No Apologies for Hiroshima

August 6, 1945 is the date on which the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. A day later, a second was dropped on Nagasaki. Shortly thereafter, Japan surrendered, ending World War II.

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The surviving veterans of that war are now dying off as might be expected of an event that ended some 64 years ago. The question is, how many of them would have survived an invasion of Japan? Back then, the estimates were in the hundreds of thousands of casualties. Having attacked America on December 7, 1941, the Japanese, who wanted to control all of Asia and had waged war in Asia for many years prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, had dreams of hegemony on the far side of the Pacific Ocean. They had bombed Beijing (then called Peking) in 1937 and invaded the Philippines in 1941. The one fact of World War II that is generally ignored is that the United States had desperately wanted to avoid participating. The war in Europe had been raging since 1939. Russia had allied itself with the Nazis and joined in the invasion of Poland. The war in Asia had begun two years earlier. Pearl Harbor brought the United States into World War II and, as they say, the rest is history. The decision to develop and then to use the atomic bomb was the right one. There were many dead in the two cities that were bombed, but there were many dead throughout the Pacific theatre of war, many of them civilian victims. To this day, particularly in the Middle East, the U.S. is accused of doing something immoral to end World War II and, in particular, the war with the Empire of Japan. War, itself, can be deemed immoral, but that has never stopped one. So I suggest there should be no apologies for what happened in Hiroshima (the U.S. dropped leaflets advising the populace to leave the city). All this is worth keeping in mind as the U.S. stands by idly while Iran works feverishly to acquire its own nuclear weapons and while North Korean tests theirs and sells the technology to any buyer.

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