The Necessity of the A-Bomb by Richard Sale

We know that President Obama is going to visit Hiroshima, and there are remarks being made that he should apologize for the Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My own view is that we have nothing to apologize for. War made bring out the best in the soldiers and Marines who fight it, but taken as a whole, wars are often barbaric lunacy.

In August of 1945, President Truman wrote a letter to Sen. Richard Russell Jr. in which he said, “I know that Japan is a terribly cruel and uncivilized nation in warfare, but I can’t bring myself to believe that, because they are beasts, we should ourselves act in the same manner. Using the A-Bomb was meant to save young American lives, but Truman added: “…I also have a feeling for the women and children of Japan.”

In 1945, the war with Japan was raging at its height. In January of 1944, Japanese studies had concluded the war was lost. Japan had been defeated long before Harry Truman became President. Yet the Japanese fought on, its soldiers bent on dying to the last man. American casualties in the Pacific war spiked to new heights. There are several excellent books on the battle of Okinawa. With the Old Breed, by Eugene Sledge is one I read again and again. It is the best personal account of the war and is a memoir of the first distinction. There is Robert Leckie’s excellent book, and there is Gerald Astor’s Operation Iceberg which is superb. The horrible U.S. casualties in that battle made the use of the atomic bomb imperative

The three months since Truman took office in April, American battle casualties in the Pacific were half the total of U.S. casualties during the whole Pacific War.

Said a U.S. caption of Military Intelligence at the time, “We had only abundant evidence in those days that surrender was excluded from the Japanese ethos.” He added, “Thousands of Marines and (Army) soldiers had died rooting out Japanese from their fox holes and bunkers when they were perfectly aware that their situation was hopeless.”

He said that even if the Japanese were beaten, “Japan’s soldiers would hold on fighting for months.” The Japanese government wanted to hold on as long as possible to avoid a complete defeat, hoping that they would gain a better bargaining position when defeat came.

According to several books about Truman, the one written by David McCulloch is among the best. According to him, Japan had 2.5 million regular troops in the home island, plus every male between fifteen and forty-five was being drafted while every female between seventeen and forty-five was being conscripted and armed with everything from bamboo spears, brass cannons plus they were taught to how to be suicide bombers, strapping explosives to their bodies in order to throw themselves under advancing American tanks.

In one several accounts I read, a young woman was equipped with a carpenter's awl and was told to stab at the enemy soldiers’ abdomen. The instructor said, "You must aim at the abdomen. Understand the abdomen.” Plus America would face thousands of kamikaze suicide planes.

The senior American military detected no evidence that Japan would quit. U.S. and Australian combat reporters predicted that the war would not end until June 1946, a view held by many.

When Truman saw the plans for the U.S. invasion of the home islands, he knew would mean “”unprecedented carnage.” Yet the estimates of between 20,000 to 250,000 US military dead were not the top issue. Already many cities of Japan were aflame, thanks to B-29’s who daily dropped incendiaries on the Japan people. What was needed now was a blow that so devastating that would administer a vast shock that would bring the Japanese government to its knees.

The means was at hand. The Manhattan Project, which had produced the first atomic bombs in history, and the country’s military and political leadership was eager to use them. As the Secretary of war, Henry Stimson said, “The Japanese were the despised enemy, perpetrators of the treacherous attack at Pearl Harbor (in the midst of peace talks,) perpetrators of the bombing of Manila and the Bataan Death March which had only become known to the American public in Feb. 1945. (Stimson’s memoirs are worth reading.)

Stimson went on, “They were the murderers of American prisoners of war, the fanatics who ordered the seemingly insane kamikaze attacks on the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Other atrocities included the Palawan Massacre, which took place on the Philippines island of Palawan, where the Japanese lured 140 American prisoners of war into air raid trenches, then doused them with gasoline and burned them alive.” What he didn’t add was that the percentage of Allied prisoners who died in the hands of the Japanese was seven times higher than Allied prisoners held by the Germans.

