57 years ago at Hiroshima…
- August 06, 2002
- 1 comment
On this day, 57 years ago, the US dropped the first of two atomic bombs on Japan. Hiroshima observed a minute of silence at 8:15 am this morning, the exact time the Enola Gay dropped the bomb. He then said in a public speech that the world should never forget the horrors of atomic bombs. 220,000 people died from the Hiroshima blast.
I often wonder whether we made the right decision in dropping the atomic bomb. But I know for a fact that both Germany and Japan had also been working on making an atomic bomb. I’m not sure whether or not the Japanese would’ve used the bomb, but the Germans would have. I’m sure it wasn’t an easy decision for Truman to make. I would’ve lost sleep for weeks trying to make the decision. Drop the bomb and kill hundreds of thousands of people or let the war continue and lose hundreds of thousands of people? What a nightmare of a decision!
link: Yahoo! News - Hiroshima Hits ‘Pax Americana’ at A-Bomb Memorial
As horrible as it sounds, not only did the bombs save the lives of many thousands of American soldiers, but it probably even saved the lives of many millions of Japanese civilians.
Japan was a nation without an infrastructure after a seemingless endless series of US fire bombing raids. Cities were destroyed and railroads were rendered useless. What little food was available had to go towards feeding the Japanese military. The sudden shift in populations from the cities to the countryside was resulting in catastrophic food shortages and starvation.
To complicate things further, the Soviets were poised to invade Japan at any minute. Even if Stalin was a generous caring person, the Soviets had all they could do to feed themselves, let alone the Japanese. The number of Japanese civilalian deaths would have rivaled that of the Jewish holocaust in Europe.
Even faced with these facts, the decision to drop the bombs would have been a gut wrenching decision to make.