The atom bomb has been used, but nuclear weapons such as exist today never have been. By anyone. Yet look at the people who have had them, or who still do. It is all a bluff. Just get rid of these wretched abominations. We could pay the affected shipyard workers quite eye-watering sums in compensation, and still save amounts that there would scarcely be the adjectives to describe. Instead of Trident, give an extra £70 billion to each of the British Army, the Royal Navy, and the Royal Air Force. Heaven knows that they need it.
"Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped," concluded
the United States Strategic Bombing Surveys. That was early as 1946. Even the Japanese condition of keeping the Emperor was granted once the Manhattan Project's cost of $2.2 billion
in 1945 had ostensibly been justified, and a meaningless signal sent to the Soviet Union, which had the Bomb within four years.
It gets some people's backs up when Hiroshima and Nagasaki are compared to the Holocaust. But beyond any crude numbers game, there was more than a touch of Josef Mengele to those bombings. No one knew what the effects of an atomic attack would be. So experiments were conducted on perceived racial inferiors, not to end the War, but just to see what would happen. "If we'd lost the War, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals," admitted even Curtis LeMay. He was right.
I offer cordial greetings to all gathered to commemorate the eightieth anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In a particular way, I express my sentiments of respect and affection for the hibakusha survivors, whose stories of loss and suffering are a timely summons to all of us to build a safer world and foster a climate of peace.
Though many years have passed, the two cities remain living reminders of the profound horrors wrought by nuclear weapons. Their streets, schools and homes still bear scars—both visible and spiritual—from that fateful August of 1945. In this context, I hasten to reiterate the words so often used by my beloved predecessor Pope Francis: “War is always a defeat for humanity”.
As a survivor from Nagasaki, Dr. Takashi Nagai wrote, “The person of love is the person of ‘bravery’ who does not bear arms” (Heiwato, 1979). Indeed, true peace demands the courageous laying down of weapons—especially those with the power to cause an indescribable catastrophe. Nuclear arms offend our shared humanity and also betray the dignity of creation, whose harmony we are called to safeguard.
In our time of mounting global tensions and conflicts, Hiroshima and Nagasaki stand as “symbols of memory” (cf. Francis, Letter to the Most Reverend Alexis-Mitsuru Shirahama, Bishop of Hiroshima, 19 May 2023) that urge us to reject the illusion of security founded on mutually assured destruction. Instead, we must forge a global ethic rooted in justice, fraternity and the common good.
It is thus my prayer that this solemn anniversary will serve as a call to the international community to renew its commitment to pursuing lasting peace for our whole human family—“a peace that is unarmed and disarming” (First Apostolic Blessing “Urbi et Orbi”, 8 May 2025).
Upon all who mark this anniversary, I willingly invoke abundant divine blessings.
Was the USA right to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima 80 years ago? Most people think so, even though they also realise that the attack killed many innocent civilians, often in quite horrible ways which it is hard to face.
Do they excuse those gruesome horrors of burned human flesh and radiation sickness because they simply can’t bear to consider the possibility that it was both a major mistake and a moral crime?
My father, who was a serving naval officer in European waters at the time, was among thousands of British sailors, soldiers and airmen who would say confidently that the bomb probably saved his life, as he expected to be sent to the Pacific for a merciless final struggle against Japan. And, like most at the time, he believed that the Japanese would put up a suicidal last-ditch resistance when British and American forces landed on their home islands.
He was not sorry to have been spared this fate. He’d had quite enough to do, fighting against Germany for the previous six years.
For the rest of his life (he died in 1987) this was a perfectly respectable belief. The accepted view was that the Japanese would have carried on fighting to the death, inch by inch.
When the US Army and US Marines, supported by British and Commonwealth forces, invaded the Japanese island of Okinawa in 1945, they faced resistance bordering on the insane, and often actually suicidal. There were hundreds of kamikaze attacks. Allied casualties totalled 50,000, more than 12,500 killed. The Japanese lost more than 100,000 soldiers and sailors, most of them killed. Perhaps 150,000 civilians died.
The battle came to be known as ‘The Typhoon of Steel’. If that was what happened on one small island, what would it be like when the Allies landed on the mainland?
But then along came Japanese-American historian, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa. Professor Hasegawa, born in Japan in 1941 but now a US citizen, is also a Russian speaker and expert on that country. In 2005 he published a book Racing The Enemy: Stalin, Truman, And The Surrender Of Japan which upset everything most people had until then believed.
His view, after careful study of Japanese and Soviet archives, is that Tokyo surrendered not because of the Hiroshima bomb, or the Nagasaki bomb three days later, but because the Soviet Union had finally entered the war against Japan on the Allied side.
The Japanese leadership of the time were ruthless, ferocious men who cared little about civilian casualties (or military casualties for that matter). They had been untroubled by the American bombing of Tokyo in March 1945, the single most destructive air raid in human history.
That attack destroyed 16 square miles of the Japanese capital and killed at least 100,000 people. Nearly 300 bombers dropped nearly 1,700 tons of bombs on the city, including napalm and white phosphorus, two of the most merciless weapons of war known to man.
