Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
Did Demons Create the First Atomic Bombs?
Every August, debate renews over both the wisdom and the morality of dropping the two American atomic bombs, 81 years ago, on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) and Nagasaki (August 9, 1945). This August has been no exception.
As ever, many critics have faulted the United States for the bombings: two gruesome blasts—aimed at dual-use military and industrial targets in both cities—that may have caused some 100,000–120,000 immediate deaths among combatants and civilians. And not all these critics are on the Left. Two years ago, podcaster Tucker Carlson blasted the Truman administration’s decision, alleging that the atomic bomb was not the result of decades of sophisticated nuclear physics research or the dividend of a two-billion-dollar Manhattan Project investment to rapidly develop an atomic weapon in a race to beat the Axis powers’ nuclear programs before they themselves developed such existential weapons.
Instead, Carlson claimed the atomic bombs were demonic, tools of innate evil, and thus apparently created through the supernatural intervention of dark powers. Unlikely—but perhaps Tucker was echoing themes from Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the Manhattan Project. After the first successful test of the bomb on July 16, 1945, Oppenheimer quoted (and mistranslated) a famously chilling line from the great Hindu epic, the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Why Did the United States Drop Two Atomic Bombs on Japan?
Indeed, from the moment the bombs were dropped, there has been an intense, 80-year debate, from which all sorts of conspiracy theories have since emerged.
No one denies that the two bombs, dropped within three days, shocked the Imperial Japanese junta into conceding surrender on August 15—a decision ratified formally and officially on September 2, 1945, ending the Pacific War. Nonetheless, almost immediately, contemporary critics objected to their use on a variety of grounds.
Many claimed the bombs were unnecessary. They argued that the previous devastation of Japan by the U.S. Army Air Forces and the U.S. Navy had made a quick surrender inevitable. Some declared that racism had prompted their use against the Japanese alone.
Of course, all these arguments were only offered with the benefit of hindsight, and they often failed to consider the dire conditions that U.S. military planners were confronted with at the time.
First, the bombs were originally envisioned to stop the Third Reich and end the costly conventional Allied bombing campaign over Germany (over 80,000 dead British and American airmen, along with some 15,000 bombers lost). But producing a deliverable bomb took far longer than anticipated and was realized only after Germany surrendered.
Second, the military, the Truman administration, and the American public were still in a state of shock over the devastating losses suffered at Okinawa, declared secure just six weeks before Hiroshima. The invading U.S. land, sea, and air forces had suffered 50,000 casualties, including 12,000 dead—in what had initially been expected to be the least costly of a half-dozen bloody American amphibious landings.
Before Okinawa, planners believed they had learned from the overconfidence that had nearly proved to be catastrophic at Iwo Jima, Peleliu, and Tarawa. Yet despite those lessons, a weakened Japanese military, and total U.S. air and naval supremacy, Okinawa became the deadliest island operation of the entire Pacific war. And because it was the last major land battle, stunned U.S. planners in summer 1945 shuddered about what might come from a planned invasion of the entire Japanese mainland. As a general rule, the closer the Americans got to the Japanese homeland, the more they died.
Okinawa had been defended by about 120,000 Japanese soldiers and Okinawan conscripts, most of whom fought to the death. The defenders had launched about 2,000 kamikaze suicide-attack aircraft—each a veritable cruise missile—sinking 26 ships and killing nearly 5,000 Navy personnel.
Given some 2.3 million Japanese troops on the home islands, fully mobilized for an American invasion and backed by 12,000 combat aircraft (including 9,000 kamikazes), as well as a militia of some 25 million combatants, American planners believed the invasion of the Japanese homeland would easily cost one million casualties—the equivalent of 20 Okinawas.
That fear of massive American casualties, combined with growing public weariness after four long years of Japanese diehard ferocity and atrocities—the Germans had surrendered three months earlier in May 1945—prompted the Pentagon to explore alternatives against an enemy that, despite being almost entirely defeated, still had no intention of surrendering unconditionally. We now forget that 1945—the last year of the war—was the deadliest to the U.S. military in the Pacific Theater of Operations.
Few now remember that, of all the belligerents in World War II, it was the Japanese military that achieved the highest kill-to-loss ratio. Japan suffered total fatalities of somewhere between 2.5 and 3 million combatants and civilians, but it caused the deaths of between 15 and 20 million Allied soldiers, Chinese, other Asians, and Pacific Islanders. By summer 1945, the Japanese military abroad was executing, killing, or starving 15,000 people a day. There was therefore an understandable desire to end the war as quickly as possible, by any means necessary, to save thousands of lives. Each day of war was literally a matter of life and death for thousands.
