To Bomb or Not To Bomb

(Homework for World History class)

The Paradox Society


On August 6, 1945, the nuclear bomb “Little Boy” was dropped on the city of Hiroshima, killing as many as 140,000 people and leaving many more affected by radiation and lead poisoning. On August 9, only three days later, “Fat Man” was dropped on Nagasaki, killing 80,000 people. In both cities, the majority of the dead were citizens. Japan announced its surrender to the Allies on August 15, officially ending World War II.

Months before, on May 7, Germany had signed the Instrument of Surrender, ending the war in Europe. The Allies had triumphed there, ending Hitler’s mad reign over the people. Everyone had been appalled by the barbarous treatment of the over 6 million Jews and other people who were murdered or tortured by Hitler, something the world had never seen before. Even today, one cringes at the thought of the Nazis tossing people into a furnace or mowing them down with machine guns.

However much we are disgusted by Hitler’s actions, when it comes the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we remain indifferent. It was a necessary evil, we say. But how necessary was it?

President Truman, who signed the executive orders for the attacks, insisted that the decision to deploy the bombs was his and so was, therefore, the responsibility of those deaths. To justify the atom bombs, Truman figuratively pointed a finger at Pearl Harbor and said “Nobody is more disturbed over the use of Atomic bombs than I am but I was greatly disturbed over the unwarranted attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor and their murder of our prisoners of war. The only language they seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them.” Despite the harsh brutality of the Japanese army, it’s hard to justify the deaths of thousands of men, women, and children.

The rationale of the bombings then came to rest on the idea that by bombing the Japanese in this way, we would save half a million American lives or more. These lives would have been lost, the government said, in the planned invasion of Kyushu and then in the invasion of Honshu the following year. However, it was calculated that the most lives lost in such a case would have been about 46 thousand Americans.

Truman’s own chief of staff Admiral Leahy said, “the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. . . . My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make wars in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.” High military officers such as Eisenhower and MacArthur condemned the bombing as barbaric.
Gertrude Ascombe, a prominent Roman Catholic and British analytic philosopher, frequently criticized Truman, condemning him as a mass murderer and a war criminal. In 1956, she protested against Oxford, where she had graduated, giving Truman an honorary degree, saying “for what is the difference between the U.S. government massacring civilians from the air, as at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Nazis wiping out the inhabitants of some Czech or Polish village?”

Following her train of thought, what if our military and government leaders had approved dropping an atom bomb on a German city, believing that it would weaken the Nazis so much that they would be lead to surrender? It would have certainly ended the war, but would it have justified the killing of thousands of innocent women and children? Would we have looked at it differently than we did at the atomic bombings?

Truman did not exhaust the possibilities of ending the war in another way. Instead, he opted for the most powerful and jolting manner in which to stop the Japanese. However, as Major General Fuller, a military historian, said, “Though to save life is laudable, it in no way justifies the employment of means which run counter to every precept of humanity and the customs of war. Should it do so, then, on the pretext of shortening a war and of saving lives, every imaginable atrocity can be justified.” For what other reason then would laws and ethics of warfare have been created if not to stop heinous acts of barbarism such as the atomic bombs?

Leo Szilard, a world-renowned physicist, stated in 1960 that “If the Germans had dropped atomic bombs on cities instead of us, we would have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them.” If we look at this event without attaching names or nationalities, it’s impossible to see the bombings as justifiable. A nation drops two atomic bombs on cities in another nation, killing thousands and thousands of innocent people, men, women, and children, for the purpose of ending a war. Who then is the greater criminal?