Victor Davis Hanson Challenges Tucker Carlson: Show Me Where I Called Hiroshima ‘Glorious’

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Victor Davis Hanson (0:38)

Tucker says that I was glorifying or I use the word that the use of these horrible weapons was glorious rather than necessary to save lives. I challenge him to produce that quote. And if he can't produce that quote, I suggest he apologize.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.

About a month ago, I talked about the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

And I made the argument why the United States did that, use those devastating weapons.

Not that I was happy about it, of course, but we all were commemorating the date. In reaction to that and to a column I wrote to the same effect, Tucker Carlson recently said that I had called the dropping of the atomic bombs glorious.

I will just take a little parentheses here and say, if he can produce the quote where I said glorious, I will pay him $1,000 or better yet, maybe he can have a wager. I will say, I never used the word glorious. He says I did. If he wants to back that up with $1,000 bet, I'll be happy to do it. And I'm not a wealthy person by any means. What I said was that we dropped the bomb for three reasons. And the reasons were not those that the paleo right is alleging are the left. We did not do it because we wanted to impress the Soviets. They got the bomb four years almost to the week. And they were in the process of assembling the information from espionage when we used the bomb. We knew they were going to get the bomb. Nor did we do it to justify the expense of the Manhattan Project. Nor did we do it because we don't like so-called Asian people. We did it because we had just suffered 50,000 casualties on Okinawa. And we did not want to repeat that on the Japanese mainland, where there were up to 20 million militia-impressed civilians and army, and 7,000 or 8,000 kamikazes. And if you do the math of the defenders on Okinawa versus the losses of 50,000 dead, wounded, missing, and apply that to Japan, we may have lost, as planners had feared, 1 million. 1 million. That was why we tried to use the plan. In addition, other people pointed out that the Japanese were killing somewhere between 15,000 and above Chinese, Asians in general, and Pacific Islanders per day. Of all the armies and militaries in World War II, as far as those who killed the most of the enemies and suffered the least doing it, the fewest, it was Japan. So we did that to save American lives, to save allied Asian lives, and to save Japanese lives. There would have been 2 or 3 million Japanese killed.

Another thing to remember is, the atomic bombs, contrary to what Tucker Carlson said, were not the most devastating weapons in World War II, nor are they necessarily even today. They have the potential to be, but so does AI, so does enhanced gain of function viruses. There's a lot of ways, unfortunately, that people die through the use of dangerous weapons. The point I'm making is in World War II, the incendiary napalm attacks on the Japanese cities killed far more than the two bombs. And more importantly, with the acquisition of Okinawa and the end of World War II in Europe, Curtis LeMay was trying to shorten the war by increasing his bomber fleet with new bombers from the American factories, B-29s, and assembling a massive armada of, say, six or seven thousand bombers, both in the Marianas and the much shorter distance from Okinawa, with B-17s and British Lancasters, as I said. The point is, it would have been an inferno had those two bombs not been used to preclude further death and to shorten the war. I don't know why Tucker Carlson does this. He also said Donald Trump once is considering using nuclear weapons. Donald Trump has said one thing continuously.