CHARLES COOKE: Yes, We Should Have Bombed Japan.

Tulsi Gabbard, the U.S. director of national intelligence, has produced and released a video that depicts the horrific consequences of the American attack on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. In the spot, Gabbard laments the “haunting sadness” that remains in that city, before insinuating bizarrely that there exists a political faction in the present-day United States that is jonesing to bring about global “nuclear annihilation.”

I am persuaded by the utilitarian case in favor of the bombings. I believe that, had the United States attempted to end the war by invading Japan, millions of people would have died in the fanatical fighting and the famines that resulted — and that most of those dead would have been Japanese and Chinese. I believe that, absent the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Soviet Union may well have invaded northern Japan, divided the country in two, and changed the remainder of the 20th century for the worse. I believe, too, that, if Truman had opted to greenlight Operation Downfall, the war in the Pacific could plausibly have lasted for another two years — which, given that the conflict in the East began in 1937, after Japan brutally attacked China, would have pushed that catastrophe into its tenth year.

But, in all honesty, those considerations are subordinate to my primary calculus here — which is that there is no good reason that the terrible cost of concluding a war that was started by another nation ought to have been borne by its victims. By the conclusion of operations, any Allied invasion of Japan would have required the deployment of up to 7 million American men. Per contemporary estimates, the U.S. government expected that between 500,000 and 1 million of those men would have died. That being so, my question is this: In what possible universe would the president of the United States — a man who was elected to represent America, not the world — be morally justified in choosing that option, when the war could have been ended (and, indeed, was ended; that’s neither a hypothetical nor a counterfactual) by dropping two enormous bombs on the aggressor?

As Roger Kimball noted in 2023: The atomic bomb saved Japanese lives, too.

This year, the recent release of Christopher Nolan’s new movie about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the making of the atomic bomb has given the controversy over the development and deployment of that awesome weapon a new urgency.

Something else that has contributed to the fraught atmosphere is the war in Ukraine. After all, one side in that conflict, Russia, controls the world’s largest arsenal of nuclear weapons, more than 6,000 warheads. My friend Roger L. Simon is right: atomic weapons are “as close or closer to being used today than ever since World War Two because of the endless war in Ukraine.”

That is a sobering thought. To his succeeding questions “Was this worth doing? Was it moral to build such an extreme weapon?” I would answer “yes” and “yes.” I also, by the way, support our use of this most horrible weapon in Japan. Why? Because its use at Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended World War Two. In so doing, it saved hundreds of thousands of American lives. Data point: the military is still using the huge supply of Purple Hearts it manufactured in anticipation of an invasion of the Japanese home islands*.

But put the number of American lives saved to one side. The use of the bomb, by ending the war, also saved millions of Japanese lives.

This was widely understood at the time. In subsequent years, however,  a new, mostly left-wing, narrative has grown up which faults President Truman for using the bomb. Today, as Oliver Kamm noted in the Guardian, “Hiroshima” and “Nagasaki” are often used as a shorthand terms for war crimes.

That is not how they were judged at the time. Our side did terrible things to avoid a more terrible outcome. The bomb was a deliverance for American troops, for prisoners and slave laborers, for those dying of hunger and maltreatment throughout the Japanese empire — and for Japan itself. One of Japan’s highest wartime officials, Kido Koichi, later testified that in his view the August surrender prevented 20 million Japanese casualties. The destruction of two cities, and the suffering it caused for decades afterwards, cannot but temper our view of the Pacific war. Yet we can conclude with a high degree of probability that abjuring the bomb would have caused greater suffering still.

Historian Mark Felton made a video in 2021 on the US military still awarding Purple Hearts that were made near the end of WWII: