Posted on 08/08/2020 9:47:50 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Question: Was it immoral to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Yesterday, August 6th, the world commemorated the 75th anniversary of America dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, thus commencing the “atomic age.” Seventy-five years later, the debate still rages on whether it was immoral for President Truman to authorize the use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and then a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki three days later.
I believe that President Truman made the right decision, the moral decision and one that stands moral scrutiny and the test of history.
To properly evaluate the decision to “drop the bomb,” several critical factors must be considered. First, the Japanese were feverishly preparing to defend their home islands with the same fanatical ferocity with which they had defended Saipan, Okinawa, and Iwo Jima.
The American invasion of Imperial Japan was scheduled to begin in October 1945. The soldiers, sailors, and airmen preparing for that invasion had been told to expect 50% casualties. In the interest of full disclosure, my father was one of those young sailors (he was 24) and his commanding officer had told him 50% casualties were expected as he was training to be part of the first wave hitting the beach. If we had invaded Japan, I would have had a 50% chance of not being here since I was conceived while my mother and father were having a second honeymoon in Texas six months after Japan’s surrender.
It was also estimated that it would take at least 18 months to subdue Japan, with 500,000 American casualties and five million Japanese casualties after a street-by-street, house-by-house, room-by-room conflict across the length and breadth of the country.
In other words, America would have lost more people dead than she had lost in the entire war up until then (approximately 410,000) in Europe and the Pacific combined. And Japan would have been more devastated than Germany was by the end of the war in Europe.
So, if you subtract the approximately 250,000 people killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki (including those who died within a year from the effects of radiation poisoning), you could argue that dropping the first atomic bombs saved about 500,000 American lives and 4.75 million Japanese lives.
Also, we now know from captured Japanese war files that the dropping of the first atomic bombs saved the lives of a very special group of Americans. The Japanese authorities were preparing to summarily execute the 23,000 American POWs still in Japanese hands in order to free their guards to focus on repelling the American invasion (38% of American POWs had already died from the cruelty and the barbarity of their captors). The executions were scheduled to begin on August 17, 1945, just 8 days after Nagasaki was bombed. If America had not dropped the atomic bombs when they did, these 23,000 American POWs (soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen) would have been executed.
So, who bears the moral responsibility for the deaths at Hiroshima and Nagasaki? The answer is the Japanese militarists who led their country to launch a sneak attack against the U.S. at Pearl Harbor in 1941. I am surprised in the still on-going discussions about moral responsibility that so few people take into account the fact that Japan attacked America, not the other way around.
In fact, I believe that if President Truman had not dropped the atomic bombs and thus ended the war, when the American people eventually discovered that so many of their loved ones (sons, fathers, husbands, brothers, uncles, nephews, etc.) had died during the bloody campaign to liberate Japan, they would have demanded the President’s impeachment and may have even demanded his trial for being responsible for the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of young Americans.
Second, the impact of the atomic bombs had a great peacemaking impact on the post-World War II world. Atomic bombs were used for the first and only time in August 1945.
Some revisionist historians have continued to argue that the U.S. did not have to drop the atomic bombs because Japan would have surrendered anyway, after the Soviet Union entered the war on August the 8th. It should be noted that the Soviets entered the war after we had dropped the atomic bomb, something which they had not previously chosen to do between VE Day (May 8th) and Hiroshima on August 6th.
Could it be that the decision to drop the bomb forced the Soviets to declare war against Japan sooner than they would have done otherwise, lest they not be able to take over Manchuria and the northern part of Korea after the war? If the Soviets had come into the war against Japan and we had not dropped the bomb, would they have demanded an occupation zone in Tokyo and in the Home Islands, modeled after the Allied partition of Germany and Berlin into Soviet and Allied zones? How different, and how much more sad, the history of post-war Japan would have been had it been divided into East and West like Germany.
And, as Chris Wallace makes clear in his riveting new book Countdown 1945, when Truman told Stalin about the atom bomb at the Pottsdam Conference in July 1945, Stalin surprised Truman by his mild response. Stalin was interested, but he wasn’t surprised. The Soviets had a spy, Klaus Fuchs, in Los Alamos feeding America’s deepest atomic secrets straight to Moscow. Wallace also reports, “A member of the Russian delegation heard Stalin and Foreign Minister … Molotov discuss it that night. Molotov said it was time to ‘speed things up’ in developing a Russian bomb’” (page 165).
Wallace then notes that in reality “The Twentieth Century’s Nuclear Arms race began” in Pottsdam “at 7:30 p.m., July 24, 1945,” thirteen days before Hiroshima. That fact pretty much destroys the argument that Hiroshima “started” the nuclear arms race. Generals like George Marshall argued vigorously for Truman’s decision to drop the bomb to end the war as rapidly as possible. Even Franklin Roosevelt’s widow, Eleanor, never accused of being a “hawk,” wrote President Truman on August 12, 1959, that “you could make no other decision than the one you made.”
