A Short Role-Playing Game (Part II)

Yesterday, August 9th, was the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, 3 days after the bombing of Hiroshima.

My goal here was to try to spark some thought about the bomings in a different way. I stripped away all the historical details because most people seem to have already made up their minds about the morality of the atomic bombings. In effect, I tried to put readers into the shoes of President Harry Truman, finding himself the Commander-In-Chief of the war effort after the death of FDR, and not having the intuitive knowledge the general public has nowadays about what an atomic bomb is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki
I have seen, time and again, a tendency to judge the United States's use of the atomic bomb on Japan with Cold War or post-Cold War ethics. Since this is the weapon that looms over our heads at all hours, and could annihilate us all in WWIII, then how dare the Americans use it... over 55 years ago, that is. In 1945 the atomic bomb was a band-new weapon... no one, including the scientists who invented it, really knew what to expect from it... the idea of "radiation" was abstract to US war planners, the spectre of nuclear fallout not known about until the weapon was used. The world, and the United States government, didn't really get the idea of just how terrible an atomic bomb was until the fifties, after the bombings and their aftereffects had years to sink into people's minds.

I have also seen a strange, vindictive mixing of past and present. It goes something like "You Americans are warmongers! The United States is the only country to use the atomic bomb in wartime!" What a wonderful injection of a past war into the present, as if something that was done in the desperate days of WWII actually happened yesterday, and somehow me and every other American alive today supported it. I could go on, but in principle, I don't believe that anyone alive today should be held responsible for something their ancestors did generations ago. In this case, Harry Truman and all the WWII generals who ordered the bombing are no longer around. The ones to blame are already dead.

In answer to my own question, I decided if I were in Truman's shoes, I would have dropped the bomb. Yes, it is an awful incident taken by itself, but in the middle of the most destructive war the world has ever seen, the bombing of a city or two to ash wasn't that unusual... many of Europe's cities had been obliterated by conventional methods. There was already an effort to destroy every last Japanese city by incendiary bombs, and now comes along a bigger bomb to do it that much quicker... of course I would use it! If I'd heard any scientists talk of radiation, I think I would have actually considered it a bonus since it increases the weapon's killing power.

In a strange way, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did save lives. It has been estimated that 1 million American soldiers and perhaps 12 million Japanese lives would have been lost in the invasion of Japan. One could think of the sacrifice of the nearly 200,000 civilians in those cities as a "fair exchange" for the millions of lives saved when Japan surrendered. The Japanese military leaders were willing to fight to the last man, literally, when they knew they would take many American lives with them... but waiting to be incinerated by bombs from far away was another matter.

Of course, I'm not saying I'd advocate using such a weapon now... far from it. I was born into a world faced with in the dread of WWIII and fallout poisoning the world... and find, for example, the short-fused nuclear standoff between India and Pakistan a cause for worry: the US and the Soviet Union had 20 minutes, as the ICBM flies, to talk things over... India and Pakistan have just 8, though that's a whole other story.

But I'm just not presumptuous enough to say I'd have known better if I'd been part of the war planning back then, when the atomic bomb was some strange new weapon.