The Moral Case for the Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

My dear brother Dominic,

I apologize for the belated nature of this kept promise. I promised you long ago that I would explain to you how the atomic bombings that have continued controversial after over 65 years, in a way that the bombings of Hamburg, Dresden and even Tokyo have not. The case can be made -- in fact my late father and I discussed the idea thoroughly years ago. I propose to tell you what we concluded then, as I have read or heard no arguments that have caused me to question the conclusions we reached in our discussions.

What awakened my slumbering interest in the subject was reading a remarkable book I received as a present from my sister Rosemary. The book is A Song for Nagasaki, by a Marist Priest named Paul Glynn. The book tells the story of a remarkable man named Takashi Nagai, a pioneer in radiology and a convert to Catholicism. Reading this book reminded me again how terrible and tragic war is, and of course a world war is the worst of all. Reading its description of the horrible wounds, deaths both instant and agonizing, and the horrible devastation caused by the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, one is tempted to conclude that such a weapon and its use in such a way must surely be indefensible.

Actually, its use can be defended, although not briefly. I'll try my best to avoid writing you a book.

It is well known that war, like other disasters, brings out the best in some and the worst in others. In a man like Nagai we see the best produced. In a man like Joachim Pieper (the Waffen SS commander who ordered the Malmedy Massacre), we see some of the worst that sane human beings are capable of.

In a man like American President Harry S Truman, we see a man suddenly thrust into a situation where a brutal war nearly six years old had to be ended as quickly and bloodlessly as possible despite the fact that the losing side refused to recognize that their defeat was inevitable.

The war in Europe had already ended with the surrender of Nazi Germany on May 8, 1945, although the most enormous clean-up project in the history of the world was just beginning. Worldwide the cataclysm had already claimed over 50 million lives. With the fall of the Nazis, Imperial Japan was left essentially alone in a war against the United States, the British, the Free French, and literally dozens of smaller nations. The Japanese Navy and Japanese Naval aviation had almost literally ceased to exist. The Japanese Merchant Marine was at the bottom of the waters around the country. The remaining Japanese forces were badly over-extended, trying to hold on to too much conquered territory with too few troops. Many of the garrisons were starving, as the Japanese Navy could not supply them in their far-flung island garrisons. Any sane person would have seen in an instant that it was time to make peace before total annihilation engulfed the Japanese nation.

Tragically, sane leaders were not leading Imperial Japan in mid-1945.

The Allies had every reason to conclude that the Japanese leaders were not rational. The fanatical resistance to the liberation of the Philippines would last from October of 1944 until September 2, 1945, the same day that the Japanese formally surrendered to the Allied Powers on the deck of the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. This bitter, savage, hopeless struggle would cost the Japanese roughly 300,000 casualties -- and the Americans 60,628. (Casualty figures taken from http://www.ualberta.ca).

The infamous battle of Iwo Jima (February 19, 1945 to March 14) would prove another example of irrationally fanatical defense. For eight square miles of desolate volcanic rock, the Japanese spent 21,000 soldiers, with only 1,000 surrendering. This proportion of killed to surrendered is another indication of the berserker nature of Japanese fighting in the Pacific Theater of the war. The battle cost the Americans 7,000 lives (25,000 total casualties). This is about 875 dead soldiers, sailors, and marines per square mile. If the American military and civilian population (government and civilians) were getting rather bitter at this point it is scarcely surprising. (Casualty figures from the World War II database at http://ww2db.com.)

The Battle of Okinawa (1 Apr 1945 - 21 Jun 1945) would prove far bloodier even than the battle for "the Rock" had been, with over 12,513 acknowledged American lives lost (many of the 60,000 wounded would not survive their wounds). The Japanese lost a horrifying 107,000 men, and that estimate is surely low, as dead soldiers sealed in caves cannot easily be counted. (Casualty figures from the World War Two Database and wiki.answers.com.) Making the battle even more nightmarish was that 42,000 Japanese residents of Okinawa were also killed, many by suicide before American soldiers could reach them. It should be remembered that many of these casualties occurred despite the fact that the Japanese had lost their only remaining powerful ally halfway through the battle.

Clearly, Japan's cause was hopeless. Just as clearly, Japan could not or would not recognize this.

All of this meant a grim dilemma for the new American President, Harry Truman.

Having become President upon the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt on April 12, 1945, Truman had had very little preparation for the role he so suddenly had been thrust into -- that of the man who must make a decision that might save thousands if not millions of lives in a war already the costliest in history. The fighting in Europe was nearly over, with the Nazis and their few remaining allies reeling toward final defeat. What fanatical existence that had remained died with Adolf Hitler, who shot himself on April 30th. The Pacific Theater was far different.

The Japanese still held large conquered territories in Asia and on many Pacific islands, and though it is often forgotten today, the Knights of Bushido had been brutal, scarlet-handed occupiers. Early in the war, in the Chinese city of Nanking, the Japanese Army "celebrated" their storming of the city by engaging in a six-week rape-and-murder festival, killing between 50,000 and 300,000 Chinese civilians in an orgy so atrocious that the appalled Nazis offered to mediate a truce.

