In this post historian Philip Jenkins seeks to justify the nuclear attacks on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima & Nagasaki 75 years ago writing: “Was the United States right to use the bombs? I think so.” Jenkins goes further and believes that it “saved a great many lives, far more than it cost.”

Now taking on a historian of Jenkins calibre is a bit of a daunting thing to do especially for an amateur such as myself.-So I’m mostly going to draw on the expert historical work of Alex Wellerstein, a historian of science and nuclear weapons and a professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology and some chap called Sir Max Hastings. I’ll throw in a few thoughts of my own along the way.

Civilians vs Soldiers?

One of the first things we need to consider as we think through war from a distinctly Christian perspective is that there are better ways and worse ways of conducting a war. For example, rape has routinely been used as a weapon of war. The Japanese armies in China during the Second World War were particularly awful for this and as a result have been rightly condemned. No Christian should ever justify that and instead see that abusers (even from amongst your own soldiers) are prosecuted. The simple point is this: the end does not justify the means.

For me, the key issue here is the indiscriminate nature of the weaponry and the evolution of tactics in the Second World War that broadened their scope to include civilian targets. Instead, we should distinguish between legitimate military targets and civilian targets and restrict the use of indiscriminate weapons. A land mine, for example, can not tell if the person who steps on it is a child (quite likely) or a soldier. And nuclear bombs did not distinguish between Japanese children or grandmothers from Japanese soldiers and military bases.

Military historian Sir Max Hastings says of Winston Churchill,

Go back and look at Churchill’s speech in a debate in the House of Commons on air raid precautions in 1937 when Churchill had opted for the high moral ground about bombing. He said, in a war, the nation which sticks to bombing military and industrial targets and does not target innocent civilians is almost certainly not only going to emerge morally purer but is also more likely to emerge victorious than the nation which simply slaughters civilians. He said this in 1937.

http://ww2history.com/experts/Max_Hastings/The_Nuclear_Bomb

Churchill was right but by 1942 he had changed his mind and the bombing of German cities began in earnest.

I would argue that any military mission that explicitly targets civilians, and I would include things like the Blitz and the bombing of Dresden or the firebombing of Japanese cities which Jenkins says ’caused no obvious moral qualms’ in the US to be morally questionable at best. Although Jenkins thinks that the nuclear bombs saved Japanese lives I think he is still open to the charge that he weighs up the lives of Japanese children and finds them to be of less value than that of American soldiers.

Was Hiroshima a military target?

Jenkins puts the bombing raid this way:

Seventy-five years ago this month, US forces attacked one of Japan’s prime military targets. In a single air attack on the headquarters of the Second General Army, the US killed upward of ten thousand Japanese soldiers and military personnel, possibly twenty thousand. In terms of damage inflicted on combatant enemy forces in a single day, that was one of the great achievements of modern military history.

Wellerstein points out though that the US had avoided conventional bombing of this ‘military target’

The city of Hiroshima was chosen as a first target for the atomic bomb because it had not yet been bombed during the war (and in fact had been “preserved” from conventional bombing so that it could be atomic bombed), because the scientific and military advisors wanted to emphasize the power of the bomb. By using it on an ostensibly “military” target (they used scare quotes themselves!), “located in a much larger area subject to blast damage,” they hoped both to avoid looking bad if the bombing was somewhat off-target (as the Nagasaki bombing was), and so that the debut of the atomic bomb was “sufficiently spectacular” that its importance would be recognized not only by the Japanese, but the world at large.

http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2015/08/03/were-there-alternatives-to-the-atomic-bombings/

Not only that but in a radio address of August 9th 1945 to the nation, President Truman said,

The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians. But that attack is only a warning of things to come. If Japan does not surrender, bombs will have to be dropped on her war industries and, unfortunately, thousands of civilian lives will be lost. I urge Japanese civilians to leave industrial cities immediately, and save themselves from destruction.

http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2018/01/19/purely-military-target/

Now, Truman was displaying either ignorance or dishonesty here. Hiroshima was not a military base but a major city that had a base. And only 10% of those who died were military personnel and so they absolutely did not try to avoid the killing of citizens. Truman also warns of further bombs, knowing what the American public did not, that they had already dropped a second one on the city of Nagasaki that day.

