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.
That’s great. Keep going!
My mom is almost as old.
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. A decision that ultimately saved millions of lives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Man
Wiki was quickie for look up.
My situation mirrors yours. In August 1945 my father had returned with his division from fighting in Germany and was at home on a thirty-day furlough. Thereafter they were scheduled to ship out and be in the first wave attacking Tokyo. In that sector, planners expected 100% casualties.
No.
Except for the residual radiation, bombs be bombs.
Bombing v. not bombing is the ethical choice.
Nope. The costs would have been much higher, an estimated 5 million Japanese and another 5 million Allied soldiers if Japan had been invaded and the country swept from top to bottomm.
100,000 residents of Tokyo are less dead because they were killed by incindiary bobms.
Didn’t they train their entire population, old and young, female and male, to defend Nipon with sharpened bamboo poles? I’ve always heard that, but I don’t really know if it is true. Seems like that would have racked up the causalities.
Freegards
Well, General LeMay would have been happy to spend the next year dropping incendiary bombs on every city and village on Japan. After three or four months of blockade, the Japanese would have been defenseless against air attacks. He would have wanted to burn the entire country to the ground before sending in troops.
With the US dropping only two atomic bombs instead, the Japanese got off light, too light, some people have said. Spend a few months reviewing Japanese atrocities before deciding who is evil, Tucker.
Even the Japanese acknowledged that the atom bomb drops were a godsend to Japan
Based on the experience of Okinawa, an invasion of Japan would have resulted in the deaths of 2-3 million Japanese and up to half a million US service men
Japan would have been devastated economically and industrially and Americans would not have been nearly as magnanimous after we won .
There would have been massive starvation and suffering in a destroyed post war Japan left to its own devices.
It is also a strong probability that a United States bogged down in a viscous war in Japan would never have been able to Marshall the resources to rebuild Europe and Japan so the entire post WWII outcome could have been much different and the economic miracles that occurred in both post war Germany and Japan would probably never have happened
Thank YOU...The Japanese started the war...we ended it. Next.
Evil?
Hell no
America would have lost severl hundred thousand troops had they had to invade
Japan started this
Whatever ended their aggression towards China, Korea, the U S.A etc was warrented
Cry and bitch about the consequences of your actions is horsecrap
God bless you.
That’s a life well lived, I hope.
NO.
Had we had another I would have dropped it on Moscow
Was America Evil to Drop Atomic Bombs on Japan? (Tucker Carlson: “If you find yourself arguing that it’s a good thing to drop nuclear weapons on people, then you are evil.”)
I added Tucker’s quote in parentheses, per protocol, because the question is coming up again at BECAUSE of Carlson.
After it got pulled, I redid it without the quote.
…and I’m explaining every 20 posts or so, that the story is really Tucker, not the question. Such is life.
Japan would not surrender.. Truman was not going to fight a war on both sides of the US.. Atlantic and Pacific. They didn’t surrender with the first one dropped.. It took 2. It was horrible, but Truman saved American lives by stopping Japan.
It was not a good thing. It was a less bad thing. In war, nothing is good, but "bad" is better than "worse," and 150,000 dead in two Japanese cities was better than 1,000,000 minimum dead in a full-scale invasion of the main islands.
And something Mr. Carlson isn't considering, which is that by the time of the atomic bombings there were very few cities in Japan left to bomb outside of the northern area that could not be reached by our bombers. A few months earlier, Tokyo was firebombed and twice as many people were burned to death as were killed by either atomic bomb--the only difference between dropping an atomic bomb in Hiroshima and firebombs in Tokyo is that it takes more planes to carry all the firebombs, but to the victims the burns are just as painful and the deaths are just as dead.
This is funny. I came into the comments to say exactly what you said. 😎
A shame we did not have more to even up the score the bastards ran up.
My father lived because we nuked the treacherous animals.
Having traveled extensively, I can tell you what the “ world” believes:
A half dozen or so so countries have developed nuclear bombs and have them at their disposal- The US is the only one that has ever used them-….
I don’t really care about world opinion- but their logic is sound, especially with our decades of forever wars.
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