Oppenheimer Had Nothing to Be Ashamed Of

By Rich Lowry

Monday, July 24, 2023

 

The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki aren’t depicted in the movie Oppenheimer, but they haunt the film — literally.

 

The eponymous physicist and “father of the atom bomb,” J. Robert Oppenheimer, is plagued by visions of the terrible destruction wrought by the weapon he helped create, even as he gives a victory speech to the assembled community at Los Alamos after the successful attack on Hiroshima.

 

In one of the more compelling scenes in the movie, Oppenheimer tells President Harry Truman in a meeting in the Oval Office after the conclusion of the war that he feels as though he has blood on his hands. Truman sardonically offers him a handkerchief and tells an aid as Oppenheimer is ushered out of the room that he never wants to see the scientist again.

 

It’s understandable that Oppenheimer would have qualms about the unfathomable horror inflicted on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (even if he always defended his work during World War II), but launching these attacks was clearly the right decision. The revisionist arguments that they were unnecessary don’t hold up to scrutiny and amount to just-so counterfactual history.

 

We were fighting a merciless foe in a savage war where every day brought more suffering and devastation, to combatants and civilians alike and across Asia. The best thing that could happen was ending the war as soon as possible, and the atom bomb brought it to a swift and decisive conclusion.

 

Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Truman talked after the war of estimates of the costs of an invasion of Japan going as high as 1 million U.S. casualties. These estimates are controversial, and there’s no way to know how many Americans would have been killed or wounded, but these numbers weren’t unreasonable.

 

Certainly, there was every reason to expect ferocious Japanese resistance. At Iwo Jima beginning in February 1945, the Marines suffered an ungodly casualty ratio. Of 70,000 Marines committed to the battle, almost 7,000 were killed and another 20,000 wounded. Almost all of the roughly 20,000 Japanese soldiers on the island, who had been urged by their commander to kill ten Americans before dying themselves, indeed fought to the death.

 

Okinawa was the same bloody story. The U.S. loss rate, according to the National World War II Museum, was 35 percent. The violence of the fight is hard to exaggerate. “The Tenth Army fired 1.1 million 105-mm howitzer rounds during the battle,” the museum notes. “In the frenetic fighting, XXIV Corps troops dropped some 521,000 projectiles down 60-mm mortar tubes, expended nine million rifle bullets, burned through 16 million .30 caliber machine gun rounds, tossed 367,000 hand grenades, and fired 25,600 rifle grenades.”

 

Then, there were the relentless kamikaze attacks. The Navy lost nearly 5,000 sailors and 36 ships went down.

 

“Given the record Japan had created,” Richard Frank writes in his authoritative account of the endgame of the war in the Pacific, Downfall, “every American could foresee an unimaginably bloody finish fight requiring not only an invasion, but a further interminable struggle against Japanese armed forces elsewhere in Asia and the Pacific and unbending warriors across the Homeland amid a fanatically hostile civilian population.”

 

The U.S. military was preparing for how to deal with massive casualties upon an invasion, and there were alarming reports that the Japanese defenses of Kyushu, where the U.S. invasion would have begun, were more robust than we first realized. Frank writes that American war-planners “discovered to their horror that Japan had raised new armies and prepared six to ten thousand aircraft for a final Armageddon exactly where American soldiers and Marines were slated to land.” The Japanese expected to defeat an invasion, or make it so painful that they’d gain negotiating leverage.

 

Whatever the number of American dead would have been — and perhaps there would have been no invasion after all if the projected costs were too high — there can be no doubt that Truman’s decision to drop the bomb saved American lives, whether it was 5,000, or 50,000, or 500,000. Since, as the leader of the United States, that was his first responsibility, this alone should create a strong presumption toward dropping the bombs being the right call.

 

The awful truth is that the atom bombs weren’t that different in kind from the incendiary raids already undertaken by Curtis LeMay.

 

Those raids didn’t come out of nowhere. The precision attacks of LeMay’s predecessor, Haywood Hansell, simply didn’t work. As Richard Rhodes notes in his classic The Making of the Atomic Bomb, “in three months of hard flying, taking regular losses, Hansell had managed to destroy none of his nine high-priority targets.” LeMay took over and worked the problem, revamping tactics and training, and settled on low-altitude firebombing.

 

The new approach proved hellishly effective. The raid on Tokyo in March 1945 killed more than 100,000 people and injured a million. A U.S. bombing survey said, in an arresting formulation, “Probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a six-hour period than any time in the history of man.”

 

LeMay kept going and at one point literally ran out of bombs. The justification for the campaign — that dispersed home industries made a significant contribution to Japan’s industrial effort — wasn’t wrong, although the bombing ranged much more widely. According to James M. Scott in his recent book, Black Snow, LeMay’s bombers burned down more than 178 square miles of 66 Japanese cities, or an average of 43 percent of the area of the targeted cities. “Along with home industries,” Scott continues, “America had damaged or destroyed six hundred factories, including twenty-five major aircraft plants, eighteen oil refineries and storage facilities, and six major arsenals.”

 

Significant Japanese voices said after the war that the firebombing was an enormous and consequential blow to Japanese morale.

 

There’s really no moral case against the atom bombs that doesn’t also apply to the firebombing. So if both of these tactics were to be left off the table, what would remain?