When the fires eventually died down the devastated streets were full of charred human corpses. Only 27 US planes were lost. Yet the Japanese made no move to surrender.
But the Japanese were afraid of Stalin. In a wrongly forgotten 1936-1939 war, the Red Army had decisively beaten the Japanese Sixth Army, finishing the job with a thumping victory at Nomonhan on the border of Mongolia and China. Japan also feared Russia’s ability to enter Japanese territory by land, via the disputed island of Sakhalin, which was then divided between Moscow and Tokyo.
Both countries had maintained a mad-seeming neutrality pact since 1941, in which they had agreed not to attack each other, even though they belonged to hostile alliances which were at each other’s throats. They ought to have been at war.
But at the Yalta conference of February 1945, Stalin had secretly promised US President Franklin Roosevelt and Britain’s Winston Churchill that he would break the pact within three months of victory over Germany.
He kept his word. Three days after the Hiroshima bomb, while the US was bombing Nagasaki, 1.6 million Soviet troops attacked Japanese forces all across North-East Asia, quickly capturing the southern half of Sakhalin and so positioning themselves perfectly for an assault on the Japanese home islands, less than 30 miles away.
They also seized the Kuril islands, a land-grab the Japanese dispute to this day. It was a real and immediate threat with no good outcome for Japan.
Japan’s ruthless military dictatorship may well have viewed this development as a threat to the actual existence of their country. A Soviet Communist occupation regime certainly would not have allowed Emperor Hirohito to remain on his throne, even if he had no power – an arrangement eventually agreed to by the chief of the US occupying troops, General Douglas MacArthur.
Russia, having been humiliated in a war with Japan in 1904, was a dangerous and greedy neighbour that might well keep any territory it took. Russian armies were much less likely than American forces to leave once they arrived.
Professor Hasegawa, who went deep into both Soviet and Japanese archives, concluded that the Russian threat was much more likely than the atom bombs to have triggered the Japanese surrender of August 15.
Addressing the military at the time of the surrender, Emperor Hirohito did not mention the A-bombs but did mention the Soviet threat. Yet, when speaking to the Japanese people, he mentioned the ‘new and cruel’ weapons that had been used against Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
There is no final tribunal that can decide for certain why Japan surrendered when it did, or whether it was Stalin or the atom bomb, which clinched the decision. But Hasegawa certainly makes a persuasive and worrying case.
Hasegawa’s view would have been a deep and dangerous heresy until quite recently when the main arguments were over whether the A-bomb should have been used at all.
Before the end of the Cold War, nuclear disarmers would often claim that the newly installed US President Harry Truman – an undistinguished machine politician from Missouri who had been lifted suddenly into the White House by the death of Roosevelt – had dropped the bombs to impress Stalin with America’s overwhelming new power. Perhaps there is some truth in this, too.
But a very perplexing question remains, to which we can probably never find the answer. Would the world be a better place if the atomic bomb had never been invented?
Albert Einstein thought one of his greatest mistakes was to encourage Roosevelt to build the bomb in 1939. The Italian physicist Ettore Majorana, rated as a genius by his scientific fellows, disappeared from the face of the earth in 1938, aged 31. Many believe he deliberately vanished and hid himself in a South American jungle as he’d foreseen that his researches would lead to the atom bomb, and he could not bear to be responsible for it.
Some of the British scientists who had helped build the bomb because they feared Hitler might make one first were grieved to see it used against Japan – and even more so when they discovered, thanks to a brilliant British intelligence coup – that Hitler’s physicists never got anywhere near a working nuclear device.
As war erupts in Ukraine and Iran like an evil disease, the argument that nuclear deterrence would bring peace looks a little threadbare. Long ago, we learned to stop worrying and love the Bomb because we thought it was a force for peace. Maybe we should start worrying again.
Fujio Torikoshi was 14 years old when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, 80 years ago today. He was eating breakfast with his mother when he heard a rumbling and stepped outside into the front garden. All he could see was a black dot in the sky, when it suddenly burst outwards to fill the sky with a blinding white light. He recalls his last memory of being lifted off the ground by a hot gust of wind. He was more than two kilometres away from the blast, but he could still feel a burning sensation all over his body. That’s when he passed out on his front porch.
Eventually, he woke up in hospital. He was told by the doctors he wouldn’t live past 20. He lived to be 86 years old and died in 2018. In one of his last interviews, he said: ‘All I can do is pray — earnestly, relentlessly — for world peace.’
This week, we remember every single person who was killed by an indefensible act of inhumanity, both on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We also remember the hundreds of thousands of survivors like Fujio — known as the hibakusha. They are the ones who endured the horror of what was left behind. They are the ones who have been campaigning to ensure the horrors of Hiroshima never happen again.
Me and the CND
When I was at school, we had a book club where we could choose a book for class. We chose Brighter Than A Thousand Suns, which told the story of Hiroshima. It had a huge impact on me. Before that book, I didn’t know what a nuclear explosion was. I didn’t know the destruction it could cause. It was that book that taught me that nuclear weapons have one purpose and one purpose only: to cause death and destruction on a colossal scale.
