Hiroshima Denial

Posted on August 6, 2003 in War

From the errors of the past we shall learn the future….

Motto of the USS Hiroshima

Scott of Gamer’s Nook blushingly defends the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki thusly:

….was the use of the bomb justified? I believe so.


Without the bomb, Operation Olympic, the invasion of Japan which was scheduled for 1946, would have resulted in upwards of a million U.S. casualties as we waded ashore on the home islands. Women and children in Japan were being trained to use sharpened stakes as weapons for suicide charges. Basically, the leaders of Japan wanted to make the cost utterly horrifying to us.


It would have been.

Mind you that this is someone who has regularly swerved from the anti-war to the pro-war camp and back again, apologizing every time he jerks from the ways of peace but never stopping himself from doing so. But let’s stick to the logic here and apply skepticism to Scott’s contention.

Not long ago, a child psychiatrist writing in Skeptical Enquirer addressed the argument made by many a survivor of child abuse in defense of perpetuating severe physical and emotional “discipline”. “Ah, gee,” the defender says. “My pa’ kicked me in the butt all the time and I turned out all right.”

The problem with making such an assertion is simple and obvious. To what are we comparing history? Conjectures about “what might have been”. Ask an apologist for the dropping of the bomb if things might have been better in the Middle East and he would say “No, worse.” Would they have been better in South and Central America? “No, worse.” What about Southeast Asia? “No, worse.” Go on down the list, add the Falklands if you like, and the apologist will insist that things would have been worse.

So why not reverse things and insist that it would have been better? Why not insist that not having dropped the bomb would have meant that we had world federalism, no nuclear weapons, resources dedicated to the AIDS epidemic, solar energy, national health care, etc.? For the same reason: it’s just conjecture.

So what do we examine when we determine the morality of dropping the bomb on Japanese civilians in two cities which had not been previously targeted? I suggest we use statistics and facts about what actually did happen. At the minimum, 64,000 people died from the effects of the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima. The U.S. Government sets the official figure at 78,000. Japanese sources say 200,000. Some count as many as 240,000 or more. Unlike the conjecture of “upwards of a million” that Scott lays out for an invasion that never happened, all of these figures have some grounding in reality, as does this picture:

Why can’t we say we’re sorry to this girl? (Aside from the fact that she is dead.) That’s Hiroshima, my love.

One thing that I can say for Holocaust revisionists is this: by denying that Hitler ever did anything so horrible as the extermination of 8 million people in the concentration camps, they are agreeing with the general consensus that this is a horrible thing. What we have in the case of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where hundreds of thousands of people were instantaneously cremated in the first and only use of nuclear weapons, is akin to those Nazis who said that the extermination of the Jews was a good thing for Germany.

To ignore the Count of the dead in either case (and we’re not at all touching on the use of incindiaries against German and Japanese civilian populations when we speak of what the Allies wreaked) is to join the ranks of those who deny atrocity. To celebrate it as utterly necessary is to pave the way for future atrocities including the use of nuclear weapons. Scott is in effect saying that if numbers showing that we will save more by using nuclear weapons against a few, he’ll go along. It’s a weak patriotism indeed that cannot say “We made a big mistake. We failed to investigate other means of ending this war.” It does not serve us to keep refusing to apologize to the people of Hiroshima fifty eight years after the fact, especially in these times when the United States has broken so many other conventions of just war.

To say that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were an unjust use of force against civilian populations is to begin to deconstruct the logic that has propelled the United States into one unjust use of force after another in the years following the Second World War.

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Evan the Clever Sheep published his own thoughts on the matter, with which I have more sympathy than those of Scott. He concludes:

I need to believe that on the night of August 6, 1945, Harry Truman sat alone in his stateroom, returning from the Potsdam Conference, his wife and daughter far away in Independence, Missouri. Removing his glasses, he rubbed his eyes, held his heavy head in his hands and prayed to his God for forgiveness .


I need to believe that a tear fell from his face, landing on the telegram which informed him that, on his order, 70,000 men and women and children breathed no more.


I need to believe that he realized, at that very moment, that he had become the modern Pandora, loosing new ills and fears and horrors which would never again be contained.

To this I replied:

I believe that it’s not too late to say “we erred”.

I believe we can say that Harry S. Truman, with the best of intentions, made a serious mistake.

I believe we can still reject the idea that the use of nuclear weapons was then or is now or ever will be necessary.

I believe in human beings, too.

I’m for attempting to close Pandora’s Box. Anyone with me?