Other postwar critics claimed the bombs were dropped only as a gratuitous signal to shock and awe and deter Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union from further communist aggrandizement. But between Nagasaki (August 9, 1945) and the first Soviet atomic bomb test four years later (August 29, 1949)—when America alone had a viable atomic weapon—Stalin was certainly not deterred. By 1948, he had already broken his word and turned all of the Soviet-occupied nations of Eastern Europe, as well as North Korea, communist. And by summer 1949, it was clear that the USSR had helped ensure the impending communist takeover of China.
Moreover, U.S. intelligence and investigative agencies were already surmising by August 1945 that Soviet spies were embedded within the Manhattan Project and the UK government, along with captured German physicists sent back to Russia.
In other words, the Pentagon had already accepted that dropping atomic bombs would likely not deter its then “ally,” Joseph Stalin, from acquiring his own nuclear weapons. The United States therefore expected soon to face a deadly nuclear rival—and one eager to retaliate in kind if America had used or threatened to use its nuclear monopoly to thwart Soviet agendas.
Were the Bombs Really Necessary?
Still other critics claimed that the U.S. government should have frightened Japan into surrender by detonating one atomic bomb in Tokyo Bay. But earlier ideas to drop a demonstration bomb in an uninhabited area were scrapped over fears of what would ensue if the bomb proved to be a dud, leaving only a single bomb available for combat use. Would one atomic bombing of a Japanese target prompt total surrender? After the two available bombs, at most one additional atomic bomb was likely to be delivered to the Pacific before October or November.
Atomic bombs, in fact, did not simply emerge complete and intact from the head of Zeus—or Satan. Building and delivering still-experimental bombs to the front was not easy, safe, or assured. The tricky enriched-uranium Hiroshima bomb (“Little Boy”) had never been tested. It was so dangerous to handle that it was armed only in the air to prevent an atomic blast if the Enola Gay crashed on takeoff.
The later B-29 Bockscar that bombed Nagasaki almost ran out of gas because of a failed fuel-transfer pump, a 45-minute rendezvous delay, and the fact that the initial target was obscured by clouds. Nagasaki, the alternate but similarly cloud-obscured target, was a last-minute adjustment that almost ended in failure, if not total catastrophe.
The cruiser Indianapolis, which delivered components of the 9,000-pound “Little Boy” to the B-29 base on Tinian in late July, was blown up by a Japanese submarine just four days later on its journey back to the fleet—killing nearly 75 percent of the crew. Only luck had prevented the Japanese from sinking the Indianapolis days earlier, along with the atomic-bomb components on board.
Yet even after the moonscape at Hiroshima, the Japanese high command still argued over capitulation, with some generals convinced that the bluffing Americans might not have another bomb. And, in a way, they were right. After the second bombing at Nagasaki three days later, the tiny American nuclear arsenal was temporarily exhausted.
Nor had even the second atomic bomb convinced the Japanese military to surrender. Instead, on August 15, 1945, disgruntled dead-ender officers launched an attempted military coup to prevent Emperor Hirohito from addressing the nation about Japan’s intention to surrender unconditionally.
Some of Truman’s top generals and admirals later expressed criticisms of the bombings. But often their objections arose because they felt their own forces had already doomed the Japanese. A dramatic atomic end to the war had thus overshadowed the hard prior work of their conventional forces in defeating the Japanese military.
Pacific B-29 forces commander General Curtis LeMay, hardly a dissident, objected that his B-29 fleet had already destroyed half of Japan’s urban areas and much of its industry—and could easily and rapidly force a surrender through further conventional incendiary bombing.
Indeed, LeMay had planned to supplement his then-current force of 1,000 B-29 bombers stationed on the Mariana Islands, some 1,500–1,700 miles distant from most Japanese targets, with a huge new force of additional B-29s—at war’s end, some 5,000 were on order. Veteran bomber crews from the Eighth Air Force, reassigned from postwar Europe, were to augment this massive force.
After the German surrender, the British, in Operation “Tiger Force,” also planned to send over some 150 to 200 heavy Lancaster bombers to join the Americans at their new bomber bases on newly conquered Okinawa—a mere 1,000 miles from Tokyo.
