Should the U.S. have dropped atomic bombs on Japan
Rob Long at Ricochet quotes from an interesting passage from Paul Fussell's Thank God for the Atom Bomb - a book I'll admit I haven't read - concerning his perspective as a member of the 45th Infantry Division, preparing for an invasion of Japan:
John Kenneth Galbraith is persuaded that the Japanese would have surrendered surely by November without an invasion. He thinks the A-bombs were unnecessary and unjustified because the war was ending anyway. The A-bombs meant, he says, â??a difference, at most, of two or three weeks.â? But at the time, with no indication that surrender was on the way, the kamikazes were sinking American vessels, the Indianapolis was sunk (880 men killed), and Allied casualties were running to over 7,000 per week. â??Two or three weeks,â? says Galbraith.Two weeks more means 14,000 more killed and wounded, three weeks more, 21,000. Those weeks mean the world if youâ??re one of those thousands - or related to one of them. During the time between the dropping of the Nagasaki bomb on August 9 and the actual surrender on the fifteenth, the war pursued its accustomed course: on the twelfth of August eight captured American fliers were executed (heads chopped off); the fifty-first United States submarine, Bonefish, was sunk (all aboard drowned); the destroyer Callaghan went down, the seventieth to be sunk, and the Destroyer Escort Underhill was lost.
Thatâ??s a bit of what happened in six days of the two or three weeks posited by Galbraith. What did he do in the war? He worked in the Office of Price Administration in Washington. I donâ??t demand that he experience having his ass shot off. I merely note that he didnâ??t.
There have been scads of papers and essays on this topic over the years, but I'm interested in what the Compass readership thinks. Let's set aside the question of the individual moral decisions made along the pathway to the atom bomb's deployment - lest we get into Jon Stewart territory and start calling American heroes war criminals - and just pose this question: should America apologize for dropping the bomb?
(For context's sake: we didn't last year.)
