When The Atomic Bomb Went Off Over Hiroshima On Aug. 6th, Essays

When the atomic bomb went off over Hiroshima on Aug. 6th, 1945, 70,000 lives were ended in a flash. To the American people who were weary from the long and brutal war, such a drastic measure seemed a necessary, even righteous way to end the madness that was World War II. However, the madness had just begun. That August morning was the day that heralded the dawn of the nuclear age, and with it came more than just the loss of lives. According to Archibald MacLeish, a U.S. poet, "What happened at Hiroshima was not only that a scientific breakthrough . . . had occurred and that a great part of the population of a city had been burned to death, but that the problem of the relation of the triumphs of modern science to the human purposes of man had been explicitly defined." The entire globe was now to live with the fear of total annihilation, the fear that drove the cold war, the fear that has forever changed world politics. The fear is real, more real today than ever, for the ease at which a nuclear bomb is achieved in this day and age sparks fear in the hearts of most people on this planet. According to General Douglas MacArthur, "We have had our last chance. If we do not devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door." The decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japanese citizens in August, 1945, as a means to bring the long Pacific war to an end was justified-militarily, politically and morally. The goal of waging war is victory with minimum losses on one's own side and, if possible, on the enemy's side. No one disputes the fact that the Japanese military was prepared to fight to the last man to defend the home islands, and indeed had already demonstrated this determination in previous Pacific island campaigns. A weapon originally developed to contain a Nazi atomic project was available that would spare Americans hundreds of thousands of causalities in an invasion of Japan, and-not incidentally-save several times more than that among Japanese soldiers and civilians. The thousands who have died in the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were far less than would have died in an allied invasion, and their sudden deaths convinced the Japanese military to surrender. Every nation has an interest in being at peace with other nations, but there has never been a time when the world was free of the scourge of war. Hence, peaceful nations must always have adequate military force at their disposal in order to deter or defeat the aggressive designs of rogue nations. The United States was therefore right in using whatever means were necessary to defeat the Japanese empire in the war which the latter began, including the use of superior or more powerful weaponry-not only to defeat Japan but to remain able following the war to maintain peace sufficiently to guarantee its own existence. A long, costly and bloody conflict is a wasteful use of a nation's resources when quicker, more decisive means are available. Japan was not then-or later-the only nation America had to restrain, and an all-out U.S. invasion of Japan would have risked the victory already gained in Europe in the face of the palpable thereat of Soviet domination. Finally, we can never forget the maxim of Edmund Burke: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought us into a war which we had vainly hoped to avoid. We could no longer "do nothing" but were compelled to "do something" to roll back the Japanese militarists. Victims of aggression have every right both to end the aggression and to prevent the perpetrator of it from continuing or renewing it. Our natural right of self defense as well as our moral duty to defeat tyranny justified our decision to wage the war and, ultimately, to drop the atomic bomb. We should expect political leaders to be guided by moral principles but this does not mean they must subject millions of people to needless injury or death out of a misplaced concern for the safety of enemy soldiers or civilians. President Truman's decision to deploy atomic power in Japan revealed a man who understood the moral issues at stake and who had the courage to strike a decisive blow that quickly brought to an end the most destructive war in human history. Squeamishness is not a moral principle, but making the best decisions at the time, given the circumstances,