Bickering Over the Bomb

Each year as each August steams its way along we find ourselves treated to yet another round of debate about an event now sixty years past. Along with the more understandable harangues from various voices of our Japanese friends, newspapers and documentaries over here end up re-hashing many of the same arguments about America’s use of Atomic weapons as were brought out during the previous year’s anniversaries. While those attacking the bombs are without a doubt sincere in their hatred of slaughter I have never found most of their arguments convincing.

Arguments against the bomb come down to two basic complaints. The first is that the weapons employed by the United States in August of 1945 were far too vicious and indiscriminate to be considered morally legitimate. The second is that even had this first question not been a factor, Japan was at that point so devastated that the atomic attacks were superfluous to the point of maliciousness.

The attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed about 120,000 people on August 6 and 9 respectively. Pictures and anecdotes from those horrific days can still make one’s stomach turn. Children turned to dust with their sheltering mothers hovering over them like charcoal statues. There can be no denying that the American weapons were both vicious and indiscriminate. These were cities that were attacked and not fleets or fortifications. Even had the target been solely comprised of well-armed warriors, can we really justify such a level of slaughter?

I have always thought that those who object to nuclear weapons because they kill lots of people must not know very much war. They don’t seem to realize just how nasty so-called conventional weapons can be. The immediate historical context of these events puts the lie to such a complaint. In the course of World War Two, somewhere between fifty and seventy-five million people were killed. This means that of this morbid total, over 99% managed to find themselves butchered by “conventional” weapons. Just few short months before Hiroshima up to 130,000 Tokyo residents as well as 100,000 citizens of Dresden, Germany were burned alive by conventional weapons each in a single night.

This scale of death is not the sole property of modern industrialized warfare. On August 2, 216 BC some 50,000 Roman legionnaires were slain by nothing more complex than swords, spears and arrows. Cortez annihilated the Aztec Empire with primitive muskets and cannon. Search through the pages and history and you will find time and again the massive slaughter of both soldier and civilian alike on a scale that will make the stoutest among us queasy from the toll. Humanity had been shredding its own numbers viciously and indiscriminately long before the invention of “Oppenheimer’s deadly toy.” If you are going to protest the human cost of weapons, you need to begin a little farther back on the technological chain.

My question to these earnest protesters is why aren’t you there for these others who have fallen in war? Are those who are killed by atomic weapons somehow more dead than those killed by guns and knives? What is about napalm and high explosives that you find so appealing that you give it a pass for its killing punch? Why don’t you protest the existence of machetes after its prominence in the killing of 800,000 Rwandans in 1994?

The next complaint about the bombs’ use is that of its utter pointlessness. The argument goes that by 1945 Japan was beaten. The combination of British progress through Southeast Asia and American advances across the Pacific Islands left “The Land of the Rising Sun” with no option but surrender. The argument goes on to say that the coming American invasions of the Japanese homeland which was slated for November of 1945 and March of 1946 would not have been as costly as is often advertised.

A corollary of this point focuses on the role of the Soviet Union in this affair. Strange as it may seem in retrospect, while the Russians were deeply involved the war against Germany, they had thus far left Japan to the English-speaking world and the Dutch. This created the odd situation that central members of the Axis and the Allies continued to have full diplomatic relations with one another. Taking advantage of this peculiar situation, Japanese emissaries sought to find a way out of the war by using the USSR as a go-between.

It is further argued that only reason that the US was so determined to use the bomb was as an opening salvo in the imminent Cold War. The reasoning is that as it was clear that the post-war world would be dominated by the Russo-American rivalry and so we were directing the bomb not as a warning to Tokyo to surrender but to Moscow to behave.

Finally it is pointed out that it had already been agreed among the Allies that since Germany was now no longer a threat, the Soviet Union would use its now idle military to neutralize Japanese forces in China. They fulfilled this promise on August 8, 1945 with a massive invasion of Manchuria that crushed the largest segments of the Japanese Army still in the field. Today representatives of the Russian and Japanese militaries are adamant that it was this action, and not the American atomic attacks, which induced Japan to surrender on August 14.