With such a huge bomber armada and flight times cut nearly in half, LeMay assumed that he could have ended the war within weeks without the atomic bombs, albeit at a far higher cost to the Japanese people and his own air crews.
LeMay’s March 9–10 firebombing of Tokyo remains the deadliest single day of warfare in human history, likely accounting for more than 100,000 Japanese deaths; moreover, it was far more lethal than either Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Indeed, the incendiary bombing campaigns killed at least twice as many Japanese as died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
Chief of Naval Operations Ernest King also joined LeMay in regretting the use of atomic bombs. On similar personal grounds, he argued that his vast fleet of submarines, destroyers, cruisers, battleships, and carriers—by 1945 larger than all the navies of the world combined—had already blockaded all of Japan’s ports. They had mined its waters, sunk most of its merchant marine, and destroyed the Japanese navy. Thus, King believed his ships could starve the Japanese into surrender.
Saving, Not Destroying, More Lives
Yet, despite these even more ruthless alternative proposals, the real reason the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the Truman administration’s sincere belief that the new weapon was the only way to shock the Japanese into ending the war as quickly as possible and thereby prevent—as it had announced at the time—the likely horrific invasion of Japan that otherwise would have been needed. Indeed, it is likely that the two bombs saved tens of thousands of Allied and millions of Japanese lives by averting a two-pronged, two-year invasion of the Japanese homeland.
All controversies about the atomic bomb’s initial creation aside, in the 81 years since the end of World War II and its 70 million deaths, there has not been, as feared and often predicted, a World War III. The Cold War was not hot because shared fears of mutually assured nuclear destruction deterred the first use of the massive Russian arsenal.
The current worry about nuclear proliferation is not so much an inherent terror of these horrific weapons themselves. None of the current nine nuclear nations have used any nuclear weapons since their inaugural appearance in 1945. The real fear is instead that rogue states, autocracies, and dictatorships—without voter, media, or opposition oversight—will acquire or have already obtained them and are more likely to do something stupid by launching a preemptive nuclear strike.
In other words, the world does not actually believe that the democratic United States, France, the United Kingdom, Israel, or India will start a nuclear war. It is more concerned that a nuclear-armed strongman in China, North Korea, Pakistan, or Russia—or a terrorist group that gains this unchecked power—will do the unthinkable. The problem, historically, has not always been the appearance of a new deadly weapon but rather the type of state or ruler who possesses it.
Still, despite all this, nuclear weapons are now seen as taboo and associated with national or even global annihilation. And so the world currently scorns even the mere talk of deploying them. But what is truly frightening at the moment is not so much the eight-decade-old nuclear age as what might follow from it.
In our globally connected, post-biolab-spawned-pandemic era—full of Star Wars-like lasers, AI-controlled drone swarms, nearly 17,000 active satellites overhead, and sophisticated biological and chemical agents—terrorists, rogue nations, and delusional autocratic governments may well conclude that nuclear weapons are just one deployable asset in their multifarious arsenals of mass death: sometimes vulnerable to antimissile defenses and often not unique in their lethality.
In short, we may consider nuclear weapons, along with other weapons that are just as deadly, to be Satanic, but they certainly were not first created by the devil.
Rather, on balance, good people sometimes invented bad weapons to stop far worse people from killing innocents.
Discussion (23)
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The only thing missing from this argument is the fact that the dying was not just occurring in Japan. The war in China, the Philippines, Burma, and the Dutch East Indies, famines in Tonkin in French Indo-China, and in Java in the Dutch East Indies, etc. were all killing people in massive numbers. It took two atomic bombs, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, and the personal intervention of the Emperor to get Japan to surrender. And if they had not been used millions would ha died all over Asia.
Very useful summary of the thinking and arguments for and against the use of these bombs in WWII. I'm going to try to add another consideration, but I find it difficult to word it, so please bear with me. I read someone's else's position that the atomic weapons, as another form of aerial bombing, were wrong to use because aerial bombing is so impersonal. You don't see your enemies, therefore it is too easy to destroy them without thinking. I drew the opposite conclusion. Given that the Japanese were probably going to fight tooth and nail, military and civilians alike, our troops were going to have to kill a lot of children, elders, and women, in some horrific circumstances. Can you imagine thousands of our young men coming back with those experiences to haunt their every day? We would still have had to kill the same or greater number of Japanese, but those who carried out the fight would have been scarred for life. I can't imagine my wonderful, loving father, who was very young and ended up in the occupation forces, having to kill a woman or child. And concerning the idea that we could have starved the Japanese into surrendering - yeah, that would have looked like a great idea decades later. /sarc
And don't forget the Japanese plans to kill the thousands of PoWs and civilian internees if Japan were invaded.