When I was 14, in the 1960s, I joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), after following and being frightened by the Cuban Missile Crisis. My first ever demonstration of any sort was with CND, and I have been a campaigner against nuclear weapons ever since. It was at CND where I met Bruce Kent, a leading figure in CND in the 1980s. It was Bruce who said, ‘I want to be optimistic because I don’t think man is intrinsically violent.’ He inspired in us a belief that peace was not just preferable, but possible.
I’ve gotten a lot of flak over the years for daring to say that I would not wish to use a nuclear bomb on human beings. For having the audacity to say that killing millions of people wouldn’t make the world a safer place. For those who are in any doubt over my position: I’m not interested in bombs. I’m interested in peace.
We also should not forget the impacts of nuclear testing, which began at the end of the Second World War. These programs caused widespread radioactive contamination and generational harm to the people of the Pacific region. It is estimated that more than two million people have died from cancer as a result of these nuclear test explosions.
Joseph Rotblat was a Polish physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, before becoming a fierce critic of nuclear weaponry. I want to share two things he said. One, ‘There is no direct evidence that nuclear weapons prevented a world war.’ Two, ‘Above all remember your humanity.’
Nuclear Disarmament
I grew up in a period where people were fearful of the possibility of global nuclear war. There was a realisation of just how dangerous nuclear weapons are.
A great achievement was the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, signed in 1970. The five declared nuclear weapons states — Britain, France, the Soviet Union, the USA, and China — agreed to ensure that there was no proliferation of their weaponry and to take steps towards their own eventual nuclear disarmament.
Since then, several countries have taken steps that have lessened nuclear tensions in certain places. The most dramatic example was when post-apartheid South Africa, led by President Mandela, announced that it would no longer develop any nuclear weapons and would completely disarm.
That in turn brought about a nuclear weapons-free continent of Africa, also known as the ‘Pelindaba Treaty’, which came into force on 15 July 2009. Those events were followed by nuclear weapons-free zones for the whole of Latin America and for central Asia.
These treaties showed that it is possible to get countries to agree in mutual co-operation, mutual disarmament, and mutual peace. We must continue to push for a renewed adherence to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which bans the development, production, possession, use, or threat of use of nuclear weapons.
The Only Path Forward Is Peace
In 2023, UN Secretary-General António Guterres addressed the General Assembly and announced that the symbolic Doomsday Clock — which measures humanity’s proximity to self-destruction — had moved to 90 seconds to midnight. (It has since moved to 89 seconds to midnight.) Declaring that humanity was perilously close to catastrophe, Guterres named three perilous challenges: extreme poverty, an accelerating climate crisis, and nuclear war.
Today, the global stockpile of nuclear weapons is accelerating as international relations are deteriorating. After a period of gradual decline that followed the end of the Cold War, the number of operational nuclear weapons has risen again; there are now said to be more than 12,000 warheads around the world. Ninety percent of these weapons are owned by Russia and the United States alone.
It’s been more than three years since Russia launched its invasion of
Ukraine. I want to take a moment to reflect on the hundreds of thousands of lives that have been lost in this ghastly war.
I also want to pay tribute to the thousands of peace campaigners in Russia who opposed this invasion, and have continued to call for a ceasefire. I also want to thank those global figures who have called for de-escalation and diplomacy. That includes the UN Secretary-General, global leaders such as President Lula, President Ramaphosa, and, of course, the late Pope Francis. Three years on, and hundreds of thousands of deaths later, I renew these calls for peace.
The longer the fighting goes on, the more lives will be lost and the greater risk of nuclear escalation. Those who fuel escalation must know that in the event of a nuclear war, nobody wins.
Meanwhile, we have all watched with absolute horror at what is happening in Gaza. Over the past 21 months, human beings have endured a level of horror and inhumanity that should haunt us forever. Entire families wiped out. Limbs strewn across the street. Mothers screaming for their children torn to pieces. Doctors performing amputations without anaesthesia. Home by home, hospital by hospital, generation by generation.
We have not been witnessing a war. We have been witnessing a genocide, livestreamed before the entire world. We must remember that our governments could have stopped this genocide. Instead, they allowed Israel to act with impunity, igniting a much wider war between Israel, the United States, and Iran — and putting the world on the brink of a nuclear conflict in the process.
I echo the call made by the UN Secretary-General: ‘There is no military solution. The only path forward is diplomacy. The only hope is peace.’
Arms Race vs A Better World
The world spends $100 billion every year on nuclear weapons — imagine if we spent that money on renewable energy, social housing, public healthcare, schools, and lifting children out of poverty instead? Think of what we could achieve if the money that was spent on items that can only destroy the planet was instead directed to resources that protected it and all life on earth.
