(This is the script of an Afterburner video that ran on May 1st, 2009. Some very minor changes have been made in the print version.)
Recently, a friend and colleague of mine – Cliff May, President of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, who I work with weekly at PJTV – made an appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
Cliff and Mr. Stewart were having a heated argument on the subject of what constitutes torture and what is merely coercion. Here’s how the conversation unfolded:
Cliff May: Do you think that in World War Two we did not inflict pain and suffering on suspects in Europe and Japan–.
Jon Stewart: –I would hope we didn’t waterboard people. I would hope we–.
Cliff May: –We did do Hiroshima. Do you think Truman is a war criminal for that?
Jon Stewart: (pause) Yeah.
Cliff May: You do?
Jon Stewart: Yeah.
This view, expressed by Jon Stewart* and shared by millions, is becoming ever more widely held the farther from the event we become. Stewart and others maintain that the atomic bombings were criminal acts, claiming that the targeted cities received no warning, that they were of no military value, that Japanese resistance was crumbling and their use was unnecessary, and that Japan was trying to surrender at the time of the bombings which were therefore nothing but an unjustified and brutal signal sent merely to show the Soviets who’s boss.
None of these positions stand up to facts.
Let’s come back to the moral issue in a moment. But let’s begin with the historical facts.
Here’s what Stewart himself says about warnings:
Jon Stewart: Here’s what I think on the atom bombs. If you dropped an atom bomb fifteen miles offshore, and you said the next one is coming to hit you, then I would think it’s okay. To drop one on a city, and kill a hundred thousand people…
Cliff May: …You think that would–.
Jon Stewart: I think that’s criminal.
So Jon Stewart’s main point is that if the Japanese had been warned, quote, “then I would think it’s okay.” But the Japanese were warned. After 6 six minutes of grueling research, I was able to discover this leaflet:
This is a photograph of the front side of Office of War Information notice #2106, dubbed the “LeMay bombing leaflet.” Over 1 million of these were dropped over Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and 33 other Japanese cities on 1 August 1945 – five days before the Hiroshima bombing. The Japanese text on the reverse side of the leaflet carried the following warning:
“Read this carefully as it may save your life or the life of a relative or friend. In the next few days, some or all of the cities named on the reverse side will be destroyed by American bombs. These cities contain military installations and workshops or factories which produce military goods. We are determined to destroy all of the tools of the military clique which they are using to prolong this useless war. But, unfortunately, bombs have no eyes. So, in accordance with America’s humanitarian policies, the American Air Force, which does not wish to injure innocent people, now gives you warning to evacuate the cities named and save your lives. America is not fighting the Japanese people but is fighting the military clique which has enslaved the Japanese people. The peace which America will bring will free the people from the oppression of the military clique and mean the emergence of a new and better Japan. You can restore peace by demanding new and good leaders who will end the war. We cannot promise that only these cities will be among those attacked but some or all of them will be, so heed this warning and evacuate these cities immediately”
Now that’s certainly more warning than our sailors got on the morning of December 7th, 1941. But was that enough? Jon Stewart suggests that the appropriate thing to do would have been to drop the first bomb out at sea as a demonstration. Well, let’s follow Mr. Stewart’s line of reasoning.
The effort to develop the atomic bomb was codenamed the Manhattan Project. It was spectacularly expensive. To give you some idea of the scale of it, the small town of Oak Ridge, Tennessee – where the fissionable materials were produced – consumed one-sixth of all of the electricity generated in the entire United States! The Manhattan Project – alone – likely used more electricity than the entire nation of Japan.
After many years this mighty effort produced four bombs. The world’s first nuclear weapon – a plutonium device code-named “Gadget” — was detonated over the United States of America, just before 5:30 am on July 16th, 1945 at White Sands, New Mexico, in a test firing called “Trinity.”
The Trinity bomb was extremely delicate and its reliability very much in question. It used an exquisitely timed series of conventional explosives to implode a plutonium core and reach criticality. Bomb #3 – Fat Man – was of exactly this type, as I believe was the unnamed and unused Bomb 4. So the Manhattan Project scientists essentially wasted 25% of the total arsenal – the Gadget bomb, in the Trinity test – to be certain that bombs #3 and 4 would actually work. The second bomb – called Little Boy – was a Uranium bullet-type bomb: less efficient, but judged reliable enough so that it would not need testing.
