eye of the hurricane
I was surprised to see a post by Steve G. this morning knocking a historian's "revisionist" take on the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Steve has a feel for domestic issues and a great deal to say, but this would not be the first time he's let his fingers do all the wrong kind of talking when it comes to the wide wide world of sports and international politics.
It breaks down like this: first, arguments about what Japan would or wouldn't have done if the U.S. didn’t destroy those two cities is the wrong fork in the proverbial road. Japanese aggression toward the U.S. originated solely from the tension between two expansion-minded nations with imperial designs on the Pacific. Essentialy, then, the bomb, or conversely a bloody and costly invasion, was not a foregone conclusion. Peace - even defeat - could've come another way, as most scholars point out that the Japanese war machine had nothing on the Germany's, which fought and fought (no thanks to Henry Ford) till the very end.
Second, but-wait-but-waits about the Germans getting the bomb first are irrelevant as well - there was nothing, nothing at all - incumbent upon the United States to actually use atomic weaponry once it "got it." And the argument that scientists and other leaders who "didn't know" about what the bomb might do is a statement that should speak for itself.
It's beyond cliched, I know, but true, sadly enough: the lesson of that horrible day should be what happens when the sum of a culture's technological capability - and I think it's fair to lump The Bomb in with the super-efficient German and Japanese death camps and the high-altitude bombings of Dresden and London - not only exceeds the sum of it's shared morality, but smashes it to bits as well.
Finally, the arguments about thousands of dead G.I.s or Japanese supply lines or their brutal and driven army or whatever else ceased to mean anything once atomic bombs were used on those two cities. And yes, I can say these things now, and yes, I can point a finger now, and yes, I can do all of this now and more, because once it began, the bombing never stopped. It never stopped, not for poor Mormon army families in Utah, or Native fishermen in the Pacific, or American Indian bands in the Southwest, and not for me or you: all across the country, perched in mountain launch pads or hunkered in underground silos, hundreds of thousands more Hiroshimas and Nagasakis wait.
And wait - the op-ed columns and melodramatic teevee documentaries will fade in time. The Bomb outlasts us all.
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