I Can’t Believe People Are Still Writing This Slop
Dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima was the right thing to do
The Atlantic Magazine has an article this month (“Vonnegut and the Bomb,” or alternatively, The Making of Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle) which is basically a retread of many other articles over the years which all say that dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima was a terrible thing to do, bordering on a war crime. The article concentrates on the massive destruction that the bomb caused and implies that the decision to drop it was morally wrong because of this. From the article:
Here’s another shameless lie: The atomic bomb was dropped to save lives. This is an ancillary thing that war does; it inverts language. See, the lives that mattered to scientists at Los Alamos were American. So they chose to focus on the lives they would spare—the GIs who would theoretically die in a conventional invasion—instead of the Japanese citizens who would actually die when the bomb was dropped. This made the morality of their actions easier to justify. In this way, they kept things sweet.
And yet, to quote a survivor, those scientists who invented the atomic bomb—“what did they think would happen if they dropped it?”
Here are some things that happened. Day turned to night. In a flash, the bomb destroyed 60,000 of the 90,000 structures in a 10-mile radius. Of the 2,370 doctors and nurses in Hiroshima, 2,168 were killed or injured too badly to work.
This thinking is typical of this genre of articles. They view the decision to drop the bomb in isolation and only lament the destruction it caused. What these articles all ignore is the larger environment in which the decision was made. A counterfactual easily points out the flaw in their logic. Imagine that the US decided against dropping the bomb. What would have happened? Most of these articles, when they consider this possibility at all, seem to imagine that the Japanese would have surrendered anyway, and that everyone would have lived happily ever after.
But that is not what would have happened. The war would have continued. The Japanese knew they could not win by early 1944. Their plan was to make the cost of a US victory so high that an armistice would be signed allowing the existing Japanese state (and military) to continue much as it had. This is consistent with Japanese tactics on Iwo Jima and on Okinawa in 1945. They fought essentially to the last man. In both places, Japanese military deaths were nearly 100% of their total force. About 20,000 Japanese soldiers died on Iwo Jima and 100,000 Japanese soldiers died on Okinawa. Total US casualties roughly matched the Japanese numbers, though with a much lower percentage killed due to better battlefield rescue and medical treatment. Iwo Jima had no civilian population, but on Okinawa, there were about 150,000 civilians killed during the fighting. There was no indication that Japanese resolve was wavering, either on the part of the government or the population.
A US invasion of the Japanese home islands would have been horrific. The US military had detailed plans drawn up for the invasion (Operation Olympic and Operation Coronet). The plans called for the war to continue through 1946 and into 1947. Projected casualties were about 1,000,000 for the US military, 3,000,000 for the Japanese military (with a very high percentage of the Japanese casualties being deaths), and roughly 10,000,000 Japanese civilian deaths. The plans called for a conventional amphibious invasion of the Japanese home islands. The atomic bomb project was so secret that regular military planners knew nothing of it and couldn’t include it in their plans. One person who did know about the bomb was George Marshall, Chief of Staff of the US Army, and he planned to use the atomic bomb as a tactical weapon during the invasion, expecting to drop 10 to 15 bombs on Japanese defensive positions if that many bombs could be produced in time.
There was another option that was brought up among US planners: simply blockading Japan until they gave up. This is the strategy Germany tried (unsuccessfully) to use against Britain. A blockade would have avoided an invasion, but would have taken years and probably would have killed as many as 50,000,000 Japanese civilians. It was not seriously considered, and no detailed plans were made for it.
My personal thinking on the question of the bomb is made clear due to its direct effect on my family. I had an uncle, Oswald Fabrizio, who was born at the end of 1925. He entered the Marines in early 1944 and was killed in action in May of 1945 during the fighting on Okinawa. Had the bomb been ready sooner, there would have been no battle for Okinawa and my uncle would have survived the war.
My father was born at the end of 1926, and completed Army basic training in Spring of 1945 at a base that had sent many troops to the European theater. Instead of shipping off to the war in Europe (since German surrender was imminent), his unit was sent to “enhanced basic training” at another camp, which sent many troops to the Pacific theater. The bomb was dropped before his unit could ship out to the fighting. When they did ship out, they were told that their troop ship was the very first one to sail across the pacific with its running lights turned on, there being no threat of Japanese submarines since Japan had surrendered.
The stark differences between the experiences of my uncle and my father were due only to a year’s difference in birthdays, and the atomic bomb.
Noah Hawley (the writer of the Atlantic article) seems to believe the options available to the US planners in 1945 were:
Drop the bombs, kill roughly 200,000 civilians, including children, and Japan surrenders in a week, or
Don’t drop the bombs, no civilians are killed, and Japan surrenders anyway.
But the options actually available were:
Drop the bombs, kill roughly 200,000 civilians, including children, and Japan surrenders in a week, or
Don’t drop the bomb, continue the war, invade Japan, kill roughly 14,000,000 people, mixed among military and civilians, Japanese and Americans, including children, or
Don’t drop the bomb, don’t invade, starve Japan into surrender, killing upwards of 50,000,000 people, including children.
Given these choices, I bet even our Noah Hawley would choose to drop the bomb, without hesitation. If not, what kind of a monster is Noah Hawley?