Issues & Insights
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Our Use Of Nuclear Weapons 76 Years Ago Was A Moral And Strategic Imperative

 

Americans are no strangers to times that “try men’s souls,” to borrow a phrase from Thomas Paine. By mid-1945, we had been at war for three-and-a-half years, enduring the draft, mounting numbers of casualties, and rationing, with no end in sight. Many Americans were weary, not unlike our feelings now, after a year-and-a-half a year of privations and anguish related to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

That sense of anxiety got me thinking about how WWII was suddenly – and to many, unexpectedly – resolved. Today marks one of the United States’ most important anniversaries, memorable not only for what happened on this date in 1945 but for what did not happen.

What did happen was that the Enola Gay, an American B-29 Superfortress bomber, dropped Little Boy, a uranium-based atomic bomb, on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. That historic act hastened the end of World War II, which concluded within a week, after the Aug. 9 detonation of Fat Man, a plutonium-based bomb, over Nagasaki. These were the only two nuclear weapons ever used in warfare.

I have two peripheral connections to those events. The first is that when Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima, my father, a sergeant in the U.S. Army infantry who had fought in the Italian campaigns of WWII, was on a troopship, expecting to be deployed to the Pacific theater of operations. Neither he nor his fellow soldiers relished the prospect of participating in the impending invasion of the Japanese main islands. When the Japanese surrendered (on Aug. 14), the ship headed, instead, for Virginia, where the division was disbanded. (I was born two years later.)

My second connection was that during the 1960s, three of my M.I.T. physics professors had participated several decades earlier in the Manhattan Project, the military research program which developed the atomic bombs during the war. In class, one of these professors recalled that, after the first test explosion (code-named Trinity), he was assigned to drive Maj. Gen. Leslie Groves, the director of the project, to view the result. They arrived to find a crater 1,000 feet in diameter, and six feet deep, with the desert sand inside turned into glass by the intense heat. Groves’ response? “Is that all?”

Approximately 66,000 are thought to have died in Hiroshima from the acute effects of the Little Boy bomb, and about 39,000 in Nagasaki from the Fat Man device. In addition, there was a significant subsequent death toll due to the effects of radiation and wounds.

Shortly thereafter, the questions began: “Was it really necessary?” The Monday-morning quarterbacks started to question the morality and military necessity of using nuclear weapons on Japanese cities. Even nuclear physicist Leo Szilard, who, in 1939, had written the letter for Albert Einstein‘s signature that resulted in the formation of the Manhattan Project, characterized the use of the bombs as “one of the greatest blunders of history.” Since then, there have been similar periodic eruptions of revisionism, uninformed speculation, and political correctness.   

The historical context and military realities of 1945 are often forgotten when judging whether it was “necessary” for the United States to use nuclear weapons. The Japanese had been the aggressors, launching the war with a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, and systematically and flagrantly violating various international agreements and norms by employing biological and chemical warfare, the torture and murder of prisoners of war, and the brutalization of civilians, including forcing them into prostitution and slave labor.

Leaving aside whether our enemy “deserved” to be attacked with the most fearsome weapons ever employed, skeptics are also quick to overlook the “humanitarian” and strategic aspects of the decision to use them.

Operation Downfall Meets A Fork In The Road 

As a result of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, what did not need to happen was “Operation Downfall” – the massive Allied (largely American) invasion of the Japanese home islands that was being actively planned. As Allied forces closed in on the main islands, the strategies of Japan’s senior military leaders ranged from “fighting to the last man” to inflicting  heavy enough losses on invading American ground forces that the United States would be forced to agree to a conditional peace. Operation Downfall was designed, in large part, because U.S. strategists knew (from having broken the Japanese military and diplomatic codes) that there was virtually no inclination on the part of the Japanese to surrender unconditionally.

Lastly, because the Allied military planners assumed that “operations in this area will be opposed not only by the available organized military forces of the Empire [of Japan], but also by a fanatically hostile population,” astronomical casualties were thought to be inevitable. The losses between February and June 1945, just from the Allied invasions of the Japanese-held islands of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, were staggering: 18,000 dead and 78,000 wounded. That harrowing experience was accounted for while planning for the final invasion.  

As I discussed this retrospective with him, a retired Marine four-star general recently told me this: “[F]ollowing Okinawa and Iwo Jima, all six Marine divisions were being refitted for the attack on the home islands. None of the divisions had post-assault missions, because the casualty estimates were so high that they would initially be combat inoperable until they were again remanned and refitted. Basically, the Marines were to land six divisions abreast on Honshu, then the Army would pass through for the big fight on the plains inland.” (Note: a division has approximately 23,000 Marines.)

