Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 6, 1995 TAG: 9508090017
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: D-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The light was brighter, said one observer, than several suns at midday. The blast flattened 10,000 buildings instantly. The firestorm left no room for escape. More than 70,000 Japanese perished in seconds. Within months, another 50,000 men, women and children died from burns and radiation poisoning.
In all, more than 200,000 were killed by the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Almost all of them were civilians.
The debate ever since has been about the motivation and morality, the necessity and consequences of the decision to use the bomb. It is by no means a merely academic debate, but tends to divide Americans along a fault-line that polarizes opinion on many issues. In our view, rather than choose one side and despise the other, people should try to discern the truth in both.
One side of the argument was a near-unanimous consensus in America in 1945. Certainly those fighting in the Pacific were clear about the bomb's meaning: It ended the war. It saved them from having to man an invasion of Japan that, without question, would have produced horrific combat and left hundreds of thousands dead.
This view does not take kindly to the assertion that America is in any way morally at fault for the deaths resulting from the blast. The Japanese started the war with a sneak attack. They committed atrocities during the war. Absent the bomb, they would have prolonged the war - enlisting civilians in vicious, to-the-death fighting against a land invasion. Dropping the bomb saved lives.
The opposing view was promul-
gated years later by revisionist historians and fed by the social turmoil of the 1960s. This perspective tends to be more suspicious of official explanations and more willing to find a dark side to America's character. Some historians have argued that Harry Truman decided to drop the bomb as much to send a signal to the Soviets, in effect starting the Cold War, as to end World War II against already defeated Japan. Others have argued that racial hatred of the Japanese, and wartime denial of their humanity, quieted what should have been moral qualms about targeting a holocaust on civilian populations.
This view may seem, to some, an academic exercise performed by smart-alecks too young to know what the war was like, and as another excuse for blame-America-firsters to find fault with their country. There is value, however, in grappling with moral questions posed by Hiroshima. Would we have dropped the bomb on Germany? How do we define terrorism, if not as violence committed against civilians to achieve political ends? Should nukes be considered not an extension of conventional warfare but an entirely different and untouchable order of weaponry, apart in kind even from the firebombs dropped on Dresden and Tokyo? Can a nuclear weapon ever be used again?
However inclined one might be to side with Truman's defenders, it is more important now to search for common ground - across national divides in general, between clashing views of Hiroshima in particular. If Americans can agree that tragedy is ambiguous (that the Japanese, for example, could be both aggressors and victims), then we can see that both sides of this debate are partly right.
Dropping the bomb did end the war and so saved lives - while also manifesting other motives and launching an era of nuclear terror. Americans do need to look deep into the horror of Hiroshima, to mourn the loss of humanity and commit never to use nuclear arms again - while also recognizing that Truman and America were not devils intent on mass murder.
Each side bristles with weapons of evidence and argument, but the world cries out for empathy and forgiveness.
by CNB