“The Rape of Nanking” was just the worst in a series of appalling war crimes committed by the Japanese throughout the war. The Bataan Death March is well known. The history of Japanese war crimes makes for stomach-turning reading. Torture, rape, murders mass and individual, fiendish medical experiments ... the Nazis had nothing on their Eastern allies when it came to hot-and-cold blooded brutality.

Japanese brutality complicated the task of liberating occupied peoples. During the liberation of the Philippines, Japanese troops had ruthlessly and seemingly senselessly massacred thousands of civilians, many apparently just because they came within Japanese sight. President Truman and his war leaders had to consider when calculating the cost of forcing the Japanese out of their conquered territories not only the blood and treasure (wars are expensive in treasure as well as in blood) that the military forces of the Allies would lose, but also the likelihood that the Japanese would murder countless civilians during their hopeless but brutal and bloody struggle to hold the lands and resources they had taken.

Another factor that the President had to consider was war-weariness in all of the Allied countries. This war had already dragged on almost or over 6 years (depending on when you start counting.) Over 50 million were dead (the two main Allied combatant nations in the Pacific Theater, Great Britain and the United States, had lost over 850,000 lives, military and civilian), incredible losses in actual property and potential wealth had caused starvation and poverty in nation after nation, and an invasion of Japan itself might be more than anyone could ever recover from. Although it did not seem to bother them, the Japanese would risk being permanent pariahs, never to be treated as civilized human beings ever again. The military minds had calculated that an invasion, although sure to be ultimately successful by the mad calculus of war, could cost between 500,000 and 1,000,000 total Allied casualties, with perhaps 200,000 dead. The Japanese would lose millions of soldiers and civilians.

The scars already inflicted by this most dreadful of all wars would already certainly take decades to heal. A bloodbath of the scale projected would perhaps rip open wounds that could never heal.

In his post-war writings, Admiral Dan Gallery suggested that the Allies could have simply surrounded and blockaded the Japanese home islands with submarines and surface ships, and waited for the Japanese, who could not long survive cut off from foreign trade, particularly in foodstuffs, to give in. When I was young, I thought Gallery was right. Today, I recoil in horror from the prospect.

The problem, once again, is that irrational leaders were at this most critical time leading Japan. No one who has ever done even casual research into the wartime leadership of Imperial Japan can honestly doubt that the leaders of the state would have fought until the last Japanese peasant starved gruesomely. Crazy leaders are the worst kind, and crazy leaders with absolute power are every people's nightmare. Living in Japan in the summer of 1945 was a never-ending nightmare. A blockade of food and fuel, while safer in the main for the Allied militaries, would have killed as many as the forced famine in the Ukraine had in the early 1930s (including millions of women and children), and would have been nearly as unjustifiable.

President Truman, a military veteran himself (he had been a first-rate artillery captain in World War I), understood many things about serving in a war that many people never think about. One of them is that just being in the service kills some soldiers. Accidents happen, and diseases happen, too, especially in the unhealthy tropical climates of the Pacific islands and in Southeast Asia, India, and Burma. He also understood what it did to a soldier to be away from his home, his family, and his civilian life. (I say soldier for simplicity's sake, but separation is just as hard on nurses and other non-combat personnel.) Truman was determined to get the people who were saving our country and the world back to their homes as quickly as possible.

Another fact that such men as Truman and his predecessor Ulysses S. Grant had understood is that keeping large forces in the field is fearfully expensive. It is an amusing fact that one reason Ulysses Grant did not stay at Appomattox Court House for the formal surrender of General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia was that Grant was commander-in-chief of the United States Army, the war was costing an immense amount of money every day, and it was time to get back to his office and start cutting expenses.

Another factor that Truman could not help but consider was that the Japanese still held large numbers of prisoners of war. A prolonged, civilization-destroying battle in Japan itself might cause the Japanese to massacre the prisoners rather than allow them to be liberated by their fellows. In fact, it had been ordered by the Japanese high command that all prisoners were to be killed as soon as the first Allied soldier set his boot on Japanese soil. Truman did not know this, but at this late hour of the war it was not difficult to predict.

The Japanese government (meaning mainly the military leadership, still largely in command) was preparing a horrifying defensive plan. It would involve thousands more of the dreaded Kamikaze, the suicide planes that had taken so many lives already. It would involve suicide weapons, including manned torpedoes and frogmen who would carry explosives to Allied landing craft, detonating them manually. Appallingly, it would even involve women and children attacking Allied soldiers with bamboo spears and knives. All of these would be combined with the tactics that the Japanese had been using throughout much of the war -- the apparently surrendering soldier followed by another with a grenade, which he would detonate when the Allied soldiers approached to accept the "surrender", the midnight throat slitting attacks by Japanese soldiers who had hidden in underground tunnels by day, and other "dirty" tactics. (One of the reasons so few Japanese were taken prisoner was that after a few such tricks, the Allies reasonably concluded that taking prisoners was too risky.)

