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Remember Nagasaki

The Obama Administration has been desperately trying to counter any suggestion that the President’s visit to Hiroshima today represented an apology, which would add to the “apology tour” narrative the Republicans have tried to stick on him. The Japanese government is cooperating by denying that it expects one. There is no point in asking for what you know you won’t get. The United States notoriously does not apologize. This is sad and unbecoming, not the least because the United States is not shy about asking other countries to apologize.

But, it is fair to ask, is there anything to apologize for?

The argument in favor of the first use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima is pretty strong, if you ignore the indiscriminate killing of civilians that was already a feature of the war: President Truman was anxious to avoid a large-scale invasion of Japan, which would have cost many American lives, and to end the war quickly. Prolongation of the war would have not only cost American but also Japanese lives. It would also have put at risk America’s capacity to sustain the war effort. If you thought Japanese unconditional surrender vital to US national security, the bombing looked like the quickest and most effective way of achieving the goal. No wonder President Truman embraced it.

Why not perform a demonstration rather than bomb a city? The short answer seems to be that the Americans feared the test might fail. Saving face is not only a Japanese concept.

The arguments in favor of bombing Hiroshima don’t apply to Nagasaki, attacked three days later, before the Japanese had determined for sure that the bomb used was an atomic one. The bombing of a second city looks gratuitous in retrospect, but at the time it was considered just a continuation of the effort to get Japan to surrender. It is unclear whether Japan would have surrendered if only Hiroshima had been bombed, but it is all too clear that the Japanese had insufficient time to make that decision before Nagasaki was bombed.

There is an important lesson here. War is politics by other means. Its purpose is to convince the enemy to do what you want him to do. It is important to leave him the time and space required to comply. Sure, Japan might have surrendered in the three days after the Hiroshima bombing, but it is hard now to see how allowing a week would have hurt the American cause. A week might have saved almost 40,000 lives.

But they would have been Japanese lives. At the time, they weighed little, if at all, in the American calculus. That, if anything, is what the Americans might consider apologizing for: the failure to minimize the loss of Japanese lives. The bombing of Nagasaki was at best overly hasty and at worst completely unnecessary. Is it too much to ask that we acknowledge those facts?

I suppose so. The President barely mentioned Nagasaki today. The second bombing has been lost in the press coverage of the President’s visit to Hiroshima, just as it has been lost in the popular consciousness in the US ever since 1945. We would do better to remember.