First atomic bomb - 58 years ago today

[maury <maury@webtexas.com>]

As you note that today (Wednesday) is the 58th anniversary of the first

employment of the atomic bomb. As the arguments continue to rage over

the relative morality and merits of this drop, you might wish to read

the Op Ed below. I think you will find that it contains one of the

lesser known, surprising stories pertaining to the bomb.

Maury Siskel            maury@webtexas.com

================



New York Times



August 5, 2003



Blood on Our Hands?



By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF



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.





          Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company





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