So let’s pick up Jon Stewarts suggestion. We’ve bet the entire farm – all of our best scientists, almost 30 billion in today’s dollars for the bombs and almost that much for the B-29’s to carry them – and we’ve already detonated 25% of the results on a test. We dropped millions of warning leaflets in the days before the attacks. But Jon Stewart says he would only be satisfied if we had demonstrated the weapon. Such a demonstration would have reduced the results of the Manhattan Project by half: four bombs built, two used as demonstrations.
Presumably, following Mr. Stewart’s suggestion, we would send a message to the Imperial High command that says, essentially, “Hey guys, how’s it going? Listen, we’ve got this super-weapon we’ve been working on for two years, and even though you’ve killed hundreds of thousands of our sons and fathers ever since you sneak attacked us without warning back at Pearl Habor, we wanted to show you what it can do. So next Sunday morning, set up some lawn chairs looking out of the ocean – we’ll tell you exactly where – and then right at noon precisely we’ll send one of these bombers out there to drop one of these wonder weapons… but no fair trying to shoot it down, just because you know exactly where and when and what to look for! Because when you see the kind of splash this thing makes, well, you’ll either give up on the spot or you’ll somehow suddenly deserve what’s coming to you when you wouldn’t have deserved it if we hadn’t dropped one in the bay. If this is a little morally confusing, don’t worry: some snarky narcissistic comedian will explain how that works sixty-four years from now.”
But the whole point is moot, and Jon Stewart knows it’s moot. We know for a fact that dropping an atomic bomb 15 miles out at sea would not have caused the Japanese to surrender in order to avoid that fate. How do we know? Because we dropped one on an actual city, and they still did not surrender.
Nor were they about to, contrary to what many would have you believe. As the U.S. Navy and Marines approached the Japanese mainland, resistance and casualties increased, not decreased. In six grinding months, from August of ’42 to February of ’43, the Allies lost about 1,500 killed at Guadalcanal. The first battle on Japanese soil – an uninhabited speck called Iwo Jima – killed 7,000 not in six months but in five brutal weeks. Four days after the official end to the carnage on Iwo, Americans went ashore at Okinawa – even closer to the sacred soil. In 82 days almost 13,000 allied soldiers were killed. The US Navy lost 34 ships – many of them to the new kamikaze attacks, which caused the United States Navy to lose more men in that one engagement than in all of America’s previous wars combined. Japanese resistance was not fading. It was becoming ever more fanatical.
After Okinawa, and before the Atomic Bombings, the father of the Kamikaze attacks, Admiral Takijiro Onishi declared:
“If we are prepared to sacrifice 20 million lives in kamikaze effort, victory will be ours!” 20 million people is one hundred times the number killed in the Atomic attacks.
This isn’t an assertion and this isn’t speculation. These are the words directly from the military clique that ruled Imperial Japan. Their battle plan was called Ketsu-Go – it translates roughly as “decisive operation.” On June 8th, 1945 – a little less than one month before the first atomic bomb was dropped, Emperor Hirohito declared Ketsu-Go would be, quote, “The fundamental policy to be followed henceforth in the conduct of the war.” It proclaimed that “Japan must fight to the finish and choose extinction rather than surrender.” Again, we’re not talking about the assertions of a comedy show host, but official policy statements from the God-Emperor of Japan. Special attack weapons were sanctioned, including additional kamikaze air and submarine attacks. Children were being trained to carry backpacks of explosives and throw themselves under American tanks. Admiral Onishi went on to say that 32 million civilians were being trained in the use of “primitive weapons” – that would be bamboo spears – in order to make a heroic last stand.
Opposing Ketsu-Go was the American plan for the invasion of the Japanese Home Islands: Operation Downfall. Phase one – Operation Olympic – would be an amphibious assault on the southern island of Kyushu with over 767,000 American troops: more than four times as many as were used in the D-Day invasion of Normandy in Europe. The core of the Japanese defense against Operation Olympic would come from the Imperial Army troops stationed in position to defend Kyushu. That army of 43,000 men was crowded in with various military installations, manufacturing facilities, and 280,000 civilians at the army headquarters, located in the heart of a modest city named Hiroshima. The bomb detonated directly over that army’s parade grounds. Hiroshima was not, as some will tell you, a purely civilian target. Like all Japanese manufacturing centers, the munitions factories, weapons depots, troop barracks and other military targets were dispersed among the civilian population.
