On August 6 th, 1945, a B 29 bomber flew over the Japanese city of Hiroshima and dropped one bomb. A second later, a nuclear explosion killed eighty thousand Japanese people in an instant. The nuclear age had begun.
Hundreds of thousands more Japanese would eventually die from burns, shocks, radiation poisoning, and other effects of the Hiroshima bomb. Similar incidents would follow in the bomb in Nagasaki a few days after the second was dropped. Soon the emperor of Japan called his army and people to surrender.
Almost from the moment the clouds of nuclear explosions dissipated, a debate ensued around the question: Was the atomic bombardment of the two Japanese states necessary? In an article for the Wall Street Journal, Warren Kozak provides an analysis of the divide between those who say yes and those who hold no.
“Today, Hiroshima has become the Rorschach test of Americans. We see the same images and hear the same facts. But depending on how we consider the country, the government, the world, we interpret these facts very differently.”
Indeed, the facts point to the inevitable conclusion that the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was necessary to prevent an invasion that would have claimed millions of lives, Japanese and Allied. Even with the nuclear bombings, things were close to being run. A group of Japanese military officers tried to abduct the Emperor so that he would not make him surrender.
To understand why the United States turned to the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we need to look at the Battle of Okinawa, which took place from March to June of 1945. To call Okinawa a bloodbath is putting it mildly. By the end of the battle, 12,000 Americans had been killed on the battlefield so far in the War on Terror. 11,000 Japanese killed almost the entire garrison. Civilian death estimates range from 40,000 to 145,000.
American military advisers extrapolated the disaster Okinawa had suffered and projected what would happen in the planned invasion of Japan. The cost estimate imposed on Japan eventually horrified even its most hardened military leaders.
Such things as the military plans for the invasion of Japan seem like madness to those who have examined them for decades. The use of nuclear bombs as a military weapon and even poison gas was seriously considered. Even without those weapons of mass destruction, the Invasion of Japan would have been the bloodiest battle in the world. history
Fortunately, the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki provided the shock that was needed to induce the Japanese emperor to call his people “tolerable” and surrender. Thus Japan emerged from the war as a defeated country, but still a land and not a waste.
Nineteen and twenty old soldiers, both American and allied, collected from the Europeans fighting on the shores of the invasion of Japan or sheltering in fences dug in Japan, already married, have families and civil careers. Children grow up and have children of their own. The generation in 1945 and early 1946 did not die.
Looked at another way, Hiroshima and Nagasaki prevented another Holocaust that would have brought down the curtain of World War II, and ever since to be flattered
Source: Hiroshima Rorschach Test, Warren Kozak, Wall Street Journal, August 6th, 2009
