One Bomb or Two Bombs

Just wanted to quickly build on Farley’s post from earlier today. It’s the 80th anniversary of the Hiroshima bomb and that deserves more play, though as anniversaries move from beyond people’s lived experiences, naturally they don’t mean as much. I generally agree with Rob here, but the question to me is not so much about the Hiroshima bomb but the Nagasaki bomb. Tokyo barely even knew what had happened by August 9. But the fact of the matter is that Truman, who had risen into the VP based on his annoying “there’s a lot of waste going on in the government and by god as senator I’m going to raise my profile by investigating it” and, uh, got his answer on where the money was going and so was determined to show it. It is also worth noting that no one believed that an invasion of Japan was going to lead to a million dead Americans, at least until the 1950s, when questions rose about bombing Nagasaki. The issue here is more the bullshit post-hoc justifications through massive lying than the decision at the time, but the moral dubiousness of it did lead to said bullshit. It’s like Kentucky joining the Confederacy in 1866.

Personally, I would have given more time and said that we are going to keep destroying your cities every two weeks (or something like that) and seen if it was going to work. But Truman wanted to justify the expense and he did and that worked domestically at least.

All that said, I do agree with Rob that this is on Japanese leadership in the end.

And yet, Hideo Sekigawa’s furious 1953 movie Hiroshima is the most righteously angry political film I’ve ever seen and I love it and agree with it 100%. It was a horrible crime and we should not celebrate, even if we argue that taking the world into a new era of horror was necessary at the moment. And honestly, it’s truly amazing that 79 years and 362 days later, there has never been another nuclear bomb used in battle.