Did the WWII atomic bombing save lives?

Original writing and research

It’s remarkable that, when we think of the history of humankind, we don’t think first of man’s contributions but the history of wars. Sad commentary for mankind, don’t you think?

Wikipedia:

The U.S. military had nearly 500,000 Purple Heart medals manufactured in anticipation of potential casualties from the planned invasion of Japan. In 2003, there were still 120,000 of these Purple Heart medals in stock.Because of the number available, combat units in Iraq and Afghanistan were able to keep Purple Hearts on hand for immediate award to wounded soldiers on the field.

Assistant Secretary of the Navy Ralph Bard proposed warning Japan before dropping the first bomb. Truman wanted a surprise attack. General Marshall stated "one quarter of a million [casualties, meaning killed and wounded] would be the minimum".

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That’s pretty close to the numbers killed directly at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Are Japanese lives worth less than Americans’?

What may have been a giant part of the decision was that the US did not want to suffer the military humiliation of having to share a divided Japan with the Russians invading from the East as had happened in Germany. The US has had an unfounded and morbid fear of “Communists” since there were Communists. Though it was useful to have them as allies in WWII.

The US had already set the moral tone for the war with the firebombings of Dresden, Hamburg and Tokyo. In Tokyo, 130,000 civilian were burned to death in a single night.

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67 Japanese cities were firebombed, killing 350,000 civilians. The cities of Hiroshima, Kokura and Nagasaki would already have been firebombed, too, but were preserved only to observe what effects the A-bombs caused. Both Germany and Japan also had nuclear weapons programmes. After the war, Japan was disarmed by a United States occupation and rendered a largely pacifist nation with only a minimal Self-Defense Force permitted. Today, Japan has forgotten the lessons of where war leads us.

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In the US Civil War, the mayor of Atlanta pleaded with General Sh.erman to save the city. And Sherman essentially said to the mayor just before he torched it and burned it down: "War is cruel. War is cruelty."

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Does this sound familiar? “The entire population of Japan is a proper military target ... There are no civilians in Japan.” opined by a senior Air Force “intelligence” officer.

In a 1986 keynote address before the World Jewish Congress in Jerusalem, “The Final Solution to the Human Problem,” Carl Sagan argued that Hitler “haunts our century… [as] he has shattered our confidence that civilized societies can impose limits on human destructiveness.” In their mutually reinforcing preparations to annihilate one another, erase the past, and foreclose the possibility of future generations, he concluded, “the superpowers have dutifully embraced this legacy… Adolf Hitler lives on.”

The same opinion is being used today for ethnic cleansing of Ukrainians, Palestinians and others. As a species, we’re still cavemen trying to wipe out other cavemen, instilling fear in our fellows.

Mahmous Darwish, poet laureate of Palestine, wrote about Hiroshima after his 1982 visit there, in Memory of Forgetfulness:

“If you are religious, then remember that this bomb is Man’s challenge to God. It’s worded quite simply: We have the power to destroy everything that You have created. If you’re not religious, then look at this this way. This world of ours is four billion, six hundred million years old. It could end in an afternoon.” [Italics in original.]

Darwish commemorates Hiroshima Day—6 August—in 1982, drawing parallels between the two warzones, Beirut and Hiroshima, and the experience of being in a city undergoing near-apocalyptic destruction.

Darwish situates the violence Beirut was undergoing within a broader historical framework, as opposed to depicting it as an isolated incident. By ‘remembering’ Hiroshima, despite the ‘American attempt to make it forget its name’, he identifies the use of the atomic bomb as a starting point for new forms of industrialised warfare, for imaginations of the end of the world, politicising its memory.

Nuclear weapons in the Middle East have been studied predominantly through fears of horizontal proliferation. These fears tend to be rooted in nuclear Orientalism, the sense that nuclear weapons are particularly dangerous in the hands of states in the Global South, deemed uniquely irresponsible, irrational or ideological.

1948 is chosen as it marks the first Arab-Israeli war and the ensuing Palestinian Nakba, resulting in major political transformations. Although there was major international resistance to nuclear weapons in the Middle East, Israel was driven to have the Bomb.

Israel built a plutonium reactor near Dimona in the Negev Desert during the 1950s-1960s with French technical assistance, heavy water from Norway and uranium diverted from South Africa. Israel had the Bomb by 1966. Golda Meir and Nixon reached a secret agreement over its existence in 1969.

This was exposed in 1986 by whistleblower and Christian convert Mordechai Vanunu in the UK  He was lured from Britain to Italy where he was drugged and abducted by Mossad for return to Israel.