So the US avoided attacking this city with conventional bombs in order to attack it with atomic ones knowing full well that the damage would be widespread because if they missed the target they would still destroy it anyway.

Japanese surrender?

Jenkins rebuts the whole idea that Japan was about to surrender regardless making the dropping of the nuclear bombs a pointless exercise in destruction. He says,

Based on the evidence available at the time, that statement about potential surrender was neither accurate, or close to accurate, and it would not be upheld by many reputable historians today…Much of the confusion involves the definition of terms like “surrender.” The Japanese did indeed float various schemes to end the war, but on terms that were totally unacceptable to any Allied power.

Actually unacceptable to the Americans.

No lesser figures than Winston Churchill and the US Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, had appealed to President Truman to clarify that the Emperor would be allowed to stay on board in a symbolic role. Truman rebuffed them, at the encouragement of his Secretary of State, James Byrnes, believing, it seems, that the perfidy of Pearl Harbor required them to grovel.

http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2015/08/03/were-there-alternatives-to-the-atomic-bombings/

Now I don’t think the Japanese were about to surrender but they did know that the war was lost. As Max Hastings points out,

On the unnecessary point I think one can certainly say that it’s overwhelmingly likely that Japan was going to be defeated, it was just a question of when. One can also see that with the Russian Armies about to sweep into Manchuria and with Japanese industry on its knees because of the strength of the submarine blockade, and finally the terrific fire bombing attack, one can say that there’s no doubt at all that Japan’s doom was sealed. So nobody can possibly argue that it was necessary to the defeat of Japan to drop the bombs.

http://ww2history.com/experts/Max_Hastings/The_Nuclear_Bomb

This contradicts Jenkins’ claim that “No atomic bombs, no Japanese surrender.”

What the Japanese wanted was to secure better terms for Japan and to some generals, it seemed that death was better than humiliation. But ‘unconditional surrender’ was the Allied mantra. Yet if the justification is to save lives as Jenkins claims, then you consider other options. But it was saving American lives and crushing Japan that mattered.

How many lives saved?

Jenkins argues that the alternatives were worse and that millions of Japanese lives were saved along with American lives. He is derisory against the idea that invasion would have costed tens of thousands of lives.

The sometimes quoted estimate of 30-40,000 U.S. fatalities resulting from such an invasion is a joke, a figure cooked to persuade the administration that General MacArthur should be allowed to get away with a piece of monstrous stupidity.

Jenkins instead reckons lives saved is more like tens of millions.

When we consider the toll of not dropping the bombs, we must remember the millions of civilians who were actually dying under Japanese occupation in China and Indonesia throughout 1945, and we should continue counting the deaths that would have occurred at that rate through 1946. Nothing was going to stop that, short of the total destruction of Japanese war-making capacity. Add to this the murder of all Allied POWs in Japanese hands, as the Japanese had ordered in the event of a direct attack on the mainland. Put those figures together, together with likely Japanese fatalities, you get about ten million dead – and that’s a conservative figure.

Wellerstein on the other hand as no time for this kind of inflation estimation:

While we are on the subject, we should note that many of the casualty estimates on the invasion have become grossly inflated after the war ended. The estimates that the generals accepted at the time, and related to Truman, were that there would be on the order of tens of thousands of American casualties from a full invasion (and casualties include the injured, not just the dead). That’s nothing to scoff at, but it’s not the hundreds of thousands to even millions of deaths that have sometimes been invoked. Be wary of this kind of counterfactual casualty estimation, especially when it is done in the service of a conclusion that is already agreed upon. It’s easy to imagine the worst-case scenarios that didn’t happen, and to use these to justify the awful things that did happen. This is bad reasoning, and a bad approach to moral thinking — it is a particularly insidious form of “ends justify the means” reasoning which can justify damned near anything in the name of imaginative alternatives.

http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2020/06/09/what-journalists-should-know-about-the-atomic-bombings/

Bombs vs Invasion?

Jenkins paints the decision to drop the bombs as being seen beforehand as a way of ending the war because the only other option was invasion or devastation through firebombing and that was worse. Again Wellerstein rebuts that kind of thinking.

