Harry Truman made an entirely defensible decision. Basing our policies on denouncing him is a recipe for more tragedy, not less.
D irector of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday released a short video on the devastation wrought by the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Her account is morally obtuse history in pursuit of feckless lessons for contemporary foreign policy. Regardless of where one draws the moral line on the decision to drop the bombs, America has nothing to apologize for — and the DNI should not be conducting her own foreign policy media strategy with campaign-style videos.
In narrating the moving story of Japanese civilian suffering from the bombs and their radioactive aftereffects, Gabbard refers to each bombing as an “attack,” without even mentioning the war that they arose from and ended. That war was started by Imperial Japan. It was Japan that invaded China in 1937, the Soviet Union in 1938, Mongolia in 1939, French Indochina in 1940, and Thailand and the Pacific Rim possessions of the United States, Britain, and the Netherlands in 1941. It was Japan that brought war to Australia, Burma, the Philippines, and many Pacific islands that the waves of human conflict had previously left unsullied. It was Japan that allied itself with Nazi Germany. It was Japan that launched the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor that killed over 2,300 Americans and was rightly branded by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as “a day that will live in infamy.” It’s a sad comment that a former congresswoman from Hawaii has seemingly forgotten that infamy.
The catalog of Japanese atrocities and war crimes between 1937 and 1945 is extensive, staggering, and copiously documented. Japan invaded nations at peace. Its military brutalized civilians, killing millions. It razed towns, torched mosques, buried people alive, used civilians as human shields, operated forced labor camps, and used mass rape and famine as weapons of war. It routinely killed, tortured, or cruelly mistreated prisoners of war and targeted hospital ships. It used poison-gas weapons in battle, and its secret Unit 731 tested biological weapons on captives. In China, Chiang Kai-shek had been able to stop the Japanese advance only by flooding the countryside, killing hundreds of thousands of his own people. All of this stopped with the bombs.
The human cost of dropping the bombs was ghastly. But so was every single day that the war continued. In Europe, the bloodiest fighting of the war — with casualty rates even exceeding Stalingrad — came in Berlin. Yet, the escalation of lost life in the European war was dwarfed by the battles of 1945 in the Pacific. Japanese defenders at Iwo Jima and Okinawa fought almost to the death of the last man, with rates of killing unparalleled in the history of warfare. As much as half of the civilian population of Okinawa was killed. Accompanying them was the debut of the kamikaze pilot, in many cases a conscripted suicide bomber. Allied tactics in response, from cave-clearing flamethrowers to the firebombing of Japanese cities, would likewise continue and escalate so long as the war persisted, atomic bombs or no atomic bombs. The Rubicon of bombing civilian cities had long since been crossed. By August 1945, the Soviet Red Army was entering the war against Japan, having left its own trail of mass rape and ethnic cleansing in its march across Europe. The advance of Stalin’s army would not be gentle or temporary. Had the war continued, Japan’s postwar history could easily have resembled those of Korea and Vietnam.
Already dealing with some 7,000 Allied casualties every week (to say nothing of Japanese and civilian deaths), President Harry Truman and Allied war planners were presented with staggering projections of the human cost of invading the Japanese home islands with a million Americans — to say nothing of the British losses expected from a concurrent invasion of Malaya. It was entirely realistic to project at the time deaths and maimings several multiples of those at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One tangible sign of that realism: Our military had half a million Purple Hearts left over when Japan surrendered, and has been awarding the decoration from that surplus in every war since 1945. It is easy today to suggest that none of this would have been necessary, but Truman had seen up close as an artillery officer the savagery it took to bring Germany to surrender in 1918, and hardly any American in January 1945 could have envisioned the extremity of Japanese resistance in the following eight months.
While the decision to drop the bombs will never be without controversy in moral debates over the just limits of war, Truman and his advisers acted out of the urgent and morally compelling desire to make peace — a peace swift enough to save countless lives and lasting enough to make the sacrifices of a generation worthwhile. After the shocking effect of the bombs, no nation on earth has been more committed to peace than Japan.
Not satisfied with distorting history, Gabbard tells us that “we stand here today, closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before.” This is false alarmism meant to suggest that Russia is closer to using nuclear weapons in the fourth year of its war with Ukraine than it was during the Cuban Missile Crisis, all in pursuit of a counsel of appeasement of Russia’s demands. Worse, the specter of nuclear war is wielded as an argument in favor of a deal with Iran that would bring the aggressive tyranny of the mullahs closer to the weapon that could make “death to Israel” and “death to America” more realistic objectives.
The true lesson of the Second World War is that peace is not made by letting monsters expand their reach and their armaments. Those are, to be sure, not the only lessons of history for international conflict. But if it is perverse to invoke Hiroshima and Nagasaki to counsel the abandonment of Ukraine, it is obscene to invoke them to counsel for arming Iran.