Should you have dropped the atomic bomb?

Answer 1

This is one of the most complex questions of all time. There is no easy, pat answer to such a highly charged, emotional issue. This is a question that calls for an opinion: in my opinion, the simple answer is yes, The Bomb had to be used. Yet the pros and cons may be strongly argued on both sides. Even Albert Einstein, whose theoretical physics helped create The Bomb and who initially advocated building it because he feared the Nazis were building one, later changed his mind and argued strenuously against its use on humanitarian grounds.

One of the main arguments against the use of the nuclear weapon is that because of the sheer power of a single bomb, it is more cruel and unusual than conventional bombs. Also, conventional bombs do not kill their victims weeks, months or even years later due to radiation. Certainly the sheer horror of the use of The Bomb as we saw the evidence in Hiroshima and Nagasaki have helped prevent its use again — so far (that's what the "Cold War" was all about). The U.S. has the dubious distinction of being the only nation in the world ever to have dropped a nuclear weapon in anger, while Japan remains the only nation in the world ever to have undergone a nuclear attack.

On the other hand, The Bomb undoubtedly ultimately saved far more lives than it took. The question has first, I think, to be looked at in the context of the times. In 1945, the Japanese simply would not quit! (For that matter, neither would the Germans, and had The Bomb been ready by April, 1945, it probably would have been dropped on Berlin instead.) It is far too easy now, after more than 60 years of peace, friendship and economic co-prosperity with modern Japan to say that we should not have dropped The Bombs. From the perspective of the present, it seems cruel, even bestial to have used this most powerful of weapons ever devised against a nation that, by 1945, was so badly beaten as to be well nigh defenseless.

Yet it is precisely because the Japanese were so badly beaten by 1945 that President Truman unhesitatingly made the decision to drop The Bomb, because the Japanese military government, despite having been decisively defeated on every battlefield, kept right on fighting, hoping for some miracle leading to a negotiated peace, or at minimum to die to save the National Honor.

Before 1945 the Japanese were a highly aggressive military state. Well before the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the Japanese armed forces had practically imposed a military Dictatorship on Japan, with the acquiescence of Emperor Hirohito. Lacking sufficient Natural Resources in the Home Islands for their war machine, the Japanese, believing that their Manifest Destiny (an American term from the 19th Century) was to rule all of Asia, began attacking neighboring countries. In 1905, after a victory over the Russians, Japan gained control of Korea and Taiwan. They continued to expand while they were still part of the alliance against the Central Powers in WW1, and in 1931 they occupied Manchuria and attacked China. The Japanese resented any interference by Western powers in their aggressive campaign to create what they called the “Greater Southeast Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” which was to be dominated, of course, by Japan.

One has to look at the conduct and mindset of the Japanese soldier of the period up to 1945. Steeped from birth in the Samurai tradition of Bushido, the “Way of the Warrior,” a code of conduct that emphasized Death Before Dishonor, the Japanese soldier was almost impossible to capture alive. One of the worst ways a warrior could dishonor himself was to surrender to an enemy. Throughout WW2, for a Japanese soldier to surrender was the exception rather than the rule. So ingrained was this medieval concept of honor, the Japanese even extended it to the prisoners they took. The infamous Bataan Death March after the Fall of Corregidor in 1942 has been blamed, at least in part, on the Japanese notion that the Americans and Filipinos who surrendered had dishonored themselves by not fighting to the death, so they were unworthy of decent treatment by their captors. This, then, was the soldier we were fighting up to 1945.

To see clearly the effect of the Code of Death before Dishonor, all one has to do is look at Japanese casualty figures for the island campaigns of 1942-1945, especially towards the end in the fights for Iwo Jima and Okinawa. On Iwo Jima, of 22,000 Japanese troops engaged, only 216 survived! They, however, took a terrible toll of the 70,000 U.S. Marines that came against them. Iwo was the only battle where the Marines lost more killed than the enemy, but they were not there to get themselves killed. The Japanese were.

Much the same thing happened on Okinawa, where about 66,000 Japanese defenders lost their lives while causing over 72,000 American casualties, which was more than twice the number of casualties on Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal combined. Most of the Japanese still refused to surrender, preferring to throw themselves on their swords, or grenades, or to lead suicidal charges against the Americans. Moreover, close to 150,000 Okinawan civilians died, many by throwing first their children and then themselves off the cliffs into the sea. For the Americans, it was a horrifying foretaste of what they could expect when they invaded The Home Islands of Japan, which was next up after Okinawa.