A few days after the German surrender the American newspaper printed a photo of a blindfolded American flyer, down on his knees, about to be beheaded by a Japanese officer whose sword was already raised above the American’s head.

The key question that loomed over President’s Truman’s mind was, why spent the lives of the flower of American manhood in a bloody invasion of the home islands, when America already had a weapon of unsurpassed might that perhaps would end the war. The political repercussions of not using it would be immense.

Of course, they were other options. Continued fire bombing could halt the Japanese or Japan could be choked into submission by a naval blockade. The dilemma of strategy came to a head when American leaders considered the phrase, “unconditional surrender.” The U.S. military and political leadership noted that Roosevelt had concentrated American power to destroy the enemy above all else, rather than laboring to create what others thought to be favorable postwar circumstances, a sure sign that he lacked sound knowledge of other cultures. This is not to say that that U.S. military felt an iota of pity for Japanese. They were eager to use the weapon to stop the war and save the lives of American soldiers. The Japanese stopped at nothing, and now America would stop at nothing. George Marshall, Roosevelt’s chief of staff of the U.S. Army, had been so stunned by the American casualties at Iwo Jima that he considered using poison gas in Okinawa.

In Astor’s book, there is a sickening description of a banzai charge. “About 150 of them stormed up the hill towards our guys, and they said that it was just like shooting ducks. You had to look, or you would step on them. They are scattered all over the place, so much abandoned equipment , these men with beards, no heavier than mine, some with quarter-sized holes in their heads while others had their bodies blown away. One GI stopped to bend over one, and jammed a cigarette into the dead Jap’s mouth. ‘Have a cigarette, you yellow son of a bitch. Sorry I don’t have time to light it for you.’”

Then the cigarette bestowing GI saw his first dead GI. “The color that these men turn just after they die is the most horrible part of the scene. The closest approximation is to say it’s the same color that appears on some men’s fingers if they have smoke a great deal.” Astor is very skilled at using anecdotes like these. “I pulled up short, after hearing a piecing scream; a Marine standing in the middle of the street, holding his crotch with his left hand, his rifle in the other, blood had formed a puddle the seat and legs of his trousers changing from mottled green to red.”

Apparently, there was little variety in the bodies of violently murdered. A few were scattered like rag dolls. In others, death had caused muscular spasms that drew up the legs and arms in a fetal position, their dead hands clenched like boxers’ fists. In a few places there was the detritus of entrails and or dried strings of brains, along with plus splinted bones or mangled flash, all clotted with flies.

One GI explained how fast decomposition occurred in this tropical heat. Within a few hours, the bodies would start to swell. He said they had seen one case where a rotted body had finally burst through its clothes, the entrails spilling out, the penis stuck up in one violent, final erection. He added that it was not uncommon to see a human body where clear bubbles could be seen moving underneath its skin. The body would finally burst, releasing a foul, sick stench that would be smelled for miles.

The Decision

Truman claimed credit for the decision to drop the A-Bomb, but most U.S. leaders felt there was no decision. The war had made it imperative, not Truman. A Truman advisor, George Eisley, said “Truman “could no more stop it than a train moving down a track.”

At the Potsdam Conference, Truman wrote, the phrase “unconditional surrender” appeared only once. It specified the surrender of Japanese armed forces, not the surrender of the Japanese people. If the armed forces didn’t surrender they faced “prompt and utter destruction, “but the document didn’t define what that phrase meant. The fate of the Emperor was ambiguous. He wasn’t even mentioned.

But savagery was the mood of the day. Truman boasted that after approving the Oder to bomb, he went to bed and slept like a baby.” But advisors present a different account. He had stopped at Babelsburg, after Potsdam, and that he had a strange night mare, and slept very poorly.

Dropping the Big One

 

“We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world,” President Truman wrote in his diary, and while he insisted it would he use only against military targets, he that was only partly true. There was a Japanese Army at Hiroshima. (The Second?)

