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.
No.
Millions of lives have been spared in the ensuing years as war has been fought conventionally and today, with so much precision that Dresden isn’t going to happen again.
No.
Liberal Catholics always use the SEAMLESS GARMENT argument and say we were wrong to drop the bomb....They expect everyone to play war with rubber swords and water pistols....
In the 8th Grade I had to write a history paper on whether we should have dropped the bomb or not. So I figured I would ask my WW2 veteran Dad what he thought. He said go in the bathroom and look in the mirror and tell him if I like what I saw or not. Summed it up for me. He had his orders to head to the Pacific as his Army assignment in the Caribbean (Battle if the Atlantic w/ Unitas and convoys) was over. So his logic was with invasion of Japan, I would not exist.
My uncle was on a Navy carrier in the Pacific preparing for the invasion of Japan. My father was a Naval pilot in the Atlantic awaiting orders to be redeployed. They and millions of other American soldiers, sailors, marines, and their families would wonder why anyone is even asking such a stupid question.
Indeed, they chose not to attack during that period. But Stalin did pledge to attack within 90 days after VE day. August 8th was the expiration of that 90 day period.
One of the funniest dinner conversations was when my daughter was in high school and they were studying WWII. The teacher was telling them about the Hiroshima bomb, and how it wasn’t necessary.
My mother in law was living with us. He brother lost a leg in the war.
She started off and went on for about 15 minutes about life in 1945. She ended with something along the lines of, “Your teacher only knows what they read in books. I was here. I lived through it. Who are you going to believe? It’s really easy to judge things after the fact.”
I didn’t laugh out loud...but it was not something I ever expected from this quiet old woman.
If not for the bomb,there’s a good chance I would never have been born.
In past years I used to have some foreign students stay with me as I live near NYC. They had been here in the US as exchange students and were near NYC for that last weekend for the fun of visiting there.
I always took them on the Circle Line Tour -— a fun boat ride that circles NYC. The tour starts near the USS Intrepid which had been hit by many kamikazi planes during the war One time I had a couple of Japanese girls with me and I explained that the guide would mention the Intrepid and the kamikazis planes, but not to take offense —— it was just what happens during war. One of the girls said -— “that’s OK -— we’ve forgiven you.” I was a bit stunned at that!
I pretty much equate people who say we shouldn’t have nuked Japan to those who say we never went to the moon. They know they’re dead wrong, on both counts, but they need attention, so this is their way of crying out for it. In other words, they deserve our pity, not our time.
By the way, there’s always the implication in these (fake) debates that if we didn’t nuke Japan, then nukes would have disappeared from the planet. Somehow I don’t think that would have been the case. Now if we hadn’t developed nukes during WW2, then someone would have, eventually, as the theory all pointed to their viability. Which country?...maybe us, maybe the Soviets, maybe even the Chinese. If we want to go further back in time so that nukes weren’t here today, we’d have delete Einstein, the Curies, and probably some of the geniuses from the early 20th Century...and then delete later geniuses like Feynman.
Actor Tom Hanks said we attacked Japan because we are racists.
If a tree falls in the forest...
The better question would be: Being in possession of such a potent weapon how could we begin to justify to certain death of as many as 1 million American and Allied soldiers sailors and Airmen to save Japanese in August of 1945? The Japanese should have thought about saving themselves sooner than they did. Not using the bombs and opting for an amphibious assault would have been a cowardly waist of innocent lives to save lives not deserving of consideration from us. Sorry but that is the truth. The Japanese never dreamed of how the war would end when they started it, that’s on them.
No.
Curtis LeMay's B-29 crews were superheating Japanese cities for months before they were provided the means to do it with a smaller carbon footprint.
If there were any moral objections to targeting Japanese population centers, they would have been raised long before August of 1945. (If they were raised, they were presumably found lacking.)
Yeah, these are the same weasels that are pulling down statues to men that had the guts to walk into rifled musket fire.
Nope.
And most people don’t know that the Manhattan Project scientists didn’t know anything about fallout and radiation effects either. They thought it was just a massive bomb. The first scientist, Harry Daghlian, that died from radiation poisoning died in September 1945.
My dad fought in North Africa and Italy. He was wounded at Anzio in May 1944 and sent back to the States. In 1945 he was told to report to duty for the invasion of Japan. He was mustered out after the bomb was dropped. There was a 50/50 chance that I would not have been born.
He went to school on the GI bill and worked in a state health lab. In the 1950’s I remember seeing half of the men my dad worked with had war injuries. They all shared their stories with each other but no one else.
Thank you Harry!!!!!!
No more immoral than Kamikaze raid on Perl Harbor.
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