Strategic or Symbolic? Reassessing Hiroshima and Nagasaki |
In the last days of the Second World War, on the 6th and 9th of August 1945, the United States deployed nuclear bombs against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This first and only use of nuclear weapons in the history of warfare proved to be highly destructive; the exact number of fatalities is a matter of debate, but estimates range between 130,000 and 230,000 people – roughly half of whom were killed at the time of the explosions, while the other half perished in the subsequent months from the injuries they suffered during the events, primarily severe burns and radiation sickness. Despite the US government’s argument that the nuclear bombings effectively brought an end to WWII (Japan surrendered on 15 August 1945) and saved hundreds of thousands or even millions of lives – American and Japanese – the fact that the overwhelming majority of victims were civilians continues to make the ethical and legal justification for the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki a matter of sharp controversy. What receives far less attention but proves equally contentious are the strategic considerations of the United States’ political and military leadership at the time and, ultimately, the question whether the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was justified from a strategic perspective.
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The Unites States was the first – and only – country to deploy nuclear bombs against another country during war. As such, the US leadership had no means to make recourse to experience and historical evidence regarding the political and military effects of deploying nuclear bombs against enemy population centres and military bases. To navigate these uncharted waters, the US leadership developed certain assumptions about the probable political and military impacts of such an act. The two main expectations were that it would shock the Japanese leadership into surrender, and that it would at the same time intimidate the Soviet Union’s leadership.
Numerous factors indicate the US leadership’s conviction that the severe destruction of entire cities through the use of single pieces of ordnance would seriously “shock and awe” the Japanese political and military leadership, which, by the end of the war, primarily consisted of Emperor Hirohito as the formal head of state, as well as the Supreme War Council, an inner cabinet consisting of the six ministers most directly involved in military affairs. The destruction caused by the nuclear bombs would be so demoralising that it would clearly demonstrate to the Japanese leadership the unquestionable military superiority of the United States, crush their morale and make them realise the futility of their resistance.
While bringing an end to the Pacific War was almost certainly the main justification for the deployment of atomic bombs, there is evidence that Washington also assumed that the destructive effects of such an unprecedented event would highly impress the Soviet government (Walker 2001, 70), who’s communist doctrine stood diametrically opposed to the United States’ notion of a liberal, capitalist world order – a bitter fault line that constituted the foundation of the upcoming Cold War. The US government had predicted this impending confrontation. In the three months between Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender on 8 May 1945 and the nuclear bombings in Japan, the Soviet Union occupied the areas it had liberated, including all of Eastern Europe as well as crucial parts of Central Europe. It soon annexed parts of the former, including them into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), while the remaining regions under Soviet control were turned into socialist satellite states. This development caused major concern among Washington and its western allies. Sending a strong signal to Moscow that the United States had an enormously powerful weapon at its disposal, it was assumed, would intimidate the Soviet leadership. Demonstrating the US government’s capability and resolve to inflict enormous destruction to anybody who threatened its core interests would give the United States significant diplomatic leverage, thereby furthering US geo-strategic interests (Alperovitz 1965).
The United States, provoked by Japan with the surprise Attack on Pearl Harbor, was paying a tremendous price in lives and money to defend its interests and retaliate against Japanese aggression. While its geography and military power protected the American people from the large-scale destruction of civilian and industrial infrastructure, the financial and emotional burden that was placed on US society was nevertheless immense. The US government pictured the nuclear bombing of Japanese cities as a way of ensuring that the home front would not collapse before victory against Imperial Japan was achieved.
The covert efforts to develop nuclear weapons, code named “Manhattan Project,” cost the US tax payer close to USD 2 billion (Hewlett and Anderson 1962, 723) – a significant amount of money for the US treasury. James F. Byrnes, a close ally of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, warned the latter that “if [the nuclear bomb] proves to be a failure, it will be subjected to relentless investigation and criticism” (Bernstein 1995, 135). Contemporary treasury experts, however, calculated that the spending for the Manhattan Project “represents the cost of less than nine days of war” (Edmonton Journal 1945, 1). Indeed, even if the nuclear bombs would have failed to detonate, by the time of their deployment the US government was certain that Japan had no chance of winning the war. Emerging victorious from WWII and becoming one of the world’s most powerful nations, it is doubtful if the US government would get into serious trouble about a failed military project.
Far more so than government spending, the devastating Japanese surprise Attack on Pearl Harbor enraged many Americans. This, in addition to the Pacific War’s high toll in blood and highly publicised Japanese war crimes against US soldiers,........