At 8:16 am on the morning of August 6th, 1945, a B-29 named Enola Gay dropped bomb number two – Little Boy – which exploded with the force of about 15 thousand tons of TNT. We’ve grown up under the shadow of hydrogen weapons – H-Bombs – but these are thousands of times more powerful than the fission bomb dropped on Hiroshima. If you detonated the Little Boy Hiroshima bomb in the center of Los Angeles Airport, the fatal blast radius remains inside the airport property.
But it produced horrific damage to these wood and rice paper structures. 70,000 were killed almost immediately, and perhaps another seventy thousand would later succumb to burns, injuries and radiation.
The Japanese did not surrender. August 7th passed with no word from the Imperial High Command, as did August 8th. American B-29s continued their firebombing of Japanese targets.
Then on the morning of August 9th, another B-29, Bock’s Car, took off with Fat Man, bomb #3 – a higher-yield, less-reliable plutonium bomb like Gadget. The Japanese city of Kokura was the primary target, but clouds obscured that city so Bock’s Car diverted to the secondary, Nagasaki. It too was overcast, but a brief hole in the cloud cover was enough to give the bombardier an aim point. Fat Man exploded with a force equal to about 22 thousand tons of TNT – about half again that of Little Boy – detonating precisely halfway between the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works, a munitions plant, and the Mitsubishi-Urakami Ordnance Works, which manufactured torpedoes for the Imperial Japanese Navy.
Total deaths a Nagasaki were lower, but about 80,000 people would die from either immediate or long-term effects.
Still the Japanese did not surrender, and still the conventional bombings continued. August 9th passed. August 10th. August 11th. The fourth bomb was being readied, and it started to appear that the air force would have to begin conserving atomic bombs for use during the invasion. You see, even after the second bomb was dropped, Emperor Hirohito was hearing from his advisors that Japan still had 32 million people prepared to give their lives for their emperor.
“With luck, we will repel the invaders before they land,” said General Yoshijiro Umezu, with the ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki still smoldering.
Japan would have eventually surrendered without the atomic bombs. It might have taken an invasion, with perhaps a million American soldiers killed or wounded, and three, or five, or seven, or twenty million Japanese civilians as well. A post-war American bombing survey concluded that Japan probably would have capitulated by November or December, prior to an invasion – but that was only because the firebombings would have continued for another three months, or four, or six. Before the atomic bombings, 40% of the much, much larger city of Tokyo had been flattened as effectively as ground zero at Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Kobe, the size of Baltimore, had been 55% scoured – wiped clean off the map – by conventional bombs. Osaka, with a population about equal to Chicago, had been 35% destroyed; almost sixty percent of Yokohama – about the size of Cleveland – had gone up in flames in conventional bombing raids… None of this devastation had brought Japan to its knees. But the Atomic Bombs did.
And the idea that had we not dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, their populations would have been spared is also fallacious. Had they not been victims of the atomic attacks, those populations would have been subjected to firebombings as had the above named cities and scores of other industrial centers. The death toll from conventional bombing may have been somewhat higher, or somewhat lower, but there is no believable scenario that does not result in the deaths of tens of thousands in these cities, even had the atomic bombs been withheld.
On August 12th, three days after Nagasaki, Hirohito was asked by a relative if the war should continue if surrender meant the loss of the Imperial family and their social structure. He replied, “Of course.” August 13th passed. Then, on August 14th, the Emperor relented. As he was traveling to the radio station to announce the surrender of his empire, he narrowly escaped by kidnapped by Imperial Japanese officers determined not to let even the God-King end the war.
But he did end it. And when he finally ended it, he said why he ended it:
“The enemy now possesses a new and terrible weapon with the power to destroy many innocent lives and do incalculable damage. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization… This is the reason why We have ordered the acceptance of the provisions of the Joint Declaration of the Powers.”
