Posted on 05/04/2024 7:00:50 PM PDT by DoodleBob
During a recent appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Tucker Carlson made a bold claim about the August 1945 decision by the United States to bomb the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—a move that effectively put an end World War II. He said:
My ‘side’ has spent the last 80 years defending the dropping of nuclear bombs on civilians… like, are you joking? If you find yourself arguing that it’s a good thing to drop nuclear weapons on people, then you are evil.
I like Tucker Carlson and find myself in agreement with him on many topics. I am especially heartened by his recent rediscovery of faith and a robustly Christian worldview. But on the nuclear bombing of Japan, I believe he vastly overstates his case.
It’s not surprising that Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson spoke on this issue. Atomic warfare has recently been a subject of burgeoning cultural interest, first with last year’s award-winning biopic Oppenheimer and more recently with the release of Amazon Prime’s TV series adaptation of the post-apocalyptic video game Fallout.
In fact, Westerners have been bombarded with apocalyptic messaging more generally for years—whether on COVID-19, or the so-called “race reckoning,” or climate alarmism.
It would not be surprising if our existential fears for the future are blurring our vision of the past.
With that said, is it true—not only that America was evil to bomb Japan in 1945—but that those who defend that decision are evil themselves?
Reaching this conclusion requires a rewrite of the historical context surrounding World War II: a wishful-thinking reprise of events that assumes diplomacy with Japan was a viable path to end the war. It was not.
In the months leading up to Enola Gay’s fateful flight over Hiroshima, Japan was in retreat all across the Pacific and still had no appetite for surrender. The capital, Tokyo, was already in ruins thanks to a U.S. firebombing raid. Okinawa had been overrun by American troops, and a mainland invasion was now within reach. Astoundingly, even after Little Boy fell on Hiroshima on August 6th and flattened the city, the Japanese leadership refused to countenance surrender.
It was only after Fat Boy annihilated Nagasaki three days later that, resisting a palace coup by hardliners still hoping to fight on, Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s unconditional surrender to the Allied Powers.
It was Japan’s deeply embedded cultural ideology—its honor culture–that necessitated such dire action by the U.S. As Mike Coté has explained at Rational Policy:
This intense honor culture was a part of Japanese society going back centuries. It was prominently represented in the samurai way of the warrior—bushido—and was a key aspect of the Japanese desire to fight to the death. Capture was seen as a moral stain on the honor not only of the individual who was captured, but to his entire family tree: past, present, and future. Combine this with the insidious propaganda of the Imperial Japanese government—claims that American troops would massacre and defile civilians, celebrations of kamikaze pilots as heroic sacrifices, and exhortations of suicidal mass resistance to any invading force—and you had a potent brew militating against surrender.
The United States had other options, of course, but they would have been far deadlier. Yielding the entire Pacific region to a bloodthirsty and cruel Japanese regime could hardly pass as compassionate.
Likewise, Operation Downfall, a proposed mainland invasion of Japan, would have required 1.7 million American servicemen fighting up to 2.3 million Japanese troops—and possibly to the death, if Japanese resistance elsewhere was anything to go on.
As President Truman and his war cabinet weighed the decision of atomic warfare, also hanging in the balance were 100,000 prisoners of war whom the Japanese planned to execute the moment a ground invasion began. And with warfare continuing on multiple battlefronts across the Pacific theater, daily deaths on each side of the conflict were reaching into the tens of thousands.
The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused well over 200,000 casualties with over 100,000 more injured.
The U.S. bombing of Japan was horrific. I have visited ground zero at Hiroshima and pondered long on the horror of that day.
It is true that American imperialism has a mixed legacy. And as the United States slides into spreading moral chaos at home, the nation’s involvement in conflicts abroad appears increasingly dubious. No doubt this consideration was central in Tucker’s rigid remarks.
Still, it is wrong to read today’s headlines into last century’s dilemmas. The decision of the United States to drop atomic bombs on Japan was eminently defensible, and we would be foolish to forget this.
I never heard that either .
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It’s a shame we didn’t have them and drop them three years earlier. Think of the lives that coild have been saved.
Thank you for your post. Well stated.
Also, sent me down a research path to find this:
Details the bio weapons the Japanese had developed after human POW testing.
On the UK, first. But the nazis also had developed a TransAtlantic bomber to hit the East Coast of the US.
So- yeah they would have used it. No doubt. Just as Iran will if they are allowed.
Tucker Carlson was writing back in 1994/1995 when the Smithsonian had its Enola Gay controversy that set off the the vets and our organizations and conservatives, I wonder what his opinion was back then?
It they had gotten it going it possibly could have wiped out half of the world's population. Asia and Europe would have been hit the hardest.
Unlike with an Atomic Bomb there is no stopping germ warfare. No blast radius. It just keeps going.
“”””The united states was broke and wouldn’t have been able to continue the war and would have been forced into negotiating peace terms. The japs had atomic bombs and had tested them off the Korean coast making it a necessity for us to use the bombs to end the war. “””””
Don’t be ridiculous.
No.
I might be biased though. There is a good chance my father would have been killed in 1945 which could have hampered my birth in 1955.
Thing is, now China is trying to do their own version of the “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere”
Interesting thread.
So f all you whining revisionists and moral relativists.
That’s not the way to put the question.
The question is: Was it just?
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they identified Kokura as the second target after Hiroshima. In Kokura, a city of 130,000 people on the island of Kyushu, the Japanese operated one of their biggest ordnance factories, manufacturing among other things chemical weapons.”
A standing joke was that this was going to be a short fight. The 1st MarDiv wasn't on the list of available maneuver elements after L Day+10, having been functionally wiped out.
Since the country was bleeding million$ per day, and 2 million young men were gone on duty, you're saying "They should just wait." Months, years?
pretty much at least once a week now, tucker carlson demonstrates that he’s little more than the latest nutter ... pretty soon i expect him to wash his face in a bowl of Cheetos ...
Welcome to history once AI takes over.
Yep ……see my post 26 .
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Tucker is doing great on most things. But he has blown it three times recently. The flying saucer thing, calling it evil to nuke Japan, and with Putin when Tucker got that goofy “confused” look and acted mystified that Putin said Nazism must cease in Ukraine. And Tucker said there hasn’t been any of that since 1945 and Germany’s defeat.
He is so very good sometimes. But other times he is rock-hard stupid here and there. I still like him, but you have to take the good with the bad I guess.
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