Security is not the ability to threaten and destroy your neighbour. Real security is getting on with your neighbour. It’s when our children can be confident of a habitable future. It’s when human beings are not displaced by poverty, destitution, and war. And it’s when everybody has enough resources to live a happy and healthy life. As Albert Einstein said, ‘In the shadow of the atomic bomb it has become even more apparent that all men are, indeed, brothers.’
So today, we must remember those who were killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We mourn the lives that were so needlessly lost. And we must listen to the hibakusha when they say: ‘humans must survive — in peace and prosperity.’ We will only honour their words — as well as the memory of those who perished on 6 August 1945 — when we rid this planet of nuclear weapons once and for all. We are all human beings on one planet. Surely that is enough to try and bring about a world of peace.
In the early hours of 6 August 1945, US bomber Enola Gay took off from North Field, in the Northern Mariana Islands, and headed towards Hiroshima, a naval port on the south coast of Honshu, Japan’s main island. At 8.15am that morning, Enola Gay unleashed its payload.
This consisted of a 9,700lb atomic bomb, known as Little Boy. Designed like a gun, Little Boy fired a bullet of enriched uranium-235 into a hollow cylinder of the same material, to begin a nuclear chain reaction 1,900 feet above the centre of Hiroshima.
The immediate impact was devastating. Many of Hiroshima’s inhabitants were skinned alive, in part or in whole, by the intense heat caused by the explosion of the bomb. In 1951, the US-Japanese Joint Commission for the Investigation of the Atomic Bomb in Japan calculated that 64,500 people – more than a quarter of Hiroshima’s population – had died from the blast by mid-November 1945, and an additional 72,000 had been injured. Furthermore, it is estimated that approximately 30,000 workers conscripted from Japanese-occupied Korea may also have died at Hiroshima.
Three days later, on 9 August, the US dropped another atomic bomb on Nagasaki, a city on the island of Kyushu. This killed more than 39,000 – a fifth of Nagasaki’s population – and injured a further 25,000.
The long-term impact of dropping the bombs was horrific. Roughly 400,000 people from the two cities were irradiated and disfigured. Referred to as hibakusha, the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki often faced discrimination when seeking jobs. Their children and even grandchildren still encounter similar problems today.
Eighty years on, amid mounting geopolitical conflict between nuclear powers, it is worth asking what drove America to do something that no other nation had done before or has done since – deploy a nuclear weapon.
For many, the main argument is well established. It was given one of its first public airings by US president Harry Truman in a nationwide radio broadcast on the day of Nagasaki. He said the use of atomic bombs was a reply to the perfidy of Japan’s 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. He denounced ‘those who have starved and beaten and executed’ US prisoners of war. And then came his key argument: ‘We have used it to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans.’
The argument that the Bomb shortened the war and therefore saved lives is a familiar one. But it’s been disputed, even by many US militarists, including Paul Nitze and his colleagues on the government’s Strategic Bombing Survey. They declared that ‘certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped… even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated’.
Their view was supported by America’s top military commander, General Douglas MacArthur, who had always opposed the use of atomic bombs. He held that Japan would surrender ‘by 1 September at the latest and perhaps even sooner’. Dwight Eisenhower, president from 1953 until 1961, declared the bombings ‘completely unnecessary’. Top brass Chester Nimitz and William Leahy and even the rabid US airforce general Curtis LeMay thought the same, with LeMay saying: ‘The war would have been over in two weeks without the Russians entering and without the atomic bomb. The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.’
To cap it all, in late August 1945, then secretary of state James Byrnes was reported in the New York Times as saying that Tokyo’s request for Soviet mediation in the war was proof of Japan’s recognition of defeat. He learned of this request at the US-UK-Russian Potsdam conference held from 17 July until 2 August 1945 – that is, before Hiroshima.
Academics Lakshmi Singh and Rahul Tripathi have recently described the bombings as ‘one of the darkest chapters of the 20th century, driven by experimental and political motivations rather than pure military necessity’. In many ways they’re right. Hiroshima was driven less by military imperatives than by two other key factors. First, America needed to flaunt its new, fearful domination of the soon-to-be-postwar world, and so strengthen its rearguard action against the rise of Asia and the growth of anti-imperialist, ‘pan-Asianist’ ideology in the East. Second, America and the Allies were motivated by animosity and contempt towards the Japanese as a race.
The road to 6 August
Hiroshima was in part a culmination of America’s determination to demonstrate its vastly superior military power – especially in the air. In the excellent new book, The Hiroshima Men, historian Iain MacGregor notes that at a White House conference on 14 November 1938, barely six weeks after Britain and France capitulated to Hitler and signed the Munich Agreement of 30 September, President Franklin D Roosevelt made sure that air power was ‘the key discussion’ that day. FDR called for America to double Germany’s annual production figure of 12,000 fighters and bombers, and to be prepared to defend the Western hemisphere ‘from the North to the South Pole’.