On the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, should not we at least entertain the thought that the American discovery and use of nuclear weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki have in fact saved untold tens of millions more lives in the intervening years than the number of lives lost at those two cities in 1945.
The fact is World Wars I and II, both occurring in the first half of the 20th century, were the bloodiest wars in human history with tens of millions dead in both wars.
In contrast, at the end of World War II with the debut of nuclear weapons and the Cold War, the second half of the 20th century was comparatively mild in bloodshed. Why? Could it be that the answer is nuclear weapons? If it were not for nuclear weapons and the Doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, we would have gotten into a war with Russia over Berlin and with China over Korea, seeking to keep the Communists from extending their control over Western Europe and all of Asia. Tens of millions across the globe would have died in such conventional wars. The threat of nuclear weapons has made conflagrations like the two world wars virtually unimaginable.
It must be acknowledged that this human calculus could all change in a moment of miscalculation between the Indians and the Pakistanis on the Indian subcontinent. Still, at this point, 75 years after Hiroshima, nuclear weapons have saved tens of millions more lives than the lives lost at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
However, it must be conceded that 75 years after Hiroshima, nuclear weapons have had an enormous “peacemaking” impact on the post-World War II world.
I, as a baby boomer American along with millions of my generational cohort, would have spent significant portions of our youth and early adulthood in uniforms in far flung places in many cases sacrificing our lives to defeat the global totalitarian ambitions of the Soviets and the Communist Chinese. Since we had nuclear weapons guaranteeing Mutually Assured Destruction, we were spared that fate. And for that I, and I suspect many of my generational cohort, are profoundly grateful.
Thank you, President Truman!
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Dr. Richard Land, BA (magna cum laude), Princeton; D.Phil. Oxford; and Th.M., New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, was president of the Southern Baptists’ Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (1988-2013) and has served since 2013 as president of Southern Evangelical Seminary in Charlotte, NC. Dr. Land has been teaching, writing, and speaking on moral and ethical issues for the last half century in addition to pastoring several churches.
Science has no moral code—unlike religion. In truth we shouldn’t have used it on a city-—the first one should have been on a military site after telling Japan what we had and offering a chance for surrender. Blow up a military target—wait a week—THEN start to blow up cities. The fire raids were almost as bad in terms of loss of life. No invasion, just starve them out and keep offering a peace deal. BUT, hindsight is 20-20. Ask yourself this—if they had the bomb—would they have dropped it on San Francisco? You bet.
Science has no moral code—unlike religion. In truth we shouldn’t have used it on a city-—the first one should have been on a military site after telling Japan what we had and offering a chance for surrender. Blow up a military target—wait a week—THEN start to blow up cities. The fire raids were almost as bad in terms of loss of life. No invasion, just starve them out and keep offering a peace deal. BUT, hindsight is 20-20. Ask yourself this—if they had the bomb—would they have dropped it on San Francisco? You bet.
Science has no moral code—unlike religion. In truth we shouldn’t have used it on a city-—the first one should have been on a military site after telling Japan what we had and offering a chance for surrender. Blow up a military target—wait a week—THEN start to blow up cities. The fire raids were almost as bad in terms of loss of life. No invasion, just starve them out and keep offering a peace deal. BUT, hindsight is 20-20. Ask yourself this—if they had the bomb—would they have dropped it on San Francisco? You bet.
The core plutonium accidentally went critical.... glowed blue and cooked this brilliant physicist. Massive doses of radiation, when, in order to stop the criticality of the core plutonium, Daghlian could not knock a tungsten carbide brick away— and had to dismantle the bricks by hand. Cannot imagine how horrifying that was.He certainly suffered a horrible end, including in the last stages— pericardial fluid around his heart making him unable to circulate blood well (without a doctor stabbing with a large hypodermic needle to draw off the fluid built up).
God Bless this brave man’s memory.
Daghlian’s father was a survivor/escapee of the Armenian Genocide by the Turks. To have his son die in the defense of freedom.
No, Hiroshima was a major military base, and the headquarters of the Japanese armies that would fight the Americans if they landed in Japan. Many of Japan’s military leaders and officers were killed in the Hiroshima attack, thus decapitating its military.
Both my mom and my father-in-law went through the Pearl Harbor attack.
See my #105—Hiroshima was a major military base and the headquarters of the home armies that would defend Japan. We killed many of Japan’s military officers that day and decapitated their military.
Remind me again how many Super Bowls Monday morning quarterbacks have won? Never mind.
