Was it right to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima?
Japan attacked us. It was a sneak attack that FDR described as “A day that will live in infamy.” We and our allies fought Japan all across the Pacific and absorbed enormous casualties, as did Japan. But Japan wouldn’t quit. We warned them, and even dropped leaflets to warn the people of the coming attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but they wouldn’t give in. Truman’s decision to drop the bombs was based on the assessment that an invasion of the Japanese homeland would have resulted in as many as 2 million deaths, many of them ours. Japan’s intransigence was demonstrated when the first bomb, on Hiroshima, didn’t cause them to surrender. It was only when we dropped a second bomb that they sued for peace. I think too much has been made of the fact that the war-ending bombs were atomic ones. The point is that we were attacked and had to fight back. Did we kill more than 200,000 people and destroy two cities with those bombs? Yes. Did we save as many as 1.8 million lives by using the A-bomb