By the spring of 1939, the US was concerned not just by the prowess of the Luftwaffe, but also by the superiority of Japanese planes flying over China. The global scope of America’s plans was confirmed when, in November 1939, a committee that included Charles Lindbergh sent a report to congress on what was to become Boeing’s B-29 Superfortress, the enormous bomber that was to deliver the atomic weapons of 1945. Its range spoke volumes about America’s objectives: more than 5,000 miles. So did the sense of urgency that surrounded the B-29 – Boeing was paid upfront for it before it was built, or its components tested.
The sums involved were eye-watering. In 1941, the US budget for weapons procurement stood at about three times the $8 billion it had laid out in 1940. It showed that America was intent on reigning supreme.
Indeed, part of Washington’s gameplan in the Second World War was to supplant Britain’s role in the world, and install itself as a more disinterested arbiter of Asian affairs in general and Chinese affairs in particular.
America’s immediate objective was to defeat Japan. Taking a leaf from the RAF’s ‘carpet’ or ‘area’ bombing of German cities, B-29s directed by LeMay firebombed Japanese cities from March to August 1945. In Rain of Ruin, an excellent new book on the atomic bombs, historian Richard Overy quotes a postwar inquest conducted by the British Mission to Japan. It observed that using incendiaries against the population ‘undoubtedly paved the way for the collapse of morale that followed the atomic bombs’. The firestorm campaign prompted Tokyo to put out ‘feelers’ for peace to the US in June 1945. As Overy rightly comments, incendiaries and atomic bombs ‘are often treated as different subjects, but were complementary’.
Evolving attitudes during the course of the war towards the firebombing of cities and towns, which caused immense devastation, paved the way for the use of the atomic bombs. As the atomic physicist, Rudolf Peierls, noted in 1987, indignation may have greeted the aerial bombardment of Guernica in 1937 and Rotterdam in 1940, but Western views soon began to change. ‘The deliberate fire raids on Hamburg [in 1943], Dresden and Tokyo [both in 1945] were considered an acceptable form of warfare. Without this background the atomic bomb raids on Japan might not have taken place.’ MacGregor goes further, writing that the firebombings ‘morally prepared’ the US and its allies for what was to come.
The firestorm raid on Tokyo in March 1945 was particularly destructive. Using cluster bombs and napalm, the US killed 100,000 Japanese, laid waste to 300,000 buildings and forced half the population to evacuate to the countryside. Killing similar numbers using an atomic weapon did not seem like such a big leap.
Furthermore, the destruction visited on the Japanese never occasioned the kind of doubts among the Allies that followed similar incinerations in Hamburg and Dresden. Thanks to the Allies’ racial animosity towards the Japanese, every man, woman and child was deemed a fair target. This was clear during the famous island battle of Iwo Jima in February and March 1945, when the Chicago Tribune led with the headline: ‘You can cook them better with gas’. It argued that Japanese dugouts on the island ‘would be an ideal testing ground to determine whether we can render the enemy impotent and materially reduce our own casualties’.
Washington’s uninhibited antagonism towards the Japanese had deep roots, and was fuelled in part by Japan’s rise during the early 20th century. When clinching its victory in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, the Japanese navy overcame a large Russian force at the Tsushima Strait, which divides Japan from Korea. The following year, a top British military planner described the Battle of Tsushima as ‘by far the greatest and the most important’ naval event since Trafalgar a century before. It was a massive shock to Western self-esteem, and demonstrated Japan’s military strength.
This explains why, after the Russo-Japanese war, America guarded itself with Plan Orange, a series of army and navy war plans for dealing with a possible conflict with Japan. By 1923, that plan included a potential air war with Japan. Five years later, America had drawn up a full war plan, which included intensive air attacks ‘designed’, as Overy says, ‘to make a ground invasion of the Japanese home islands unnecessary’. By 2 March 1943, General Henry Arnold, chief of staff of the Army Air Corps, told a State Department committee that ‘complete and utter havoc-bombing’ should assure ‘the total destruction of the enemy on his own soil’.
America soon learned how badly things were going for Japan. After September 1943, MacArthur’s Central Bureau in Melbourne, Australia deciphered the codes used by Japan’s principal attachés in Europe. As a result, the newly constructed Pentagon knew the details of Tokyo’s defensive formations against a final US assault, as well as about Japan’s leanings toward peace.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then, were not simply triggered by a desire to avoid American casualties. The bombings were the climax to 40 years of planning a response to the threat posed by Japan. They were part of America’s determination to vanquish its Pacific rival, and demonstrate its aerial superiority to the entire world.
But the atomic bomb was different to the firebombing campaigns – not so much in the scale of immediate deaths, but in its terrifying and awesome symbolism.
‘A brilliant luminescence’
After a swift win in the Marshall Islands in February 1944, the US found itself able to attack Japanese targets ahead of schedule. By December, inflation and the worst rice harvest in nearly 50 years had reduced Japan still further. By summer 1945, few Japanese cities were left for the US to bombard. The atomic bomb, therefore, was designed not so much to pile on further devastation, but rather to organise a show for the whole world. As war secretary Henry L Stimson wrote in 1947, the atomic bomb ‘was more than a weapon of terrible destruction; it was a psychological weapon’.
