to protect the Imperial family and make Hirohito out to have been a powerless figurehead who only wanted peace or at worst did nothing. Too bad for that bullshit, which was then built upon by ignorant historians into the 1970s when the truth started to come out, even when doing nothing the Emperor is guilty, because Imperial protocol dictated that the Emperors silence on any matter was the same as his open approval.

How the fuck this man was allowed to continue to command US troops after the Bonus Army incident, let alone the December battles in the Philippines is just beyond me. It almost makes my blood boil when I read the endless tails of his ‘brilliant strike’ at Inchon when any of about 50,000 other US Army officers could have made the same plan (just look at say Salarno and Anzio) while his illogically driven fuckup at Wonson is almost always ignored.

One should also keep in mind that until the fall of Saipan, the Japanese population was not being informed on the course of the war in any realistic manner. As far as the knew the IJN was rampaging back and forth in the south pacific sinking fleet after fleet as the US was defeated by attrition.

It was fucking hilarious. I was reading some of Kurita's old testaments prior to Leyte. It's pretty interesting to hear about a "Whole US Fleet Scuppered at Formosa" when the only thing that happened was a scuffle with some Kamikazes...that got their asses kicked anyway. Not like that was a special instance. They must have reported "Every Ship in the USN sunk" on at least 5 different occasions.

I don't think anybody knew Mutsu had blown up and sunk in harbor until the war had ended. Nobody even knew Shinano EXISTED until post war. People knew about the Yamatos, mainly because they were public icons, though their specifics were well kept secret. "Special 16 inch" guns my ass.

What's funny is that people took them seriously for a little while, but by 1944 the daily weather forecast was scattered fire bombing, it was was pretty obvious even to the fanatics what was going on.

Skimmer's right about Hirohito's control too. Sorry, but he actively encouraged the war at every turn and was unrepentant about anything he had done until he was totally surrounded by death and mayhem. By then it was waaaaaay too late to be tactful about shit.

CaptHawkeye wrote:
It was fucking hilarious. I was reading some of Kurita's old testaments prior to Leyte. It's pretty interesting to hear about a "Whole US Fleet Scuppered at Formosa" when the only thing that happened was a scuffle with some Kamikazes...that got their asses kicked anyway. Not like that was a special instance. They must have reported "Every Ship in the USN sunk" on at least 5 different occasions.

It’s even worse then you might think. The Japanese simply did not have intelligence officers at the squadron or wing level, the guys who in other air forces would eventuate all the pilots’ claims and then work to eliminate redundant claims or assign them as only ‘probable’. They just copied down all the pilot claims and added them together most of the time, and this became the official report. That meant even the Japanese leadership didn’t really know how ineffective their air power had become.

I don't think anybody knew Mutsu had blown up and sunk in harbor until the war had ended. Nobody even knew Shinano EXISTED until post war. People knew about the Yamatos, mainly because they were public icons, though their specifics were well kept secret. "Special 16 inch" guns my ass.

Japanese public didn’t know a thing about the Yamatos actually, not until postwar. When they left the builders yards the Japanese declared air raid drills and deployed thousands of police to prevent anyone from seeing them. After that the two ships only entered Kure at night, and it was a military base ringed by mountains. All the rest of the time they were kept overseas, or at remote anchorages near Kure in the home islands. When trains ran past the anchorages all the window blinds had to be closed (they put police on every train to ensure this) so that no one could see any of the other fleet units. The secrey around those ships is pretty well unmatched before or after.

After Midway the Navy only admitted to two carriers being sunk, with the other two ‘placed in reserve’ even to the Army! IIRC the public wasn’t told about the loss of the two until after the battle of Santa Cruz when the IJN could show off pictures of its destroyers torpedoing Hornet. Though, to be fair the USN also kept losses a secret until it could announce a victory at the same time too, and both sides often kept survivors of sunken ships hidden away on remote islands or locked up in hospitals for months afterwards.

Sea Skimmer wrote:He was personally briefed on and approved of all aspects of the war and the manner in which it was fought, including directly approving of decisions to treat Chinese prisoners like vermin and to use prisoners as forced labor. Many documents concerning the conduct of the were found with his notes and approvals written on them. He even personally decorated Prince Asaka, his uncle and commander of the Japanese Army in China right after the rape of Nanking was concluded. Hirohito damn well had the power to control the Japanese war machine, and far from attempting to control it he egged it on at every turn, even after the war was clearly hopeless her rejected talk of surrender before a ‘last victory’ had been won.

Interesting, I was aware of none of this.

What is astonishing to me is that the Imperial Japanese military had such a hard on for secrecy and projecting a strong image that the army and navy managed to hide so much important information from each other. What I find even more amazing is the level of control these people managed to exert on the Japanese population at large. In "The Pacific War" Saburo Ienaga provides an interesting (and first hand, in some parts) look at the propaganda put out by the Japanese press and the incredible indoctrination in Japanese schools during and before the war and it's pretty scary.

Two questions now. First, I thought the Russians invaded Manchuria after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. I was also under the impression that Hiroshima was a really crummy target for firebombing because of the way it's split up by large rivers (natural firebreaks). This is not to say it wouldn't have been firebombed (or just bombed) anyway, but it was really low on the list. Am I wrong on either or both of these?

Count Chocula wrote: And BTW, the MAD doctrine deliberately targeted (maybe still does?) civilian populations. Of course, it's not a war crime until or if the balloon goes up, and then the last country standing can decide who was right or wrong.

That's wrong on so many levels.

