Yes, We Should Have Bombed Japan

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, June 12, 2025

 

Tulsi Gabbard, the U.S. director of national intelligence, has produced and released a video that depicts the horrific consequences of the American attack on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. In the spot, Gabbard laments the “haunting sadness” that remains in that city, before insinuating bizarrely that there exists a political faction in the present-day United States that is jonesing to bring about global “nuclear annihilation.”

 

Gabbard is correct to be appalled by the carnage that was caused by the bomb. War is disgusting, and that extraordinary chapter, which concluded what was undoubtedly the most terrible war in history, provides no exception to the rule. But Gabbard’s implications — that (a) ending World War II with atomic weapons was a mistake, and that (b) there is a contingent of American voters whose enthusiasm for nuclear weapons is the result of a failure to understand that — are flat-out wrong. Our decision to end the Pacific War as we did was not only defensible, it was imperative — and it was imperative precisely because the alternative was the unjustifiable “annihilation” of blameless U.S. citizens.

 

I am persuaded by the utilitarian case in favor of the bombings. I believe that, had the United States attempted to end the war by invading Japan, millions of people would have died in the fanatical fighting and the famines that resulted — and that most of those dead would have been Japanese and Chinese. I believe that, absent the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Soviet Union may well have invaded northern Japan, divided the country in two, and changed the remainder of the 20th century for the worse. I believe, too, that, if Truman had opted to greenlight Operation Downfall, the war in the Pacific could plausibly have lasted for another two years — which, given that the conflict in the East began in 1937, after Japan brutally attacked China, would have pushed that catastrophe into its tenth year.

 

But, in all honesty, those considerations are subordinate to my primary calculus here — which is that there is no good reason that the terrible cost of concluding a war that was started by another nation ought to have been borne by its victims. By the conclusion of operations, any Allied invasion of Japan would have required the deployment of up to 7 million American men. Per contemporary estimates, the U.S. government expected that between 500,000 and 1 million of those men would have died. That being so, my question is this: In what possible universe would the president of the United States — a man who was elected to represent America, not the world — be morally justified in choosing that option, when the war could have been ended (and, indeed, was ended; that’s neither a hypothetical nor a counterfactual) by dropping two enormous bombs on the aggressor?

 

I sometimes hear it suggested that the United States had an ethical obligation to extinguish the lives of an untold number of its citizens in order to avoid being directly responsible for a strike as nasty as those at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I profoundly disagree with this view. In 1937, every single one of the young men who would have been dispatched to the Pacific in Operation Downfall was minding his own business in the United States. None of them had anything to do with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria; with the rape of Nanking; with the unprovoked attacks on Pearl Harbor, British Malaya, Hong Kong, and Singapore; with the war crimes committed at Manchu Detachment 731, or with the decision of the Japanese Empire to ally with Nazi Germany and attempt to take over the world. It is true that not all of the victims of the two atomic bombings — or of the blockade of Japan and the firebombing of Tokyo, for that matter — were responsible, either. But they were clearly more directly connected than was the American public, and, as has become irrefutably evident in the decades since, they were inserted into the reckoning by the expectation that they must fight against the United States to the last man, woman, and child. Choosing between those people and his own citizens was not, I daresay, President Truman’s favorite task. But it was not a difficult call. They started it; we did not. The expenses necessary to end the war had to be paid by the instigators.

 

In my estimation, this same rule would have applied to the British response to the Nazis, if, by some miracle, the British had possessed atomic weapons in 1939. By the summer of 1940, Hitler’s armies had swept across Western Europe and were sitting at the edge of the English Channel planning their next move. All told, that move was simple: First, the Luftwaffe would destroy the Royal Air Force and its associated defenses, and then, once unmitigated air superiority had been established, it would implement its full-scale invasion plan, “Operation Sealion.” Mercifully, the Royal Air Force managed to repel the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain and, thereby, to render the rest of the project a dead letter. (Aware that he had been thwarted, Hitler changed tactic and began the devastating mass bombing of British cities that became known as “the Blitz.”) But suppose that it had not. Suppose that, instead of stalling the Nazi’s western sweep, the Battle of Britain had been lost, and the British Isles had been subjected to its first invasion since 1066. If, at this point, Britain had possessed an atomic bomb, would it have been wrong for its government to have dropped it on Berlin? I do not think it would. The alternative, in that case, would have been to permit the Nazis to conquer Britain and subjugate everyone who lived there — soldier and civilian alike — under the worst ideology that has ever sullied the world. Why, exactly, would any British leader make that decision?

 

In 1940, my grandfathers were 22 and 19, respectively. One lived on a farm, the other was an apprentice carpenter. Both signed up for service, and both were immediately sent into the fray. The 22-year-old ended up fighting in North Africa under Montgomery, and then in Italy — including at the Battle of Monte Cassino. The 19-year-old ended up serving in the Atlantic Escort and, later, repairing some of the boats and aircraft that would be used in Operation Overlord. This, unfortunately, was unavoidable. But, had it not been, would it have been virtuous to demand the duty nevertheless? The Nazis, not the British, started the war. Like the families that they left behind to be bombed mercilessly from the air, my grandfathers had nothing to do with that call. If the British government had been able to end the fighting without a single British death, they would have been well within their rights to do so.

 

In the course of her video, Tulsi Gabbard supposes that the imaginary pro–nuclear war faction within the American polity must hold its views because its adherents “are confident that they will have access to nuclear shelters for themselves and for their families that regular people won’t have access to.” This, I’m afraid, is perfectly backwards, for, back in the summer of 1945, it was not the elites who stood to benefit from the decision to drop the two bombs on Japan, but the millions upon millions of everyday American men, who, having been heaped together from San Francisco to Okinawa, were trying as hard as they could to enjoy the last days of their lives, before being shipped across the East China Sea and into the very mouth of hell.