Hiroshima and the abyss
Why the great US military commanders opposed the atomic bombings as unnecessary and unconscionable
By July of 1945, the Manhattan Project had produced two kinds of atomic bomb. One, known as a “Fat Man”, was filled with plutonium. The other — a “Little Boy” — was uranium-based. On 6 August, a Little Boy was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima during the morning rush-hour. As the great historian John Keegan remarked, at Hiroshima “man stared more or less universal destruction in the face.” As children walked to school with their parents and people bicycled to work, 64 kilograms of uranium was detonated 2,000 feet above their heads. Between 70,000 and 80,000 people were killed instantly by the blast. The bodies of many left charcoal shadows ingrained on the streets. Others were incinerated by agonising whole-body burns. Many thousands more died in the following days from terrible burns and radiation sickness. Although leading government figures in Japan argued for imminent surrender, the army’s senior leadership, not understanding the sheer extent of the catastrophe, insisted that the fight would continue. The United States thus dropped a Fat Man on Nagasaki on 9 August, killing a further 70,000 people.
At its conclusion, between 135,000 and 230,000 people had been killed, the overwhelming majority of them civilians. The annihilation was indiscriminate: the policeman and the soldier were not distinguished from the baby in her cot. Indeed, the unbearable and shocking destruction of human life in flourishing cities was the entire point of using these weapons. It is broadly accepted that the bombings were a horrible, but ultimately justified, means of ending the terrible war in the Pacific against a doggedly determined enemy. However, when we look closer we discover not only that the moral justification for using such weapons was absent, but also that deeper motives underlay the decision to use them. At its heart, using the deliberate mass annihilation of civilian lives as an instrument of war revealed a startling diminishment in Western moral integrity. Furthermore, it presaged the rise of a new standard “utilitarian” rubric that has only risen in power and prevalence since.
The reigning orthodoxy on this episode holds that the decision was necessary in order to force Japanese surrender. By forestalling further military bloodshed, the bombs “saved more lives” than they destroyed. Defenders of this view argue that the impending Allied invasion of the Japanese mainland, planned for November 1945, was bound to inflict colossal casualties, with some estimates reaching — somewhat arbitrarily — into the millions. The bombs, it is contended, were a timely prevention of untold Allied and Japanese losses. The problem with this account, however, is that it is simply untrue: it is historically inaccurate and morally absurd.
The senior US military commanders were almost unanimous in their opposition to the bombings. Douglas Macarthur, Dwight Eisenhower and William Leahy, the great leaders of the Allied war effort, argued that the use of atomic weaponry was militarily pointless and morally impermissible. By August 1945, Japan was on the absolute brink of surrender. Chief of US Army Air Forces, Henry Arnold, observed eleven days after the destruction of Hiroshima: “The Japanese position was hopeless even before the first atomic bomb fell, because the Japanese had lost control of their own air.” Indeed, five months previously, Tokyo had been firebombed mercilessly, killing 100,000 civilians with impunity. By August, the military effects of the Allies’ total air superiority had become acute. More importantly still, US intelligence agencies had broken the Japanese codes and knew by early August that the looming Soviet declaration of war on Japan had terrified the Hirohito government, which was trying to negotiate a preemptive surrender through Moscow. As the eminent US historian Gar Alperovitz observes, the Japanese leadership had become accustomed to the aerial annihilation of its cities at the hands of US bombers: what it feared far more profoundly was the comprehensive destruction of its military through an aggressive land invasion of the Red Army. The Soviet Union formally declared war on Japan two days after the bombing of Hiroshima. Although the Japanese government was shocked by the new power displayed in the bombs, the true extent of the devastation was not understood fully in the chaos of those days. The Hiroshima bombing was not by itself sufficient to effect an immediate national surrender. Indeed, the Japanese military leadership was callously unfazed by it. Rather, it was on the impending doom of the Red invasion — and the sheer aggression of the initial Russian assault into Manchuria on 9 August — that the surrender was truly predicated. The critical point is that — before the bomb was dropped — Japanese surrender was already being negotiated to avert a Soviet invasion. The Allies, led by the might of American military power, had attrited the Japanese nation to the brink of certain defeat. The imminent Soviet entrance into the war meant not only definitive military annihilation, but also the looming prospect of the Japanese nation yielding permanently to the partial or total dominance of Stalinist Moscow. This fear was understood by all sides in the summer of 1945.
The US leadership knew beyond doubt in early August that the Japanese government was seeking surrender, and that complete military superiority had been established. It was a matter of weeks before victory would be declared. Hence, seven out of the eight senior US military commanders opposed the nuclear bombings. As Alperovitz notes, these officers were, for the most part, conservatives and not liberals. Admiral William Leahy, Truman’s chief of staff, wrote in his 1950 memoir I Was There: “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.… In being the first to use it, we…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.”
General Dwight Eisenhower objected to the use of these weapons on the same grounds as Leahy. When notified by the US Secretary of War of Truman’s decision to use atomic weapons, he “voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.”
