Ramblin' with Roger

Saving a million American lives?

When I was in sixth grade, we had a rigorous debate about whether the atomic attacks were justified. Most of us were opposed, but our teacher, Paul Peca, suggested they were appropriate.

Mr. Peca likely would have supported the position of Henry Lewis Stimson, who wrote in Harper’s in February 1947: “The decision to use the atomic bomb was a decision that brought death to over a hundred thousand Japanese. No explanation can change that fact, and I do not wish to gloss it over. But this deliberate, premeditated destruction was our least abhorrent choice. The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki put an end to the Japanese war. It stopped the fire raids and the strangling blockade; it ended the ghastly specter of a clash of great land armies.”

Only recently, I learned that McGeorge Bundy, a future national-security adviser, was the ghost writer for Stimson, when they “claimed that dropping nuclear bombs on Japan had averted further war, saving more than a million American lives. Kai Bird, a co-author of ‘American Prometheus,’ the definitive biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, [said] that this pushback was specious: ‘Bundy later admitted to me that there was no documentary evidence for this ‘million’ casualty figure. He just pulled it out of thin air.”

As I noted here, Dwight Eisenhower wrote in 1963: “Japan was already defeated, and dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary… Secondly, our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.”

To this day, the debate continues. 

Movie

I saw the 1982 documentary The Atomic Cafe in the cinema; here’s the trailer. “A disturbing collection of 1940s and 1950s United States government-issued propaganda films designed to reassure Americans that the atomic bomb was not a threat to their safety.” It was really good, and also had a killer soundtrack (but not the last track on this YouTube chain). 

Here’s a list of seven books on Hiroshima, starting with Hersey’s book and including Barefoot Gen by Keiji Nakazawa (1982); the “comic book has little of the artfulness and refinement of the modern graphic novel. But the storytelling’s power, simplicity, and anger, based on the author’s experience, are indelible.” I bought it at the time and still own it.

This week, ABC News touted a new book that uses oral history to tell the story of the atomic bomb. Martha Raddatz spoke with author Garrett M. Graff about his new book, The Devil Reached Towards The Sky, on the nuclear bombing during WWII.

The events of eight decades ago still resonate with me since I have written about Hiroshima every five years since 2010.