At a key meeting between military chiefs and scientists at Los Alamos, New Mexico, held over 10 and 11 May 1945, minutes record that it was agreed that the Bomb had to be ‘sufficiently spectacular for the importance of the weapon to be internationally recognised when publicity on it is released’. On 31 May, at another key meeting, it was stated that the effect of one atomic bomb would not differ from ‘any Air Corps strike of current dimensions’. However, at that point, Robert Oppenheimer, the so-called father of the atomic bomb, felt compelled to interject. ‘The visual effect of an atomic bombing’, he said, ‘would be tremendous. It would be accompanied by a brilliant luminescence which would rise to a height of 10,000 to 20,000 feet.’ The use of the Bomb was always conceived in spectacular terms.
Covertly delivered by single planes, the atomic bombs were to exterminate thousands through what war secretary Stimson called a ‘coherent surprise shock’. The shock was aimed at the whole world, not just Japan. Moscow was certainly meant to get the message. Leslie Groves, who directed the Manhattan Project and oversaw its security against espionage, said that after two weeks into the job, he never had ‘any illusion’ that ‘Russia was our enemy, and the project was conducted on that basis’.
America was out to impress the whole world. Somewhere, somehow, an enormous number of combatants and civilians had to be burnt to death not over months, nor even in a night’s flames, but in an instant.
The Japanese were in some ways the ideal target. They had been conjured up in the Western imagination as a race apart – a cruel, martial and imperialistic people. The racial thinking went both ways. As historian John Dower explained in his classic, War Without Mercy (1986), in both America and Japan, race was the prism through which international relations were viewed.
Nevertheless, it was America that had developed atomic weapons. And as Dower showed in a later book, the Allies looked on the Japanese almost as a separate species. During a UK-US Conference on Psychological Warfare Against Japan, on 7 and 8 May 1945, speakers claimed that the Japanese were marked by an ‘inferiority complex, credulousness, regimented thought, tendency to misrepresent, self-dramatisation, strong sense of responsibility, super-aggressiveness, brutality, inflexibility, tradition of self-destruction, superstition, face-saving tendency, intense emotionality, attachment to home and family, and Emperor worship’. Little wonder that, later that month, a top-level meeting involving Stimson entertained the use of poison gas against Japan and authorised tests of mustard gas. In June, ‘mass employment’ of gas, ‘throughout Japan’, was mooted.
After 1945, the horrors of the Holocaust discredited racist attitudes in the West. But right up to Japan’s surrender, American animus toward the Japanese was significantly more ferocious than what passes for racism in the US today. Why? Because of Pearl Harbor. Because of Japan’s treatment of American prisoners of war in general and the notorious, 65-mile ‘death march’ it held in Bataan, the Philippines, in 1942 – a forced trek to internment camps, during which hundreds of Americans died of exhaustion, overcrowding, brutality, starvation and disease.
To have these humiliations visited upon Americans instilled the spirit of revenge. While US generals and admirals might have objected to the use of the Bomb on military grounds, Truman, the politician, saw it as an essential lesson to friend and foe alike. World domination, and a world in which the Japanese could never again figure as impudent usurpers, was his aim. To that end, atomic weapons were for him a right and proper means to make these two points.
But America’s victory proved transient. By 1949, Uncle Sam had lost its monopoly of atomic weapons to Moscow, and had lost China to Mao. In retrospect, Hiroshima and Nagasaki gave American imperialism a breathing space – one that it still enjoys today. But they didn’t provide it with the supremacy it wanted.
The Allies attempted to present mass annihilation as an essential, even life-saving act. Eighty years on, it’s an account that no longer endures.
“I was against it on two counts,” Dwight Eisenhower, supreme allied commander, five-star general, and president of the United States, said of dropping nuclear bombs on two Japanese cities. “First, the Japanese were ready to surrender, and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon.”
This certainly cuts against the common argument these days: that dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved lives, certainly the lives of American soldiers, and maybe even Japanese lives on net.
Since the movie Oppenheimer came out, I have had occasion to opine against the nuclear bombings based on straightforward moral principles. I have repeatedly been told that I am being too precious.
Many view the question of whether to kill the civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as an example of the “trolley problem.”
The trolley problem is a philosophical exercise meant to test the distinction between the moral weight of the actions we choose versus the consequences of inaction. Is it the better decision to take an action that kills one person versus taking an inaction that results in five deaths?
The implication is that nuking Nagasaki and Hiroshima is flipping a lever, rerouting the trolley, and causing the death of fewer people.
It’s a fine ethical exercise, but it’s inapplicable in real life for a million reasons because, in real life, things don’t run like an automated trolley on a track. We know where a trolley will go if we don’t flip a switch because there is a track there. We don’t know what Japan’s military and civilian population would have done had we not flipped the switch.
Defenders of the atomic bomb say that our only alternative to the deliberate slaughter of tens of thousands of noncombatants, including babies and elderly women, was a massive land invasion that would have cost millions of lives. They present this as if it was one of two sets of train tracks available.
