Sixty-five years ago today the United States government carried out a decision which made sense in a pragmatic way, but which was, perhaps, the most disastrous moral and ethical decision of modern times. It was a fulcrum day which signaled the beginning of a new era in human existence.
A U. S. plane flew over Hiroshima, Japan, and dropped an atomic bomb which virtually destroyed the huge city, killing men, women and children in numbers too large to be understood at that time. Three days later a second plane was to do the same thing at Nagasaki. In all nearly 250,000 people were killed in the two bombings, most of them civilians.
As a pragmatic decision, it worked. It brought the remaining Japanese people to their knees, and surrender was to follow. The war in the Pacific was over. It was a victory in the narrow sense of the word. A bloody and frightening World War II was coming to an end.
To this day scholars, diplomats, military strategists, theologians and ordinary people debate the consequences of that fateful day. The heart of the Japanese people has never been the same, and the conscience of the American people has struggled to discover a singular place of peace.
The fact that the generations have not changed sufficiently keeps the issue before us. There are people of my generation who were alive at that time. In Japan there are individuals and families who still bear the physical scars of the massive explosions. It won’t be long before this generation passes and the issue will be more virtual than real.
Visual images will continue to exist, but in the same way that pictures of doughboys and stories of mustard gas from World War I prevail as more hypothetical issues than anything else. The Enola Gay will pass into history in the same way that the Hindenburg and The Spirit of St. Louis became romantic memories.
Each year when this day rolls around again I find myself sobered and somewhat depressed. I understand the rationale that guided our nation’s leaders to make the decision to drop the bomb. It was a matter of stopping the killing of Allied troops quickly, preventing the continued slaughter of a generation of young men in a brutal war that was discovering technology never before utilized in the making of war. Who is to say how many “lives were saved” by this action over Japan?
But that is a very Western-centric way of assessing the situation. The death of non-military residents of two entire cities was the cost paid for that pragmatic decision. In today’s experience of global thinking those innocent people were not strangers and enemies as much as they were fellow residents of a shrinking ball spinning through the universe. Today we use the terms “brothers and sisters” more liberally than we would have in 1945.
What has emerged from August 6, 1945, is an era of nuclear awareness. It was going to occur one way or another as the human mind sorted through the options. If not an American decision, it would have been the decision of some other nation, perhaps an enemy. The fact that we live in a tense nuclear age was to be a given. That doesn’t lessen the twinges of conscience, however.
A pragmatic decision will continue to remain as the subject of controversy. Today it is personal. Some day soon it will be more academic.
(I apologize for the fact that this is so late in being published this morning. My server was down.)
