Nor is dropping the atomic bombs on Japan some ancestral sin for which all Americans henceforth and forever must atone for. I understand the meaning of the word in the usage Mike Cote and others are using it here, but I can’t make “good” a synonym of “justifiable” in this case. That some of history’s worst actors have had the power of atomic and nuclear weapons and have not used them again to date is a strong argument that there was a deterrent from America having done so. Without hesitation.ħ8 years of history tells us everything we need to know that it was the right decision, the necessary decision, the required decision. If I’m bombardier Thomas Ferebee on the Enola Gay, I release the weapon. If I’m Truman, I order the bomb to be used. If I’m Oppenheimer or any of the untold thousands working on that project, I do my best to see it through. If I’m Roosevelt, I order the Manhattan Project and give it every priority. With the Nazis trying to build their own, and the frenemy Russians looming after the wartime marriage of convenience is over, and a Japan swearing all 70 million citizens will fight to the end, if I’m in those positions I do the same thing. It is telling that even after the second bomb was dropped there was still waffling among the powers of the Empire of Japan to struggle on. The list of atrocities the Japanese military inflicted on civilians and soldiers alike is ghastly to read. As Mike went into great detail with, warring with an Imperial Japan that not only swore to fight to the last man but very nearly did is almost unimaginable to modern sensibilities even with all documented evidence we have. The logic laid out as to the necessity of the bombs is not what I mean. And that difference is very important when talking about something like atomic bombs and morality. Perhaps it is a minor quibble compared to big issues caused by those two history-shaping explosions, but it is the word “good” I object to. Mike Cote’s recent piece dealt with the particulars of that debate well enough, and I agree with wide swaths of his writing.īut I cannot agree that, quoting the title of his piece: “Dropping the Atomic Bombs Was Good, Actually.” Being chronically too-online myself, I rather dreaded that. Lending as much gravity as possible to something so momentous that resulted in so many deaths without getting preachy about is not easy, but Oppenheimer managed it.Īmong my other thoughts not written down was the realization that the always simmering online debate over the bombings would be cranked up to a full boil online and elsewhere. The film did a good job covering all the bases and arguments that went into the decision and not only the morals and strategy involved, but how personalities and fears both known and unknown played into it. Using two atomic bombs on Japan is something that humanity will not only always debate but should always debate and wrestle with. All in all, as I wrote in my own review of the film which you can read here, I think Christopher Nolan and crew handled it pretty well. While I was watching the Oppenheimer film in the theater, I was mentally braced for how the debate over the dropping of two atomic bombs onto Japan was going to be handled. It brought peace to the world at that time.” The thing is it did what it was supposed to do. When talking about dropping the atomic bombs on Japan, Paul Tibbets who flew on the missions put it this way: “I do not dwell on the moral issue. The distance between the concept of “justified” and the concept of “good” has a river of moral conundrums flowing through it. Things that are different are not the same. Marine Corps Photograph, now in the collections of the National Archives Battered religious figures stand watch on a hill above a tattered valley.
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