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 like listening to broadcasts from that era, in particular the ones right after VJ Day. The crowds celebrating in the streets will tell you everything you need to know as to whether or not it was the right thing to do.
The atomic bombs probably saved over one million Japanese lives. Curtis Lemay had thousands and thousands of heavy and medium bombers sitting idle in Europe and he had every intention of putting them to use on Japan.
Additionally, the US warned the Japanese about its intended use of the bombs. We wanted to spare innocent lives and there’s only so much you can do to accomplish that. We couldn’t force them to do it.
Warning Leaflets
https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/key-documents/warning-leaflets/
The people had time to evacuate.
They thought the Emperor was GOD. Every man, woman and CHILD would have fought with tire irons and kitchen knives if we had tried to invade. IT WAS WAR.
To be clear, it isn’t the question that is the story.
The story is that the question came up again, in the news, because Tucker Carlson said it was “evil.”
“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.”
Tucker is on his way to going Full Glenn Beck. Never go Full Glenn Beck.
Hirohito wore a military uniform—He was the commandder in chief of all the arrmed forces of Japan— a deserving abom military target.. Allies screwed up...
Was Japanese leadership evil for Pearl Harbor? For the Nanjing massacre? Were they thinking about what retaliation might mean for their own citizens?
I’m glad we let Hirohito stay on after the war.
We should have done the same with The Kaiser in Germany, it sure wound up beating the alternative.
Do you want the US to use it?
plus many of those houses were micro factories makin small parts for airplanes, submarines etc.. Both cities were legitimate military industrial targets.
Questions that never come up when discussing the *morality* of dropping the bombs.
Fatboy would have been bomb number three.
No we were not. However Japan was evil to murder or work to death 40 million or so civilians and non combatants in their little experiment in colonialism, and of course, anyone who died defeating Japan in WWII.
Bookmark.
The decision was easy. Hundred of thousands of US military casualties, possibly millions of Japanese military and civilian deaths and the war stretching out months or years vs 200,000 Japanese and zero American deaths and it ends now.
In Sept. I will be….if I make it .
….
No.
Would the people of those cities be less dead if they had been bombed and shot?
Was Japan evil to kill 24 million Chinese—many with germ bombs?
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