The Americans also had to contend with Kamikaze attacks — airplanes loaded with explosives and piloted by men who had no intention of coming out alive (there’s a modern parallel with the radical Islamist suicide bombers). The Kamikaze had first appeared in 1944, but by Okinawa there were hundreds of attacks resulting in the sinking or heavy damaging of at least 30 U.S. warships by over 1400 suicide attackers. This was the enemy we were fighting in 1945.

Okinawa was a bitter lesson for the planners of the invasion of the Home Islands: the Japanese had shown without doubt that they would fight to the literal death. The Japanese were arming and training women and children with sharpened bamboo staves to use against the Americans on the beaches. The Japanese leaders were actually debating whether it was better for the entire population of Japan to immolate themselves rather than face the national dishonor of surrender! For American planners of the final invasion of The Home Islands, called Operation Downfall, the estimates of casualties on the Allied side ran to the millions (!) and on the Japanese side to the tens of millions (!). But the problem remained that the Japanese simply would not give up, even though it’s probable that their leadership had known they were beaten as early as 1943. We had the grisly examples of Iwo and Okinawa to remind us how savagely the Japanese would fight. More than a million young American men stood to lose their lives …

Unless …

In Total War, nations strive to totally destroy one another’s ability to fight. This includes destroying civilians and cities because cities are centers of the manufacture of war matériel, and civilians man the factories that produce it. Throughout WW2 all belligerents had been bombing cities flat. By 1945, the U.S. Army Air Force was nightly dropping thousands of tons of incendiaries on Japanese cities (made largely of paper and wood), incinerating tens of thousands of people, but it hadn’t made a dent in the Japanese will to resist. The Japanese Navy was largely on the bottom of the Pacific, including the two largest and most powerful battleships ever launched. The Japanese Air Force was reduced to crashing itself into our ships. The Army, what was left of it, was drawing its battle lines to defend The Home Islands while the government issued sharpened bamboo staves to children. The clear fact was that what was needed was a weapon so powerful, so devastating, so unutterably shocking that the Japanese would finally realize that we would simply annihilate them without giving them the chance to take any of us with them.

And we had that weapon in the atomic bomb.

On July 16, 1945, a secret program know as The Manhattan Project successfully detonated a plutonium cored implosion-type weapon in New Mexico. It yielded an explosion roughly equivalent to 20,000 tons of T.N.T. A B29 Superfortress of the day could normally carry 20,000 pounds of bombs (not all of which was active explosive), but a little way oversimplified arithmetic shows that a single B29 carrying a single bomb similar to that exploded in New Mexico was the equivalent of about 2000 B29s each carrying a standard bomb load.

President Truman was immediately informed of the success of the test and that we had two more combat ready bombs, one a uranium device, and the other another plutonium bomb. Truman unhesitatingly gave the order to use one of the weapons on a target city in Japan. (If Germany hadn’t surrendered in May, Berlin might have been the target.)

Truman always said he never lost any sleep over the decision to use The Bomb. There was a suggestion that we might do a demonstration by dropping a Bomb over an unpopulated area, but that idea was rejected primarily because, [1] if the Japanese were forewarned they might successfully shoot the plane down, but more to the point, [2] if the bomb failed to detonate we would have accomplished nothing. No, the only way was to essentially drop The Bomb with no warning on a military/industrial city and then if it didn’t go off there’d be no harm done. If it did go off, we’d have made the shocking point we intended.

On August 6, 1945 a uranium bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. About a minute later it exploded about 2000 feet above the city with a blast equivalent to about 13,000 tons of T.N.T. The radius of total destruction was about a mile, with 90% of Hiroshima’s buildings being pretty much flattened. Possibly 90,000 people were killed outright, and more died later as the result of burns and/or radiation. We had delivered the shock we intended.

Yet, amazingly, the Japanese government still waffled, some even believing that we didn’t really have any more of the super weapons, so three days later we dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki, not doing quite as much damage, even though this plutonium weapon was more powerful, because the bombardier missed his aiming point due to clouds. It still killed about 70,000 people outright. We finally had the Japanese government’s attention. The Emperor personally stepped in, declared the war lost and broadcast a surrender message. The lives of tens of millions had been saved by the sacrifice of tens of thousands.

The political and military implications have, of course, lasted to this day, not to mention the ongoing threat of one of these things somehow getting loose, especially in the current crisis of terrorism. But long ago I personally concluded that, so long as we had built it, the use of the Atomic Bomb, while no less morally reprehensible than anything else done in Total War, was justified in that it finally jolted the Japanese into giving up without our having to invade the Home Islands. You can argue the morality of it forever, but to the American boys who came home alive to have their families and live out their lives, there was little doubt in their minds that the decision to drop it had been the right one.