Japanese pilot Mitsuo Fuchida led the air attack against Pearl Harbor. After the war, he told Paul Tibbets, pilot of the Enola Gay, quote: “you did the right thing. You know the Japanese attitude of that time, how fanatic they were. They’d die for the Emperor. Every man, woman and child would have resisted the invasion with sticks and stones if necessary. “
The use of the atomic bombs saved – at minimum — hundreds of thousands of Japanese lives from continued conventional bombing. If the invasion had been necessary – and no one at the time had any reason to think it would not be necessary, given the pattern of resistance – then millions more Japanese would die holding bamboo spears and wearing explosive backpacks. Hundreds of thousands of American soldiers would have been killed. Perhaps including this one:
I got to know this man over the course of my life. He was just a regular Army 2nd Lieutenant who got to Germany just as the war there was ending. He and all of his friends knew where they were headed next, and having watched the Marines fight and die for every inch of sand they took, they frankly did not think they were going to come home.
When the word came of the Japanese surrender, they were stunned. The Marines were stunned. Navy pilots – tough, battle-hardened men who had seen horror Jon Stewart and I will never be able to imagine, thanks to them – those men burst into tears at the news. They were going to live. They were going to go home, because of the decision that Harry Truman made that day.
This man would go home and marry this woman:
They’d have four children, and some of those children would have children.
The oldest one would play some little league baseball, then go to high school, then make movies, and finally that little boy would write this essay, because Harry Truman gave his father a chance to come home.
Jon Stewart wants to call Harry Truman a war criminal? If Harry Truman is a war criminal for the atomic bombings, then Roosevelt is one for the fire bombings of Tokyo and Dresden. And if Roosevelt is a war criminal for causing the fiery deaths of civilians, then Abraham Lincoln – whose Union armies burned Atlanta and Columbia to the ground in order to end that war – well he must be one too.
And if, by the snowy standards of these liberal’s Olympian intellect and morality… if Harry Truman is essentially the same creature as Adolph Hitler – war criminals – then these people, the actual victims of real war criminals become a little less to worry about. Don’t they?
Mr. Stewart, you do no exist on some superior intellectual plane – and most certainly not on a moral one. You can slander the men who have given you a life where the toughest decision you have to make is what to have your assistant get you for lunch. But those people who came home as a result of Harry Truman’s courage deserve a hell of a lot better than to be told that their lives are worth less than your moral discomfort. And the de facto “voice of a generation” should be someone not quite as self-centered as you.
*Shortly after he called Harry Truman a “war criminal,” Mr. Stewart apologized for the comment.
(A great deal of the background material of this essay was found in a remarkable book called Flyboys, written by Flags of our Fathers author James Bradley. While it deals primarily with the capture and brutal execution of American Naval Aviators on Chi Chi Jima, it is exhaustively researched and examines both the conventional and atomic bombings of Japan in great detail. I cannot recommend this book highly enough, although I will say the details of the Japanese treatment of Amrrican POW’s and Chinese civilians is not for the weak stomached. )
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36 Comments
1. Tantor:The objection not yet made which I’m happy to preemptively squash is that the Nagasaki Bomb was dropped too soon after Hiroshima, only three days. Originally, the plan was to drop the second Bomb ten days after the first, but weather defeated that idea. The monsoon season was coming. The weather was predicted to be socked in for the next two weeks, precluding the drop of the Bomb because the ROE was it must be dropped visually.
They had to launch the second mission immediately and even that was almost too late. Kokura, the primary target, was completely overcast and Nagasaki, the secondary target, nearly so. The leading edge of the storm front had nearly obscured both. And, of course, you win wars by punching faster, not slower.
May 19, 2009 - 3:17 pm 2. Brian:Geez,i didnt know ole Jon Stewart took the warped left wing mindset so seriously.Truman a war criminal ?What nonsense is this?Oh yeah i forgot,left wing nonsense.The world has come full circle once again,60 years later and the next one will be fought once again by those who know what evil is.Evil is stirring to the East,and i for one am paying attention,both at home and abroad.
May 19, 2009 - 4:06 pm 3. BrotherJ:Just as powerfule a rebuttal in print as in video, if not more so. Brilliant, Bill.
May 19, 2009 - 4:20 pm 4. Shannon:Since the Japanese had looked into developing a fission bomb, and knew almost immediately after the attack what had happened, the military and the Emperor knew what we had dropped on them. They had already lost several cities to firebombing, including Tokyo. The Russians were coming into the war against them. Three days is plenty of time to say “oh crap, now this” and decide to surrender.
May 20, 2009 - 7:32 am 5. Lissa:I remember writing some pedantic, fat-headed essay on Why Truman Was Wrong back in tenth grade.
When my future kids get that essay assignment, this post will be required reading before they start.
Thank you.