So, driving the Japanese from every possession would take months if not years, and would be expensive in blood and treasure as well. A blockade of the Japanese islands would leave large populations in occupied countries in continuing danger from their occupiers, and would also cause perhaps the most gruesome man-caused famine in world history, while serving their countries in unhealthy climes would continue to cause death and suffering to soldiers who had already seen too much of it. Invading the mainland would initiate an unprecedented carnival of blood and death from which mankind and civilization might never recover, and would also cost the lives of every prisoner of war who had managed to survive captivity by the brutal Japanese prisoner-abuse system, which featured starvation, torture, forced labor, and executions, often by decapitation. It seemed that Truman might have no way of ending the war that did not involve oceans of blood and dehumanizing brutality.

As history records, however, Truman had one ace up his sleeve.

An immense wartime effort had turned the theoretical possibility of an atomic weapon into a physical reality. The American effort had been triggered by a letter from the great physicist Albert Einstein (a refugee from Nazi oppression of Jews -- showing just how expensive bigotry can be) to American President Franklin Roosevelt, telling him of the possibility of a bomb and warning him that the Nazis would almost certainly try for the bomb whether the Americans did or not. Roosevelt heeded the warning, and the Manhattan Project was born. After years of effort, the first nuclear weapon was tested on July 16,1945, ironically too late to use against its original intended target, Germany, who had already surrendered over two months before the test. Perhaps the shock of this new and amazingly powerful weapon could persuade the Japanese to surrender when "mere" conventional weapons had failed.

We must remember that the firebombing of Tokyo on March 10, 1945 is believed to have killed at least 100,000 people, and the Japanese stubbornly continued their hopeless struggle. At this point, the Allied leaders must have concluded that only the threat of complete annihilation (or perhaps, horribly, actual total annihilation) could end Japanese resistance.

Once the atomic bomb had been added to the American arsenal, it opened up options that might render the other shocking options unnecessary. It was proposed that an atomic bomb be dropped, with prior warning given, on an unpopulated area, so that the Japanese might see what awaited them if they fought on. This idea was rejected both because the Americans in fact only had two bombs available, and thus would lose half of their supply on a demonstration, and also because in those days before the Internet, the Japanese might have been able to deceive their population as to what that terrifying flash and roar had actually been.

The Allies did warn the Japanese government that unless they surrendered, a new and devastatingly destructive weapon would be used against them. The Japanese refused the ultimatum. Alone, defiant, they prepared to face the unknown peril.

And the bombs dropped.

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and August 9 of 1945 killed over 100,000 people immediately and many thousands more later. (It should be remembered that at that time the dangers of radiation sickness were little understood, and the dangers of nuclear fallout not even anticipated. It is sadly ironic that Dr. Nagai would die not of the atomic bombing, but from the radiation he absorbed in his work in radiology research, which caused the leukemia which would kill him.) Even then it took the tradition-defying personal intervention of Emperor Hirohito to accomplish a Japanese surrender. (Number cited above from AtomCentral.com, the Atomic Bomb Website.)

The fact that the bombings were successful in their goal of forcing the Japanese to give up is indisputable. I believe that they also were correct morally.

The first fact to remember is that a person killed by a block-buster bomb in Hamburg or an incendiary in Tokyo was just as dead as a person killed by a nuclear blast in Hiroshima or Nagasaki. The atomic bomb is not inherently more evil than any other type of bomb, or indeed any other type of weapon. If radiation is the difference between the evil atomic bomb and the less-evil high-explosive bomb, then should we try to replace the use of radiation for medical purposes with some sort of treatment with high explosives? You may have some research, development, and testing troubles with that idea. Good luck getting test subjects, too.

The second factor to remember is that actions and their morality can only be judged by the circumstances in place when the actions were taken. Shooting another human being may be wrong in the abstract, but I would see the shooting of another human being who is about to kill my mother in a rather different light. In that circumstance, I would see the shooting of that person as a moral imperative. Likewise, dropping a bomb (of any sort) on a Japanese city during peacetime would be a shocking crime against humanity. In August of 1945, given the mad circumstances of the time, it was a better moral option than the others available.

Both of the other options available to President Harry Truman in the summer of 1945 would have taken many months and cost millions of lives. The atomic bombings cost 102,000 or thereabouts, ended the war, and sent all of those soldiers home to their families and friends. As a melancholy bonus, it also got the Japanese an earlier start on rebuilding their country as a successful democratic state. History tells us that their efforts succeeded.

The morality of all actions taken must be measured against the morality of all other reasonable options available. Given the situation he inherited and the choices available, and in the cold light of rational analysis, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the best and most moral option that Harry Truman could choose.

I praise his courage and logic in taking it.