[Buddha-l] Hiroshima vs Terrorism..........?

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Sat, 2005-10-08 at 14:43 -0400, Stanley J. Ziobro II wrote:

> I think you're shooting from the hip here, Richard.  If such an article
> exists, and if therein the claim was made that 10,000 lives were saved by
> dropping the atomic bombs, the claim is simply silly. 

The article does exist, and I did read it. It was one of the many things
I read about Hiroshima before I went to live there and to study Buddhist
philosophy at Hiroshima Daigaku. As I reported, the article chronicles
military statements over the course of about fifteen years and shows
that in each statement made on the topic, the number of lives allegedly
saved increased.

>  U.S. military
> estimates for Allied deaths alone in the proposed invasion of Japan
> exceeded 500,000.

Yes, eventually. And a bit after that, it rose to several million.

> Maybe.  You would know.  I've wasn't born then.

You refer to the McCarthy era. I was born early enough to witness this
tragic episode in American history. Although I was only a child when it
took place, I vividly recall my parent's reactions to reports that
friends of theirs were being blacklisted, and I recall the fear that
people had of the government. If you'd like to have a sense of what it
was like, go see George Clooney's new movie on the life of Edward R.
Murrow.

> You have a penchant for discerning my state of mind.  How do you do it?

I learned to read a while back. And I have never been able to shake the
habit of thinking that people mean what they say. So when I read your
words, I begin with the assumption that you are speaking your mind.

> Without denying the
> question of whether the taking of civilian lives was justifiable (strictly
> speaking, it wasn't), the statistical projections regarding casulties and
> deaths turns out to have been extremely conservative. 

Sorry, but I can't manage to be sufficiently naive to believe that. What
we know for a fact is that as time went on, the claim for the number of
lives saved rose. We know that, because it is amply documented. Where we
disagree is WHY the number of allegedly saved lives kept getting higher.
Your claim, which I think is naive, is that the initial figures were
wrong and were corrected by subsequent investigations. What I claim is
that as people became more aware of how many people suffered in the
atomic bomb attacks, the only way they could cope with the guilt was to
inflate the number of lives that were eventually saved. I also note that
inflating the numbers happens to have served the purpose of justifying
the enormous build-up of nuclear weapons.

> But it remains the case that by dropping the bombs the Japanese High
> Command chose to surrender.  

So you are trying to tell us that the Japanese are lucky they didn't
have someone like George W. Bush as their leader? I agree. He would no
doubt have made a speech telling the Japanese people that he had to
finish the job and that it would be a disaster to embolden the enemy by
cutting and running. By showing the good sense to surrender rather than
subjecting the people of Japan to more terrorist attacks, the Japanese
High Command did the wise and compassionate thing. I only wish our
current leaders were half so wise or a quarter so compassionate.

> This action spared both the Allies and the Japanese millions
> of lives that would otherwise have been lost.  Maybe this is something you
> desperately do not want to believe, or maybe you are simply encouraging
> discussion, or maybe, you're just being contrary for whatever reason.  I
> really don't know.

You're right. You don't know. So let me explain it to you again. We do
not know how many people would have died if the Americans had not
dropped atomic bombs on two non-military targets. We will never know.
All we can do is guess. What we do know is that as a result of a
decision to drop an atomic bomb in a populated area (rather than, say,
demonstrating its force by dropping it where no human beings would be
injured by it), a very large number of innocent people, nearly all of
them civilians, were killed or made very ill through radiation sickness.
I believe that to try to justify their very real suffering by appealing
to guesses and speculations about how many lives were saved, is
obscene. 

And I would add that it is morally short-sighted in the extreme to fail
to take into account that using a weapon of mass destruction against a
civilian population set a precedent that has made the world incalculably
more dangerous and taht much of the danger of the world in which we now
live is a direct descendant of that awful decision to use the atomic
bomb. The USA showed itself to be a nation that would carry out two
massive terrorist attacks and would then continue to justify doing so.
And if one claims that these atrocious attacks can be justified simply
on the grounds that they worked, then one has no ground whatsoever to
condemn Osama bin Ladin or any number of Palestinian or Iraqi suicide
bombers. They are simply doing, on a much smaller scale, what the USA
has shown to them is a workable strategy. If if we continue to insist
that whatever works is legitimate, and that terrifying civilians works,
we cannot possibly say that it is not legitimate for others to try to
get what they want by terrorizing us.

In summary, I find the quality of your thinking on this subject
appallingly lacking in moral discernment. Pardon me for saying what I
believe so plainly without coating it in honey. Now go put on your Moral
Dunce's cap and go sit in the corner and give some thought to the
implications of what you have been saying. And be ashamed of your folly.

> Neither Hirosshima nor Nagasaki were "completely non-military targets".

The only sense in which they were military targets is that they were
cities in a country against which a war was being conducted. I suppose
you could say that the school children who died in those attacks would
have grown up to be enemy soldiers, and the women who were killed might
have given birth to more enemy babies. Aside from that, however, they
were of no military importance. 

Indeed, if Hiroshima and Nagasaki HAD been military targets, they would
have been bombed or shelled earlier. The reason they were chosen as
targets for the atomic bombs is because they had never been bombed or
attacked in any way before; the military picked previously untouched
targets because they wished to be able to assess exactly how much damage
an atomic bomb would do. Bombing Tokyo would not have served this
purpose, because it was already so badly damaged by conventional fire
bombs. (Most of the claims made here are documented in Enola Gay by
Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts. (New York: Stein and Day, 1977.)

There is a considerable literature that questions the claim that basis
of the decision to use the atomic bomb against the Japanese had anything
at all to do with Japan. There is much evidence that Japan was on the
verge of collapse and that the Allied Command expected Japan to
surrender very soon. So why use the atomic bombs? One theory is that the
bombing of Hiroshima was not meant to be the last action of the Second
War but the first action of the Cold War. The purpose of using the
bombs, according to this theory, was to sent a clear signal to Stalin
that the Americans would not hesitate to use such weapons on the Soviet
Union if they got out of line. Do I believe that? I don't know. Let's
just say I am as prepared to believe that as I am to believe that the
main purpose for dropping the atomic bombs was to save lives.

-- 
Richard Hayes <rhayes at unm.edu> 
*** 
"Everybody's crying `Peace on earth--
just as soon as we win this war.'" -- Mose Allison