US Atomic Bombings Didn’t Save Lives or End the War

By John LaForge

August 6 and 9 are the 80th anniversaries of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The killing of 140,000 civilians at Hiroshima was the result of detonating a 60-million-degree Celsius explosion (10,000 times hotter than the surface of the sun) over the city. Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb reported, “People exposed within half a mile of the … fireball were seared to bundles of smoking black char in a fraction of a second as their internal organs boiled away…”

The use of atomic bombs was rationalized after-the-fact using myths that transformed the burning of children into a positive good. President Truman and government propagandists justified the attacks, claiming they “ended the war” and “saved lives” ⸺ stories still believed today ⸺ but, as historian Gar Alperovitz has demonstrated in The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, and the Architecture of an American Myth, the pretext of “saving lives” was fabricated.

General Dwight Eisenhower, who had been the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, notes in his book Mandate for Change that he told Secretary of War Henry Stimson at the July 1945 Potsdam Conference that he opposed using the bomb because it was “no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.” Ike told Stimson, “Japan was already defeated and dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary.”

Broad declassification of wartime documents has made the facts accessible to everyone, leading the historian of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, J. Samuel Walker, to report in the winter 1990 edition of the journal Diplomatic History: “The consensus among scholars is that the bomb was not needed to avoid an invasion of Japan and to end the war within a relatively short time.”

Dozens of leaders who ran the war agree. Winston Churchill wrote in his history of WWII, “It would be a mistake to suppose that the fate of Japan was settled by the atomic bomb. Her defeat was certain before the first bomb fell.”

Admiral William Leahy, the Chief of Staff to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, declared in his memoir I Was There: 

“The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender. The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”

Major General Curtis LeMay, who directed the devastating incendiary destruction of Japan’s 67 largest cities before August 1945, was more emphatic. Asked by a reporter at a Sept. 20, 1945, press conference, “Had they [Japan] not surrendered because of the atomic bomb?” Gen. LeMay declared, “The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.”

Gen. “Hap” Arnold, commander of the Army Air Force, wrote in Global Mission (1949), “It always appeared to us that atomic bomb or no atomic bomb the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse.”

Likewise, Brig. Gen. Bonner Fellers reported in Reader’s Digest, “Obviously … the atomic bomb neither induced the emperor’s decision to surrender nor had any effect on the ultimate outcome of the war.” And the renowned Gen. Douglas MacArthur said, “he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb.”

Religious and cultural leaders contemporaneously condemned the attacks, as on March 5, 1946, when the Federal Council of Churches issued a statement signed by 22 prominent Protestant religious leaders saying in part, “the surprise bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are morally indefensible. … Both bombings, moreover, must be judged to have been unnecessary for winning the war.”

Nuclear weapons are still protected by lies like “limited nuclear war.” This month’s anniversaries remind us to rebel against them, to demand that the United States apologize to Japanese survivors and their descendants for the crime; that the U.S. abandon its nuclear attack plans and preparations (deterrence); and that it finally stands-down and eliminates the crown jewels and poisoned foundation of all government waste, fraud, and abuse ⸺ nuclear weapons.

John LaForge, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is Co-director of Nukewatch a nuclear power and weapons watchdog group.