For the very first time, the US ambas sador to Japan has been ordered to attend the annual ceremony at Hiro shima commemorating those who died when the Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb there 65 years ago.
A State Department spokesman was quick to say the ambassador wouldn’t be offering an official apology for dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended World War II. But he didn’t have to. The simple presence of a US official at this ceremony was a powerful symbolic act, even if no one actually said “We’re sorry.”
Yet Americans shouldn’t feel sorry for ending the most violent and brutal war in history, and toppling one of the most bloodthirsty regimes of the 20th century. Where is the ceremony where Japanese officials commemorate the deaths caused by imperial Japan’s rampage through Asia, including a genocidal war that claimed some 13 million Chinese?
Sadly, it is the myths about Hiroshima and Nagasaki that dominate the White House’s moral calculus, not the actual facts.
Those myths are that the dropping of the bomb on Japan was an overt act of racism by an American government that saw the Asians who’d be killed as inferior and therefore expendable; and that in building the atomic bomb, America created a weapon so terrible and barbaric that its presence poses a constant threat to civilization and the planet — which is why nuclear disarmament must be not only a strategic, but a moral imperative.
The first myth distorts historical truth. The second may doom us to a permanently perilous world. Both also ignore certain ineluctable facts.
First, the Manhattan Project developed the atomic bomb for use on the Germans, not the Japanese. It was pure accident that the Third Reich collapsed before the bomb could be dropped in Europe, and became available to use on Japan instead.
Second, the number of Japanese who died in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings — some 300,000 in all — would have been dwarfed by the 2 million or so who’d have perished in a full-scale invasion of Japan — along with the 1 million Americans GIs, Marines, sailors and airmen whom US military planners calculated would also be killed or wounded in that assault.
Thus, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings saved Japanese lives, as well as untold tens of thousands of other Asians in China, Thailand and Malaysia who’d have died if the war had dragged on for another year — or even two.
Yet equating Hiroshima with racism is doubly insidious.
America is now trying to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. The most urgent argument for halting Iran’s nuclear program is to stop Tehran from carrying through its threat to attack Israel and triggering a second Holocaust. But by implying that the United States once committed its own version of the Holocaust at Hiroshima, we knock away the moral underpinnings of our own argument.
Far from cleansing the record, we are telling the world our government has occupied the same barbarous ethical plane as the mullahs in Tehran or the Nazis — and all in defiance of historical truth.
One more misconception is leading us astray here. It was not the terrible, almost unimaginable suffering at Hiroshima and Nagasaki that forced Japan to surrender. Rather, the implied threat that the United States was ready to drop more atomic bombs finally forced the Japanese government to believe it faced a stark choice: surrender or oblivion.
Inducing that fear is the heart of nuclear deterrence — whether we are talking about imperial Japan, Stalin’s Soviet Union or Islamicist Iran. It’s why the United States has kept an overwhelming nuclear arsenal ever since.
That implied threat kept Western Europe free from being overrun by Stalin in the early days of the Cold War — and prevented later regional conflicts like Korea, Vietnam and the Yom Kippur War from spinning out of control into full-scale clashes between the superpowers.
America’s status as the world’s pre-eminent nuclear power has been the one fixed anchor in international relations since World War II. And far from undermining the push to stop Iran from going nuclear, it gives our effort gravity and credibility.
In short, what happened at Hiroshima 65 years ago made the world a safer place, not a more dangerous one. By distorting the historical and moral truths about what happened that day, President Obama is pointing us in the opposite direction.
Arthur Herman, author of “Gandhi and Churchill,” is finishing a book on the arse nal of democracy in World War II.