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.
Agree!
“Certainly a better fate than many defeated societies in past eras have endured.”
And it’s very possible, in a few years, their society will be in FAR BETTER condition than our own (thanks mainly to Republicans sitting out elections because they’re mad at Roberts).
Let’s reverse the question.
Would it be immoral for Japan to go nuclear on the US?
They certainly tried to use other immoral weapons on us.
Toture for one, biological weapons for another
“When we saw our comrades mutilated, with their genitals stuffed in their mouths, I had no problem killing Japs.”
A Veteran of the Battle of Guadalcanal.
It sure saved my late father-in-laws life. He was a 4th. Division Marine recuperating from a serious leg wound he suffered on Iwo Jima.
He came home, met my late mother-in-law and they married. They had four daughters. One of them is my wife.
That’s an excellent point. The problem there is that it exposes the whole “look how many lives — both American AND Japanese — it saved!” argument as a childish non-sequiter.
What would have happened if the Japanese hadn’t surrendered after the second bomb was dropped? If the U.S. felt compelled to drop a second bomb because the Japanese didn’t surrender after the first one, then on what basis would anyone presume today that the U.S. had any intention of invading Japan at all?
Immoral? Nope.
No it was not immoral.The Japanese people were warned in advance if I recall my history to evacuate the targeted cities.They failed to evacuate their deaths are on the Japanese government.
Beside that the Japanese government thought very little about killing thousands of Americans on December 7,1941.Those Americans were at peace minding their own business when they were attacked and killed.
A third one was going to be ready about a week after Nagasaki.
https://outrider.org/nuclear-weapons/articles/third-shot/
Read Richard Frank’s book, “Downfall”, it will answer most your questions on using the Bomb.
So are you saying that using atomic bombs WAS immoral?
Fair? Was it fair when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?
There’s no sound moral principle anywhere that justifies the targeting of civilian populations in combat. That has nothing to do with the two atomic bombs themselves, either. As another poster pointed out on this thread, the U.S. had already crossed the Rubicon on that question long before August of 1945.
“the US had pretty much shot their wad for their nuclear arsenal”
That is what I had thought, but apparently head of the Manhattan Project Major General Leslie R. Grove claimed they would have had a 3rd ready by 8/24, and then they could further produce 3 a month for September and October.
My daughter’s teacher asked this question when she was in 8th grade and we were stationed in Hawaii. I got her to ask the teacher about Japan’s atrocities (Nanking, Battaan, Unit 731 etc). The teacher asked her where she heard about those and she told her from me (I’m a history nut). Teacher said the school didn’t feel that 8th graders were mature enough to learn about them so they would learn them in high school. Yet in 8th grade they were showing them films of the Holocaust.
(At least it was before the United States did it.)
But I don't think we can have a balanced discussion on the subject because we're simply too close in time to the event; there are those living who know people who were physically and mentally immersed in the war effort.
As long as someone is going to be able to believe, "If there wasn't a bomb then my father wouldn't have met my mother at the USO where she gave him a box of Twinkies and danced with him", then the discussion becomes more emotional than rational.
“Groves expected to have another “Fat Man” atomic bomb ready for use on August 19, with three more in September and a further three in October;[87] a second Little Boy bomb (using U-235) would not be available until December 1945.[229][230] On August 10, he sent a memorandum to Marshall in which he wrote that “the next bomb ... should be ready for delivery on the first suitable weather after 17 or 18 August.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki
“My FIL was a first lieutenant on a ship headed for Japan”
My Dad had just returned from Europe. After a short leave, he was on a train passing trough Kansas on his way to the west coast when the news came. They stopped at Fort Reily for a couple of weeks, and then got their walking papers. You would have had a hard time convincing him it wasn’t the right thing to do.
“all people need to lay down the weapons of war”
That would be nice however war is war unfortunately and by today’s and tomorrow’s standards the A Bomb was a fire cracker.
The US developed the A Bomb out of necessity fearing that Germany would be the first there. And Japan also was at work with A Bomb development, unsuccessfully. Any ideas abou what they would have done with it had they been the first?
http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/archives/pdfs/docsworldwar.pdf
Was dropping A Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki immoral ? Was a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor immoral? War itself is immoral? Yet the invasion of Japan by allied troupes would likely have caused far more deaths and damage than the A Bombs caused and made it possible for thousands of U S servicemen to come home alive when the war was over. Actually a friend of mine was in San Diego ready to ship out to take his part in the invasion when the bombs were dropped and was very thankful that they were.
A better question: “Is war moral?”
If the A bombs failed Lemay was armed and ready to launch an aggressive incendiary bombing program which would have killed MILLIONS.
The reason they were using incendiary devices almost exclusively over Japan was because the air currents from Asia did not allow bombers to accurately drop conventinal HE bombs on target. The AAF went to the incendiary devices because accuracy was out of the question due to prevailing air currents and since much of Japanese industial zones (and the cottage war industries) were in and around cities constructed mostly of lumber, incendiary methods were deemed the most effective.
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