People who were very involved at the time disagree. Again, Eisenhower said the Japanese were about to surrender.
Eisenhower told his biographer that he expressed to War Secretary Harry Stimson his “grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face.’”
Was Eisenhower right that the atomic bomb was “no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives”? I don’t know! Neither do you! There’s a lot of uncertainty here.
Adm. William Leahy, President Harry Truman’s chief military adviser, agreed with Eisenhower. “It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan,” Leahy wrote. “The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.”
Again, you can believe other people besides Leahy or Eisenhower. I can’t adjudicate the various claims. But I can conclude that there was lots of uncertainty about where this war was going. There certainly weren’t just two possible paths.
When we are deeply uncertain about the consequences of our actions, where do we turn? We turn to moral principles, including the principle that it is immoral to kill innocent women and children.
“The Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.” —Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower
“In 1945 Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. … The Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent. During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face.’ The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude.” — Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower
“The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul.” — Herbert Hoover
“[T]he Japanese were prepared to negotiate all the way from February 1945 … up to and before the time the atomic bombs were dropped; … [I]f such leads had been followed up, there would have been no occasion to drop the bombs.” — Herbert Hoover
“I told [Gen. Douglas] MacArthur of my memorandum of mid-May 1945 to Truman, that peace could be had with Japan by which our major objectives would be accomplished. MacArthur said that was correct and that we would have avoided all of the losses, the Atomic bomb, and the entry of Russia into Manchuria.” — Herbert Hoover
“MacArthur’s views about the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were starkly different from what the general public supposed. When I asked General MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb, I was surprised to learn he had not even been consulted. What, I asked, would his advice have been? He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor.” — Norman Cousins
“General MacArthur definitely is appalled and depressed by this Frankenstein monster. I had a long talk with him today, necessitated by the impending trip to Okinawa. He wants time to think the thing out, so he has postponed the trip to some future date to be decided later.” — Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s pilot, Weldon E. Rhoades
“[General Douglas] MacArthur once spoke to me very eloquently about it, pacing the floor of his apartment in the Waldorf. He thought it a tragedy that the bomb was ever exploded. MacArthur believed that the same restrictions ought to apply to atomic weapons as to conventional weapons, that the military objective should always be limited damage to noncombatants…MacArthur, you see, was a soldier. He believed in using force only against military targets, and that is why the nuclear thing turned him off…” — Richard Nixon
“The Japanese were ready for peace, and they already had approached the Russians and the Swiss. And that suggestion of giving a warning of the atomic bomb was a face-saving proposition for them, and one that they could have readily accepted. In my opinion, the Japanese war was really won before we ever used the atom bomb.” — Under Secretary of the Navy, Ralph Bird
“The Japanese position was hopeless even before the first atomic bomb fell, because the Japanese had lost control of their own air.” — General “Hap” Arnold
“The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan.” — Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet
“The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace before the atomic age was announced to the world with the destruction of Hiroshima and before the Russian entry into the war.” — Adm. Nimitz
“The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons … The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.” — Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Staff to President Truman
“Truman told me it was agreed they would use it, after military men’s statements that it would save many, many American lives, by shortening the war, only to hit military objectives. Of course, then they went ahead and killed as many women and children as they could, which was just what they wanted all the time.” — Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Staff to President Truman
“The war would have been over in two weeks without the Russians entering and without the atomic bomb. … The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.” — Major General Curtis LeMay, XXI Bomber Command
“[LeMay said] if we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he’s right. He, and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?” — Robert McNamara
“The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment … It was a mistake to ever drop it … [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it.” — Fleet Admiral William Halsey Jr.
“I concluded that even without the atomic bomb, Japan was likely to surrender in a matter of months. My own view was that Japan would capitulate by November 1945. Even without the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it seemed highly unlikely, given what we found to have been the mood of the Japanese government, that a U.S. invasion of the islands scheduled for 1 November 1945 would have been necessary.” — Paul Nitze, director and then Vice Chairman of the Strategic Bombing Survey
“[E]ven without the atomic bombing attacks, air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion. Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.” — U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, 1946
“Just when the Japanese were ready to capitulate, we went ahead and introduced to the world the most devastating weapon it had ever seen and, in effect, gave the go-ahead to Russia to swarm over Eastern Asia. Washington decided it was time to use the A-bomb. I submit that it was the wrong decision. It was wrong on strategic grounds. And it was wrong on humanitarian grounds.” — Ellis Zacharias, Deputy Director of the Office of Naval Intelligence
“When we didn’t need to do it, and we knew we didn’t need to do it, and they knew that we knew we didn’t need to do it, we used them as an experiment for two atomic bombs. Many other high-level military officers concurred.” — Brigadier General Carter Clarke, the Military Intelligence officer in charge of preparing summaries of intercepted Japanese cables for President Truman and his advisors
“The commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet and Chief of Naval Operations, Ernest J. King, stated that the naval blockade and prior bombing of Japan in March of 1945, had rendered the Japanese helpless and that the use of the atomic bomb was both unnecessary and immoral. — Brigadier General Carter Clarke
“I proposed to Secretary Forrestal that the weapon should be demonstrated before it was used… the war was very nearly over. The Japanese were nearly ready to capitulate… My proposal… was that the weapon should be demonstrated over… a large forest of cryptomeria trees not far from Tokyo… Would lay the trees out in windrows from the center of the explosion in all directions as though they were matchsticks, and, of course, set them afire in the center. It seemed to me that a demonstration of this sort would prove to the Japanese that we could destroy any of their cities at will… Secretary Forrestal agreed wholeheartedly with the recommendation… It seemed to me that such a weapon was not necessary to bring the war to a successful conclusion, that once used it would find its way into the armaments of the world.” — Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Navy Lewis Strauss
“In the light of available evidence I myself and others felt that if such a categorical statement about the retention of the dynasty had been issued in May 1945, the surrender-minded elements in the Japanese government might well have been afforded by such a statement a valid reason and the necessary strength to come to an early clear cut decision. If surrender could have been brought about in May 1945, or even in June, or July, before the entrance of Soviet Russia into the Pacific war and the use of the atomic bomb, the world would have been the gainer.” — Under Secretary of State Joseph Grew
And for what it’s worth, then-Army Chief George Marshall wanted only to hit military facilities with it, not cities.
