Why would a leader decide to drop a nuclear bomb? Almost three weeks into Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, with still no end in sight, it’s a question that hasn’t felt so urgent since the outbreak of the Cold War. When asked recently whether the possibility of Russia using nuclear weapons was a “real concern” for the British government, Michael Gove replied: “Yes.”
But the answer is not so simple. Nuclear bombs have been dropped in conflict just once, in August 1945, by the United States. The horrific scenes of destruction and human suffering in Hiroshima and Nagasaki — and a death toll estimated to be about 200,000 civilians — provoked widespread condemnation. The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in the New York Times that the bombings were “morally indefensible”. Even hardened military figures were aghast. “We had adopted the ethical stand common to the barbarians in the Dark Ages,” grieved Admiral William Leahy, the US’s highest-ranking military commander.
Years later, the former Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower told Newsweek: “It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing”. It was a comment that alluded to the military tactics behind the decision, which are separate from the more emotive philosophical debate over the morality of dropping the bomb. What does it mean for it to be “necessary” to drop a nuclear weapon? If it wasn’t necessary, then why did the US government — indeed, why would any government — willingly inflict such pain and suffering on civilians if there was a legitimate alternative path to peace?
The man who made the decision, Harry Truman, gave a lecture in 1959 to Columbia University students about the powers of the presidency. The talk was described as “earnest, good-humoured, and sometimes salty”, and was well-received by the 1,200-strong audience. But during the question and answer session, things took a more serious turn. A student thought it was odd that Truman had skirted over the nuclear question. When confronted with it, the usually good-natured Truman became a touch defensive:
“It was used in the war, and for your information, there were more people killed by the fire bombs in Tokyo than dropping of the atomic bombs accounted for. It was merely another powerful weapon in the arsenal of righteousness. The dropping of the bombs stopped the war, saved millions of lives”.
This is the orthodox view: dropping nuclear bombs saved lives. In this telling, the Japanese were not prepared to surrender, meaning the US and Soviet Union had two choices. They could either launch a land invasion, something on the scale of the D-Day landings in France, in which an estimated million US soldiers alone would be lost. Or they could prevent such a bloody undertaking by shocking the Japanese leadership into capitulation.
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