When the crew of the B-29 named Enola Gay, a plane part of the 509 Composite Group, was told that the bomb they were about to drop was the equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT, they looked sick and stricken. Captain William F. Parsons, was the only man aboard who thoroughly knew the technical side of the new weapon, made the decision before they took off, that if he ended up in the enemy’s hands, he would have to kill himself to keep the secret. He borrowed a pistol from a young intelligence officer nearby.

Captain Robert A. Lewis, the co-pilot of Co. Paul W. Tibbits, Jr., was passing the time writing a letter home to his parents. “I think everyone will feel relieved after we have left our bomb with the Japs and are half-way home. Or better still, all the way home.” When daybreak came at 5 o'clock, he waited an hour and wrote. “Near six o’clock, I think we will have clear sailing for a long spell.”

When the plane entered Honshu, Lewis’ handwriting got cramped and jagged. “We are now loaded,” he wrote.

Now the plane had a straight four-mile run to the target. Tension rose. At 9:15, the bombardier pressed a singe toggle switch, releasing a single missile. It descended in less than sixty seconds, a time recorded on the wristwatches of the severed arms of Japanese who were the targets of the bomb. Captain Lewis had just written , “There will be a short intermission while we bomb our target,” but then he scrawled wildly, “My God!”

The crew were wearing welders’ goggles, and the first ting they saw was “a tiny point of purplish light. Within milliseconds, it had “expanded to a purple fire ball a half-mile wide. The whole monstrous seething mass of red and purples fire rose, accompanied by vast gray smoke rings encircling the column of flames until, at thousand feet, the seething mass roiled outward to form the first mushroom.” At 50,000 ft. the second mushroom appeared. It was flashing every color in the spectrum.

At 9:14 a.m., Hiroshima had been an energetic city of 344,000 people; by 9:16, it lost 60,175 people who were dead or missing. The bomb vaporized and incinerated four square miles. Truman said that America had spent $2 billon dollars on the biggest gambler scientific gamble in history – and we won.” Many thought that speaking of the A Bomb as a gamble was in questionable taste.

Even the U.S. military political leadership was unable to take in what they had done. Four tenths of a weight of a dime could lift a million-ton load to the crest of a mountain six feet high. It was incomprehensible, it was too difficult to grasp.

The strike order to bomb Nakasaki was issued on Aug. 8, 1945. On the morning of Aug. 9, a plutonium bomb hit the city. A total of 39,000–80,000 were killed or wounded; roughly half of the deaths in each city occurred on the first day. During the following months, large numbers died from the effect of burns, and other injuries, compounded by illness and malnutrition. In both cities, most of the dead were civilians, although Hiroshima had a sizable military garrison, as we said earlier.

Victims

 

It pays to view and study the photos of the Japanese burn victims. Some faces had their lips burned off on one side, leaving their teeth exposed. Others had their fingers permanently deformed. I saw the back of a Japanese woman who had her skin burnt off, leaving nothing but red, peeling raw tissue. One man I saw had his eyes burned out. Many were so badly burned they looked like creatures out of a horror movie. Another one, who had one eye penetrated by the first flash said, “It felt like an arrow in my eye.” Many thousands died of radiation sickness.

But the atomic bomb explosions were not the worst that Japanese civilians had suffered. The worst came on the evening of March 9 when the B-29s came over Tokyo flying very low. Said General Power, “It was the greatest military disaster incurred an enemy in military history.” There was a key eyewitness there, one Father Gustav Bitter, German-born rector of Sophia University. “It was like a silver curtain falling,” he said. It reminded him of the tinsel that hung from German Christmas trees. “Everywhere the silver streams touched the earth, red fires would spring up.” He described how the one central fire set started other fires radiating out from it like the ribs of a fan.

He went on,”…the fire in the center sent up a column of air which drew in towards the center the outer circle of flame, and a hot swift wind began to blow towards the center, a twisting wind which spread the flames between the ribs of the fan very quickly. Thus, everywhere the people ran there was fire, in front of them and in back of them, closing in on them from all sides. So that there were only a few who escaped.”