Part of the “decision” narrative above is the idea that there were only two choices: use the atomic bombs, or have a bloody land-invasion of Japan. This is another one of those clever rhetorical traps created in the postwar to justify the atomic bombings, and if you accept its framing then you will have a hard time concluding that the atomic bombings were a good idea or not. And maybe that’s how you feel about the bombings — it’s certainly a position one can take — but let’s be clear: this framing is not how the planners at the time saw the issue.

The plan was to bomb and to invade, and to have the Soviet invade, and to blockade, and so on. It was an “everything and the kitchen sink” approach to ending the war with Japan, though there were a few things missing from the “everything,” like modifying the unconditional surrender requirements that the Americans knew (through intercepted communications) were causing the Japanese considerable difficulty in accepting surrender.

http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2020/06/09/what-journalists-should-know-about-the-atomic-bombings/

America vs Japan?

In Jenkins’ entire piece it is seen almost exclusively as a war between solely America & Japan. The Allies are mentioned of course but not in any way that seems to make any material difference. Yet one fact conspicuous by its absence in Jenkins piece is the invasion of Japanese-occupied Manchuria by the Soviets. Consider this timeline:

• 6th August. Bombing of Hiroshima
• 8th August. Soviets declare war on Japan.
• 9th August. Soviets invade simultaneously on three fronts and catch the Japanese by surprise.
• 9th August. Bombing of Nagasaki.
• 15th August. Japanese surrender.

Max Hastings says that the most decisive factor between the 8 & 15th August was not the bombing of Nagasaki but the Soviet invasion, “Oddly enough, Soviet entry into the war on August 8 was more influential than the atomic explosions in convincing Japanese leaders that they must quit.”

Wellerstein says,

The Soviets had been promised several concessions, including the island of Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands (giving them unimpeded access to the Pacific Ocean) for their entry in the war, but by late July 1945, the Americans were having second thoughts. As it was, once Stalin saw that Hiroshima did not provoke an immediate response from the Japanese, he had his marshals accelerate the invasion plans, invading Manchuria just after midnight, the morning of the Nagasaki bombing.

http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2015/08/03/were-there-alternatives-to-the-atomic-bombings/

This then is not about saving lives but about the politics of power and influence. Stalin sees an opportunity to gain a sphere of influence to the East as well as West and that as much as anything else begins to concentrate Japanese minds on surrender.

Why two bombs and why not three bombs?

The US dropped the first on the 6th August 1945 and waited barely three days before dropping a second

Three days was barely enough time for the Japanese high command to verify that the weapon used was a nuclear bomb, much less assess its impact and make strategic sense of it. Doing so may have avoided the need for the second bombing run altogether. Even if the Japanese had not surrendered, the option for using further bombs would not have gone away. President Truman himself seems to have been surprised by the rapidity with which the second bomb was dropped, issuing an order to halt further atomic bombing without his express permission.

http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2015/08/03/were-there-alternatives-to-the-atomic-bombings/

The interesting thing to note is that two atomic bombs were still not enough to cause an immediate surrender. In fact, surrender didn’t happen for another seven days! This seems to cut against the idea that it was the bombs alone that were decisive in forcing Japan to surrender. And if that rapid goal was the aim why wasn’t there a third bomb? It seems the main reason was that President Truman had already begun to doubt his choices. On the 10th August 1945, Truman made the decision “to halt further atomic bombings (at least temporarily) because, as he put it to his cabinet meeting, “the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible. He didn’t like the idea of killing, as he said, ‘all those kids.’”2

Conclusion

In short, I think in this case Philip Jenkins has got his history wrong but just as importantly I think he’s got his ethics wrong. The Second World War was horribly destructive and in the context of 50 million dead another 100,000 here and 100,000 there doesn’t seem to make much difference. So I can understand the temptation to just ‘end this thing’ in a world weary of war.

Yet I reject the idea that the end justifying the means is an acceptable idea even in war. We must in the face of horrors and the awfulness of war push for it to be fought to as high a standard as we can hold ourselves, whether the enemy does or not. We do not stop being Christians when we walk on the battlefield nor when we sit in the command centre. A child, the disabled, the sick, the elderly, are not and should not be considered legitimate military targets and an atomic bomb does just that.