Claire Chennault, heading the Flying Tigers before the United States (officially) entered the war, was pushing for long-range bombers for the purpose of bombing Japanese cities months before the United States even entered the war.
"A small number of long-range bombers carrying incendiary bombs could quickly reduce Japan's paper-and-matchwood cities to heaps of smoking ashes." - Claire Chennault TheJournalofHistoricalReview
Roosevelt approved this in July of 1941. (Look up "JB-355", which authorized the use of American bombers to be flown against Japan.)
(Everyone knows of the attack on Pearl Harbor on 12/07/1941; how many know of the Japanese attack on Clark Airfield in the Philippines on 12/08, where American B-17s were destroyed?) (Does anyone even wonder what American B-17s were doing in the Philippines in December of 1941 before the war began?)
James Doolittle and his "raiders" dropped incendiaries on Tokyo during their early 1942 raid.
The campaign against Japanese cities wasn't accidental or forced; there was a well-known weakness in Japan's defenses, and the US was simply going to exploit it
My father survived two amphibious landings on Japanese held islands in the Pacific. When the war ended, he was recovering from malaria and knew he would have been part of an amphibious landing on mainland Japan had the war not ended.
From what he saw first hand of the fighting in the Pacific, there was absolutely no doubt in his mind that dropping of the atomic bombs was the right thing to do.
I would also point out that those who question the morality of the atomic bomb, need to look at what alternatives would have been used. The Army Air Corp had already been firebombing major cities leading to huge civilian casualties. Further, the naval blockade of Japan had produced a food crisis in the County.
At the time of year that the atomic bombs were dropped, the weather in Japan was still reasonable. If the war had gone on the homeless exposed to the elements from homes destroyed by fire bombing and the starvation would have also produced mass civilian casualties.
Using any means to end the war as quickly as possible, was the moral thing to do.
Actually, that is only partially true. There were no US Bombers, available to drop the extremely heavy and large bombs in the European theater. There was a British bomber that could have if the bombs had been developed sooner.
As it was, the bombing of Japan required two very specially modified Boeing B-29 Superfortress bombers that were modified and tested at the last minute.
The first bomb did not cause them to surrender.
How many months or years of traditional warfare would it have taken to end their imperialist war?
We detonated the first atomic bomb on our own soil during WWII as a test.
Why no annual essays debating whether it was wrong of Japan to use prisoner of war slave labor or to kill their POWs?
He may have been aware of some of the effects but he acted to prevent an explosion from happening
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Daghlian
Criticality accident
The sphere of plutonium surrounded by neutron-reflecting tungsten carbide blocks in a re-enactment of Daghlian’s 1945 experiment[5]
During an experiment on August 21, 1945, Daghlian was attempting to build a neutron reflector manually by stacking a set of 4.4-kilogram (9.7 lb) tungsten carbide bricks in an incremental fashion around a plutonium core. The purpose of the neutron reflector was to reduce the mass required for the plutonium core to attain criticality. He was moving the final brick over the assembly, but neutron counters alerted Daghlian to the fact that the addition of that brick would render the system supercritical. As he withdrew his hand, he inadvertently dropped the brick onto the center of the assembly. Since the assembly was nearly in the critical state, the accidental addition of that brick caused the reaction to go immediately into the prompt critical region of neutronic behavior. This resulted in a criticality accident.[5]
Daghlian reacted immediately after dropping the brick and attempted to knock the brick off the assembly without success. He was forced to disassemble part of the tungsten-carbide pile in order to halt the reaction.[6]
Daghlian was estimated to have received a dose of 510 rem (5.1 Sv) of neutron radiation, from a yield of 1016 fissions.[5] Despite intensive medical care, he developed symptoms of severe radiation poisoning and his mother and sister were flown out to care for him (his father had died in 1943).[2] He fell into a coma, and died 25 days after the accident.[6] He was the first known fatality caused by a criticality accident. His body was returned to New London, where he was buried at Cedar Grove Cemetery.[7]
“Yet in 8th grade they were showing them films of the Holocaust.”
I 8th grade Mr. DeBolt made us look at pictures from one of the camps. I remember him yelling at us “LOOK AT ‘EM. AND DON’T FORGET!”. I don’t remember anything being said about Japanese war crimes.
The Germans dropped incendiary bombs on English cities in WWI. The Japanese deployed incendiary bombs (ineffectively) on the American west coast in 1944. Oh, and by the way, the war HAD started by 1940. The Japanese started it in 1931. We just hadn’t officially joined the party.
“Criticality accident”
They had to have at least 2 of these accidents before they decided to stop fooling around willy-nilly with this stuff. They were smart people, but I guess you can’t be smart about everything.
Two that we know about. Other nations may not have been so public.
Yes, demonivitch korski probably got a few of them, too. Not to mention the fooling around that went on at Chernobyl.
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