With its most senior military commanders insisting on the absence of a military requirement to use nuclear weapons against Japanese cities, the decision can only be explained by deeper, masked motivations. The war was very obviously in its closing act. Indeed, it was in the US leadership’s very awareness that the war was approaching its finale that the explanation for the bombings truly lay. By August of 1945, the outline of the coming post-war peace was starkly apparent. At the Yalta Conference of February 1945, at which the futures of the liberated European nations were decided, important concessions had been made to Stalin. Soviet troops, having routed the German army back to Berlin from Stalingrad, now occupied much of Germany and Eastern Europe. By March, Stalin had already reneged on his promise to honour Polish free elections. It was clear that Eastern Europe was to soon become solidified under de facto Soviet control. A year later, Churchill delivered his famous speech declaring that an “iron curtain” had fallen across Eastern Europe, marking the outset of the Cold War. Indeed, it was George Orwell in his brilliant essay of October 1945, You and the Atomic Bomb, who applied the term “cold war” to the emerging superpower stand-off. He foresaw “the prospect of two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds, dividing the world between them.” Orwell observed that this state of endless colossal tension would “put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a ‘peace that is no peace’.” With unique clarity he foretold that the coming post-war “peace” would be defined by permanently juxtaposed civilisational camps, each backed not only by immense conventional military strength but also by terrible weapons of unfathomable power.1
It was in this context — of Stalin’s tightening grip on Eastern Europe and the unveiling of a new global stand-off — that the decision to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki was made. Almost immediately after learning that a Fat Man had been tested successfully in July 1945, Truman “casually” informed Stalin, who replied with affected nonchalance but privately applied pressure to his own scientific chiefs, demanding that development be accelerated. Atomic weaponry was thus aligned from the very start with the new imperative to contain and intimidate Soviet imperial ambitions. Importantly, US concern in 1945 over Stalin’s rapid consolidation of power in Eastern Europe was coupled with the more immediate fear that the impending Soviet entry into the war in the Pacific would foreshadow long-standing Red influence, even outright imperial dominance, in East Asia. And hence the capacity for new, singularly destructive technology to provide a form of high-octane diplomatic intimidation at this crucial waypoint in history was of great strategic importance.
Even prior to the successful testing of the bombs, Secretary of State James Byrnes argued that they should be used precisely in order to dominate the coming post-war stalemate. Leo Szilard, a Manhattan Project scientist, stated in May 1945 that “[Byrnes] was concerned about Russia’s postwar behavior…[and thought] that Russia might be more manageable if impressed by American military might, and that a demonstration of the bomb might impress Russia.” It is therefore clear from the historical records that, for America’s political and strategic chiefs, the atomic weaponry was understood to be an instrument with which the approaching post-war order could be sculpted. This strategic imperative was not cited explicitly during the decision-making discussions with military commanders. Indeed, why would Truman and his political aides speak brazenly of such motives in front of conservative senior officers who already took profound moral exception to the prospect of using these weapons for purely military purposes? Yet it is clear that America’s leaders, including Truman, viewed the new bombs as tools of ultimate deterrence in the new counter-Soviet paradigm that, within the American strategic rubric, had already overshadowed the inevitable military defeat of Japan.
Moreover, it was argued by prominent commanders and officials that the lower, more practical motivations of politics were at work, too. Truman, some contended, was under pressure to demonstrate to the American public — and to the taxpayer — the fruits of the Manhattan Project, which cost a staggering $2 billion. Further, many argued that, whilst the weapons had been tested in the desert, the scientists (and politicians) were eager to test the effects of atomic weapons on infrastructure — and on people. Admiral William Halsey declared: “It was a mistake.... [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it.” Indeed, a long-standing US project in Japan measured the effects over time of radiation on the surviving victims, illustrating a form of experimental, cold-hearted scientism that seems to have revolved near the core of the entire endeavour. Although not in themselves sufficient explanations for the decision, it stands to reason that the refusal to use new hard-earned weapons would in fact have been viewed as wasted opportunity, time and money not only by the architects of the Manhattan Project but also by a multitude of broader Western critics. Such considerations are perennial features of politics and human nature. It is foolish to disregard them.
Yet the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is explained finally by a moral and intellectual decline that had been at work in the West for decades, even centuries. The utilitarian philosophical rubric of John Stuart Mill is the standard moral apparatus used to justify the bombings. His doctrine states that, in accordance with the principle of “the greatest good for the greatest number”, a scientific calculation in lives and suffering will illuminate the best course of action. On Mill’s account, it is worth harming five people in order to save ten people, for example. As we have seen, even if we accept Mill’s radical utilitarian logic, the military leaders were almost unanimous in insisting on the military pointlessness of the bombings: they were not in fact projected to save more lives than they would take. But even if we consider a hypothetical situation in which they did save lives overall, we still find that the action was morally wicked. What of the distinction between combatants and non-combatants, let alone that between grown men and children on their way to school? This matters not only in military law but — more importantly — in the moral principles of the just war that underpin it. These principles are rooted in our specifically Christian heritage. It is unacceptable and downright evil to intentionally kill hundreds of thousands of civilians in order try and spare the lives of combatants. Such actions both invert and subvert the relationship between combatants and civilians. The former ought to protect the latter. Which civilised person could accept, for example, that the enemy’s families be shot on sight so that its soldiers can be demoralised on the frontline? Such a policy would indeed have provable military effect; but it breaches the moral law. It should simply never be done under any circumstances — and there are neither exceptions nor qualifications to such principles. It is rotten, serpentine, sophistic thought that convinces men there are innate “ifs” and “buts” built into the rudimentary moral laws of our existence.
And so it is with nuclear annihilation, the logic of which pretends that the lives and sufferings of innocents may be used as cruel means to strategic ends. Such thought is the inevitable result of the revolutionary utilitarian model, which has become embedded at the heart of Western civilisation, supplanting and warping the Christian doctrine of our ancestors. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the most shocking and abhorrent examples of Mill’s corrupt, absurd pseudo-morality in practice.
Far above the question of military necessity, it was through their refusal to accept the tyrannical modern notion of ends justifying means that Douglas Macarthur, William Leahy and Dwight Eisenhower were ultimately united. Tragically, these great men were defeated by the underlying motives of their political masters, who were beholden to the allure of the liberal’s moral sophistry — the same sophistry that has since become the default moral code of our civilisation.
The Soviet Union tested its first nuclear weapon in 1949; but its atomic programme was well underway by 1945. The eventual success of its programme was a known inevitability.