Many years past I had the honor of meeting McArthur’s 6th Army’s chief of nursing. She told me they had been preparing to handle 600000 American casualties in the first month of the Japan home island invasion. You tell a mother in Kansas in 1945 her son died to spare Japanese lives.
is it conceivable that dropping two nuclear bombs on Japan (and getting a "quick" surrender) also prevented Soviet invasion of Japan, and avoid a resulting partition of Japan into democratic and communist portions?
One of the things that has always puzzled me is the choice of Nagasaki as an alternate target, primarily because it killed in an instant a significant portion of Japan's Christian population. I have never found a clear explanation of why that target was chosen - frankly, for many in Japan at the time, killing Christian's was a plus, not a threat. I would be interested if you had any thoughts or comments on that?
Truman was a pragmatist and was convinced - and proven correct - that the bombs would save lives.
VDH does all he can to teach the world how we got to where we are, and how ignorant the foes arrayed against us really are. It is sad, very sad, that so many in this world have not heard from VDH. For that reason, we who are listening, and have heard, need to do all we can to spread the word. May God bless Victor.
Of all the rogue actors I worry about Iran leads the list, with Pakistan and North Korea next. Russia and China want to win, not destroy the world. But Islam believes massive destruction is necessary to cause the Mahdi to arrive. Dying for that cause is an honor so death isn't a deterrent. That's a very dangerous mindset.
While critics focus on the bombing and its aftermath, the whole picture was a very aggressive Japan that invaded China and other SE Asian nations without provocation. It then mercilessly dealt with the civilian populations with unmatched brutality. They used their powerful armed forces to punish and subdue the defenseless civilian populations. To then whine about the devastation by two nuclear bombs because of the destruction of two cities within Japan is a false note from observers who appear content with the idea of massive casualties of US forces by this heavily entrenched enemy. This is the typical liberal focus on the victims without looking at why they became victims. The Japanese government had a duty to protect its citizens from harm. By attacking its neighbors and the United States, the Japanese government exposed those citizens to the extreme retribution from those they had attacked. The decision to firebomb Japanese cities and to drop atomic bombs was an appropriate conclusion to a predatory power with the least possible harm to our forces. That is the lesson of the end of WWII in the Pacific.
My dad was in the USN and assigned to PTO in September of 1945. Had the war not ended who knows what would have happened. Untold thousands upon thousands of Baby Boomers would not be here had the islands been invaded. I went through the museum in Hiroshima. Outside the memorial I practiced English with young Japanese school kids. I saw the prefecture trade center remains and walked on the "T" shaped bridge that was the bomb's aiming point. I know the cousin of Paul Tibbets and met a sailor from the USS Indianapolis. All that said: nobody with a shred of decency wanted the war. No one with a lick of sense wanted to die on some godforsaken, diseased island. But when insane totalitarians are in charge, a lot of people are going to die. And that evil is not just something that can be ignored or swept away. Evil must be stopped.
Russia is taking a beating right now. What's going on in Putin's mind? I've heard his subordinates and colleagues won't let him drop the big one and I've heard others want him to and he won't. I suspect many in Russia are thinking what the heck they constructed all of those nukes for if not for this right now. What nation would retaliate if Russia pressed the button? That development would be stunning.
Is it possible to determine whether the two bombs should have been dropped? Logically, numbers can be computed. The Japanese mind set can be identified. But thinking as Americans after the event, we cannot know whether the alternative of fighting it out on land and sea would have worked. And, as is often asked, at what cost? I am stunned again to realize that another million Americans might have died. It is not easy to make difficult calls in war. It is always easy to armchair quarterback. Perhaps, just once, we need to trust that no one wanted to drop bombs But even more, no one wanted more dead body bags to be delivered to parents and loved ones. Thank you Dr. Hanson for your excellent explanation. Your ability to think through situations present and past clearly is appreciated by many. Your family fought and died. Thank you for that, too.
