American Exceptionalism and the A-Bomb

One of the more sickening rituals of the American mainstream media rolls around every August, when the anniversaries of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are observed. Today, as they do every year, newspapers across the nation will gravely remind us that another year has passed since the bombing of Hiroshima. Much will be made of the fact that today marks the 65th anniversary of the bombing – the media likes anniversaries that end in fives or zeroes – and the fact that, for the first time, an American delegation is scheduled to attend a memorial ceremony in the Japanese city. The actual attack of August 6, 1945 will be relegated to a brief summary, ending with the solemn reassurance that, whatever unpleasantness resulted, the bomb “ended the war quickly” and may have “saved up to a million American lives.” It’s almost enough to make one forget that it also killed 140,000 men, women, and children, some incinerated in the initial blast, others blinded and horrifically burned, left to die from radiation poisoning. Then the U.S. did it all over again three days later, killing 80,000 more in Nagasaki.

If those last sentences sound harsh, it is only because it is rare to read the human toll of the atomic bombings acknowledged starkly, without excuses or a qualifying statement of some sort. It’s always “Hundreds of thousands died, but we saved millions more.” Or: “Hundreds of thousands died, but we had to end the war quickly.” Or: “Hundreds of thousands died, but the Japanese were going to fight to the death. There was no other way.” While that may be a comforting thought, a look at scholarship on the subject demonstrates that there were most definitely other ways. They simply weren’t tried.

The scenario facing America’s wartime leaders during the summer of 1945 has been pitched as a choice between dropping the atomic bombs or launching a full-scale invasion of Japan. While that sort of impossible decision may be appealing from a public relations standpoint, making the destruction wreaked by the bombs more palatable to the American public, these were not the only options available. Indeed, the much-dreaded invasion of Japan was not inevitable and may not have even been necessary.

As Howard Zinn revealed in his A People’s History of the United States, the U.S. leadership was highly aware that – far from fighting to the last man – Japan’s surrender was imminent. Blockaded, its navy and air force decimated, its army forced to conscript civilians into irregular units, there was no way out for Japan’s militarist leaders, and they knew it. The U.S. government knew it, too. The Americans had been intercepting and decoding Japanese messages, and were aware that Japan had sought help from the Soviet Union to mediate a negotiated peace with the Allies. But the U.S. insisted on an “unconditional surrender,” and there would be no negotiations.

The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, cited by Zinn, makes the situation abundantly clear. Commissioned to assess the effectiveness of the military’s bombing campaigns, the Survey released shortly after the war a report on the atomic attacks, which read in part:

“Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”

Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, who served as Chief of Staff under President Truman, later wrote in his memoirs, I Was There:

“It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons. The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”

The oft-repeated claim that an invasion of Japan would have cost between half a million and one million American lives has likewise been debunked. Professor Barton J. Bernstein of Stanford University, writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, drew attention to the fact that it wasn’t until after the war that government officials started producing such large casualty figures. In his article A Postwar Myth: 500,000 U.S. Lives Saved, Bernstein points out that during the war, U.S. military strategists openly rejected those projected losses: “In fact, in early June 1945, when a layman suggested such a high number as a half million dead, army planners bluntly replied in a secret report: ‘[such an] estimated loss . . . is entirely too high.’”

The Joint War Plans Committee, charged with drawing up invasion plans, estimated between 25,000 and 46,000 U.S. deaths depending on the particular invasion scenario – at its high end still not even a tenth of the 500,000 American lives that Truman would later claim to have saved, and nowhere near the one million that would soon enter the popular lexicon. Why the discrepancy? In his article, Bernstein postulated why the figures grew so inflated in the years after the bombings:

“Perhaps in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Truman developed a need to exaggerate the number of U.S. lives that the bombs might have saved by possibly helping render the invasions unnecessary. It is probably true, as he contended repeatedly, that he never lost any sleep over his decision. Believing ultimately in the myth of 500,000 lives saved may have been a way of concealing ambivalence, even from himself. The myth also helped deter Americans from asking troubling questions about the use of the atomic bombs.”

Bernstein’s last statement makes clear why we do not often hear about the contents of these military reports, which strike down the foundational myths of the pro-bomb crowd: that Japan was not willing to surrender, that an invasion was necessary to compel that surrender, and that the human costs of such an invasion would have been in the millions. When these myths are shattered, the case for the bomb crumbles.

There are some who, totally convinced of the righteousness of the atomic slaughter, will blissfully disregard such information. Rather than acknowledge the truth, they will reassure themselves that war is hell, that civilian casualties are inevitable, and that the bombings cut short a terrible war and ultimately saved more lives in the long run. One can only ask of such people, at what price? If one can justify the incineration of two hundred thousand innocent people on the grounds of winning a war quickly, what then cannot be justified? Where does one draw the line?

One soon realizes that no such line exists. If the suffering in Hiroshima and Nagasaki can be justified as a matter of necessity, then any atrocity can be justified, regardless of the scale of death and destruction involved, because those committing the atrocities invariably view themselves alone as exceptional and their actions as necessary. Defenders of the bomb would no doubt scoff at the prospect of comparing American atrocities to those committed by the Germans or Japanese – the perpetrators were Americans, after all, their country unique among the nations, and therefore inherently incapable of doing wrong. Yet the murder of innocent people remains an outrage, no matter the nationality of the murderers. Such atrocities cannot be justified; they can only be condemned. The only rational response is to denounce the murder of innocents on all sides. It is a universal standard, applicable to all peoples and nations – and America is no exception.