How I Learned to Stop Worrying and etc.

I'm not sure I agree with the argument I make below.  Take this as a writing exercise.  I wanted to see if I could articulate this stance and whether doing so would clarify my thinking.  I don't know that it has. I do know that the writing is a little stiff.

But if it *is* true that the use of the bombs saved many hundreds of thousands of other lives in the months that followed, this seems like a valid line of thinking.  The real problem (one not addressed here at all) is this:  how do we understand (even forgive) the horrors of the past without giving license to the future?

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A few thoughts on the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a propos of a recent personal discussion.

Obviously, bombing civilians is an awful thing and should not be done. This principle should guide us as we act in the present and plan for the future. But we do wrong by the past when we look at the atomic bombings and judge them purely in hindsight.

It's far from clear that Imperial Japan was ready to surrender. The "tottering Empire" myth shaped most condemnations of the bomb from the sixties until recently, but it has begun to give way. (The Soviets were fond of this line, but they had their own reasons.) Richard Frank's Downfall: the End of the Imperial Japanese Empire makes a strong case that Japan was far from finished, and I think most historians have taken his view as a necessary correction.

More to the point, Truman and company had no reason to *believe* that Japan was getting close to surrender. At the end of the war in Europe, Germany was in worse economic and military shape than Japan a few weeks later, and it still took fighting in the streets of Berlin before the Germans gave up. The Japanese were still fiercely loyal to the Emperor, with little popular resentment or expression of war weariness. (In Germany there was visible civilian cynicism about Hitler as early as 1944, but there seems not to have been any such cynicism in Japan.) The Japanese government put out no feelers of surrender, and were in fact accelerating their brutality towards POWs and conquered civilians--hardly the behavior of a country that expected to be negotiating as the losers any time soon.

The Americans in the summer of 1945 looked at Japan and knew that an invasion would be necessary in order to eliminate and replace (rather than merely contain and humiliate) the Japanese regime. They knew that invasion would be insanely costly in terms of American lives (not to mention Japanese lives, but of course no one did). The spectacle of an all-but-defeated Germany resisting the Russians at tremendous cost was really the only model at hand. No one welcomes the hated invader, even when defeat is inevitable.

In short, after four years of grinding slaughter in the Pacific, Truman faced the choice: he could launch a months-long invasion in which hundreds of thousands of American boys would die or be maimed, or he could use the new super-weapons and possibly end the war in a few days at the cost of no American lives. We can criticize the nature of the targets, but civilian targets were an established feature of the war as a whole to this point, not of the atom bombs particularly. (We had already been routinely fire-bombing Axis cities at higher civilian cost than Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By the end of the war, such attacks were routine.  They would have continued for months as the invasion approached.)

Ultimately the bombs saved more lives (on both sides) than they cost. Hirohito later said (unless this is myth--it's not my specialty) that the spectacle of the bombs was the only thing that allowed him to plausibly surrender, and that he could not have capitulated simply in the face of invasion. It can be argued, too, that the actual employment of the only two nuclear weapons in existence gave the world a view of horror that is responsible for preventing employment of the thousands of weapons that followed. Without Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Korean war (or Cuba or Vietnam) would almost certainly have gone atomic, and there were many more bombs available then.

Obviously we should take the case of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, viewed in hindsight, into all of our thinking about choices we make now and in the future. But we shouldn't (as Walser, whom I really respect, unfortunately does, and as Rawls apparently does too) mistake our ethical calculus for a comprehensive understanding and judgment of historical choices. Real experience is too messy and too fraught for that. I believe that Truman and the allies opted for the lesser of necessary evils as they understood them.

I suspect that not a few of my friends disagree here, particularly those leaning farthest left.  But I think the fault line is not essentially about the use of force, but about the use of historical experience, of hindsight.  To understand the use of the A-bombs in the circumstances of 1945 is not to condone the use of WMDs in the present or the future.  It's difficult to imagine how a leader today might come to face precisely the same choice that Truman did at that time.  Were they to do so, however, it is difficult to imagine how they could make a different choice.