We fast approach the seventy-eighth anniversaries of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.[1]  Could Imperial Japan have been forced to surrender unconditionally without either an American invasion or the use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? 

Certainly. 

In early Spring 1945, the Army Air Force shifted from high-altitude, daytime, precision bombing to low-level, nighttime “carpet-bombing” with incendiaries.  The first such attack, “Operation Meetinghouse,” in March 1945, killed more than 80,000 people in Tokyo.  Thereafter, American bombers worked steadily down the list of Japanese cities, destroying homes, industry, and infrastructure.  In the aptly-named “Operation Starvation” Army Air Force bombers sowed 12,000 mines that sank 670 ships and annihilated Japanese imports and inter-island trade.[2]  All you had to do was to wait while the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” trampled over Japan.  In the end, the conventional bombing killed 210,000 people, the atomic bombings 120,000. 

Could the United States have escaped the moral culpability of being the only country to use nuclear weapons? 

What culpability is that? 

Atomic weapons were developed as part of what Anglo-American leaders understood as a nuclear arms race with Nazi Germany.  If the weapons had been ready in 1942, would it have been immoral to atom bomb Nazi Germany?  Or was it only immoral to bomb Japan? 

The two atom bombs were not “worse” weapons than the alternatives of fire-bombing cities or starving huge numbers of people to death through a blockade.  Dead is dead. 

Was saving even one American soldier’s life worth killing 80,000 Japanese?  How would you answer if you were the mother or father of that American soldier?    

If there is moral culpability here it lies with the Japanese government of the time.  First, that government began the Second World War in the Pacific as an escalation of its effort to conquer China.  Second, it waged that war in an atrocious fashion which elicited atrocity in response.[3]  Third, it continued to wage war long after it became impossible to avoid eventual defeat.[4]  The Japanese government’s essential strategy lay in accepting the mass death of Japanese in hopes of inflicting mass death on American soldiers.  Their “hope” or “plan” lay in the belief that the Americans would not accept high casualty totals.  Indeed, the Americans understood Japanese intentions and they would rather not suffer such casualties.  That’s why they had so many bombers—and terrible kinds of bombs. 

People seem to view the bombing of Japan through the filter of the subsequent nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, and through the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the hands of many other countries.  Would it be immoral to begin a full-scale nuclear war today?  Yes, that would probably be immoral.  That isn’t what happened in 1945. 

[1] And it coincides with “Oppenheimer” (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2023) and Evan Thomas, Road to Surrender: Three Men and the Countdown to the End of World War II (2023). 

[2] See: Wesley F. Craven and James L. Cate, (eds.), The Army Air Forces in World War II, Vol. V: The Pacific: Matterhorn to Nagasaki, June 1944 to August 1945, pp.  662-673. 

[3] Race hatred played a powerful role on both sides, and not merely that of the Americans.  See: John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (1986). 

[4] When did Japan “lose” the war?  Possibly at Pearl Harbor (December 1941).  Probably at Midway (June 1942).  Certainly with the Battle of the Philippine Sea (June 1944) and the American capture of Saipan (June-July 1944).  The Battle of the Philippine Sea destroyed what remained of Japan’s naval offensive power.  Saipan put American bombers within range of the Home Islands.  That’s more than a year before Hiroshima and Nagasaki.