The following essay is a two-part Sunday special commissioned by The Hub to mark the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945. The opposing essay arguing against the justifications for the bombings can be found here.
Like all cliches, the phrase “turning point in history” is overused. But the nuclear era that began with the first atomic bomb test on 16 July 1945 and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki three weeks later really did mark a radical break with everything that came before it. Cities have always been razed in wars since antiquity, but in a nuclear war, hundreds of cities could be razed in minutes. Think of it this way: in the time it takes to watch a rerun of Celebrity Apprentice, the show’s former host and his counterpart in the Kremlin could kill a billion people.
The issue isn’t U.S. President Donald Trump or Russian President Vladimir Putin per se. The issue is that for two generations, the fate of civilization has hinged on whether the leaders of the United States and Russia wake up on the right side of the bed. Even the leaders of lesser nuclear powers are capable of unleashing suffering on an unimaginable scale.
The historical chasm separating our world from the summer of 1945, in those last days before Hiroshima, makes it difficult to grasp the complexity of the problems faced by U.S. President Harry Truman’s senior civilian and military advisors. They did not have the benefit of hindsight as they planned the end of the Second World War. They lived in a world before Hiroshima, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Dr. Strangelove, Stanislav Petrov, The Day After, and the decades of nuclear saber-rattling that have carried on to the present.
After the test in the New Mexico desert, Truman’s advisors understood that they possessed a powerful new weapon, albeit one in short supply and tricky to deploy. They were, moreover, unsure if the bomb by itself would compel Japan’s surrender: dozens of Japanese towns and cities had already been destroyed in American firebombing raids, yet the Japanese continued to fight with literally suicidal tenacity.
Nothing so exemplified this as the Battle of Okinawa, which ended less than a month before the atomic test. Nearly 15,000 Americans had fallen in capturing the island that is a tenth the size of Hawaii. Meanwhile, diplomatic signalling from the Japanese was ambiguous, reflecting deep divisions within Japan’s own leadership about whether to continue fighting. More recently, some scholars have argued that Japan’s leaders considered the USSR’s declaration of war against Japan on August 8 to be at least as important as the atomic bombs in their decision to surrender. But such findings are curiosities for historians to muse over. They were not part of the deliberations of men in 1945 who could not divine the intentions of the enemy, let alone the future. Nor are there yet-to-be-revealed documents that will shed additional light on the thinking of America’s leaders in the weeks before Hiroshima. We have had access to all the minutes of all the meetings and the personal papers of the key decision makers for decades. Probably no other set of documents has been so picked to the bone by historians, not that you would know it to read annual debates in the popular media, carried on as if decades of historical scholarship had simply never been written.
What is called the “decision” to drop the atomic bomb has usually been framed as if Truman’s advisors presented him with a series of clear-cut options: invade Japan or drop the bomb; blockade or the bomb; negotiation or the bomb. There has been a particular fixation on the false binary of Truman making a choice between heavy American casualties in an invasion on the one hand or using the atomic bomb on the other. But no such unequivocal choice was offered or made. Moreover, the rule that presidential authority was needed to use nuclear weapons had not yet been established. Truman was less involved in operational decisions about the bomb than is commonly believed, only asserting his authority after the destruction of Nagasaki. Tormented by the thought of “killing all those kids,” he ordered that there were to be no further atomic bombs dropped without his authorization.
So why was the “decision” to drop the bomb made? Historians continue to debate the details. It is rare for our profession to reach consensus, but in recent decades, something like it has been achieved on one point. The truly remarkable fact is not that American leaders decided to drop the bomb; it is that no one in a position of operational authority seriously considered not using it. Some military and civilian leaders — notably Admiral William Leahy — expressed misgivings later, but neither Leahy nor any of the others expressed unequivocal opposition at the time. Indeed, when Japan surrendered on August 15, most Americans took it for granted that the bombs had been justified. For soldiers and their families, especially, the atomic bomb seemed like deliverance from the prospect of a long and terrible campaign through the Japanese home islands.
The atomic bomb was built on the assumption that it would be used, if not against Germany, then against Japan. Most American decision makers viewed the bomb as no more than a very powerful new explosive, a means of advancing an already existing campaign of destroying cities from the air. Rapidly, however, the bomb came to represent something more: an existential dread requiring new theories of war to contain it. But in late July 1945, no nuclear taboo existed.
Today, we have accepted the taboo and have learned to live with the dread because we believe we have no other choice. Even a figure as cruel and bellicose as Vladimir Putin understands what no one could before Hiroshima: that nuclear arms are not just another weapon of war, to be used like any conventional armament. Nonetheless, the possibility of nuclear use in Ukraine or elsewhere remains. The United States and Russia have made enormous strides in reducing their nuclear stockpiles since the end of the Cold War, but make no mistake: the arsenals that remain could recreate Hiroshima and Nagasaki on a global scale.
Every society in history has had its own apocalyptic fears; ours is unique because we possess a certain means of realizing them. Historians must be wary travellers in the realm of moral judgement. Rather than justify or condemn the decision to drop the atomic bomb, we should instead try to understand why the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was inevitable given the context. It was to date the last time (and only time) nuclear weapons have been used in warfare. For eight decades humanity has successfully walked the nuclear tightrope, but it would be folly to think that we can walk it forever.