May 20, 2009 - 7:48 am 6. Liz Le Mond:Mr. Whittle, very much the same thing happened to my husband’s father; he was on a troop ship, scheduled to take part in the invasion of Japan that never happened, when we dropped the bombs and Japan surrendered.
May 20, 2009 - 9:29 am 7. Bob:I have saved this and will be sure my children read it when the subject of WW2 is covered in their American History classes.
May 20, 2009 - 12:35 pm 8. Ellis:Bravo, Sir!
May 20, 2009 - 1:01 pm 9. BizzyBlog » Lucid Links (050609, Morning):[...] bombs on Japan to shreds, and incinerates the shreds (Update, May 21 — The print version is here). Yes, Stewart has apologized for the claim, but IMO he did it to save his career, not because he [...]
May 21, 2009 - 4:27 am 10. Bubba:Excellent essay, Bill. The historical context surrounding these events probably should be reviewed by every American at least every few years. Alas…
Also, I especially appreciate the print version as my work computer would not play the video without distracting lag time interruptions.
Cheers
May 21, 2009 - 5:08 am 11. bobn:This is beyond good. It is even beyond great. This is one for the ages.
May 22, 2009 - 9:06 am 12. Obloodyhell:Bill, you missed one of the other argumental options — that the alternative was not invasion but blockade.
That fails, too, of course, because it basically would have meant the starvation deaths of God-alone knows how many Japanese civilians (and, of course, firebombings would not have ceased, either).
And if you think dying from starvation is even vaguely humane, well, there are a few four-letter words to describe you, and a lot more that don’t have four letters but are pretty damned similar in many qualities.
May 22, 2009 - 10:45 am 13. Stephen J.:I think the reason the atom bombs, more than anything else, get the “war criminal” epithet thrown around is primarily emotional, rather than logical. Whether Japan’s defeat would have cost more or fewer lives without it, it is certain that winning the war would have still cost hundreds of thousands of lives, lost to ordinary weapons and bombs. But the atom bombs had several unique qualities that have come to make them an especial horror.
1) Disproportion between volume and impact. One bomb wiping out a city simply violates our instinctive sense of proportion in a way that reducing it via thousands of normal bombs doesn’t.
2) Disproportion between people deciding and people affected. Millions died in the Holocaust, but the Holocaust was a product of an entire cabal of coordinated, like-thinking people who turned the forces and bureaucracy of a nation towards genocide; it took years to plan and implement and could only happen at all by riding on the back of sociohistorical currents spread over decades and centuries. By contrast, in 1945, one man, on his own, after less than two years of intensive technological frenzy, made the effectively dictatorial decision to end nearly 200,000 lives by direct isolated action, rather than as indirect consequence of battle.
3) The utterly new (to most of the world) and utterly horrifying death of radiation poisoning. Again, it’s the disproportion between the cause of death and the process/effect. To survive a blast of that magnitude by apparent sheer good fortune, only to waste away over a period of weeks or months as your own tissue literally disintegrates from unravelling DNA, takes the Bomb from horrifyingly huge brutality all the way into an almost satanic cruelty and malevolence.
But while those reasons may be emotional rather than logical, in the sense that they cannot be differentiated by a cold calculus of lives lost either way, that doesn’t mean they don’t hold validity. In George R.R. Martin’s novel A STORM OF SWORDS, a fantasy-mediaeval war saga, one of the warring leaders says to his son after pulling off a particularly brutal bit of treachery that effectively wins the war, “Tell me how it is more honorable to kill ten thousand men in the field than to kill ten men at dinner.” From a strictly consequentialist viewpoint, of course, he is correct. And yet there is a part of us, the part that deals in absolutes and knows the difference between honor and treachery, that cries out in protest.
Many people denounce Truman as a war criminal because they want to look good for allies or score points against political enemies. But there are still many who are so horrified by the reality and the threat of nuclear war that they consider any attempt to justify any use of nuclear weapons an unacceptable first step back towards the brink. I may not agree with what those zealots wish to do, but I cannot say I don’t understand and respect that passion.
May 22, 2009 - 12:01 pm 14. Steve:At my daughter’s middle school (in ultra-liberal Marin County, CA) the kids stage a mock trial of Harry Truman where they try him for war crimes. They have been doing this for years and the teachers still seem shocked that Truman virtually always gets acquitted on all counts. Even sixth graders recognize pretty quickly how ridiculous this is. Of course they don’t hear anything from their teachers about the Bataan death march or the rape of Nanking, just the noble suffering of the poor Japanese people at the hands of the evil Americans.
