ON THE 60TH ANNIVERSARY of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we can affirm the following with near certainty: Barring some horrific dissolution of the international order–and/or a direct nuclear threat to the U.S. homeland–America will never again target an enemy population with atomic weapons. Of course, that bears little or no pertinence to retrospective debates over the morality of nuking Japan to end World War II. Those debates typically pivot on whether or not Tokyo’s unconditional surrender could have been negotiated absent the deployment of Fat Man and Little Boy (or absent a massive U.S. invasion of the Japanese mainland). Most traditionalists say no. Most revisionists say yes–or, at the very least, probably.
The tides of evidence have been shifting over the past decade–and not in the revisionists’ favor. As historian Richard B. Frank has pointed out in THE WEEKLY STANDARD, decoded (and now declassified) intercepts revealed a Japanese war cabinet that, when faced with the option of unconditional surrender, appeared ready, willing, and able to fight to the last man. Moreover–and this actually runs contra to the traditionalist view, “but with a twist”–U.S. military strategists were far from unanimous in their endorsement of “Operation Olympic,” the full-scale invasion of the Japanese Home Islands slated for November 1945.
Says Frank, “With the Navy’s withdrawal of support, the terrible casualties in Okinawa, and the appalling radio-intelligence picture of the Japanese buildup on Kyushu [Island], Olympic was not going forward as planned and authorized–period.” It wasn’t that Olympic had suddenly become “unnecessary.” Rather, “It had become unthinkable.” The death-toll projections–both for American troops and Japanese civilians–were simply too grisly.
Frank’s conclusion: “It is hard to imagine anyone who could have been president at the time (a spectrum that includes FDR, Henry Wallace, William O. Douglas, Harry Truman, and Thomas Dewey) failing to authorize use of the atomic bombs in this circumstance.”
As a practical matter, then, the pro-A-bomb argument has seen its stock appreciate. There is, however, at least one unresolved moral dilemma posed by Hiroshima and Nagasaki that transcends both Catholic and secular just-war theories.
To wit: How many Japanese civilians were worth killing to end the war swiftly and with minimal casualties among U.S. servicemen? It’s estimated that between 110,000 and 200,000 people died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, most of them noncombatants. Would the bombing have been justified if 500,000 perished? What about 700,000? A million? Two million? Objectively speaking, there is no “right” or “wrong” answer. But the question is worth pondering, even if it doesn’t deflate the traditionalist view that President Truman acted wisely in August 1945.
WHETHER OR NOT Hiroshima and Nagasaki were legitimate military targets–and there’s a raft of evidence suggesting they were–U.S. policymakers clearly knew the bombing would produce tens of thousands of civilian fatalities. In that sense, and for argument’s sake, let’s concede that the bombing represented a deliberate massacre of Japanese civilians. How does that affect its morality, if at all?
A great deal, argues Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review, himself an eloquent critic of Truman’s decision to nuke Japan. “The conservative error,” Ponnuru writes, “is to assume that the intentional killing of civilians is justified in order to avert a greater number of deaths.” It would be a most unfortunate “change,” he adds, “if we were to intentionally target civilians whenever we thought that doing so would hold our military casualties down (or even hold the total number of civilian and military casualties down).”
Ponnuru thus pokes at the Achilles’ heel of the pro-A-bomb camp. But in doing so he also places an unfeasible moral burden on World War II-era U.S. strategists and unduly depreciates the grim realities of the Pacific theater.
It’s true, there is a threshold point–even in a “total war” such as that with Imperial Japan–at which deliberately killing enemy civilians to curtail U.S. military casualties becomes morally problematic. But how does one calculate that threshold point? It’s a brutally tricky enterprise. Does the life of one enemy civilian equal the life of one American GI? That’s a totally impractical–and, in its own way, highly unjust–formula for a U.S. president to employ. At the same time, any other formula is hopelessly arbitrary. Lose one GI for every 20 enemy civilians? For every 50 civilians? For every 100? For every 1,000? There’s no objective standard.
Many (perhaps most) Americans would tolerate excessively high casualty rates among enemy civilians in wartime if it helped suppress the U.S. military’s death toll. They would do so out of a fierce patriotism and a profound reverence for our armed forces. After all, Americans are hardly obligated to feel a kinship with the enemy’s populace, especially when that populace, as in Imperial Japan, broadly supports the anti-Western zealotry and blood-drenched totalitarianism of its rulers. And in a conflict as staggeringly awful as World War II, any U.S. president who did not exercise every means at his disposal to conclude hostilities–and who let hundreds of thousands of American boys die for the sake of protecting enemy civilians–would have a lot to answer for.
WHICH BRINGS US BACK to the A-bomb. By early August 1945, a host of factors–including Japanese fanaticism, the unimaginable carnage of Okinawa, the ghastly prospects for a U.S. invasion, the fate (execution) that awaited tens of thousands of American POWs if we did invade, and our unique position as the world’s sole nuclear power–had created a most unusual moral environment. Without the atomic bombs, Tokyo’s unconditional surrender presupposed some type of U.S. assault on mainland Japan. The expected U.S. casualties in such an undertaking ranged from 200,000 to 1 million. The anticipated casualties among Japanese–soldiers and civilians–ranged far, far higher, well into the millions. The Tokyo fire raid in March 1945 had incinerated at least 100,000 Japanese civilians, and probably many more. Who knows how many such missions would have accompanied an all-out U.S. invasion?
In terms of the aforementioned threshold point–after which deliberately killing enemy civilians becomes morally dubious–we were nowhere near crossing it with the atomic bombing. Indeed, it’s perfectly reasonable to believe the bombing saved lives, perhaps millions of lives, American and Japanese alike. That’s not a retroactive justification. Such moral calculus was a crucial part of the decision-making process in Washington 60 summers ago.
Even still, was an unconditional surrender worth all the devastation? “We could have accepted a conditional surrender,” maintains Ponnuru. Let’s assume that’s correct (and I see little reason why it isn’t). Would such an outcome have been preferable to the bombing? Depends on the meaning of “conditional.” If it meant, as the revisionist school has long claimed, a mere “figurehead role” for the emperor, then maybe conditional surrender was a tolerable alternative. But if it meant, as prominent Japanese historians have since written, a preservation of the imperial system, that rather changes things. Ponnuru admits that, had Truman agreed to a conditional surrender from Tokyo, “The last 60 years of world history probably would have been worse, perhaps a lot worse.”
Where does that leave the A-bomb debate? Basically, we must weigh the relative immorality of two nightmarish options: erasing a pair of cities with nuclear weapons, or allowing Japanese militarism to remain on life support. There are good arguments for each choice. But at the end of the day, it’s hard to deny that Japanese militarism was an ideology every bit as evil, murderous, and unquenchably expansionist as German National Socialism.
Seen in that light, we can all be grateful that Truman acted as he did.
Duncan Currie is a reporter at The Weekly Standard.
