Seventy years ago today, on Aug. 6, 1945, most of the city of Hiroshima, population 350,000, disappeared in a flash of light brighter than the sun. Approximately 80,000 people in the city, including a dozen American servicemen held in a prisoner-of-war camp, also disappeared.
Although stunned, the Japanese government refused to surrender. Three days later, the city of Nagasaki met Hiroshima’s fate. Another 40,000 people died immediately. Over the next few years, tens of thousands more Japanese would die from injuries, burns, and radiation sickness.
And, for the past 70 years, the debate about the morality of the atomic bombings has raged on. Some critics of the two bombings have called them atrocities and war crimes on a par with the Holocaust, the systematic slaughter by Nazi Germany of millions of innocent European Jews.
Yet, many U.S. World War II veterans of that I have interviewed have but one response: “Thank God for Harry Truman and the atomic bomb.”
They believe, and with good reason, that if the bombs not been dropped, the war likely would have lasted at least another year. The veterans also believe that they might have been among the predicted million casualties the United States and its allies would have suffered had Operation Downfall, the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands, proceeded.
On Aug. 15, 1945, Emperor Hirohito, realizing Japan’s position was untenable, declared that his nation would surrender; the official documents formally ending the war were signed aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on Sept. 2, 1945. History’s most destructive war had at last come to an end.
For years, a new weapon of unimaginable destructive power had been sought by the major combatants: Germany, Japan, Great Britain, and the United States. Only the U.S. had the wherewithal to turn theory into reality.
Many years and millions of dollars — plus the combined brainpower of scores of scientists such as Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, and Manhattan Project head Robert Oppenheimer — went into splitting the atom and turning the unleashed energy into a terrible weapon that offered both the promise of ending wars forever and the threat of ending all life on earth.
There was a brief hope that the possibility of atomic annihilation would bring humanity to its senses. World War I – -billed as the “war to end all wars” — was never able to deliver on that promise. Perhaps “Little Boy” and “Fat Man,” the names given to the bombs that brought Japan to her knees, would.
However, despite the sudden and clear-cut end to the war, mankind soon discovered that tampering with the laws of physics resulted in the invoking of the law of unintended consequences.
Instead of being the sole nation possessing the secret of unlocking the atom, America soon found herself engaged in an arms race after other nations stole the secret and built their own bombs.
Advances in weapons technology during the past seven decades have resulted in the creation of nuclear warheads so powerful that they make the bombs that destroyed two Japanese cities look, in comparison, like puny firecrackers.
And, during the past 70 years, the controversy over America’s use of “the Bomb” has not gone away. Was it moral and ethical to kill hundreds of thousands of people with two weapons in order to end a war that seemed to have no end?
Humanity continues to struggle with that question — and continues to be unable to live at peace.
One thing is for certain: the two A-bombs did bring about a swift end to a war that had already cost humanity as many as 80 million lives.
Denver author and military historian Flint Whitlock is editor of WWII Quarterly magazine.
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