Technically, it’s been 79 years since the dropping of the two atomic bombs on Japan. The first was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and the second was dropped on Nagasaki three days later – August 9, 1945. These bombs ended World War II, but the question has persisted ever since, should they have been dropped in the first place?
The birth of the atomic bomb is due in part to the Anti-Semitism of Hitler and Nazi Germany. That anti-Jewish fanaticism and persecution drove many Jewish scientists and intellectuals out of their native Germany looking for asylum. Some, like Albert Einstein, found it in the United States.
Albert Einstein wrote to President Franklin Roosevelt on August 2, 1939, outlining the dangers and potential of nuclear power. That launched a secret program to research and hopefully develop a nuclear weapon before the Axis enemies of the United States produced their own nuclear bomb(s). The program became known as the “Manhattan Project” and cost $2 billion (about $30 billion in today’s dollars). The recent Academy Award winning film “Oppenheimer” (named for Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist in charge of the Manhattan Project) and the 1989 film Fat Man and Little Boy (the nicknames for the two atomic bombs) do a wonderful and entertaining job of elucidating the Manhattan Project for the uninitiated.
Many have claimed that the decision to drop the bomb was racist, because the Japanese are Asians. That’s hogwash. We didn’t choose to go to war with Japan, they attacked us. The reason we didn’t even consider using atomic weapons against Nazi Germany was simply because the war with Germany was over by the time scientists in America had produced a working nuclear weapon. The war with Germany ended in May of 1945 and it was July of ’45 when the bomb became operational.
There were those who suggested informing the Japanese we had a new, awesome weapon and they should surrender. Anyone who has played poker knows this is a non-starter. After four years of bloody fighting, one side is not going to give up just because of an assertion by the other side! Come on, we’d never give up on just the enemy’s say so, why would the Japanese? Put up or shut up, as the saying goes, and put up we did two days in early August 1945.
Others recommended that the High Command of the Japanese Imperial Forces be invited to see a demonstration of the atomic bomb. Again, this was not a realistic suggestion. What nation is going to send their top brass into the laps of their sworn enemies for a “demonstration”? Even if the top brass did go and assuming the demonstration was successful (and there was a chance it wouldn’t be), what has been achieved? A big boom and a bright light, that’s all. We weren’t going to blow up anything other than desert, so how to gauge the effectiveness of the bomb without structures or people in the target area? On the other hand, if the demonstration were a dud, that would only reinforce the desire of the Japanese to fight on to the bitter end. Besides, we had only three bombs at the time. The first we tested ourselves to see if it would go BOOM!! It did. That left two with a manufacturing time for additional bombs dependent on mining, refining and then configuring uranium and platinum components into yet another weapon. There were no bombs to spare on a further demonstration and time was an issue. After all, American boys were dying by the droves in the Pacific. The demonstration would be on a live target, a Japanese city.
The Japanese, in part, brought atomic destruction on themselves. They couldn’t have known it at the time, but their Bushido credo and kamikaze tactics sowed the seeds of the “definitely drop the bomb” decision in President Harry Truman’s mind. Take, for example, the Battle for Iwo Jima.
Everyone knows the Battle of Iwo Jima, if only because of the iconic photo of the flag raising on that island. Joe Rosenthal won a Pulitzer Prize for his picture and the boys who raised the flag have been cast in bronze and are a part of the Marine Corps Memorial located just outside of Arlington National Cemetery.
Iwo Jima is 5 miles long and 800 yards to 2.5 miles wide, depending on where you are on the island. Three Americans perished for every two Japanese soldiers who died in combat. There were 21,000 Japanese troops on the island. It took five weeks of hard, hand-to-hand, fighting to root all of them out. Of the 21,000 Japanese only 216 were taken prisoner and most of those were too wounded or otherwise incapacitated to resist any further. That American death toll and Japanese tenacity was repeated all throughout the Pacific on little nothing islands everywhere. It’s what led to the American strategy of “island hopping”, skipping entirely some Japanese held islands because of their heroically stubborn fight it out to the last man attitude. That strategy and the Code of Bushido (Never Give Up, Never Surrender as Buzz Lightyear would say) led to Japanese soldiers still “fighting” World War II being discovered on these little rocks of islands in the Pacific then repatriated back to Japan well into the 1970’s.
