Since it is a tradition at this time of year for editorialists to dust off the familiar argument justifying our country's use of atomic bombs against Japan in August of 1945, I want to say that I have never found said argument at all persuasive. I think the nation as a whole has deployed a defense mechanism more easily identified in individuals who have done something shameful. In order to live, it helps to have at least a somewhat rosy view of one's own character, and so people tell themselves stories to account for dark deeds. They say, "I had to do it." They say the other guy gave them no choice. Aided perhaps by sympathetic friends and family, they persuade themselves it's true and move on. But they believe their story because they must. The story was invented by them to be believed by them so that they don't have to torture themselves with regret. To an outsider, however, the story is thin. That is because its utility is psychological, not moral.
The usual argument for the atomic bombings features spurious alternatives. Yes, it is true that an invasion of the Japanese mainland would have been a horrible bloodbath. It doesn't follow that there was no option but to destroy two Japanese cities, three days apart, by exploding atomic bombs over the respective city centers during the morning rush hour, thereby immediately incinerating tens of thousands of noncombatants. There could have been a comparatively nonlethal demonstration--an atomic bomb detonated, for example, over an uninhabited expanse of Japanese territory, so that the country's high command could assess the devastation and the hopelessness of their military position. It is said this couldn't have worked, that the Japanese were "fanatics" determined to "fight to the last man." The point to be made here is that that's an open question--open, because we made no attempt.
What was the hurry? Why the rush to kill and destroy? We could have delivered a warning bomb, then negotiated for three weeks, or three months; instead, we incinerated a city, then waited three days before incinerating a second.
The best discussion of these questions I know of is the essay, "Of Accidental Judgments and Casual Slaughters," by the Yale sociologist Kai Erickson. First pubished in The Nation on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the atomic bombings, it was reprinted in Best American Essays of 1986, which is where I read it. Erickson argues that there was really nothing like "a decision to drop" or, at the highest level, any "mature consideration" of the consequences of direct military use of the atomic bomb. He explains what I have called a rush to kill by referring to war-weariness, the emotions of wartime, and bureaucratic momentum. There are no villains in his interpretation. That able, decent people could not, in the circumstances, restrain the impulse to perform horrific acts is the strongest possible argument for disarmament. The events of sixty years ago at Hiroshima and Nagasaki are, in his view, a cautionary fable about what can happen when human beings "find themselves in moments of crisis and literally have more destructive power at their disposal than they know what to do with."
Erickson's title, by the way, is from Hamlet. He explains in a footnote that according to Merle Miller, author of Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman, the president had in his library a book on the atomic bomb that, near its conclusion, quoted from Horatio's penultimate speech in the drama's final scene. The president had in his volume marked the following words:
And let me speak to th' yet unknowing world
How these things came about. So shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause,
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fall'n on th' inventors' heads.
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