Victor Davis Hanson: The Atomic Bombs Dropped in Japan Were Not 'Satanic'

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**Victor Davis Hanson** (0:38)
It's August, so we have the annual debate over the dropping of two atomic bombs, one on August 6th, and then three days later on Nagasaki with a plutonium bomb. Both of them killed somewhere between 100 and 130,000 Japanese soldiers and civilians. People have said, we didn't need to do it. This isn't indicative of America. This is the only time in the history of nuclear warfare capability that anybody's actually deployed it in anything other than a test. But why did we do it?
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal. It's August, so we have the annual debate over the dropping of two atomic bombs, one on August 6th, the uranium bomb called Little Man that was dropped on the dual-use target, military and industrial Japanese city of Hiroshima. And then three days later on Nagasaki with a plutonium bomb, although it was not quite as powerful as the uranium bomb. Both of them killed somewhere between 100 and 130,000 Japanese soldiers and civilians.
So for the last eight decades, people have said, we didn't need to do it. This isn't indicative of America. This is the only time in the history of nuclear warfare capability that anybody's actually deployed it in anything other than a test. So why did we do it? Well, one thing was the European theater had been closed with the surrender of Germany on May 9th, 1945 And then we thought the war in Japan would quickly end. And of course, it didn't. It went on all of May, all of June, all of July, and all of August, four months. We should remember another thing. 1945 was the year closest to the surrender. I mean, Japan formally surrendered on September 2nd, 1945 But counterintuitively, it was the worst year of the Pacific War, in which more Americans died in that year than in all the other years combined. 1945
Why then did we drop the bomb? Well, one of the reasons was, in that terrible year, we had just landed on Okinawa. We thought Okinawa would be an easy target, because it was near the end of the war, and we had learned a lot from near catastrophes by invading Pelelu, Tarawa, Iwo Jima. But the opposite happened. Okinawa was the bloodiest island invasion of the entire war. 50,000 Americans were killed, wounded, or missing. 12,000 were killed that we know of. Japan lost probably 120,000 to 130,000 Japanese soldiers, and Okinawa militia and civilians.
People said, if this happened, right near what we thought would be the end of the war, can you imagine what the planned invasion of Japan is? Japan has 20 times the resources they had on Okinawa, the homeland. We were going to invade in 1945 and 1946, the two main islands of Japan. And given the resources they have that are 20 times larger than Okinawa, we can expect a million casualties. 20 times the 50,000 who perished or were casualties on Okinawa. Now, there's a lot of confusion about that exegesis. People said, well, Japan was defeated. Why did we do it? Curtis LeMay said, I have burned down 50% of the industrial and civilian urban core of Japan. My B-29s, I have 1,000 of them and I've got 5,000 ordered. And we're going to put them on Okinawa and it's only 900 miles from Tokyo. It's not 1,500 like the Marianas. And we'll use both bases and we'll burn the whole city of city structure, urban core of Japan down. He would have. In other words, the atomic bomb saved Japanese lives and American lives because if we wanted to avoid an invasion, we would have just kept the incendiary raids. I should remind everybody on March 9, 1945, the first fire bombing of Tokyo was the most deadly attack in the history of warfare. Over 100,000 people died from B-29 bombings. I should add another thing is that Ernest King, Chief of Naval Operations, said we didn't need to drop the bomb because I wanted to keep going. And what keep going meant he had the biggest fleet in the history of civilization that was larger than all the fleets in the world by 1945 And he had mined the harbors, he had mined the passageways, he had blockaded the exits and entries into Japanese ports. He said we can starve them out. Again, more casualties than you could dream of. So whether we let LeMade burn the country down or King starve it out or we invaded, whatever scenario you chose, they were far more egregious in terms of life's loss than the dropping of the atomic bomb. People said, well, we just did it because we didn't trust Stalin anymore, our ally. He had shown that all of Eastern Europe and we just dropped the bomb to deter him.