Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [3]
One plane, one city, one morning in August, one atomic bomb: simple. The commander of the Enola Gay, a 29-year-old air-force colonel named Paul W Tibbets, had practiced many times during the preceding weeks and months dropping mock equivalents of atomic bombs, filled with concrete and high explosives, on an isolated patch of the Utah desert and in the Pacific Ocean. The way his plane bounced upwards once the bomb had been dropped and then detonated was no surprise to him. That the bomb worked, creating an awesome cloud of fire and smoke and dirt and buffeting the Enola Gay with its shock wave, was testimony to the technological competence of an American-based team of scientists, who had solved many (though hardly all) of the scientific problems the Second World War had presented. And there seemed to the crew of the plane that bright morning a moral simplicity to what they had done. The criminality of the Japanese—all Japanese, without distinction—was to them unquestionable.
The Japanese had treacherously attacked Pearl Harbor. They had murdered civilians in China and Southeast Asia, tortured and starved their prisoners, and fought remorselessly for their island conquests in the South Pacific. If dropping an atomic bomb above the center of Hiroshima would end the war sooner, the men of the Enola Gay would simply do it, without hesitation and untroubled by pangs of conscience.
Over sixty years after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima (and Nagasaki, bombed three days later), we remember the event with much of the same stark simplicity with which it was regarded at the time. The atomic bomb, many claim, was an appropriate punishment for a people who had visited war and misery on the world, a punishment commensurate with Japanese malfeasance in Asia and throughout the Pacific. The Japanese deserved the bomb. Moreover, the bomb was essential to end the war. The Japanese war cabinet, or influential members of it, had vowed to sacrifice multitudes of their fellow citizens in defending their homeland against an anticipated invasion by the United States. The devastating firebombings of Japanese cities, including Tokyo, had not caused military officials to waver. Only a shock as powerful as the one the atomic bombs administered was sufficient to convince Japan’s leaders, including the Emperor Hirohito, to quit the war on reasonable terms. The bombs thus saved hundreds of thousands of Japanese and American lives.
Or: The atomic bomb was a weapon so heinous in its composition, so willfully indiscriminate, so simply and obviously aimed at ordinary people, that its use was a moral outrage, even if it might in the end have saved lives. No people, regardless of the behavior of their government, deserves annihilation by a weapon as terrible as a nuclear bomb. In its very singularity as an instrument of war the atomic bomb stood condemned. It was the only known weapon to destroy so much by itself, to create such a powerful blast, such a devastating fire, and—perhaps above all— to spread radioactivity throughout its targeted place, with consequences as fearsome as they were at the time poorly understood. And, critics charged, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unnecessary to win the war. Japan was near defeat by the summer of 1945, and some cabinet members, and possibly even the Emperor himself, were frantically looking for a way to surrender to the Americans