These are serious charges. If the critics are correct then America is guilty of butchering tens of thousands of people for no better reason than a desire to throw her weight around. For the most part the facts cannot be denied. I wonder though whether or not this is the only conclusion possible.

The fact that Japan was already defeated by time we dropped the bomb is a strange argument to make about war in 1945. I am sure that the hundreds of thousands of American, British and Russians who died in Europe in the war’s last months would have been comforted by the fact that Germany was already beaten. The Nazis did not stop fighting their lost war even when the Red Army was swarming all over Berlin and thoughts of victory were supplanted by dreams of a “noble” death. Why do we think that the Japanese would have been any different?

Those who would say so have to argue with two massive battles of that same year. Of the some 22,000 Japanese who had garrisoned Iwo Jima before the American invasion only 212 surrendered. On the American side nearly 7,000 fell trying to take a speck in the ocean only 8 square miles in area. At Okinawa a few months later only 7,400 Japanese out of 130,000 defenders lived to see the end. As at Iwo Jima American losses were high with over 12,000 dead. In this battle, the first on native Japanese soil, approximately a quarter of the civilian population perished as well.

Does this sound like a nation who was prepared to give up? Whatever peace feelers the Japanese might have been sending Russia’s way it was war that they were preparing for. The civilian population was being geared up to oppose the expected American invasion with whatever weapons they could fashion. The military was getting psyched up for a final, noble stand. Their hope was that in the face of the inevitably massive casualties among the American forces should we land in Japan, the American populace would agree to more generous surrender terms.

Anyone who continues to doubt their intentions should consider one fact. On the night before their surrender announcement, military units in Tokyo attempted a coup to force the emperor to keep on fighting to the end. They had heard of his intentions and could not abide the thought of defeat. People at war are often neither logical nor practical. Any American invasion of the Japanese homeland would have been far more devastating than the atomic attacks were.

The Russian factor also fails to convince if for no other reason than such arguments are mutually exclusive. On the one hand we are to believe that the bombings were unnecessary since peace was being sought through the Soviets. Then we are also to believe the bombings were unnecessary because the same Soviets were about to invade China and thereby defeating Japan. Whatever hopes the Japanese may have cherished for peace, the Russians were not at all interested in finding it for them. Someone wiping out your remaining bargaining chips is hardly the person to go to for mediation.

The final complaint, that the United States had the ulterior motive of preemptively facing down the Soviets, simply doesn’t make sense. Let us say that Truman and Churchill were conniving scare the Russians into a more amendable post-war position. After all, we had the bomb and they didn’t. Unfortunately for critics this makes as much sense as saying that police shouldn’t use force to stop one criminal presently wreaking havoc since it can also be used to scare another criminal from starting his mayhem. That America wanted Russia stay in line does not negate the fact that we were already at war with a nation that was still willing and able to continue the fight.

120,000 immediately died in the atomic attacks of August 1945. Even those who survived did so only with intense physical and psychological scars. But these things in themselves cannot make these weapons into a category of obscenity all alone. Over thirty million civilians were killed in the years 1939-45 even without atomic weapons. Those who survived conventional weapons also did so only with deep scars. War is a nasty brutish business without exception. It is not fair to the millions who died in the “normal” ways of war to say that their deaths are somehow less tragic or obscene. They deserve more.

The Humane Society

When we are born all our actions are passive. We must be fed, clothed, bathed and whatever else by another if these things are to happen at all. Even the few movements we do in fact do are instinctive. When an infant is presented with a breast, he turns to suckle even if it is not his or anyone else’s mother. When his bladder is full, empties it. If he is unhappy or uncomfortable, he cries. All this is done without thought, reflection or intention.

As he gets older he begins to take control of his world. The road to dominion starts with his own body. He learns that his hands are attached and that, to his delight, that he can move them at will. At first these movements are clumsy and often futile. Later on he learns that certain actions affect even those things that are not attached to his person. The bottle can be grasped; the rattle can be shaken and so on.