 

There was a blockade. Less spectacularly than the B-29s, U.S. submarines kneecapped the Japanese economy through their attacks on Japanese shipping. The U.S. was tightening the noose.

 

Already in 1945, Japan was looking down the barrel of mass starvation, with daily caloric intake constantly dwindling. A Japanese historian has noted that, “immediately after the defeat, some estimated that 10 million people were likely to starve to death.” The new U.S. bombing campaign near the end of the war was going to go after the Japanese rail system, which would have made the situation immediately more dire. (The mining of Japan’s home waters to hamper shipping further was called, not subtly, Operation Starvation.)

 

The problem, obviously, with starving a country out is that lots of people are going to die. There are no fireballs, but there is incredible privation and death by the hundreds of thousands or millions all the same.

 

“Aerial bombardment inflicted,” Frank writes, “civilian deaths in Japan measured in hundreds of thousands, but the direct and indirect effects of the blockade in China killed noncombatants by the millions, and the blockade against Japan aimed for the same ghastly results.”

 

Frank points out that there was a reason that, as recently as World War I, blockades were considered unethical, because they didn’t distinguish between civilians and troops.

 

How about letting the Soviets do the dirty work? This would have had major geopolitical downsides, of course, and wasn’t a particularly moral option, either.

 

Frank notes of the brief Soviet entry into the Pacific War:

 

The Soviets captured about 2.7 million Japanese nationals. The dead and permanently missing among this group, only one-third of whom were members of the armed forces, numbered at least 347,000, and perhaps as many as 376,000. This exceeds all but the most exaggerated tolls attributed to the atomic bombs.

 

Getting invaded by the Russians is not typically what you wish upon a society you are trying to protect from the wide-ranging and uncontrolled ravages of war.

 

It’s also important not to forget the cost of the continued war throughout the region. James Scott writes, “March 1945, for example, saw 240,000 noncombatants killed across Asia, an average of 8,000 people a day.”

 

If we hadn’t dropped the bomb, hadn’t engaged in the firebombing, hadn’t blockaded Japan, and hadn’t waited for the Soviets to do their worst, then you’re back to a U.S. invasion.

 

The cost in American casualties aside, massive land invasions aren’t antiseptic, either. Consider Okinawa again. Credible estimates of civilian deaths go as high as 100,000 or 150,000. How many times would that have had to be repeated in a land campaign to bring Tokyo to heel? By the way, in the real world, an invasion can’t be separated from other acts of violence. A purpose of the incendiary campaign was to pave the way for a ground invasion. And the use of, yes, the atom bomb was contemplated as a way to support an invasion. (The same was true of chemical weapons.)

 

All the counterfactuals aside, the atomic bombs definitely ended the war — and did it more quickly than any other option. They secured an unconditional surrender that, significantly, was honored by the Japanese military in the field.

 

There have been unconvincing attempts to argue that Japan quit the war on our terms for other reasons, or that it was bound to happen soon anyway. “Those insisting that Japan’s surrender could have been procured without recourse to atomic bombs,” Frank writes, “cannot point to any credible supporting evidence from the eight men who effectively controlled Japan’s destiny.”

 

In explaining the decision finally to quit the war, the emperor put a heavy emphasis not on the Soviet invasion, which was, no doubt, a contributing factor, but on the atomic bomb and aerial attacks. In his message ending the war he spoke of a “new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is indeed incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives.”

 

In December 1945, Kantaro Suzuki, Japan’s prime minister at the end of the war, explained that the Supreme War Council proceeded with its plan to resist an American invasion “until the Atomic Bomb was dropped, after which they believed the United States . . . need not land when it had such a weapon; so at that point, they decided that it would be best to sue for peace.”

 

The attack on Nagasaki, often characterized as unnecessary, showed that we had more than one bomb and we weren’t going to be dissuaded from using it by the international reaction to the first. As a bomb-assembly technician put it, “everyone felt that the sooner we could get off another mission, the more likely it was that the Japanese would feel that we had large quantities of the device and would surrender sooner.”

 

There is simply no way around the fact that defeating Japan was going to require a cataclysm one way or the other — whether from the air or the ground, whether a form of destruction very new or very old, whether sudden or drawn out.

 

Imperial Japan was aggressive and remorseless. Its attacks on Pearl Harbor and treatment of U.S. prisoners were enormities enough. But it killed perhaps as many as 20 million people in China alone. Everywhere it went, from Nanking to Manila, it brought large-scale, bestial cruelty. And, as it was wrestled onto the defensive, it resolved to fight with the irrationality of a suicide cult.

 

Historian John W. Dower has written that the “Japanese died in hopeless suicide charges, starved to death in the field, killed their own wounded rather than let them fall into enemy hands, and murdered their civilian compatriots in places such as Saipan and Okinawa.” The defense of the homeland was supposed to involve waves of people wielding wooden spears.

 

Oppenheimer uses to great effect the famous, haunting line that the scientist is associated with from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” In the Pacific in the 1930s and 1940s, it was Imperial Japan that was the destroyer of worlds. It had to be stopped. After years of struggle, Oppenheimer’s handiwork finally did it, and — at a great cost, yes — brought peace and amity where there had been only violence and despair.

 

Thank you, Dr. Oppenheimer.