Ambivalent Anniversary

The United States dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and one on Nagasaki two days later, with a death and injury total over 200,000.

Why they were dropped.

Nuclear weapons are often said to pose a unique threat to humanity, and in the wrong hands they do. But when President Truman gave the go-ahead to deploy Fat Man and Little Boy, what those big bombs chiefly represented was salvation: salvation for young Lt. Fussell and all the GIs; salvation for the tens of thousands of Allied POWs the Japanese intended to execute in the event of an invasion; salvation for the grotesquely used Korean "comfort women"; salvation for millions of Asians enslaved by the Japanese.

Not least, and despite the terrible irony, the bombings were salvation for Japan, since they prompted Emperor Hirohito to intervene with his bitterly divided government to end the war, thus laying the groundwork for America's beneficent occupation and the country's subsequent prosperity. To understand the roots of modern Japan's pacifist mentality, so at variance with its old warrior culture, one need only visit Hiroshima's peace park.

Kate of Small Dead Animals posts a pair of photographs of bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki….or so it may seem at first.

Here’s an interesting article on Japan’s Self Defense Force of today--a member of the Coalition of the Willing.

Victor Davis Hanson considers Hiroshima.

[O]ur own generation has more recently once again grappled with Hiroshima, and so the debate rages on in the new age of terrorism and handheld weapons of mass destruction, brought home after an attack on our shores worse than Pearl Harbor — with more promised to come. Perhaps the horror of the suicide bombers of Japan does not seem so distant any more. Nor does the notion of an extreme perversion of an otherwise mainstream religion filling millions with hatred of a supposedly decadent West.

And up close and personal with “Fat Man” on the ill-fated Indianapolis.

(Thanks to The Truman Library)

Comments

[radtech59]

Every year at this time we see the same articles. All the peaceniks out there wringing their hands about the lives lost with atom bombs. But we never get credit for not using them since. We didn't use them in Korea, Vietnam, Persian Gulf 1 or 2. But that never seems to come up. Odd that.

[charles]

The fact that we, as a civilized society, can still be 'debating' whether we should have used them or not shows just how civilized and 'fully human' we really are. (BTW, I believe without a doubt we did the right thing)

The fact that we don't hear such 'debates' within the Muslim world about trying to destroy Israel, beheading innocent civilians, bombing civilians, using their own children as weapons, etc. says something about their current lack of humanity.

Japanese society prior to and during WWII was quite *fanatical*. Many islamists today hold that same kind of fanaticism. Just as it took something as powerful and awesome (in the real sense of the word, not its watered-down meaning today) as the atomic bombs to break that fanaticism of the Japanese I cannot help but wonder if perhaps we don't need something also as powerful and awesome today to break the fanaticism of the Islamists.

[ricardo]

I don't think you can draw an analogy between suicide bombers and islamists. people capable of doing that do not only live in the middle east but can be british born-as those who struck london and american born (our homegrown snipers)
in fact the deadliest suicide attack in iraq was carried out by some dude who appeared normal (on the outside) in every way imaginable.