He went on: “What made this different was unlike the Pacific campaign to date, other than Guadalcanal back in 1942, this would be the first time the Japanese could reinforce their units. After Guadalcanal, in the fights across the ocean, the U.S. Navy isolated the objectives so the Japanese could not reinforce. The home islands would be a different sort of fight, hence the anticipated heavy casualties.”

A study performed by physicist (and future Nobel Laureate) William Shockley for the War Department in 1945 estimated that the invasion of Japan would have cost 1.7-4 million American casualties, including 400,000-800,000 fatalities, and five to 10 million Japanese deaths. These fatality estimates were, of course, in addition to the members of the military who had already perished during almost four long years of war; American deaths were already about 292,000. The implications of those numbers are staggering: The invasion of Japan could have resulted in the death of more than twice as many Americans as had already been killed in the European and Pacific theaters of WWII up to that time!

The legacy of Little Boy and Big Man was in reshaping the course of history; a swift end to the war rendered Operation Downfall unnecessary.

Mounting Casualties, Both Non-Military And Military Alike

Over the past half-century, much has been made of the moral boundary that was breached by the use of nuclear weapons, but many military historians regard as far more significant the decisions earlier in the war to adopt widespread urban bombing of civilians. This threshold was initially transgressed by Hitler, who attacked English cities in 1940 and 1941; the practice was later adopted by the Allied forces, resulting in the devastation of major cities such as Dresden, Hamburg, and Tokyo. 

Previously, the bombing had been focused primarily on military objectives, such as airfields, munitions factories, and oil fields; or on critical transportation links, such as train stations and tracks, bridges, and highways. Never before, on such a scale, had non-military targets been targeted in order to degrade the morale of the populace. In one instance, over 100,000 were killed in a single night of firebombing of Tokyo, March 9-10, 1945 (many bodies were incinerated and never recovered); more than 22,000 died, in Dresden, February 13-15, 1945, and about 20,000 in Hamburg, July 1943.

In an email to me, my former colleague historian Victor Davis Hanson called attention to two factors that made the case for the use of America’s nuclear weapons. First, “thousands of Asians and allied prisoners were dying daily throughout the still-occupied Japanese Empire, and would do so as long as Japan was able to pursue the war.” Second, “Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay [who was in charge of all strategic air operations against the Japanese home islands] planned to move forces from the Marianas to newly conquered and much closer Okinawa, and the B-29 bombers, likely augmented by European bomber transfers after V-E Day, would have created a gargantuan fire-bombing air force that, with short-distance missions, would have done far more damage than the two nuclear bombs.”

In fact, the most destructive bombing raid of the war, and in the history of warfare, was the nighttime fire-bombing of Tokyo on March 9-10, 1945. In a three-hour period, the main bombing force dropped 1,665 tons of incendiary bombs, which caused a firestorm that not only killed some 100,000 civilians, but also destroyed a quarter of a million buildings and incinerated 16 square miles of the city. Tokyo was not the only target: By the end of the war, incendiaries dropped by LeMay’s bombers had totally or partially consumed 63 Japanese cities, killing half a million people and leaving 8 million homeless.

As President Harry Truman found in deciding whether to use Little Boy and Fat Man, sometimes you need to choose the least bad of the alternatives.

The WWII casualty statistics are numbing, and bring to mind a saying often attributed to Joseph Stalin: a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. We should not forget that many of the dead were non-combatant innocents. Equally as staggering are the numbers lost in active combat.

During World War I, Europe lost most of an entire generation of young men; combatant fatalities alone were approximately 13 million. Memories of that calamity were still fresh three decades later. In 1945, as they deliberated, Allied military planners and political leaders were correct, both strategically and morally, in not wanting to repeat that history. (And Truman, who had succeeded Franklin D. Roosevelt upon the latter’s death only four months earlier, would not have wanted his legacy to include causing the unnecessary death of hundreds of thousands of American servicemen.) It was their duty to weigh carefully the costs and benefits for the American people, present and future. Had they been less wise or courageous, my generation of post-war baby boomers would have been much smaller.

