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Eighty Years of the Bomb

It is time for conservatives to reclaim their criticism of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

World War II, after the explosion of the atom bomb.
World War II, after the explosion of the atom bomb in August 1945, Hiroshima, Japan. (Photo by: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
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“It’s hard for me to find the words to express what I saw, the stories that I heard, the haunting sadness that still remains. This is an experience that will stay with me forever.”

That was the reaction of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard after returning from a June visit to Japan. August 6 and 9 mark the 80th anniversaries of the U.S. dropping of atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively, in the closing days of the Second World War.

“This attack obliterated the city, killed over 300,000 people [the combined death toll for both cities], many dying instantly while others died from severe burns, injuries, radiation sickness, and cancer that set in the following months and years,” Gabbard said in the most humane and regretful language given this century by a senior U.S. official about the attack. “Nagasaki suffered the same fate. Homes, schools, families, all gone in a flash.”

Today, Pew Research finds that Americans are equally divided between those who believe the bombings were justified, those who believe they weren’t, and those who aren’t sure. Politically, the division is much less even. Fifty-one percent of conservatives justify the decision to destroy the cities, while 42 percent of Democrats do not.

This is a historical anomaly. In the aftermath of President Harry Truman’s decision to deploy the bomb, conservative leaders were his most prominent critics. That included Felix Morley, cofounder of Human Events, and Medford Evans, who wrote in National Review in 1959, “The indefensibility of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima is becoming a part of the national conservative creed.”

“There was in fact mounting criticism after the war, started by the conservatives, not by the liberals, who defended Truman,” explains Gar Alperowitz, whose 1995 work The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth remains the definitive analysis of the internal debate and timeline leading up to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

One of Truman’s predecessors in office, Herbert Hoover, had in his post-presidency become a kind of old man of the American right—a stature far removed from the progressivism he practiced in the White House. But what Hoover could lay claim to was a lifetime commitment to humanitarianism, and after Hiroshima he wrote, “The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul.”

Dissent from Truman’s rationale extended to his eventual successor as well. Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower counseled against using the bomb to Secretary of War Henry Stimson in July. “First, the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing,” he recalled to Newsweek in 1963. “Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon.”

After Hiroshima, the personal pilot of General Douglas MacArthur—who hadn’t been consulted about the decision beforehand—recorded that his superior “is appalled and depressed by this Frankenstein monster [the atom bomb].” MacArthur was later touted as a Republican presidential prospect (actually as early as 1944), and for the remainder of his life he maintained that the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki served no military utility.

In agreement with that estimation was the always blunt William D. Leahy, retired admiral and default Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who concluded his 1950 memoir: 

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. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender…. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had joined the barbarians of the world. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.

But the informed opinions of these renowned military men haven’t stopped modern conservative talking heads from breaking away from their ideological forebears, and defending the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as not just necessary but moral. They denounce any objection to the “Good War” narrative as unpatriotic, and subversive of Washington, DC’s self-proclaimed mandate to rule the world. Even DNI Gabbard’s mournful remembrance put her on the ropes inside the Trump administration.

The foremost of these arguments is that the atomic bombings prevented the necessity of a military invasion of Japan, which would have cost the United States the lives of over a million soldiers. “Modern scholarship has nevertheless demonstrated the estimate to be without any serious foundation in the documents of the period,” writes Alperowitz. 

The origin of this postwar rationalization was a 1947 Harper’s Magazine essay published under the byline of 79-year old Henry Stimson, ghostwritten by 27-year old McGeorge Bundy, future national security advisor during the Vietnam War. As testified by Eisenhower, MacArthur, Leahy, General Curtis LeMay, General Bonner Fellers, and many other senior officers in all branches of service, Japan was not prepared for continued resistance, but rather on the verge of complete defeat when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were targeted. 

The late historian Martin Sherwin, whose biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer inspired the 2024 Academy-award winning film named for that scientist, wrote, “The choice in the summer of 1945 was not between a conventional invasion or a nuclear war. It was a choice between various forms of diplomacy and warfare.” The determination reconfirmed by the Allies at the Potsdam conference to seek unconditional surrender with no assurances against Japan was not a military but political decision, and one that delayed an earlier end to the war in the Pacific.

As an aside, a layman’s talking point used to substantiate the million-man myth is that for the remainder of the 20th century the U.S. government awarded to wounded American soldiers Purple Heart decorations manufactured during World War II; they were left over when a bloody invasion of the home islands was avoided. In reality, the U.S. produced 1.5 million Purple Hearts for the duration of the war, and at its conclusion, 500,000 remained and would indeed be handed out in the coming decades. But it’s not to be interpreted that these 500,000 were intended specifically for Operation Downfall, or that this number of leftover supplies represents a casualty estimate.

Another defense, hotly argued from a mindset of vengeance, is that the atomic bombings were justified retribution for Japan’s sneak attack on Pearl Harbor and their deplorable war crimes. While overshadowed by the Nazi Holocaust, the Imperial Japanese Army employed the most heinous conduct imaginable against Chinese civilians and Western prisoners of war, including mass executions, biological warfare, and even human experimentation. The infamous Rape of Nanjing in 1937 has a comparable death toll to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

But evil cannot justify evil. “No matter the barbarity, the savagery of the Japanese empire, no matter the justice of America’s cause, we had no moral right to kill like that,” wrote The American Conservative’s cofounder Pat Buchanan, condemning the decision to incinerate cities of “old men, women, and children.” 

A proud, self-assured nation should be big enough to admit the mistakes of its government. And Gabbard’s description of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as “unimaginable horror” should once again be conservative vernacular, rather than continued apologia for the destructive and dastardly foreign policies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman.

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