According to the superb historian Eric Larrabee, “Tokyo’s fire chief reported that within thirty minutes the fire was out of control; it consumed 95 fire engines and killed 125 firemen. The destruction of light buildings was total…The police records indicate that 267,171 buildings were destroyed, about a quarter of Tokyo, and over a million were made homeless.. Removing the dead from the ruins took twenty-five days.”

Worse was to come. Many had died in the panic of trying to find safety and shelter in order to flee the fire and wind by jumping into rivers or canals which was fatal since the water in some of the canals reached the boiling point. The official toll was 83,793 dead and 10,40,918 wounded. No other attack in the war, either in Europe or Japan was so destructive of life and property.

I love the Yeats’ poem, the Second Coming. I have read and reread it.At one point it says,

   Surely some revelation is at hand;     Surely the Second Coming is at hand.     The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out     When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi     Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;     A shape with lion body and the head of a man,     A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,     Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it     Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

    The darkness drops again but now I know     That twenty centuries of stony sleep     Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,     And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,     Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

I used to think the imagery foretold Hitler and other barbarians, but perhaps he was writing about all of us.

Comments

[turcopolier]

All

Occasionally someone says the we used the A-bomb on the Japs (pejorative - deliberate). IMO that is not true. We showed the germans no mercy at all in strategic bombing. IMO the Germans were lucky that the war ended just when it did. With regard to the Japs, they reaped what they had sown. pl

[BabelFish]

Amen on all that both Richard and Pat have stated. I am probably not the only SST member who might not have been here had it been necessary to invade the Japanese home islands.

[no one]

Nice Piece, Richard. Maybe it should be mentioned that the battle for Okinawa was not only horrible for the combatants, but also the civilians. Some estimates have the number of Okinawan civilians killed to be equal to the number killed by the A-bomb at Nagasaki. So civilians were doomed either way.

Also, the Japanese had something like a million POWs and other prisoners (including Chinese) that were dying terrible deaths at an increasing rate from disease, starvation and other maltreatment (including executions). Those lives had to be considered as well in bringing a quick end to the war.

[turcopolier]

All

Old soldier man brooding - Murder? No. We meet each other hand to hand. That is not murder. I have seen many men killed in battle or recently killed in battle. The details of their mutilations are unimportant. Two American POW's died in the attack on Hiroshima. They were there because the Japanese were busy trying to work and starve them to death. Spare me the tender hearted bullshit. pl

[b]

@Richard

- Listening all the cruelties the Japanese had done as somewhat justification for the A-bomb sounds highly hypocritical. The Japs did no better or worse than what the U.S. did in the Philippines and other places. Bombing Tokyo was a war crime of a higher degree than most the stuff the Japanese had done during the second world war.

- The bombs did nothing to move Japan to surrender. Some 30 cities were already totally lost due to bombing - the additional two did not mean anything. The move to surrender came a few days later after Russia, as promised by Stalin, declared war on Japan and annihilated the famed Kwantung army within a few days. The Japanese hope that some peace status that would avoid occupation and losing the emperor could be agreed upon through Russia was gone.

- The real reason to use the A-bombs was to deter Stalin through a demonstration of the new weapons. This was to mostly push for a more U.S. favorable position in Europe. Stalin, who had just lost some 25 million Russians to fighting the fascists, wasn't impressed at all. The hoped for advantage was not achieved.

[Richard Sale]

You are perfectly correct. Okinawan civilians suffered horribly, The Japanese thought them an inferior people and inflicted torture and starvation on them. U.S. Marines and GI were surprise by the early surrender of them.

But another great tragedy occurred when the Marines and GIs, on alert for the habitual night attacks of the Japanese, shot down civilians who were using the dark to try to escape. The slaughter was terrible, and the men who watched the aftermath were heartbroken.