May 22, 2009 - 12:23 pm 15. airfoil:The ninth circle of Hell is reserved for those who betray. Treachery and cruelty are in there somewhere, but it is betrayal that is Satan’s favorite. For those wishing a scalar or metric, that could help. In a real way Truman betrayed a tacit morality of the time. How quaint to believe two million dead in mud and muck in 1917 France is somehow noble when the true betrayal was at the muzzle of an assassin’s gun. Send in the SEALs, take him out, fewer die, right? It isn’t possible to mix reason and warfare. Truman carried the burden for all who are sane, and paid the price for our sanity, a tolerance of madness in defense of what morality may be.
May 22, 2009 - 1:11 pm 16. Dave T:As usual a very fine essay.
May 22, 2009 - 9:22 pm 17. Jeff Wood:Now a slight correction: Nagasaki is on the island Kyushu (Operation: Olympic); Hiroshima is on the main island of Honshu.
I read an interesting article that stated that American stategic bombing was about to change tactic, based on analysis of the bombing of Germany. Starting on August 15 Railroad stations, bridges, and other transportation infrastructure would be targeted. Most of the people of Japan (then and now) do no live near where the rice is grown. As it was, Tokyo was near starvation in the spring and summer of 1946, with more or less intact distribution system and the allies doing their best to get food in. 10-20 million dead was estimated in the article, without a US invasion. Also had Japan not surrendered *right then* the USSR would have declared war, and occupied the northern island of Hokkaido. A wrinkle in the Cold War as well.
Truman made the right decision.
Thanks for this. The comments are of a high standard, and I particularly appreciate Stephen J’s review of the moral nuances.
Perhaps because my Dad was in India, on his way to the Japanese war in his Lancaster bomber, I understand your relief at the sudden end of the war.
Critics of Truman’s decision are not good at seeing the context. By 1945 the War was being run by some damned hard men in London, Washington, Delhi, Moscow and elsewhere. Not to mention the hard men in Berlin and Tokyo.
But at least our hard men were concerned to end the War as quickly as possible, with as few casualties as possible. We, today, are simply not able to enter their mindset except at a distance, but we can at least respect Truman’s ability to take the decision he did. Your piece shows very clearly why he was right.
A late thought. The US was never bombed. Over here, Warsaw and Rotterdam were bombed very early in the War. London and other British cities got the same treatment, and London only got relief when the V2 launch areas were overrun in late 1944. Meantime my Dad and a lot of others took the War to Germany the only way possible, by bombing the Germans. In the same way, for a long time the only way to take the War to Japan was by bomber.
In that context, one last Bomb, or rather two, followed naturally.
May 27, 2009 - 1:38 pm 18. Obloodyhell:> *Shortly after he called Harry Truman a “war criminal,” Mr. Stewart apologized for the comment.
Someone must have whispered in his ear that Truman was a Democrat…
May 28, 2009 - 11:25 am 19. Obloodyhell:Stephen, et al:
Back in 1990, on the 45th anniversary of The Bomb, noted SF author Harlan Ellison was on Nightline, and had some particularly interesting comments to say about The Bomb and the idea that it is somehow morally wrong:
It was Ellison’s claim that, instead of being an immoral weapon, The Bomb was, in fact, the most moral weapon invented since kings stopped riding into battle at the head of their armies. For the first time in hundreds of years, those whose choice it was to go to war, suffered as great a risk as those who had to prosecute the war.
The devastation of nuclear war would affect not just the soldiers and their families, but the lives, wealth, and power of those legislators and businessmen who stood at the forefront of any such decision.
In support of his case, Ellison also noted that it had, in fact, been (then) 45 years (now 59) since the development of that weapon, yet it had not been used again in war in the intervening time.
THIS IS UNPRECEDENTED IN HUMAN HISTORY.
For humans to develop a weapon, and then eschew its use in war for decades is simply not done**. We’ve now had not less than six all-out wars directly involving nuclear powers where such weapons were eschewed (Korea, Vietnam, Gulf, Iraq, Soviet-Afghanistan, and Falklands), as well as any number of minor skirmishes.
I think Ellison’s case, even if you disagree, has its merits, and ought to be made anywhere that this “The Bomb is immoral” meme turns up.
