Today marks the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. It came three days after the first military use of the bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945.
Despite all those years, the debate continues about whether the United States should have deployed its atomic bombs against Japan. The traditional view says that the bombs saved thousands, perhaps millions, of both Japanese and American lives by forcing an earlier Japanese surrender.
One common revisionist view argues that Japan was already defeated and blockaded, and President Harry S. Truman used the bomb, not to defeat Japan, but to deter the Soviet Union from expanding. Japan would have given up earlier, except for the Allied demand for “unconditional surrender.”
Truman made the decision to use the atomic bomb on Japan. He took the responsibility then and later. The sign on his desk said, “The buck stops here,” and he meant it.
But suppose Truman had decided not to use the bomb against Japan, an aggressive empire that had attacked the United States without warning on Dec. 7, 1941. What would have happened?
Take the bomb out of the equation, and his realistic choices were to blockade Japan while continuing the conventional bombing, or invasion.
Conventional bombing was at least as lethal as the atomic bombs. The fire-bombing of Tokyo on March 10, 1945, killed more than 100,000 people, as compared to 65,000 killed in the Hiroshima blast.
Little was known then about poisoning, cancers, birth defects and other effects of radioactivity – so little that Americans were subjected to radiation as bombs were tested on our soil during the 1950s and 60s. In light of 1945 knowledge, there was no legitimate humanitarian argument in favor of continued conventional bombing.
Strategists of the time worried about how long a bombed and blockaded Japan might hold out, and we Americans are not a patient people. Public pressure for an invasion would have mounted by the day.
The military favored an invasion, starting that November at Kyushu, the southernmost of the Japanese islands. Gen. George C. Marshall, chief of staff, estimated 31,000 American casualties in the first 30 days after a landing. Adm. Ernest J. King, citing the terrible struggle for Okinawa, estimated 41,000 dead and wounded in the first month. Adm. Chester Nimitz predicted 49,000 – 7,000 more than the first 30 days after the Normandy landing. Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s staff estimated 50,000.
Pentagon planners estimated the overall cost of a Japanese invasion at 220,000 casualties, and Secretary of War Henry Stimson, in the words of Truman biographer David McCullough, “was certain the Japanese would fight as never before,” and “American dead and wounded could reach a million.”
Suppose Truman had foregone the bomb, and ordered the invasion. It likely would have meant at least a year of bloody, brutal fighting.
The atomic bomb was as secret as any enterprise that large could have been, but eventually someone in the know would have looked at the mounting casualties and spoken out: “Despite the deaths of thousands of American boys, President Truman refuses to use a powerful secret super-bomb that could force Japan’s immediate surrender.”
How would he have answered that? He might have said he would not discuss military secrets. Or that the powerful secret weapon was just too horrible to use on the same nation that had massacred 300,000 people at Nanking in 1937-38.
Neither sounds like an answer that the American public would have accepted, and Truman was a public servant.
He ordered the Hiroshima bombing. Nagasaki followed, in accordance with military plans but without specific presidential orders. One more bomb was available, but Truman forbade its use without his express permission, for he was horrified by its effects. Japan surrendered on Aug. 14.
Truman made the right decision in accordance with his first priority – minimizing American casualties while forcing Japan to surrender. Any other course would have required fortune-telling, and tends to reflect a modern fantasy that restraint would have somehow averted the nuclear age. After 60 years, the debate should be over.
But of course it isn’t, and perhaps that’s for the best. There are some things we have to ponder from time to time, depressing as they may be, and the Hiroshima and Nagasaki anniversaries serve that purpose.
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
