The Devil Reached Toward the Sky

“It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.” —J. Robert Oppenheimer

Ref. 7AAB-A

1945. Was Japan ready to surrender soon anyway? Was the second bomb used on Nagasaki necessary at all? Did the atomic bombs save more lives than they took in the cold calculation of war—and, if so, does that make their use against large civilian populations any more acceptable? How much of the US calculus on using the bomb was less about Japan than about Russia and the coming conflict of the Cold War?

Ref. 8E8F-B

World War II was a conflict that shattered the lines of morality and the traditional divides in warfare between civilians and combatants; as James D. Hornfischer, one of the premier modern scholars of the conflict, wrote, “The question of morality in warfare is vexing. Is there a moral way to kill someone? Is a bullet preferable to starvation, starvation to incineration?” The ebb and flow of that debate surely has influenced some of the memories captured by the participants over the years; many of the memories of the 509th Composite Group, the Army Air Force unit that delivered the bombs to Japan, and others were gathered after history took a strong turn against the bombing in the 1980s and 1990s, and controversy erupted over the display of the Enola Gay at the Smithsonian Institution. We will as a society surely never satisfy the what-ifs and could-have-beens, though recent scholarship by historians like Evan Thomas in his book Road to Surrender has made a convincing case that hard-liners in the Japanese government were not anywhere close to surrender even after the second bomb; in fact, a military coup unfolded in the Imperial Palace the night before the surrender was announced, with troops rushing unsuccessfully to uncover and destroy the emperor’s recorded announcement.

Ref. 5EB5-C

Regardless of the ultimate moral calculation to use atomic weapons, the result of those twin bombings in August 1945 was so horrific that the world has sought to avoid ever using these terrible weapons again. Even so, the US, the Soviet Union, and a dozen other countries pursued building tens of thousands of weapons many times more powerful than those dropped on Japan. Today, several thousand nuclear weapons remain on constant alert, hidden in missile silos and submarines beneath the ocean, ready to annihilate most life on our planet in thirty minutes or fewer at the personal order of the US or Russian president. Eighty years into the nuclear age, there is still no check or balance nor second opinion necessary to issue this world-ending order by these two presidents. Any study of modern postwar history makes clear that we have avoided global nuclear war since as much by luck as by skill.

Ref. D8CA-D