The U.S. atomic destruction of 140,000 people at Hiroshima and 70,000 at Nagasaki was never “necessary” because Japan was already smashed, no land invasion was needed and Japan was suing for peace. The official myth that “the bombs saved lives” by hurrying Japan’s surrender can no longer be believed except by those who love to be fooled.
The long-standing fiction has been destroyed by the historical record kept in U.S., Soviet, Japanese and British archives — now mostly declassified — and detailed by Ward Wilson in his book Five Myths About Nuclear Weapons (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013).
Greg Mitchell’s Atomic Cover-Up (Sinclair Books, 2011) also helps explain the durability of the “saved lives” ruse. Wartime and occupation censors seized all films and still photos of the two atomic cities, and the U.S. government kept them hidden for decades.
Even in 1968, newsreel footage from Hiroshima held in the National Archives was stamped, “SECRET, Not To Be Released Without the Approval of the DOD.” Photos of the atomized cities that did reach the public merely showed burned buildings or mushroom clouds — rarely human victims.
MacArthur’s Censorship
In Hiroshima in America: 50 Years of Denial (Grosset/Putnam, 1995), Robert Lifton and Mitchell note that Gen. Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, “left nothing to chance.” Even before Hiroshima, he prohibited U.S. commanders from commenting on the atomic attacks without clearance from the War Department.
“We didn’t want MacArthur and others saying the war could have been won without the bomb,” Groves said.
In fact, MacArthur did not believe the bomb was needed to end the war, but he too established a censorship program as commander of the U.S. occupation of Japan. He banned reporters from visiting Hiroshima or Nagasaki, expelled reporters who defied the ban and later said that those who complained that censorship existed in Japan were engaged in “a maliciously false propaganda campaign.” That most people in the United States still believe the “saved lives” rationale to be true is because of decades of this censorship and myth-making, begun by President Harry Truman, who said Aug. 6, 1945, “Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base. That was because we wished this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.”
In fact, the city of 350,000 had practically no military value at all and the target was the city, not the base three kilometers away.
Taking President Truman at his word, the 140,000 civilians killed at Hiroshima are the minimum to be expected when exploding a small nuclear weapon on a “military base.” Today’s “small” Cruise missile warheads, which are 12 times the power of Truman’s A-bomb could kill 1.68 million each.
Official censorship of what the two bombs did to people and the reasons for it has been so successful, that 25 years of debunking hasn’t managed to generally topple the official narrative.
A Created Myth
In 1989, historian Gar Alperovitz reported, “American leaders knew well in advance that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not required to bring about Japan’s surrender;” and later, in his 847-page The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (Random House, 1995), “I think it can be proven that the bomb was not only unnecessary but known in advance not to be necessary.” The popular myth “didn’t just happen,” Alperovitz says, “it was created.”
Kept hidden for decades was the 1946 U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey’s conclusion that Japan almost certainly would have surrendered in 1945 without the atomic bombs, without a Soviet invasion and without a U.S. invasion.
Not long after V-J Day in 1945, Brig. Gen. Bonnie Feller wrote, “Neither the atomic bombing nor the entry of the Soviet Union into the war forced Japan’s unconditional surrender. She was defeated before either of these events took place.”
President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a five-star general and the supreme allied commander in Europe, said in his memoirs he believed “that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary.”
Adm. William Leahy, the wartime chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in 1950, “It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material success in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.”
Feller’s, Ike’s and Leahy’s opinions were conspicuously left out of or censored by the Smithsonian Institution’s 1995 display of the atomic B-29 bomber Enola Gay.
Admiral Leahy’s 1950 myth-busting and censor-busting about the Bomb could be an epitaph for the nuclear age: “I was not taught to make war in that fashion,” he said of Hiroshima’s incineration, “and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”