Our Use of Nuclear Weapons 75 Years Ago Was a Moral and Strategic Imperative. Invading Japan was not a serious option. Neither was a negotiated peace. By Henry I. Miller, M.S., M.D.
EXCERPT
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 half a year of privations and anguish related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
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.
That sense of anxiety got me thinking about how WWII was suddenly—and to many, unexpectedly—resolved. August 6th will mark one of the United States’ most important anniversaries, memorable not only for what happened on that 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 August 9th 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 August 14th), 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. Gen. Groves’s 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 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, sceptics are also quick to overlook the “humanitarian” and strategic aspects of the decision to use them.
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