The anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, which occurred 42 years ago today, is an opportunity to reflect on the horror of war and the danger of nuclear weapons, an exercise that is fully justified. It is also the regular occasion for an attack of national conscience, which is not.
Viewed apart from what went before, the use of the atomic bomb against Hiroshima and Nagasaki stands out as unique: the only time since they were created that nuclear weapons have been unleashed. The attacks did represent, in one sense, the dawn of a new age. But, in another, they were remarkable only for their concentrated impact. The American use of the bomb is just one chapter in the chronicle of unparalleled destruction that was World War II.
A generation of Americans has grown up thinking of the Vietnam War as the height of wasteful carnage. Some 1.4 million people, including 56,000 Americans, died in that war. World War II killed perhaps as many as 60 million, nearly 300,000 of them American servicemen. It recognized no protection for civilians, who accounted for roughly 40 percent of all deaths. Though its territory was largely shielded from attack, the United States paid a dreadful price for a war it didn`t start.
Nowhere was the experience more hellish for the American fighting man than in the Pacific. After the battle of Midway, the Japanese had little prospect of victory, but they were grimly resolved to inflict the highest possible number of casualties on the enemy.
Typical of the war of attrition was the battle for Iwo Jima, an outcropping of volcanic rock occupying just eight square miles, with no strategic significance except an airstrip. The island was supposed to be secured in a few days. It took the Marines six weeks and 7,000 lives to wipe out a force of 21,000 men dug into caves, pillboxes and seven miles of underground tunnels. American advances came only with excruciating slowness and devastating losses. Some divisions lost 75 percent of their men.
That was the Pacific war: island after island which had to be pried away from ferocious defenders who would fight to the last man. After Guadalcanal, where wounded Japanese greeted American medics by blowing themselves up, prisoners were rarely taken by either side. Nor were the Japanese fastidious about noncombatants. Their record of atrocities in the places they conquered pales only next to Hitler`s.
Over three and a half years, this bitter war had schooled Americans in a deep hatred of the Japanese. It had also given a taste of what the U.S. would face invading Japan, where the enemy would be stronger. Most Americans placed the greatest importance on winning the war at the least cost in American lives. The fate of the enemy population was no more than a secondary consideration. Only a nation of saints would have been more charitable.
The predictions heard of a million American dead and wounded were inflated, but occupying Japan by force would would have been bloody. Says Ronald Spector, author of a distinguished history of the war, ``It`s hard to imagine fewer than 100,000 American casualties.`` The number of Japanese casualties, military and civilian, would have been far higher. The last major battle, Okinawa, had killed not only 12,000 Americans and 70,000 Japanese but 80,000 islanders, most of them civilians.
The appeal of the atomic bomb was that it would force a prompt capitulation by Tokyo, which still refused ``unconditional surrender.`` Even after Germany`s defeat, the military chieftains who controlled Japan`s government resisted the logical course. Some thought that if the Americans met spirited resistance to an invasion, they would accept terms more favorable to Japan. Some simply preferred a suicidal war against the invader to a humiliating surrender.
An invasion might have been avoided even without the bomb. After the war, a U.S. commission concluded that Japan would have surrendered anyway by the end of 1945. But that wasn`t clear at the time, and this option was no more humane. It assumed the continuation of the napalm bombing that had devastated dozens of Japanese cities and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians.
The difference between a firebombing and an atomic explosion, says one historian, ``was largely academic.`` In military terms, the bomb was not absolutely necessary. In moral terms, it was irrelevant.
The two atomic bombs dropped on Japan killed more than 100,000 people. Compared to an invasion or several more months of merciless air raids, though, this may have been the least destructive option. In any case, it was merely the culmination of an established policy in fighting the Axis powers--one that could have been avoided only by deliberately sacrificing huge numbers of American servicemen, most of whom were no more willing participants in the war than the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That is not the kind of exchange any nation would voluntarily make. It is not one the U.S should have made.