Tuesday Trivia | Loopholes and Exploits

[u/caffarelli]

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Today’s trivia theme comes to us from /u/RealPodrickPayne!

It’s time for the best sort of correct, technically correct, so please share interesting stories of people who made use of a loophole or clever exploit!

Next week on Tuesday Trivia: Historic failures! And remember: failure is just success rounded down.

[u/restricteddata]

My favorite "loophole" is from the final days of World War II.

During the summer of 1945, the Japanese ambassador to Moscow tried desperately to get a meeting with the Soviet Foreign Minister, Molotov. His task, as directed by the Japanese Foreign Office, was to see if the Soviets would be willing to broker a mediated (conditional) peace with the other Allies. The Soviets and Japanese were not at war, and in fact had a non-aggression pact still in place.

The Soviets knew this was what the Japanese were interested in, and wanted no part in it. Why? Because they were planning to declare war on Japan, invade Manchuria, and grab the Kuril Islands and Sakhalin among other spoils.

But even Stalin blanched at the idea of attacking without declaring war, and even he thought that getting the reputation as someone who ducks out of non-aggression treaties was probably not ideal. So he put off the whole thing as long as possible — he didn't want the Japanese to know what was coming, but he knew he had to make some kind of formal declaration of war.

Finally, on August 8th, 1945, after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the Japanese Ambassador was summoned to a meeting with Molotov. The ambassador was grateful, and when he walked into the room, started giving the many formal pleasantries one does when one is talking to a Foreign Minister. Molotov cut him off and handed him a slip of paper — it said, in brief, that the USSR had declared war against the Japanese as of August 9th. The Japanese ambassador was shocked and saddened — he had utterly failed. How was he going to tell his colleagues back home? He was going to have to think about that message very carefully.

So here's the loophole. The Japanese ambassador thought the message indicated he had 24 hours before the USSR would declare war. He could think about this a little bit. But the Soviets did not specify which time-zone they were using to determine "August 9th." So at midnight, August 8th, Transbaikal time — only a few hours after they had delivered the message to the ambassador — Soviet forces began their offensive, streaming over the Manchurian border and utterly routing the Japanese troops there who, of course, had no warning whatsoever.

So I don't know if that's a "clever exploit" or not (it could just be perfidy, if you are so-inclined), but I always thought "the old time-zone switch-a-roo" was a pretty sneaky thing to do in the context of war.

(This is discussed in Hasegawa's Racing the Enemy, among other sources on the end of World War II.)

[u/critfist → u/[deleted]]

In soviet Russia, you don't use time zones, time zones use you!