These kinds of decisions are truly the stuff of history, writ large, but governments perform such balancing acts all the time. We are seeing that today in the creation of policies to manage the COVID-19 pandemic. How, for example, do we balance the very real, and high, costs of lockdowns – businesses obliterated, livelihoods lost, children deprived of education and social stimuli – against increasing numbers of deaths, the persistent, debilitating, post-”recovery” effects of infections, and other spinoff impacts on health from COVID-19 infections, if reopening occurs too rapidly?

As Truman found in deciding whether to use Little Boy and Fat Man, sometimes you need to choose the least bad of the alternatives. To decide which of them will turn out to be best in the long term, you need to value data over ideology, politics, or vox populi. 

I pity the decision-makers.

Note: An earlier version of this appeared in Human Events.

Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, was a research associate at the National Institutes of Health and the founding director of the FDA’s Office of Biotechnology. You can find him online or on Twitter at @henryimiller, and read more of his writing at henrymillermd.org.

We Could Use Your Help

Issues & Insights was founded by seasoned journalists of the IBD Editorials page. Our mission is to provide timely, fact-based reporting and deeply informed analysis on the news of the day -- without fear or favor.

We’re doing this on a voluntary basis because we believe in a free press, and because we aren't afraid to tell the truth, even if it means being targeted by the left. Revenue from ads on the site help, but your support will truly make a difference in keeping our mission going. If you like what you see, feel free to visit our Donations Page by clicking here. And be sure to tell your friends!

You can also subscribe to I&I: It's free!

Just enter your email address below to get started.

Share

14 comments

  • Two additional points to make:

    1. Don’t forget the Russians. Russia belatedly declared war on Japan on 8 August 1945 (after the Hiroshima bombing). This was aimed less at helping end the war but more as a post-war territorial grab. Had Japan not sued for peace shortly after the Nagasaki bomb on 9 August, the Russians would have invaded and Japan would have no doubt been carved up like Germany was into Communist and Free zones, exactly as happened in Korea. In fact, This was recognized by many in Japan, and resulted in General Curtis LeMay being awarded Japan’s highest military honor in 1964.

    2. The advent of nuclear weapons, despite its potential for catastrophe, has in fact resulted in the lowest rate of worldwide death due to war in the last 500 years. See https://www.vox.com/2015/6/23/8832311/war-casualties-600-years .

  • My late father was a Veteran of Normandy. After V-E Day he was in Reims, France awaiting orders for Operation Downfall, the Allied invasion of Japan. Having spent two years in Japan, which is most mountainous and forested, it would have been a slaughter on both sides given how fanatical the Inperial Japanese were. In addition, 22,000 people were dying every month in Japanese POW and internment camps throughout the Pacific.

    Like Mr. Miller, I too may never have been born had the Bombs not been dropped. And despite the armchair-quarterback whining of Western liberals, far more lives would have been lost in a ground invasion of Japan. I’m no Dr. Strangelove, but I see the historical necessity of those bombings and never question them.

    • Long after the war, my wife got to know Gen. Omar Bradley, who commanded the U.S. First Army on D-Day, which presumably included your father. Whenever she gets frazzled working on a project and complains about things not going well, I quote this: “On June 6, 1944, Bradley is on the cruiser USS Augusta and observes the landing on the beaches of Utah Beach and Omaha Beach. The situation on Omaha is so disastrous that he even thinks to interrupt the landing on this beach, re-embark the American troops and redirect them to Gold Beach. But the boats are not sufficient to allow such an operation. Thus he continues the operation which results in a semi-successful, the American losses being extremely high.”

  • Of course, dropping the nukes on Japan was the right thing to do. It saved Japanese lives and more importantly it saved American lives. It is hard to understand why we are still talking about this.

  • It truly was the best of a group of bad choices and it was the right decision. That’s what my generation learned in high school. I wonder how they teach about it in the high schools now?

  • On a related note, the anniversary of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis was a week ago. Only a handful of her survivors remain.

  • Why invade in the first place?

    If the invasion of Japan was projected to be such a blood letting then why invade?

    God bless

    Richard W Comerford

    • You must have missed this in the article: “In an email to me, my former colleague historian Victor Davis Hanson called attention to two factors that made the case for the use of America’s nuclear weapons. First, ‘thousands of Asians and allied prisoners were dying daily throughout the still-occupied Japanese Empire, and would do so as long as Japan was able to pursue the war.'”

  • Greetings:

    Several evenings back, in trying to avoid the Olympics, I channel surfed into the NHK English-language broadcast. The segment I saw concerned a Hiroshima man who was leading the effort to have survivors transmit their stories (and their all important feelings) to follow-on generations of grannies to staff up the memorial events ad infinitum.

