For nearly all other Americans, whatever dread they may have felt about the long-run future of the Bomb (and there was more expression of this in elite media than most people remembered later) was offset at the time and ever afterward by a powerful aura of its legitimacy, and its almost miraculous potential for good which had already been realized. For a great many Americans still, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs are regarded above all with gratitude, for having saved their own lives or the lives of their husbands, brothers, fathers or grandfathers, which would otherwise have been at risk in the invasion of Japan. For these Americans and many others, the Bomb was not so much an instrument of massacre as a kind of savior, a protector of precious lives.
Most Americans ever since have seen the destruction of the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as necessary and effectiveâas constituting just means, in effect just terrorism, under the supposed circumstancesâthus legitimating, in their eyes, the second and third largest single-day massacres in history. (The largest, also by the U.S. Army Air Corps, was the firebombing of Tokyo five months before on the night of March 9, which burned alive or suffocated 80,000 to 120,000 civilians. Most of the very few Americans who are aware of this event at all accept it, too, as appropriate in wartime.
To regard those acts as definitely other than criminal and immoralâas most Americans doâis to believe that anythingâanythingâcan be legitimate means: at worst, a necessary, lesser, evil. At least, if done by Americans, on the order of a president, during wartime. Indeed, we are the only country in the world that believes it won a war by bombingâspecifically by bombing cities with weapons of mass destructionâand believes that it was fully rightful in doing so. It is a dangerous state of mind.
Even if the premises of these justifications had been realistic (after years of study Iâm convinced, along with many scholars, that they were not; but Iâm not addressing that here), the consequences of such beliefs for subsequent policymaking were bound to be fateful. They underlie the American government and publicâs ready acceptance ever since of basing our security on readiness to carry out threats of mass annihilation by nuclear weapons, and the belief by many officials and elites still today that abolition of these weapons is not only infeasible but undesirable.
It might be true that we shouldn't throw away our nukes; they are necessary for our defense, but to say that 'most Americans' agree that the use of nuclear weapons in Japan and the death of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians was justified and necessary is pure ignorance and intellectual fallacy on multiple levels.
It is one thing to kill corrupt international leaders and even the soldiers who knowledgeably choose to kill and be killed, but civilians have just as much of a right to live as anyone else. Is there any wonder why America takes so much criticism for it's hypocrisy when we claim to be advancing freedom and liberty throughout the world while effectively committing countless tragic war crimes? "Blow 'em up first, ask questions never."
I'm reminded of the ignorant rednecks native to my hometown who say things like, "we oughtta just go over dare an' take over. just kill all uv dem towle heads; at way we git all duh oil an' we aint gotta worry 'bout dem crashin' planes indu our houses."
Please, whoever wrote this article; realize that you cannot speak for everyone else and don't try to justify War Crimes committed by America; it makes us look bad. We need to admit our mistakes and move in a positive less-violent direction. It's people like you that cause this nation to digress.
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