Seventy years ago this week, the United States unleashed the only two nuclear weapons used in wartime, devastating the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The attacks, which killed more than 100,000 instantly, ushered in the age of atomic weapons and two competing races — one to amass huge stockpiles of nuclear warheads, the other to prevent their proliferation. The atom bomb exploded at about 1,900 feet above the centre of Hiroshima. The devastation was cataclysmic. Immediate casualties, dead and injured, numbered approximately 115,000. This didn’t include another 60,000 who would succumb within a year to the effects of radiation. Three days later, a second similar device was released over the city of Nagasaki, with only slightly less devastating results.
It wasn’t at the command of a megalomaniacal tyrant, but a former small-town shopkeeper, that a weapon capable of wiping out all life on Earth came to be transferred into the bomb-bay of an aircraft whose pilot, Lt. Col. Paul W. Tibbets, named his Superfortress “Enola Gay” after his mother. The most destructive force in human history was first deployed by ordinary people serving the world’s greatest democracy.It took another week for Japanese Emperor Hirohito to address his loyal subjects in the “Jewell Voice” broadcast of August 15, announcing his country’s acceptance of the Joint Declaration of Potsdam, in which the Allied Powers called for Japan’s unconditional surrender. Using a remarkable understatement, Hirohito expressed the view that the war was turning out “not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.” True as this was, to put it mildly, Japan could have continued defending its remaining possessions and home islands for a long time, and there’s little doubt that without Truman’s decision to deploy the bomb, it would have done so. Some estimates put the number of combined Allied and Japanese lives lost, had the war continued, to over a million, arguing that the decision to drop the bomb saved lives.
Even if true, this isn’t the argument I would prefer to rely on at Judgment Day. I would sooner argue that ending the war before the enemy could develop a similar weapon was the duty of any U.S. president. Once the scientific capacity to harness the destructive energy of atomic power existed, it was only a question of time before other nations’ scientists developed it as well. Dropping the bomb is a harsh but possible method of stopping proliferation; banning the bomb through international treaties is not.
Ban-the-bomb campaigns and negotiated agreements ensure only that the most aggressive and fanatical regimes possess the most destructive weaponry. The result of nations agreeing to actually abide by a ban-the-bomb treaty would lead to no nuclear weapons in the hands of any but rogue nations, such as North Korea. It’s unnecessary to spell out what that would mean.
The law is a great instrument to use against the law-abiding.
Using it against the lawless works only in conjunction with force,
which is what you give up when you disarm yourself
hoping that the lawless will follow suit.
Unmaking the bomb is like trying to un-eat the forbidden fruit. Leaving the Tree of Knowledge alone might have been a better choice, but it’s a bit too late for that. Pretending it never happened isn’t a useful idea. God had good reasons for his dietary restrictions in the Garden of Eden, arbitrary as they may have seemed to his critics, then and since. Truman had contended for the American presidency, not the Nobel Peace Prize. He didn’t feel entitled to risk Japan dropping a bomb on San Francisco one day, if he didn’t have the fortitude to drop one on Hiroshima. How Truman’s successors would feel about such matters, only time will tell.
Read the entire article at the National Post
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