    Apparently, time’s whittling down the original survivors has been recognized as a problem to be addressed.

    And, once again, there was no word from the Nanking, Manila, or Seoul grannies.

    • An interesting anecdote: A businessman who was visiting Hiroshima when the bomb was dropped survived. He then returned to his home . . . in Nagasaki and survived the bombing there too. So, as (probably) the only person in history to have survived two nuclear bombings, was he the luckiest or unluckiest person in the world?

  • Nuking hundreds of thousands civilians saved no one and was simply a cynical live human experiment on a people deemed subhuman by American propaganda.

    Here is a American military newsreel from WWII gloating about the mass murder of civilians.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdJyOBriLTI

    Six of the seven US WWII five star officers concluded that the nuking of hundreds of thousands of civilians was totally unnecessary.

    As Brig. General Carter Clarke stated:

    “… .we Brought them [the Japanese] down to an abject surrender through the accelerated sinking of their merchant marine and hunger alone, and when we did not need to do it, and we knew we didn’t need to do it, and they knew that we knew we didn’t need to do it, we used them as an experiment for two atomic bombs. ”

    As Daniel Ellsberg indicates, Harry Truman delayed the end of WWII to demonstrate nuclear weapons.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuKdRF5r3FI

    Harry S Truman’s decision to mass murder Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s women and children was perhaps not surprising given his bizarre religious delusions and feeble-minded racism. According to Harry Truman:

    “I think one man is just as good as another so long as he’s honest and decent and not a N@@@ER. or a Chinaman… THE LORD made a white man from dust, a N@@@ER from mud, and then threw what was left and it came down a Chinaman. He does hate Chinese and J@ps. So do I….We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world. It may be the fire destruction PROPHESIED in the Euphrates Valley Era, after NOAH and his FABULOUS Ark….This weapon is to be used against Japan….”

    -Harry S Truman

  • It saddens me to see what is more white washing of history and the continual promoting of a totally false narrative.

    It is a well documented fact that the Japanese were prepared to surrender with the only condition being that their emperor not be executed. They offered to surrender many times and were ignored. In the end, after the bombs were tested, I mean dropped, the Emperor was not executed.

    Even more damning, is General Eisenhower and MacArthur and I believe Admiral Nimitz, all personally visited the White House arguing not to drop the bomb.

    Here is an excerpt from an article citing Presidential papers and archival material that totally obliterates most everything in Mr. Miller’s post that claims US leadership had no choice but to drop the bomb.

    “Every year during the first two weeks of August the mass news media and many politicians at the national level trot out the “patriotic” political myth that the dropping of the two atomic bombs on Japan in August of 1945 caused them to surrender, and thereby saved the lives of anywhere from five hundred thousand to 1 million American soldiers, who did not have to invade the islands. Opinion polls over the last fifty years show that American citizens overwhelmingly (between 80 and 90 percent) believe this false history which, of course, makes them feel better about killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians (mostly women and children) and saving American lives to accomplish the ending of the war.”

    I urge everyone to familiarize themselves with the entire, documented piece at the link below.

    BTW, we are producing a film on Charles Lindbergh, who also suffered a disinformation campaign because he was anti-war. The most egregious accusation was that he was an anti-Semite. Advancing that canard they totally ignored that among his best friends, New York’s Guggenheim family, Harry and Daniel, orthodox Jews, defended Lindbergh claiming there was no substance to the charges. Did nothing to prevent the propaganda spreading like a cancer.

    The Hiroshima Myth , by John V. Denson – https://mises.org/library/hiroshima-myth

About Issues & Insights

Issues & Insights is run by the seasoned journalists behind the legendary IBD Editorials page. Our goal is to bring our decades of combined journalism experience to help readers understand the top issues of the day. We’re doing this on a voluntary basis, because we believe the nation needs the kind of cogent, rational, data-driven, fact-based commentary that we can provide. 

We Could Use Your Help

Help us fight for honesty in journalism and against the tyranny of the left. Issues & Insights is published by the editors of what once was Investor's Business Daily's award-winning opinion pages. If you like what you see, leave a donation by clicking on donate button above. You can also set up regular donations if you like. Ad revenue helps, but your support will truly make a difference. (Please note that we are not set up as a charitable organization, so donations aren't tax deductible.) Thank you!
Share
%d