The Japanese nation is made up of a series of islands that are a total of 2,361 miles long, north to south, and take up 147,116 square miles. Imagine Iwo Jima style fighting over every inch of their homeland. That’s the kind of fighting it would have been too. The kamikaze, more than 2800 of them, inflicted severe damage on the American Navy; 34 ships sunk, another 368 damaged, 4800 sailors wounded and 4900 killed. Japanese civilians were being trained to fight house to house in anticipation of the expected American invasion. American military planners estimated over a million American casualties – dead and wounded – before Japan would be vanquished and as much as five more years of war to get that job done.
For all of the hand wringing by those with second thoughts and double guesses later, it really was a no brainer for Harry Truman. He was the American President, in charge of the American war effort and responsible for American lives. There was no other decision he could have made. He said so in his memoirs and also that he never lost sleep over his decision to drop the bomb. It ended the war and saved American lives, what’s to second guess?
Colonel Paul Tibbets lost some sleep though. He was the command pilot of the Enola Gay (he named the plane in honor of his mother) that dropped “Little Boy”, the first atomic bomb and the one that was uranium based, on Hiroshima. Colonel Tibbets had no regrets in dropping the bomb. It was war time; Japan was the enemy, and the alternative was much grimmer for the United States. However, as time passed now General Tibbets recognized that the political wind was changing, the American mood shifted and world attitudes against the bomb and its dropping had hardened. When he died, he opted for cremation and had his ashes spread over the English Channel. He didn’t want his grave to either become a shrine or an item of protest or controversy, depending on where a person stood on Tibbets’ role in dropping the first atomic bomb.
The Hiroshima bomb was right on target and killed 66,000 people outright. The bomb was 120 inches long and 28 inches in diameter, weighing 9,700 pounds. When those suffering from the after effects of the bomb (like the fireball 1200 feet in diameter with a temperature of 6000 degrees) and radiation sickness are added in, the total death rate goes up to a bit north of 140,000. That doesn’t count the generational effects of birth defects from exposure to radiation.
Kokura was the primary target for the second bomb. That city was saved by billowing smoke and cloud cover. Since targeting was done visually, the crew moved on to their secondary target of Nagasaki. That city also had dense clouds, but the American crew found a hole in them and dropped their load – Fat Man, the plutonium bomb. Fat Man was 128 and a quarter inches long and 60 and a quarter inches in diameter, weighing in at 10,265 pounds. Fat Man was a plutonium bomb and more powerful than the Hiroshima uranium one but because of the clouds was dropped two miles off target. The Nagasaki bomb killed 35,000 people outright and 80,000 total when all was said and done. Around 46% of those who died in the Nagasaki bombing died suffering from leukemia.
Robert Oppenheimer ran the scientific side of the Manhattan Project and General Leslie Grove ran the military and administrative side. It was General Grove who pushed hard to use the second atomic bomb. Part of his rationale was to see if the plutonium bomb worked as well as the Hiroshima uranium bomb and the other part was to bring the recalcitrant Japanese still dithering to the surrender table.
After Hiroshima, the Japanese Generals wanted to fight on, come what may. It was Emperor Hirohito who put an end to Japan’s involvement in the war.
I think if there is any fault on the American side, one might argue that three days wasn’t enough time for the Japanese to assess the damage and to take stock before hitting them again. I suspect, given what I know of the Code of Bushido and the ethos of the militaristic Japanese of the time, a second bomb would have been necessary in any event. To be fair to the American research team, much of the negative and long term effects of radiation were unknown to them at the time of the decision to drop the bomb. It was the practical application of nuclear weapons on human targets that made plain what could only be theorized about in the laboratory.
The United States remains the only nation in the history of the world to have used nuclear weapons. We did the world a service. We ended a terrible and costly war that surely would have continued if nuclear weapons had not been used. If nuclear weapons had not been employed then there would have been more death and destruction than was wreaked on just two cities with the inevitable wholesale devastation visited on all of Japan that a full-fledged American invasion and dogged Japanese resistance would have entailed.
The cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the sacrificial lambs of world history. Their fate demonstrated the power, might, terror and misery of nuclear weapons so that their use became unthinkable in future conflicts. Imagine if we had not had the example of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, what greater damage and loss might have been inflicted in a later crisis without that stark and vivid example from World War II?
The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was devastating. The casualty toll from a single bomb, shocking. The deaths and generational effects from radiation poisoning were catastrophic, terrible and heart rending. However, as long as nations continue to refrain from using nuclear weapons, then the sacrifice of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will not have been in vain.