Dropping the A-Bombs

The debate over whether it was wise or humane to drop even one atomic bomb on the Japanese people 50 years ago this month will continue until the end of time. However, this much is clear: The United States and other Allied powers were preparing for an alternative called Operations Olympic and Coronet, set to begin about November, 1945, carrying the war into 1946 or even 1947 with an invasion of Japan. Heavy casualties were predicted on both sides. Although skeptical of Manhattan at first, calling it “merely a professor’s dream”, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson came to respect it so that, following the surrender of Nazi Germany, he outlined four proposals for the top military advisers to President Truman:

* Operations Olympic and Coronet. He advised against this, as it would lead to massive casualties for both sides and prolong the war.

* The A-bomb, after calling a cease-fire with Japan and openly testing it on one of the Pacific islands we were occupying, in front of an international audience. He advised against this too, because we would have become a laughingstock had the bomb failed to detonate.

* Dropping the two A-bombs on Japan after first notifying its government of our intention to do so. He advised against this, on the basis that we could not demonstrate the full capability of our ultimate weapon with people tucked safely away in shelters.

* Dropping the two A-bombs on the Japanese without letting them know until after the first bomb had been dropped. This was the only option he was willing to endorse.

I am not writing this as an apologist for what happened then. I wish the A-bomb did not have to be used, but it did bring the war to a swift, successful end.

ERIC NEIL KOENIG

Dana Point

* I have a profound memory of being 8 years old and huddling around the radio with my family as we listened to the report of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. I don’t remember four years later hearing any debate about our using the atomic bomb to end that war. However, during those war years I do remember seeing gold stars appear on many front windows in our neighborhood signifying that families had lost sons in the war.

It seems to me that those who want to revise history and have us assume guilt must not have lived in those times. They either have no conception of the deep impression and effect that the Pearl Harbor attack had on this nation or would have us forget it. For myself I do remember.

CHARLES E. CARTER

Huntington Beach

* Re Conrad’s cartoon (“The bomb that saved the lives of thousands of GIs who didn’t invade Japan”, Aug. 2) and all the other hype justifying the dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki:

At a time when Leonardo da Vinci was a struggling young artist in Venice, the Venetian city fathers offered a 25,000 lira prize for the winner of a competition on ideas and/or devices which could defend Venice from an attack from the sea. The young Leonardo thus came up with the concept of the torpedo. He did not enter it into the competition, however, claiming that it was “too horrible a weapon to loose on humanity”.

Where was such moral courage in 1945? The fact is that at the very least the bomb could have been dropped in the sea a couple of times in order to demonstrate its power.

BURT WILSON

Simi Valley

* Your feature on Hiroshima, “Dropping the Bomb” (Aug. 6), was strong on color graphics but weak on history. Some quotations you omitted: Dwight D. Eisenhower, from his 1963 book “Mandate for Change”: “Japan was already defeated and dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary”. Henry H. Arnold, commanding general, Army Air Forces, from his 1949 memoirs: “It always appeared to us that, atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse”. United States Strategic Bombing Survey, June, 1946, report: “Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated”.

The killing of civilians in wartime is always wrong, whether it’s done by the Japanese in Nanking in 1937, by the Serbs in Srebrenica last month, or by our bombing of Hiroshima. The fact that the Hiroshima bomb seems to have been unnecessary to force a Japanese surrender makes it especially reprehensible.

JON WIENER

Professor of History, UC Irvine

* The only unarguable truth about the decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan is that Truman and his advisers operated in a vacuum of moral and political experience concerning nuclear warfare. Hiroshima and Nagasaki have made a decisive difference. Nuclear weapons “to save American lives” were rejected in Korea and Vietnam; and Russia abstained from their use in Afghanistan and Chechnya.

Today we understand that the bomb is too grave a threat to humanity ever to be used again. Or do we? The horrifying premise, widely held after 50 years of reflection on nuclear warfare, that the decision of 1945 is justifiable unconditionally, not simply by the narrow and specific historical circumstances of August, 1945, leads me to the conclusion that the world has not seen its last Hiroshima.

LEON ROTH

Highland