The mouth of the Lord can order such things, just as He could order the slaying of Isaac. Woe to the mere man who thinks he can do so, for such is delusion. I give you post #40, above.
OK, you’re President Truman.
Choose one:
1) End the war by causing 150,000 civilian casualties and destroy two cities. The four year war has already caused 400,000 American deaths, and over 1,000,000 wounded.The Okinawa campaign has just ended with a frightful number of Americans killed, presaging the difficult bloody fight that will be needed to take Japan. The Navy daily suffers kamikaze attacks, in some cases, wiping out hundreds of Americans in a split second.
2) Invade Japan by land causing up to 9 million civilian and military deaths, destroying many cities, and having 250,000 Americans KIA and another 1,000,000 wounded in a fight to the death.
Choose quickly. Americans are dying daily.
You can pontificate about moral choices until the cows come home. But in reality, Truman made the only correct choice open to him.
And in doing so, he saved countless American and Japanese lives.
We can second guess decisions made 62 years ago, but we dare not disregard the context of the times.
We can take responsibility for Hiroshima, but the Japanese themselves are wholly responsible for Nagasaki. They could have surrendered then, but chose not to. Indeed their military officials plotted to the last second to prevent Hirohito from making his radio broadcast to the Japanese people announcing surrender, even after Nagasaki occurred..
Still losing 75,000-90,000 lives in Hiroshima and saving 9- 10 million is a dirty business but it had to be done to end the fanaticism of an empire that would have sacrificed its own people in a death duel that it knew it could never win.
President Truman made the right decision. As a result not only did the people on both sides live, but they went on to have innumerable children and grandchildren, who would have been cutoff had more people died in Japan in 1945-1946.
And before this War on Islamic Terror is over, similar choices will have to be made.
It's true that Washington and Lee would have considered such destruction barbaric according to the thinking of their times. Sherman might have considered it a necessary act. The thinking at the time of WWII was that in an era of industrial war civilian populations of workers were part of the ability of the enemy to continue to fight and thus were strategic targets. That said, it's my understanding that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were targeted because they had been untouched by previous conventional bombing, not because of their military significance. I believe that this was done to show the Japanese the horrifying cost of continued resistance.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not the United States sins, the destruction ended the war and given the thinking of the times were not barbaric acts.