“Thank God for the atomic bomb.”
It’s always tempting to second-guess things like this, but it was the best decision that could have been made at the time with the information available at the time. Hundreds of thousands of troops were expecting to have to fight (and die) to take the home islands as hard as they just had for Okinawa. And countless Chinese were still being tortured and murdered.
[Update a few minutes later]
More thoughts from Roger Kimball:
The idea that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima — and, since the Japanese failed to surrender, of Nagasaki on August 9 — was a ‘war crime’ has slowly acquired currency not only among the anti-American intelligentsia but also among other sentimentalists of limited worldly experience.
Yes. And years ago, Bill Whittle took on the ignorant and not-to-be lamented Jon Stewart on the subject.
… but it was the best decision that could have been made at the time with the information available at the time.
This seems to suggest that a different decision would have been appropriate knowing what we know now.
Did you intend to suggest this?
Only in the sense that in theory more/different information might be later uncovered, not that any has.
The ironic thing is that the atomic bombs saved many more Japanese lives than American. Literally millions would have perished in an all-out invasion, many of them civilians.
Or an extended bomb-and-starve-’em campaign, which is what Nimitz and King were increasingly leaning toward as August rolled around and more information became available to them about the extent of Japanese defenses on Kyushu.
Millions of civilians would have died by the winter in a scenario like that.
And very likely a million or two Japanese would have either died fighting, or of starvation.
The bomb almost certainly saved millions of lives by forcing Japanese surrender.
My father is one whose life may have been saved by the bomb. He was in Germany in the summer of 1945, having fought across Europe in Patton’s 3rd Army. He told me many times that his unit already had a port date for shipping out to the Far East for the invasion of the Japanese home islands. Their reaction to the news of the atom bomb: amazement and relief.
I’m trying to think through the alternative. Granted that it would have cost millions of lives, but it would have, what? Left the use of nuclear weapons against civilians as something unthinkable, something that had never been done and was therefore taboo? Sounds kind of nice, but I don’t believe for a minute that the Soviet Union would have cared. Nor does North Korea or Iran. We care, but not more than if we’d never used the bomb.
So I don’t quite see the gain. I’ll go with the lives saved.
It is worth mentioning that both Germany and Japan were also working on atomic bombs of their own. If America had lost that race, or held off until Germany or Japan completed their bomb, then a nuke would have been used against Americans first.
World War 2 was a total war. Everyone was involved in some capacity, even if only sewing uniforms or growing food for soldiers or collecting scrap metal. And it was an existential war of competing ideologies. To those who say “we won, but at what cost?” or some such variant, one is only able to even ask that question if this side won the war. If the other side won, such questions would never be asked – the question itself would be verboten.
Most of the (European) scientists who cooperated in the Manhattan Project did so exactly because they were worried Hitler would get the bomb first. More than a few objected to its use on Japan because of that.
Well, they were working on it. It’s not entirely clear how far along they were.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_nuclear_weapon_program
Though, given the state of the Japanese naval and air forces, they’d have had a hard time delivering one to a strategic target.
The German program was apparently not very close either; I seem to recall some speculation that renowned physicist Werner Heisenberg, who was heavily involved, deliberately slowing things down behind the scenes.
I seem to recall some speculation that renowned physicist Werner Heisenberg, who was heavily involved, deliberately slowing things down behind the scenes.
I’ve heard that as well, but I’ve also heard that might be part of an effort to rehabilitate Heisenberg’s reputation after the war. He was actively working on the bomb. According to one documentary I saw not too long ago, they had a lab accident that slowed things considerably. His efforts weren’t helped by the fact that some high-ranking Nazis thought physics was a “Jewish science” because of prominent Jewish physicists like Albert Einstein. At this point, who knows the truth about the matter?
“We care, but not more than if we’d never used the bomb.
So I don’t quite see the gain. I’ll go with the lives saved.”
You have a greater appreciation for the magnitude of nuclear weapons than our friends in the White House. The moral dilemma in using nuclear weapons is just as important as preventing proliferation and especially in letting countries like Iran getting nuclear weapons.
Invasion wasn’t necessarily the only other option. A negotiated truce with fewer net short term casualties is certainly within the realm of reasonable speculation, but the US wouldn’t accept anything less than total surrender at the time.
Of course, even that option leave a lot of unsolved issues. As long as one is speculating, it’s fair to ponder whether the cold war MAD would have held without some awareness of the horror (I doubt it).