=========
May 28, 2009 - 11:41 am 20. Tim McGaha:** You might argue the use of gasses in war also apply, but gasses are notoriously dependent on wind, and all too often they turn back on the user, so I’d argue this doesn’t apply here. There are valid problems with the reliability of their use in war that discourages them, as opposed to mere “you use them, we use them” problems.
There is another reason why a second bomb was necessary. One bomb, by itself, might be a laboratory curiosity. It might take years to build, even given America’s resources. But a second? A second implies a third, a fourth, a fifth … This line of thought was implicit in Hirohito’s announcement of surrender.
May 28, 2009 - 1:47 pm 21. Don Robinson:The killing of the Japanese is justified and acceptable because the Japanese were very brutal and cruel to the US soldiers that were captured and sent to the prison camps. There was no reason to treat them as bad as they did.
May 30, 2009 - 6:48 am 22. roesti:“But the whole point is moot, and Jon Stewart knows it’s moot. We know for a fact that dropping an atomic bomb 15 miles out at sea would not have caused the Japanese to surrender in order to avoid that fate. How do we know? Because we dropped one on an actual city, and they still did not surrender.”
“None of this devastation had brought Japan to its knees. But the Atomic Bombs did.”
Seems a little bit contradictory, maybe? And you totally ignore what was most likely the decisive factor in Japan’s decision to surrender – the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, which commenced on the same day Nagasaki was bombed and eliminated any chance of using the Soviet Union as an intermediary to broker a “peace with honor” (from the Japanese perspective). This remote possibility had been a major factor in the rationale for continuing the war until one last battle could be fought. I’d suggest you read Tsuyoshi Hasegawa’s “Racing the Enemy” for an excellent in-depth discussion of this complex matter.
Jun 2, 2009 - 2:42 pm 23. Just Generally Angry:You know you’re on Mencius Moldbug’s blogroll? After writing this, I wonder if that will change. On the whole I agree with you rather than him, but he goes on and on about how the Roosevelt Administration was in the war to basically just to kill Japanese people. You know, Roosevelt got a present made out of the bone of a Japanese soldier and he thought it was awesome, city bombing is evil, the estimates of casualties from an invasion were exaggerated, etc.
He did say he wanted you to be President though, before he said he wanted the Prince of Lichtenstein to become King of America.
Jun 5, 2009 - 2:55 pm 24. JFM:Mr Whitttle
You forgot somerthing: the nuclea
Jun 8, 2009 - 7:36 am 25. JFM:Mr Whitttle
You forgot somerthing: the nuclear weapons saved millions of Chinese, Filipino and Indonesian lives as every month of Japanses occupation caused over tow times more deaths than at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Milliions of Asians would have died if Mr Stewart had had his way, but as it was evident in Vietnam and Cambodia, for people like him, Asians are just untermenschen and their lives only valuable when they can’t be used against America and put the spotlights on Mr Stewart and consorts. Once these goals are fulfilled, their lives aren’t worth a flea’s life.
Jun 8, 2009 - 7:45 am 26. alexakim:Elixir. So refreshing to hear the sane voice again. Those bombs, the culmination of long, painful, heart-rending, soul-searching deliberation by many, many people, assisting the stopper of bucks in chief, SAVED lives.
Were you wearing long pants by then (I’m thinking it was you standing beside your dad)? Already taking after your handsome dad.
Jon Stewart should resume his short pants.
Jun 9, 2009 - 11:12 am 27. Séín:I still think Truman was a war ciminal.
Jun 10, 2009 - 9:21 am 28. Susan:As regards the warning that was given, can you really expect the Japanese to listen to what must have obviously seemed American propaganda? They didn’t know what they were dealing with, and had no reason to believe us.
The emperor of Japan had a point – if you are at war with a nation, do you really have the right to wipe its entire population off the face of the Earth? There’s aggressive bombing of strategic targets, and then there’s the obliteration of a population centre. Even if it is more costly for ourselves, we must still discriminate between military and civilian targets as much as possible, and not just annihilate everything. How many citizens of another country would you kill to save the life of one of your own soldiers? 1,000? 10,000? 1,000,000? More? I find any such answers to be monstrous, and we should never sink to such callous disregard for human life. Even if more of our own soldiers will be killed, we must be humanitarians in warfare. That is what makes Western nations so great.