Richard Sa;e

The

[Richard Sale]

I agree with Pat. The Japanese were merciless. What choice did we have? But, like President Truman, I feel for the civilians.

Richard Sale

[Richard Sale]

With all due respect, your figures are wrong.

Richard

[Old Microbiologist]

This can and will be debated for years. For example, tin can be argued it was unnecessary and that Russia's imminent arrival into the Pacific theater was the true reason Japan capitulated. It can also be argued it saved (American)lives. What is definite is we are the only nation to have ever used nuclear weapons against another nation. Whatever the reasons this remains the fact and serves to give pause to those who are not convinced the US can and will do whatever is necessary if it believes it is justified.

[A Pols]

I knew a grand old lady in Charlottesville (Passed away in 2011 I believe). She had been married to Admiral Kimmel's son, Manning, a submariner, who had been captured by the Japanese and was held prisoner.
After being starved and abused , he was murdered by guards who, angered at losses in American bombing raids, doused the younger Kimmel and some other prisoners with gasoline and ignited it.
These things were so routine it's no wonder nobody had any real compunctions about employing the bomb as soon as it became operational.
It's easy for those who were not yet born, or were babies at the time, to second guess the decision, but the Japanese were simply dreadful in the sort of "wilding" type of barbarism now exhibited by folks like Daesh.

[turcopolier]

b

That is untrue.. The UU sought to avoid civilian casualties in Manila until it was clear that Intramuros could only be taken with massive artillery support . The Japanese Army deliberately killed 100,000 Filipino civilians. pl

[no one]

Richard, Wrong? Could be depending on the source. Anywhere from 42,000 to 150,000 civilian killed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Okinawa
Some of the best military history I've read has the figure at 80,000.

Estimates of the Nagasaki A-bomb deaths are 39,000 - 80,000

As for prisoners, I included Chinese to suggest that more than Allied POWs and American/British/Australian civilians were part of the equation. Chinese under the most stringent Japanese occupation sectors were, de facto, prisoners.

My father fought on Okinawa with the 6th Marines. Once every few years something would get into him and he'd tell me some things about the combat there. Awful.

[M.H.]

My father is turning 90-years old this weekend. We plan a big birthday bash for him in Maryland this weekend. I talk with him every day and he's as sharp as ever. He and my mother will celebrate their 60th wedding anniversary this year. He and she still faithfully attend their local Catholic church. He raised five good children. He was in the U.S. Army 77th Division in the Battle of Okinawa and has some incredible stories to tell. Some pretty funny. He said while on the ship traveling over, they were all given a pamphlet on all of the poisonous snakes of Okinawa. He said that when he got done reading it he was hoping a Japaness bullet would take him out the first day, before encountering one of these snakes. He talks about the thick mud and rain. He said a Japanese soldier came running over the hill and threw a hand grenade right into his foxhole. He braced and prepared for the worst but in the thick mud the Japanese grenade just let out a thud and caused no damage. He talks about hearing a constant whizzing sound (bullets). He said there were always rumors of the U.S. working on a super bomb. One day while a colonel was going over instructions for the invasion, a private ran up and handed the colonel a note. The colonel read the note and put it in his breast pocket and continued going over tactics, the use of the bangalore torpedo, etc. After he was done the colonel said, "And one last thing boys... the war is over."

[tim s]

All's fair in love and war, and war is hell. Anyone who believes otherwise lives in some sort of Disneyland.

Moralizing after the fact against the inhumanity of the victor, particularly by those remote from the events, is pissantness of a high order.

[Amir]

Are telling me that the "Japs" behaves like in Abu Garib?

[no one]

typo correction - 6th Marine div (not regiment).