In any case, it’s a bit absurd to attempt to apply our current sensibilities about atomic war to the very past that shaped those sensibilities.
No Allied power was going to accept any peace settlement that left the Japanese militarists in power and their crimes unpunished.
“In any case, it’s a bit absurd to attempt to apply our current sensibilities about atomic war to the very past that shaped those sensibilities.”
That’s sort of the whole point of this post. As Rand posted, “It’s always tempting to second-guess things like this, but it was the best decision that could have been made at the time with the information available at the time.” There is a growing group of individuals who want to do just that, for their various reasons (most of which are deemed by others as “anti-American”). It’s a natural side-effect of the death of WWII vets and the continued forward march of space-time.
The less direct connection we have with those events, and the fewer people who are around to remember what happened and why it happened, the easier it is to second-guess the decision, and the more likely such an event is to repeat itself.
A negotiated truce with fewer net short term casualties is certainly within the realm of reasonable speculation, but the US wouldn’t accept anything less than total surrender at the time.
While unconditional surrender was the stated policy, the US in fact did grant Japan the concession of leaving Emperor Hirohito in place, if only as a symbolic figurehead.
Using nukes to end a horrible war probably turned out much better than if they’d been used to start another horrible war. Nobody thinks hard about not using a weapon until they’ve experienced what the consequences of using it are.
In addition to saving hundreds of thousands of American lives and millions of Japanese lives, the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki focused the minds of everybody in the nuclear club. I don’t think we’d have gotten the same outcome from the Cuban Missile Crisis if everybody hadn’t been viscerally aware of what the stakes were.
” the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki focused the minds of everybody in the nuclear club”
Our current leadership doesn’t comprehend the threat and our country is too detached from reality.
When the bombing of Japan comes up, I always like to remind people that there was a third choice – continuing the total blockade and bombardment. That was the pre-war strategy end game. We would just blockade them until they accepted whatever terms we found acceptable.
Had Truman opted for that course, Japan (and, by extension, whatever captured territories we didn’t liberate) would have been a land of the dead by mid-1946.
GClark, you forget that by that time American voters wanted the war over, and the soldiers home. Call it an effect of the “four-year rule.”
Blockade was never politically feasible. If memory serves the Allies were planning to use poison gas during the invasion. That would have been hideous.
What I find ironic is that all of these people who agonize over the two nuclear bombs never say anything about the Tokyo firebombing of April 9-10. Martin Caidin’s A Torch to the Enemy graphically describes what happened.
I would rather be at ground zero of a nuke than be burned or boiled alive. The next morning Tokyo’s swimming pools were full of corpses who jumped into the water to avoid the flames. The water was gone, and the bodies melted together.
One of the reasons Caidin wrote that history was to illustrate that even without using nuclear warheads we had developed weapons to the point where we could wipe out whole cities. The B-29s were doing so at the rate of one per day by the time of the surrender. I suppose death by napalm is preferable to death by fission for the anti-war crowd. Ironic, given their opposition to the stuff in Vietnam.
The honest ones will admit that they find the firebombings to be war crimes as well. It’s at least consistent.
There was actually a big brawl looming between MacArthur on the one hand and Nimitz and King on the other by early August over whether to stage Operation OLYMPIC at all. Intelligence made it increasingly clear that Japanese force levels in southern Kyushu were far higher than anticipated, and appeared to even outnumber the planned U.S. forces in the operation. In short, Nimitz was now leaning back to a starve-and-bomb strategy, while MacArthur was grimly determined to have his big invasion. It would have been a fight that Truman would have been forced to adjudicate, and it would have been very ugly. Not politically feasible? Well, an OLYMPIC that turned into a charnel house unable to achieve its objectives wouldn’t have been politically helpful, either.
Fortunately, we weren’t forced to face that quandary.
Curtis LeMay forthrightly said that had we lost the war, our bombing campaigns in both theaters would have been called war crimes. WW2 was total war; it serves nothing to pretend differently.
It’s always worth remember who we were dealing with. More civilians were killed in the Rape of Nanjing, often cruelly at the ends of bayonets, the women after being gang-raped and abused, than died in both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.
The cruelty Japanese forces visited on their victims was front-page news across the US. The list of war crimes is rather long.
Japan then was very different from Japan now.
Peter Grant has some good comments, mostly from George MacDonald Frasier, worth considering about the atomic bombs.
I always wait for a Google doodle to be posted on August 6th, with the “o’s” perhaps forming Tojo’s glasses, and the “l” being the stalk of a mushroom cloud. Am I naive in this?