Hello Victor and happy to see you recovering and staying healthy. As always, you and family are in my prayers. I thoroughly enjoyed your take on the nuke debate. My dad, step dad and uncle fought in WWII. Dad was a gunner on a liberty ship, stepdad fought on Saipan and got wounded on Tinian and my uncle was a submariner in the Pacific. All, thank God survived the war, however, to your point about the possibility of having to invade Japan, not sure they would have made it through. I am very concerned over the conflict in Iran. I support the president and pray that he and his administration make the correct decisions and bring this to a positive end for all concerned. The future of our country is at stake now and if the left wins congress and the white house, we are in very serious trouble.
good people sometimes invented bad weapons to stop far worse people from killing innocents. That's the problem to overcome. How to deal with those "far worse people"?
Excellent analysis, Mr.Hanson, as usual. Back in 1985 I worked with a Japanese man in a company in NYC. He had survived Hiroshima as a child and still bore the scars. That August I remember there was an exhibit in the Smithsonian which positioned the US as evil for the atomic bombing. I felt bad about what happened to my associate. BUT, my then future father was a 19 year old Marine stationed in the South Pacific and had fought in Iwo Jima and the Marshall Islands. He told us stories about witnessing the Kamikazes who were devoted to the Emperor and willingly sacrificed their own lives to destroy Americans. I realized that if we hadn't bombed those 2 Japanese cities, my futre father might never have returned home and 3 years later I would never have existed!!! Surviving War is what it's all about.
Even after the second bomb, we had to gamble that the Emperor's recorded call to surrender broadcast on the radio would work . . . it did, a horrendous gamble that paid off. We have no need to listen to ANY revisionist critic.
My dad fought in WWII in the battle of the Bulge. He survived but spoke very little about it. I found this intriguing history surrounding the dropping the two nuclear bombs in 1945 fascinating. I understand better how pivotal WWII was in creating the world as we know it. I did not realize how much more horrific the Pacific Theatre was in comparison to the others. Your valuable insight into the deterrence effect that nuclear bomb ownership had on world history explains why allowing Iran to have a nuclear bomb would be a huge mistake. Prevention versus cure is a calculation that is often lost in our current "compassion" addled society.
Hello, Victor. It seems LeMay was in some ways a hypocrite, because he decries the use of the bomb and yet was ready to sacrifice (what likely would have been) MORE Japanese lives AND American lives in a bombing campaign that would have cost America dearly. We seemed to forget that the Japanese Junta had no interest in stopping the war. Maybe they balked some in Okinawa, but they were certainly not going to surrender anytime soon. Fortunately for untold people whose descendants are alive today, we had leadership that understood that we had to hit them hard, overwhelmingly, and shockingly. If Colonel John Warden were alive at that time, he would have concurred (re: Rings of Power analysis) that the bomb quickly and with finality got at all five strategic rings of the Japanese in one fell stroke. The cost was high in terms of people, but it may have been higher without the bomb. OJ Dona, Lt Col, USAF (Retired)
All post-WW2 peace movements in the West, including those about nuclear weapons, aimed at victory for communists and their allies.
I am alive today because the Bomb was dropped and because my father did not die in the Sea of Japan. But Nuclear Apocalypse is like the rumblings of the thunderstorm which has not yet arrived. For if the storm finally hits, both the good and the evil will get wet.
While Truman became president upon the death of FDR, his reelection may very well indicate the voters in 1946 believe he did the rigtheous decision in dropping the bombs. As someone who may not have been born, had Truman succumbed to LeMay and others I must side with Truman's decision. My father was on a destroyer in the Pacific whose ship had already survived a kamikaze attempt. The odds of him and crew surviving an assault on Japan's mainland are unknowable. Professor Hanson's article provided even more justification than I had previously considered (the lives saved in Korea and China). Besides myself, I know VDH's father and uncle were in the Pacific during the war and may consider his life a result of dropping the bombs on the mainland.
Thank you Mr. Hanson! We needed to be reminded of historical context. This current generation, perhaps more than ever before, looks at history through a modern lens and falls short - ever denigrating the decisions of those who have preceded them, applying today's standards, mores etc. without full consideration of the situation they faced. May I also recommend an excellent PragerU video presented by a Catholic priest who concurs with your analysis and conclusion...that is was actually the moral thing to do in terms of lives saved. It is titled "Was it Wrong to Drop the Atom Bomb on Japan?" May God bless you with continued good health! Linda