[VietnamVet]

The use of atomic bombs stopped Russia in its tracks in Asia. It is dubious that the Japanese militants would have surrendered without invasions of Japan’s main islands. Their use provided the Japanese with a face saving way to surrender and avoid dishonor. It would have been a political and military nightmare to ship 3 million combat tested troops from Europe to Asia to invade Japan when the USA had super bombs armed and ready to be used in its arsenal since August of 1945. The mid-20th century elite were well aware of the people’s potential to use their power against them. They provided the returning troops a generous GI Bill to go to college to avoid any potential unrest.

[Medicine Man]

Haunting writing, Mr. Sale. Thank you for sharing this.

[doug]

One of the more interesting aspects of WWII is that both the Germans, and Japanese (initially w/o the knowledge of the Germans) were working on developing an A bomb as well. The fundamental physics of it came out of the German discovery of uranium fission in the 30's. Rather nice of them that the academic community published this before it's implications were fully appreciated. As the war progressed Japan was working on two methods of separating U235/238 and they even had some estimates of our ability to manufacture them based on the physics involved at the time of the Hiroshima. I sometimes wonder if we didn't hope for a Japanese attack as a means of entry. At the time the US population was pretty opposed to getting involved in the European war but I have to believe FDR and the military were highly concerned that such a device might be developed and what that would mean to us should Germany perfect such a weapon. The Manhattan Project was quite nascent but had started initial investigations by the summer of 41. The potential power of such a weapon was known. The engineering effort involved wasn't. Initially. But that rapidly changed and the war kicked it into high gear.

[James Loughton]

From Mr. Sale: "Captain William F. Parsons, was the only man aboard who thoroughly knew the technical side of the new weapon, made the decision before they took off, that if he ended up in the enemy’s hands, he would have to kill himself to keep the secret. He borrowed a pistol from a young intelligence officer nearby."

This actually became Air Force policy during the early days of the Cold War. I learned this from my father who had been a B-36 pilot in the early fifties. Dad was also the "weaponeer" aboard his crew. In those days the physics package was not fully assembled until the aircraft was in the air to the target. In order to do that job, the weaponeer had to have considerable knowledge of the bombs' design. Because some of this information was highly classified, dad carried a 38 in a shoulder rig at all times. In the event the aircraft was shot down or abandoned over enemy territory and he survived, he was expected to commit suicide in the event of imminent capture. In case he did not do so, another crew member whose identity was unknown to my father was assigned to kill him. I never knew this until dad mentioned it to me when he was in his late seventies, although I do recall seeing the shoulder rig as a young child.

[Cieran]

b:

With all due respect, your "real reason" as quoted is inaccurate. To your credit, most public discussions involving nuclear weapons technology suffer from an information vacuum caused by the "born classified" aspect of this line of work within the NNSA complex, so that "those who know cannot talk and those who talk cannot know".

But thankfully, those who know about the end of WWII have recently been able to write about why the U.S. needed to drop two atomic bombs on Japan, and the information that has been declassified has been vetted, validated, and demonstrated as accurate by historical, military, and other accounts.

Unfortunately for those who like to wring their hands and insist that Americans should be found guilty for the bombings of Japan (both conventional and nuclear), the accurate story of why we dropped two bombs on Japan leads to some realizations that many anti-nuclear pundits find unpleasant enough to ignore, even though those truths explain perfectly the question of why two atomic weapons were used.

I would particularly recommend Reed and Stillman's highly-readable and equally highly-informative "The Nuclear Express", but plenty of other fine references on nuclear weapons technology, and the problems it creates for the modern world, can be found in virtually any local library.

The summary version is this: Japan, like many industrialized countries during WWII, had an advanced program to design and build an atomic weapon. That program had many moving parts, but its center of intellectual gravity was found in the N Project (after Nishina), whose separation technology was destroyed in the Tokyo firebombings that categorically ended the Japanese version of the Manhattan Project. The Japanese project was staffed with brilliant scientists and engineers, and history would indicate that had Japan succeeded in developing nuclear weapons first, they would have in all likelihood been deployed on Allied targets. So the notion that the U.S. invoked some kind of nuclear version of original sin by developing the atomic bomb is complete b.s.

