The New
York Times
August
5, 2003
OP-ED
COLUMNIST
Tomorrow will mark the anniversary of one of the most morally contentious
events of the 20th century, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. And after 58
years, there's an emerging consensus: we Americans have blood on our hands.
There has been a chorus here and abroad that the U.S. has little moral
standing on the issue of weapons of mass destruction because we were the first
to use the atomic bomb. As Nelson Mandela said of Americans in a speech on Jan.
31, "Because they decided to kill innocent people in Japan, who are still
suffering from that, who are they now to pretend that they are the policeman of
the world?"
The traditional American position, that our
intention in dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and then Nagasaki was to end the
war early and save lives, has been poked full of holes. Revisionist historians
like Gar Alperovitz argue persuasively that Washington believed the bombing
militarily unnecessary (except to establish American primacy in the postwar
order) because, as the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey put it in 1946, "in
all probability" Japan would have surrendered even without the atomic
bombs.
Yet this emerging consensus is, I think, profoundly mistaken.
While American scholarship has undercut the U.S. moral position, Japanese
historical research has bolstered it. The Japanese scholarship, by historians
like Sadao Asada of Doshisha University in Kyoto, notes that Japanese wartime
leaders who favored surrender saw their salvation in the atomic bombing. The
Japanese military was steadfastly refusing to give up, so the peace faction
seized upon the bombing as a new argument to force surrender.
"We of the peace party were assisted by the atomic bomb in our endeavor
to end the war," Koichi Kido, one of Emperor Hirohito's closest aides,
said later.
Wartime records and memoirs show that the emperor and some of his aides
wanted to end the war by summer 1945. But they were vacillating and couldn't
prevail over a military that was determined to keep going even if that meant,
as a navy official urged at one meeting, "sacrificing 20 million Japanese
lives."
The atomic bombings broke this political stalemate and were thus described
by Mitsumasa Yonai, the navy minister at the time, as a "gift from
heaven."
Without the atomic bombings, Japan would have continued fighting by inertia.
This would have meant more firebombing of Japanese cities and a ground
invasion, planned for November 1945, of the main Japanese islands. The fighting
over the small, sparsely populated islands of Okinawa had killed 14,000
Americans and 200,000 Japanese, and in the main islands the toll would have run
into the millions.
"The atomic bomb was a golden opportunity given by heaven for Japan to
end the war," Hisatsune Sakomizu, the chief cabinet secretary in 1945,
said later.
Some argue that the U.S. could have demonstrated the bomb on an uninhabited
island, or could have encouraged surrender by promising that Japan could keep
its emperor. Yes, perhaps, and we should have tried. We could also have waited
longer before dropping the second bomb, on Nagasaki.
But, sadly, the record suggests that restraint would not have worked. The
Japanese military ferociously resisted surrender even after two atomic bombings
on major cities, even after Soviet entry into the war, even when it expected
another atomic bomb — on Tokyo.
One of the great tales of World War II concerns an American fighter pilot
named Marcus McDilda who was shot down on Aug. 8 and brutally interrogated
about the atomic bombs. He knew nothing, but under torture he
"confessed" that the U.S. had 100 more nuclear weapons and planned to
destroy Tokyo "in the next few days." The war minister informed the
cabinet of this grim news — but still adamantly opposed surrender. In the
aftermath of the atomic bombing, the emperor and peace faction finally insisted
on surrender and were able to prevail.
It feels unseemly to defend the vaporizing of two cities, events that are regarded in some quarters as among the most monstrous acts of the 20th century. But we owe it to history to appreciate that the greatest tragedy of Hiroshima was not that so many people were incinerated in an instant, but that in a complex and brutal world, the alternatives were worse.