August 16, 2006
More on V-J Day Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:30 PM EST Fred Schwarz’s post on V-J Day suggests out that one likely consequence of failure to use atomic bombs against Japan would have been a united Korean peninsula today brutally misruled by Kim Jong Il, rather than one divided between a monstrous tyranny of 22 million people and a prosperous democracy of 48 million people. This post interests me for a number of reasons, foremost among them its unusual place in a rhetorical field where the use of atomic weapons against Japan is often described as an unmitigated moral catastrophe. But not as an incomparable moral catastrophe; we hear quite a bit of one comparison, of which more below.
It is not simply that the atomic weapons are often asserted to have been at irrelevant to Japan’s surrender—that case is nowadays widely assumed, rather than argued—it is that the use of the bombs is considered as great an evil as people have ever inflicted on one another. The Second World War, and for that matter the twentieth century, are described with remarkable frequency as the war, and century, “of Auschwitz and Hiroshima.” This strongly suggests that Auschwitz and Hiroshima were comparable evils.
Were they? If the slaughter of innocents is the criterion, scale may matter, and also intention. In terms of scale, by December of 1945 as many as 140,000 people may have died as a result of the Hiroshima bomb; at least 1.1 million people were murdered at Auschwitz, and most modern estimates for total deaths at the Auschwitz camps circle around 1.6 million. If exponents don’t matter, can the twentieth century plausibly be described as the century of Auschwitz and Son of Sam? This is not to minimize the death of 140,000, a horrific number: It is to try to avoid relative minimization of ten times that number.
How about intention? Auschwitz was devoted to the racist mass murder of Jews, Poles, Gypsies and Soviet POWs. We often hear that Hiroshima was the target of similarly racist attack, and that the Allies would never have used atomic weapons on fellow Caucasians. There is no evidence for that proposition, and much against. 600,000 German civilians killed by strategic bombing also died by blast and fire, but not by radiation—does that make their deaths incomparably less horrific than the deaths of the civilians who died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Again, why Auschwitz and Hiroshima?
Was Hiroshima a uniquely unacceptable target by the laws of war as then understood? Hiroshima was a city of industrial significance, with military camps located nearby, including Field Marshal Shunroku Hata’s 2nd General Army Headquarters, which was responsible for the defense of southern Japan. Hiroshima, also a communications center, storage point, and assembly area for troops, was a legitimate target by the standards that had prevailed in the European theater. Jewish, Polish, and Gypsy civilians were adjacent to no Allied military targets, and their murders cannot conceivably be described as even wanton and indiscriminate collateral effects of legitimate military action.
For Hiroshima to be an event handily bracketed with Auschwitz, Allied intentions ought to be morally comparable to Nazi intentions. So it becomes very important to assume that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not only irrelevant to Japan’s surrender but actuated by cynical and evil motives. We must have done it to impress Stalin. The evidence for this was never that strong, and in the specialized literature the case that we only did it to impress Stalin has become less and less impressive over time. The Allies had several intentions when using atomic weapons, but their primary intention seems to have been to end the war as quickly as possible, at the smallest cost in life. The German intention at Auschwitz was genocide. So why Auschwitz and Hiroshima? Why not Auschwitz and Rwanda? Is it a subliminal or in some case conscious desire to make the Allies morally comparable to their enemies? Maybe not, but it cannot but have that effect, and I find the comparison idiotic and repellent.
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