Hiroshima Day 2003 – 2

Posted on August 5, 2003 in War

The philosophy of “everything’s for the best in this best of all possible worlds” didn’t die with the writing of Voltaire’s Candide, unfortunately. Can’t we ever look back at our history of warfare and say we made a mistake, that we overreached, that we did too much to win? (The only war we seem to regret is Vietnam and only because we “lost” it.)

Jeremy at Frog-N-Blog is upset (understandably) about the justifications given by echelons of the wishy washy middle regarding the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He dismisses the “armed rapist” argument given to justify the dropping of the bomb, whose primary purpose in the end was to prevent the death of an untold number of American troops when they invaded Japan.

What apologists for the dropping of the A-Bombs don’t like to mention are a couple of confounding factors:

• Those who developed the bomb proposed a pre-attack demonstration of its power off the coast of Japan. An island would be chosen and the bomb dropped. Flyers would appear over Japanese cities, inviting the government to explore the island and see what the Bomb could do. It was rejected largely because it would have removed “the element of surprise”. The U.S. only had a limited number of bombs and they weren’t about to waste one in a demonstration. From the Just War perspective, the Japanese were never given the chance to think if they wanted this horror dropped on one of their cities. The Americans had a third bomb waiting in the wings, ready to drop. They only needed two bombs. With this tactic, they might have needed only one.
  
• Japan had been probing diplomatic channels to relay the message that they were ready to end the war. They went to Stalin, our ally. Stalin wanted a piece of the East and rejected the overture. The word that they were ready to negotiate never got to Washington.

Here’s a final horror: the last survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will be dead inside of ten years. These people who were living on the fringes of the cities at the time suffered the ill effects of the bombs for years. When they die, there will be no more eyewitnesses to scream in rage when a madman, perhaps a Bush, moves to use the Bomb to promote his Pox Americana.

The Wishy Washy Middle will be all too glad to go along, as they always do, regardless of the horror.

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Some photos of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors. Not for the squeamish.

Black Rain is a good book about one family’s experience surviving the atomic bomb blast.

Hiroshima by John Hersey is a classic that you should have read in high school.