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Since the war, historians have pointed out other choices that the Americans had. They could have defeated Japan by a sea blockade and conventional bombing, without an invasion. Or they could have waited to see if the Soviet attack on Japan would finish the job. Soviet forces attacked Japan in Manchuria on the same day that Nagasaki was bombed. Truman and his colleagues were not trying to avoid using the atomic bomb. As Stimson explained after the war: ‘No effort was made and none seriously considered to achieve surrender merely in order not to have to use the bomb.’ Hiroshima was doomed.
One other question still remains, why was it necessary to bomb two cities? The Japanese government didn’t even have enough time to react to the Hiroshima bombing. They had sent a military and scientific team to the city to report on what had happened. By the time they were sure Hiroshima had been destroyed by an atomic bomb Nagasaki had also been hit. (11)
President Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb was morally wrong. Truman wrote in his diary that he had ordered the bomb dropped on a "purely military" target, so that "military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children." (12) In his radio speech to the nation on August 9, President Truman called Hiroshima "a military base." (13) This was clearly not the case. Undersecretary of the Navy Ralph A. Bard wrote that use of the bomb without warning was contrary to "the position of the United States as a great humanitarian nation," especially since Japan seemed close to surrender. (14)
"It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were almost defeated and ready to surrender...in being the first to use it, we...adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages."
---Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy,
Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during World War II
Mass murder of innocent civilians can never be justified. So therefore the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was an arbitrary and callous act of terror. The USA never even apologies to Japan for the bombings or admitted it might have been a mistake. “Hiroshima marked the beginning of a new age in history – the age in which humanity must live with the knowledge that it can destroy itself” (Arthur Koestler, 1945) Half a century later in countries all across the world, peace groups have organised to oppose nuclear weapons. The experience of the two Japanese cities in 1945 seemed a foretaste of what might happen in the future of the whole planet. (15)
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Yvonne Shao
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