He spent 18 years in prison including 11 in solitary confinement. Ever since he has been threatened with parole violation and reincarceration for speaking to foreigners. American whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg has referred to him as "the preeminent hero of the nuclear era". Israel considers him a traitor.

It is estimated Israel has 80-90 nuclear warheads. The US plans to invest $1.5 trillion to “modernise” its nukes in the coming decades.

Reports in Israel mention that Palestinians believed that Jewish militias had—and were using—an atomic bomb in Safed in the north of Palestine in May 1948, long before Israel actually developed the Bomb in cooperation with apartheid South Africa as a source for the materials.

Mere rumours of nuclear weapons, it suggests, are enough to ‘deter’ the enemy. And in fact, this fantasy would later become the cornerstone of Israeli policy on its nuclear weapons, which are officially governed by the principle of amimut, which translates into opacity or ambiguity, i.e., that Israel does not confirm or deny having nuclear weapons.

However, Mossad carried out well-documented assassinations of Middle Eastern nuclear scientists.

Eric Morris: “Moreover, what does it mean to remember Hiroshima in a world where, while no atomic bomb has been dropped on Gaza, the tonnage of “conventional” explosives unleashed there is already equivalent to six Hiroshima bombings? As the nuclear abolitionist organization Nihon Hidankyo, composed of Japanese atomic bomb survivors, warned in the lead-up to being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2024, the suffering of Gaza’s children all too eerily mirrors their own experiences in Hiroshima. It takes no great imagination to envision Hiroshima in the wreckage of Gaza or in the increasingly bombed-out cities of Ukraine.”

Daniel Ellsberg: In the rapid erosion of ethical restraints under the exigencies of an existential war, “liberal democracies… in fighting an evil enemy, picked up the methods of that enemy and made them into a private ethic that was indistinguishable really from Hitler’s ethic.”

Tt seems little short of a miracle that no atomic weapon has ever again been used. The Bomb may have brought the war to a rabid end. But Hiroshima remains only a symbol of peace, hope, and resilience, a testament to our professed commitment to “never again.” Seems like we have far to many “never agains” in our world, doesn’t it?

References inline, as well as:

Shmuel Bar, “Israeli Strategic Deterrence Doctrine and Practice.” Comparative Strategy 39 (4), 2020.

Yasmine El-Geressi, “The Long History of Suspicious Deaths of Egyptian Nuclear Scientists”, Majalla, 27 September 2019.

Beatrice Heuser, The Bomb: Nuclear Weapons in their Historical, Strategic and Ethical Context, 2000.

Rufus E. Miles, “Hiroshima: The Strange Myth of Half a Million American Lives Saved”, Int Sec, 1985.

Michael Palumbo, The Palestinian Catastrophe: The 1948 Expulsion of a People from Their Homeland. London: Quartet Book, 1989.

Don Peck, “The Long Tradition of Killing Middle Eastern Nuclear Scientists”, The Atlantic, 2012.

Eric Ross, “Hiroshima Remains an Open Wound in Our Imperiled World”, TomDispatch, 2025.

Hebatilla Taba, “Everyday nuclear histories and futures in the Middle East”, Camb Rev Int Aff, 2023.

10 minutes ago, unblocktheplanet said:

Did the WWII atomic bombing save lives?

Hyperbole designed to bait people into an argument or a debate. Nearly 100 years later, is this really a question that demands endless rehashing when there are countless issues happening right now with far greater relevance and consequences for humanity?

I believe I addressed to modern consequences as well. History always needs to be considered in the present so we don't make the same mistakes!

Of course, my post is intended to encourage debate. AN is a forum, remember, the Latin word for argument and debate?

30 minutes ago, unblocktheplanet said:

It’s remarkable that, when we think of the history of humankind, we don’t think first of man’s contributions but the history of wars.

To some degree it was the wars that brought the advancement of human civilization to this point in history.

33 minutes ago, unblocktheplanet said:

Sad commentary for mankind, don’t you think?

No, not at all. Though humans have advanced technologically, human nature hasn’t budged one bit. Though modern civilization has a way of suppressing and controlling humans true nature, we’re no less aggressive and no less apt to war than we were ten thousand years ago. The idea that somehow if we just simply drop our defenses, then they will come in peace totally contradicts human nature, pacifism is not only stupid, it’s guaranteed suicide. War is an unfortunate harsh reality, though an unmovable and necessary reality of human nature nonetheless. So with that, it’s not sad at all for mankind since it’s in our nature, that’s the reality of it and the sooner one understands this the quicker they’ll snap out of their sad delusion.