MAX BOOT
Why feel guilty about Hiroshima?
Conventional weapons also devastated cities, but they wouldn't have ended the war.
Max Boot
August 3, 2005/L.A. TIMES
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Only with the Axis threat long vanquished have numerous historians and philosophers come forward to claim that the use of the A-bomb was unnecessary and an atrocity that blemishes American honor.
These criticisms rest, it seems to me, on a profoundly ahistorical assumption: that there was something unusual about what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's true that the atomic bombs were, by many orders of magnitude, the most powerful explosives ever employed. But the havoc they caused, with a combined death toll of over 100,000, was far from unprecedented.
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I've had this debate with friends and not-so-friends. The core of their argument, mirrored here by Mr. Boot, is that atomics are like other explosives...
only bigger.
But this is incorrect. Atomic weapons have three main effects, only two of which are shared with conventional ordinance. Those are: blast, heat and radiation. It's the third item, the one even the largest thermobaric bomb can't deliver, that places fission and fusion weapons in an entirely new category.
In short, although it sounds sensible -- in a bloody minded way -- to say 'well, the US Army Air Corps was already carpet bombing Japanese cities with incendiaries, killing tens and tens of thousands so what's the difference?' this misses the point entirely.
The point being that fission and fusion devices not only transform the living -- through vaporization, blast shockwave, flying debris, extreme burns and other horrors -- into the dead; they also poison the living (not just human but nearly all life within the blast and fallout area) in profound ways, mangling genetics, spawning multi-generational diseases.
No ordinary bomb, not even the worst, does all this. For this reason, using atomics against Japan, though it's certainly plausible that at the time, reasonable people could see doing so as the only decisive way to swiftly end a brutal war of unprecedented scope, was surely not the same thing as what had gone before.
.d.
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