Also, it was not just inhabitants of those cities that suffered. The children and descendants of those people suffered from cancer and radiation. Is it right to punish people WHO HAVE NOT YET BEEN BORN, to save the lives of American soldiers?
And come on, Hitler?! Hitler-comparisons are so over used. The man was much more than a war criminal and we all know it. And no, by neither Jon Stewart’s standards nor anyone else’s, should every war criminal be on par with each other. I doubt that is his opinion, for starters. And secondly, you cannot put them all on par because a war crime is not just a war crime. Nothing is that clear-cut and simple. What about motivations, moral standards and so forth? I still think Truman was a war criminal, but you cannot perfectly equate any war criminal with any other.
Wonderfully researched and written. Great work, Bill!
Jun 10, 2009 - 9:20 pm 29. Horace Wells:When the west first went to war against the Nazis and Bushido heads, we condemned them for mass aerial bombing of cities and unrestricted submarine warfare against non naval ships.
Jun 13, 2009 - 10:30 pm 30. Jane:Funny, but by the end of the war, we were the best at both. Is this moral relativism or not?
This was the most amazing thing I have seen in a while. I watched it several weeks ago – five times. Thank you so much. You are extremely articulate and well informed. I wish this could be shown in High schools across the country. I am so glad to be able to tell you on your blog how much I enjoyed and cheered you for doing this. I hope it was viewed by many.
Take care.
Jun 18, 2009 - 2:28 pm 31. Rich Rostrom:Coming in very late with four points.
1) Hiroshima held the HQ of II Area Army, which commanded the defenses of southern Japan (and for some reason Hokkaido). I’ve heard estimates that about _half_ of the people in Hiroshima were military personnel.
2) The largest nuclear bomb ever built was the Soviet “Tsar Bomba”, which was about 45 MT (3,000 times the Hiroshima bomb). The largest bombs in operational service were about 20 MT. The vast majority of large H-bombs were on the order of 1-2 MT – about 100 times bigger than the Hiroshima bomb, not “thousands of times more powerful.”
3) The Japanese hardliners had plans (and were about to issue orders) for the massacre of all Allied prisoners, including civilians. There were several hundred thousand such prisoners.
4) By summer 1945, public health measures were collapsing in Japan. Typhus, cholera, and typhoid had appeared in places, and epidemics were imminent. It is probable that millions of Japanese would have died.
5) The Japanese hardliners did not see the Soviet declaration of war as a reason for surrender. They had deluded themselves that the U.S. would agree to preserve Imperial Japan as a military counterweight to the USSR. Then the Soviet army erupted into Manchuria and Korea, conquering large areas. The hardliners now claimed that with the USSR showing such power, the U.S. would _have_ to deal with Japan!
Jul 1, 2009 - 3:41 pm 32. Rich Rostrom:Please correct “four” to “five” in the preceding comment.
I really don’t want to imitate the Spanish Inquisition.
Jul 1, 2009 - 3:43 pm 33. Windy Wilson:Excellent essay, another one out of the park!
Lissa, in your defense as a pedantic, fat-headed sophomore (Latin or Greek for wise fool, I forget which), most of this information was not widely known when you were 15 years old. Residual security classifications and that odd, sanitized version of the war prevented this from being widely known.
Shortly after making an ass of himself, Jon Stewart apologized. How shortly after? A day? A commercial break? The length of time it took for David Letterman to make his anaemic “apology”?
Jul 5, 2009 - 6:26 pm 34. Geneva Conference (1954) » Blog Archive » Second Sino-Japanese War:[...] Eject Eject Eject » THE TRUTH ABOUT THE ATOMIC BOMBS (PRINT VERSION) [...]
Jul 8, 2009 - 9:11 am 35. PFN:Thank you, sir. Perfectly stated and informative. And sadly, none of this is being taught in history classes (not even mine which were 20 years ago!)
Jul 8, 2009 - 8:07 pm 36. Matt Woods:My uncle, John L. Woods, who has since deceased would have been one of those 19 year olds to land on Japan’s shores. I thank God for the men who carried out the atomic bombings. Their courage lead to my uncle’s career of 40+ years of teaching and scouting. Hundreds of young people crossed my uncle’s path and are better for it!!
Not all of generation X has forgotten or refused to learn our proud, noble American history.
Aug 20, 2009 - 12:09 pm