Number one, Mutually Assured Destruction is not and never has been U.S. Government doctrine or policy. U.S. nuclear doctrine is that we should be in possession of a secure and effective nuclear deterrent force. What that translates to is that the United States should have nuclear forces adequate to destroy the war-making potential of its strongest opponent after absorbing a nuclear strike from that opponent. Mutually Assured Destruction was a term created to ridicule McNamara's "stability" arguments by pointing out the logical conclusion of those arguments.

Number Two. We never, repeat never, deliberately targeted civilians as part of planning nuclear strikes. What we actually targeted were things determined by the strategies dictated by the political powers that be. These might have been military bases, factories, C4I, whatever but the civilian population as a whole never featured on that list.

Number Three International law specifically accepts civilian casualties as a by-product of military operations provided they do not occur as a result of civilians being deliberately targeted or the means used are disproportionate to their aim. For example, the Russian artillery bombardment of Berlin was not a war crime despite the number of civilian deaths it caused because Berlin was a defended city and the bombardment was necessary to help troops take that city. Back in the day, ICBMs were so wildly inaccurate that we had to use large warheads to ensure destroying the specified targets. Therefore, any civilian deaths that resulted were covered by the first exemption - the target was the (say) factory and any civilians who died did so because they happened to live close to it. Their tough luck. Because of the ranges involved, we had to use strategic weapons so that falls under the second exemption. The means of attack was determined by range and everything else was a product of that requirement. So, the use of nuclear weapons was not a war crime.

Number Four The legal requirements for military operations and the position of civilians within that system is already defined by the appropriate treaties. Either Geneva 47 or Hague 05 depending on which country you belong to. We don't have to wait for a war.

Number Five When planning nuclear attacks, we went to gerat lengths to try and reduce civilian casualties wherever possible. As weapons got to be more accurate, we reduced the size of the warheads we used in order to reduce collateral damage. Today we use conventional precision-guided weapons to achieve results that, thirty years ago, we needed nuclear weapons to equal. Fifty years ago, we needed big nuclear weapons to equal those effects/

Number Six Contrary to popular belief, killing huge numbers of people isn't necessarily a war crime. The tests are A - were those people deliberately targeted and B- was the means used disproportionate to the strategic objective. If the answer to those questions is "No" then exterminating the entire population of a country is entirely legal under the laws of war.

Number Seven Just to finish this off. "Genocide" requires two elements. One is premeditation and the other is discriminatory motive. Genocide is the pre-planned elimination of entire groups of people on the grounds of their race or religion. We never planned to kill anybody on the grounds of race or religion, their deaths were the result of them living next to something we wanted to blow up.

Stuart, while you're correct that MAD was not an officially used acronym for US policy, and that we don't deliberately target civilian populations, there is little doubt that civilian populations are targeted in nuclear attack/defense scenarios.

First, a bit of background on the doctrine (from a Wiki Article, which has credible source material):

After WWII, John Foster Dulles articulated America's nuclear response as "massive retaliation" under Eisenhower. Good ol' McNamara later articulated MAD:

It was only with the advent of ballistic missile submarines, starting with the George Washington class in 1959, that a survivable nuclear force became possible and second strike capability credible. This was not fully understood until the 1960s when the strategy of mutually assured destruction was first fully described, largely by United States Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.

(bold added).

In 1980, the Carter Administration changed the approach to "countervailing strategy," again quoting from the article:

According to its architect, Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, "countervailing strategy" stressed that the planned response to a Soviet attack was no longer to bomb Russian population centers and cities primarily, but first to kill the Soviet leadership, then attack military targets, in the hope of a Russian surrender before total destruction of the USSR (and the United States).

(again bold added).

The debates over Strategic Defense Initiative projects clearly indicate that MAD was a concept that was accepted by nations across the globe.

Regarding the deliberate targeting of civilians: I do not know enough about Russia's military structure to judge which of their cities have nearby or in-city military facilities, so I'll address one point of our doctrine that DOES include the targeting of civilian populations. Our "planned response" from 1980 and IIRC still in effect, targets Russian leadership first, then military targets. The seat of government in Russia is Moscow, where the Politburo, KGB, NKVD, and military service headquarters are located (I may have missed one or twelve others ). Moscow has a population of 10+ million, and they would probaly not have time to get everyone into civil defense shelters unless Russia launched first.

I'll illustrate my point with some cities in which I have lived. Here's a short list of military targets in urban or suburban areas:
1) Washington, DC - Baltimore Metro Area: Pentagon, Congress, White House, FBI, CIA (Langley VA), Quantico (VA), Treasury, Federal Reserve, Andrews AFB, NSA (Fort Meade MD), NRO (Chantilly VA) etc. etc. A strike on US civilian and military leadership would target upwards of 8 million civilians.

2) San Diego, California: MCAS Miramar, MCRD San Diego, Camp Pendleton, Point Loma Naval Base (surface and subs), Coronado, SEAL Team training and on and on (total of 16 military facilities). Civilian population of San Diego County is around 3 million, with about half the population in San Diego proper.

3) Atlanta, Georgia metro area: Dobbins AFB, Fort McPherson, Centers for Disease Control (valid target in all-out CBN war), population of around 5.5 million.

4) Tampa, Florida: population including St. Pete/Clearwater is around 3 million, it's home to CENTCOM, SOCOM, MacDill AFB, and the busiest deepwater port in the state.

Needless to say, in any large-scale nuclear exchange I would expect a massive loss of life on both sides, simply due to the proximity of civilian populations to military and strategic targets.

Minor nitpick: by 1946 the NKVD had been renamed the MVD.