The bomb dropped on Hiroshima was a gun-type assembly weapon, which is an inefficient use of special nuclear materials, but so simple that it didn't need testing in the New Mexico desert. But the production of such a weapon (because of certain characteristics that distinguish relevant isotopes of Uranium and Plutonium) is incredibly difficult, so when leading Japanese weapons physicists were summoned to examine weapons effects at Hiroshima, they advised the Japanese leadership that Little Boy was a one-off weapon, i.e., the likelihood that the U.S. had any more was negligibly small.

Those Japanese scientists were absolutely correct: Little Boy was a one-of-a-kind dead-end for an advanced industrial nation, so the Japanese government did not sue for peace. And then we dropped a completely different kind of weapons on Nagasaki, one that could be more-or-less mass-produced. Japanese scientists realized that the U.S. could possess many other Fat Man-style bombs in its arsenal, and advised their government to sue for peace, which they eventually did (in all likelihood because soon after Nagasaki, we began to carry out the kind of aerial operations that had preceded the other bombings, and that kind of thing tends to concentrate the attention of governments).

So this was not about impressing the Russians: had we wanted to do that, it would have been easy to do so, without nuclear weapons being deployed on even one Japanese city. We dropped two because one wasn't enough, thanks to the incredibly brilliant Japanese weapons physicists. They were right, but to bad effect for subsequent victims. But at least by being right on the second pass, they saved the Japanese nation from more weapons that would surely have preceded an invasion of the mainland.

Of course, knowing the physics helps a lot towards resolving the "why use two weapons?" story, but it also points out the fact that like the U.S., Japan was trying to build nuclear weapons that could be used in WWII. And once you realize that fact, the whole notion of guilt for the U.S. deployment of those weapons simply vanishes. Would anyone have preferred that the Japanese military gotten there first?

There is a great unclassified literature on nuclear weapons technology (e.g., anything by Richard Rhodes), on nuclear non-proliferation, and on the history of nuclear weapons programs in various countries. I strongly recommend that anyone interested in learning without prejudice the lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki read this literature before making assertions that cast guilt on the U.S. for its role in ending WWII. I'm not normally a fan of moral equivalence arguments, but given the history of the Japanese role in the Pacific theater, those arguments seem perfectly obvious here.

--Cieran

[Babak Makkinejad]

Kurchatov & his team were already working on atomic weapons East of the Urals at that time.

[Babak Makkinejad]

My Arab acquaintances always tried to reassure me that Saddam Hussein would never have dropped atomic bombs on Iranian cities had he possessed them.

I remain unconvinced.

[Babak Makkinejad]

I heard that the Japanese soldiers hid behind the civilians and herded them towards US lines in Okinawa...

[Booby]

To All:
I had an uncle who was an Army 1st Sgt in a weapons repair unit in WWII. Short of manpower, he was assigned a group of German POW's as labor. He found that the senior POW was a German senior SNCO. He treated the German SNCO with respect & made him a supervisor with an office next door to his own. The relationship worked well. After Germany's surrender the unit was notified that it would be redeploying to the Pacific Theater. The German SNCO presented my uncle with a letter signed by all of the POW's requesting that they be allowed to join the US Army & deploy to the Pacific.

After Japan's surrender my uncle's unit was moved to Yokohama & given a large bombed out warehouse to work in. Japanese POW's were provided as laborers to clear the rubble. Once again my uncle found the senior Japanese SNCO to assist him. One day a bull dozer arrived to help move rubble. The Japanese POW's paniced. They assumed that the bull dozer was there to dig a mass grave for them. Over time my uncle & the Japanese SNCO became friends. One day the Japanese thanked my uncle for America dropping the atomic bombs & ending the war. The Japanese SNCO explained that he had two daughters, 9 &10, who had been trained to attack invading Americans with sharpened bamboo spears. Ending the war had saved his daughters' lives.

We can be glad that we had a US Army combat veteran making the decision to drop the bombs.