This goes further when he begins to pull the rug to bring the toy on it within reach. He can make mommy come when he cries or make daddy pick up the toy he has intentionally thrown on the ground. His actions make the world change. Soon language is added to his palette. By manipulating his body in his larynx, he can make his desires known and call attention to interesting things around him.

Throughout childhood this set of actions becomes less instinctual and more intentional. His shuffling steps become running and skipping and dancing. Grunts and cries turn to sentences and to songs. He trains his body to do what he wants even when his desires serve no bodily function.

Life becomes less and less natural. He eats things not as fuel in an indiscriminant fashion, but chooses which foods he wants to satisfy an internal desire. He learns that sometimes the most effective way to accomplish his desire is the indirect route. At first he stamps his foot and screams. Later he quietly pleads and puts his head on mommy’s shoulder. He learns how to seek the two in the bush in spite of having one in the hand by working for what can be rather than being satisfied with what is.

At first he plays with blocks without rhyme or reason. Soon he is building complex castles that he has never seen. First he plays with the dirt and the grass. Then his yard becomes a faraway land with battles and adventures. The more he distances himself mentally from being a cog in nature’s machine, then the more he is able to take from nature what he wants and to cause it to be what desires. Nature slowly becomes his.

As an adult this dominance grows. If he wants to feel alert and sharp, he drinks coffee. If he wants to feel relaxed and mellow, he drinks wine. Even his own state of mind becomes subject to his desires.

This is not his subservience to his own bio-chemical impulses, but an expression of nature and his own body as his possession. He must always obey nature in that he cannot drink a gallon of coffee or wine and still function. Yet it is this very submission to nature’s laws that allows him to make nature submit to him. He must sleep, but he sleeps when he chooses. It isn’t healthy to stand in the rain, but he does so if he chooses.

We all recognize that this self-conquest as maturity, but it is often indistinguishable from stupidity. If a man stands in the cold rain to catch a glimpse of a girl we call him a romantic, a fool, or maybe a pervert. This is exactly where humanity’s supernatural-ness comes to the fore. For people the choice of particular actions has a moral quality corresponding to their context.

If a male animal senses a female in heat then he must obey his instinct. No one thinks a dog is a fool or a pervert when he breaks into a yard to get at a bitch. No one thinks an ape is a fool if he passes on a gourmet meal later so he can have a banana now.

To be human means to cause your instincts to submit to your will and to manipulate nature in the same way. Yet it is for this aspect of our daily lives that the atheist has no answer. For him all is natural. We are not distinct in our desire for music from the animal’s desire for food.

By his reckoning we have no reason to judge a child’s actions as truly less mature. A child obeys his instinct and defiles himself where his sits without thought or care. This is natural. It is unnatural to discipline one’s body. Adults are the ones who are delusional to think there is a value to withholding a desired action.

To kill one’s rival as an animal is not sniffed at by their fellows or by us. To kill one’s rival as a child is prevented only by being weak and small. As an adult human, I am called upon to restrain my passions and instincts. I would be rightly condemned as outside the moral map if I obeyed every physical impulse.

Some might say that the natural attitude is exactly what is needed. They say we ought to get in touch with our inner child and to drop our taboos about sex. To them it is our separation from nature that has caused our misery and nature’s desolation.

But how many of really want to live in a world if we all acted “naturally?” Does the lion care if “no means no,” or if the lioness is not in the mood? Does he treat her as an equal and unique partner in spite of his physical superiority? Does he value the intrinsic value of his rivals’ cubs? No is the answer to all of these. He mates at his convenience. He lies on the grass while the lioness hunts for his food. He kills his rivals’ cubs without care as soon as their father is banished. Is this what we want?

Only humanity can have a humane society. It will not be by getting back to nature that we will achieve a good life. Nature’s society is brutal, selfish, and often cruel. Nature may have no place for hate, but it also has no place for love. It is only by the suspension of our own natural desires and, at times, the violation of natural laws that the concepts of goodness, beauty and love will ever have any meaning. Only by rising above ordinary nature can humanity be what we are naturally intended to be.