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.
And simultaneously letting them know how we did it (atomic secrets) - so that they could easily re-create it!
For the first five post-war years, the Soviet Union was too busy gobbling up and digesting its new territories and vassal states in Eastern Europe to really care!
Regards,
It is generally agreed upon among military strategists and theorists that you don't want to completely decapitate your enemy, since then there's no one there with whom you could negotiate a cease-fire / peace.
Our most ardent war hawks understood that.
Regards,
No, it is rhetorically easier and thus more elegant to simply demand that your opponent provide an alternate solution, that would have resulted in less loss of life.
Puts the onus entirely upon him. Otherwise, if you begin listing Japanese atrocities, your opponent might simply start listing alleged American atrocities - and it becomes a mud-slinging match!
"What should we have done instead?"
Regards,
My father was glad we dropped atomic bombs on Japan. Otherwise he would have been part of the invasion of Japan. Instead he got on a ship and came home. If not for those bombs I might not be here.
Ping to 165. 👋
It does, however, contain some typographical errors.
One of the unpleasant facts for anyone in the ground armies during the war was that you had to become pro tern tem a subordinate of the very uncivilian George S. Patton
Regards,
I know the argument. I just don’t buy it.
A decapitation strike gets rid of the Leadership that caused the problem, at least the top tier.
Both military and civilian government are hierarchies. You go down the list until you get to the ones which are still alive.
Hmmmm...
The rape of Nanking.
Pearl Harbor.
The Bataan Death March.
We dropped one bomb and warned we would do it again if they did not surrender. They chose poorly.
Sorry, but at what point were the Japanese the good guys?
IIC, more people died in the Dresden firebombing raids than at either Hiroshima or Nagasaki. The Japanese were training little children with sticks to fight an American invasion. They were planning a full scale defense that would have decimated he entire population. Dropping hose to bombs saved untold lives on both sides.
bttt
The merging of the Nazi ideology with the German Prussian hard core military code, which was the origin of a lot of Nazi Germany's similar atrocities, created a similar culture but the German code incorporated a very different code of honor when it came to treatment of captors and defeated enemies.
Both countries went through a period of collective insanity as their militaristic cultures adopted modern weapons of mass destruction but did not modify and moderate their militaristic cultures.
At some point, the leaders of countries that bring such unprovoked destruction and atrocities on other countries know that they will be executed if they surrender so they develop delusional attitudes and fight to the bitter end and take as many lives of their countrymen and those of the enemy with them.
These cultures needed to be eradicated and the atomic bombs shocked the world and convinced enough of the Japanese military leadership that it was time to throw in the towel The atomic bomb was developed by the United States in response to intel from European nuclear scientists that Germany and Japan were developing atomic weapons with the capability to wipe out entire cities with one bomb.
This was accurate intel. We were in a race with both Germany and Japan to develop nukes and they would not have hesitated to use those bombs of us. In fact, the German V1 and V2 missile programs were development projects for long range, precision guided delivery systems for nuclear weapons.
More importantly, they were viewed as such by the handful of military leaders who were in the know about our nuclear weapons development project. So much so, in fact, that they formed special teams to locate and acquire the technology and technicians to form the nucleus of our strategic nuclear forces. They felt that Germany must be very close to having a working nuclear device given the accelerated development of delivery systems.
The debate over the atomic bomb use is really quite revisionist. America expended a massive amount of it's industrial and technological strength to develop the tech and to build the weapons. Over one third of America's war time electrical power generation capability was being consumed by the Manhattan Project.
Given that expenditure of resources alone, it was a foregone conclusion that the US would use it's nuclear weapons as soon as they were developed to make sure that we used ours before the enemy used their atomic weapons on us. t was part of our military doctrine at the time.
Our military leadership was very concerned about Nazi Germany's ability to deliver nukes with their V Weapons and were equally concerned about the Japanese Kamikaze threat if they were given nuclear weapons.
We see WWII through the lenses of nearly a century of victory against a totally defeated enemy. But both Germany and Japan had decades of high tech weapons development both pre war and during the war and we had not idea of the state of readiness of their nuclear weapons programs.
The closer we got to realizing a working device, the more our leadership feared the enemy might get there first.
In the same vein...
Bombs and Rockets-Carl Ruth 1959 (sorry for the poor audio quality)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXUWXKH14Vo
Excellent post. It states my own opinion better than I ever could!
Every August 6 and 9 I give thanks to the brave people who ended the war so decisively. Without them I wouldn’t be here (and I suspect a few others as well).
Very true, or maybe William II couple have resigned in favor of his son, if he would have been considered unbearable as a head of state any more. Either by the Entente or by the German people and political class - or by both.
The institution of „Emperor“, the head of the German state in an unbroken line from 962 to 1804, and resurrected in 1871, would have been vastly more important than the individual monarch. There had been resignations of emperors before, after all, so an abdication of William II would not have been without precedent.
Sorry, the end of the Holy Roman Empire was, of course, not in 1804, but in 1806. Shame on me.
Carlson suffers from a case of present dayism, judging historical events from a current perspective. If he was a marine in 1945 facing the prospect of invading Japan, he would not be so glib. Not to mention, Truman would have been severely condemned if he didn’t use the 2 billion dollar weapon that ended the war.
The United States did not sneak over to Japan with multi planes and bombs and bomb their Country on December 7th...just like Hamas did to Israel.
My sister and family were stationed there, with her Navy husband, on 12/7/41
I cannot tell you how that affected my family. The subsequent anguish that we lived with...ANY MEANS OF JUSTICE, WOULD HAVE BEEN APPRECIATED.
I REALLY HATED, AT THAT TIME, THE JAPANESE...SO, YES IT WAS NEEDED...IT WAS JUSTICE.
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