Bomb Away! The moral conundra of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 80 years on,
Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.
-Krishna to Arjuna, Bhagavad-Gita, 11:32, quoted by J. Robert Oppenheimer at the conclusion of the first, “Trinity,” test of the atomic bomb, Alamogordo, New Mexico, July 16, 1945.
One Hundred Million die together.
-Widely quoted by hardline,“no surrender,” members of the Japanese high command in 1945, among them, War Minister Gen. Anami Korechika.
Mokusatsu suru.
-Japanese verb meaning, among other things, remain in a wise and masterly inactivity, (practicing Haragei), a meaning much beloved of Japanese politicians, but also meaning “to treat with silent contempt.”
[T]hey send an Air Force officer to tell me they've constructed this ... Apparatus.
-Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins, screenplay, MacArthur, 1977, depicting the general’s allegedly sulfurous reaction to the news that Hiroshima had been bombed with a nuclear device.
[T]he war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest.... Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to damage is indeed incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives.
-The Shōwa Emperor (Hirohito), r. 1926 – 1989, Gyokuon-Hōsō, (The Jewel Voice speech,) Japan’s surrender broadcast, August 15, 1945,
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Summary: Eighty years after Japan’s Shōwa Emperor broadcast, in his famous Gyokuon-Hōsō address to his nation, his and his government’s momentous decision to surrender to the Allies and bring World War II to an end, we still find ourselves conflicted over the morality of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Though it has been fashionable in some circles to characterize the use of nuclear weapons as nothing more than a morally inadmissible act of mass murder, we dare not ignore the reality that as the Pacific War wound down, and as Japan braced for a land invasion, diehards within the Japanese high command, among them, War Minister Gen. Anami Korechika, were seriously advocating that the Japanese people should commit what amounted to national suicide. To the extent that their mantra, “One Hundred Million Die Together,” was known to Allied planners, as it was indeed known, it presented the Allies with a moral conundrum. Which is the least worst option? To incinerate between 100,000 and 200,000 individuals in an atomic bombing, or become complicit in a planned act of national self genocide? 80 years on, the descendents of those One Hundred Million who did not die together are alive because leaders like Harry Truman swallowed hard and gave the green light.
Cathedral City, August 13, 2025
Lo, it is nearly 80 years ago that Japan’s Shōwa Emperor (Hirohito) broadcast his famous Gyokuon-Hōsō, or Jewel Voice Speech, announcing to a stunned nation his country’s government’s decision to surrender to the Allied powers and thus bring to an end the Second World War.
Nine days earlier, what Shōwa characterized in the surrender broadcast as “a new and most cruel bomb” had been dropped on the southwestern industrial city of Hiroshima. Three days after this first atomic bomb, known as “Little Boy,” had fallen on Hiroshima, a second atomic bomb, “Fat Man,” had been dropped on the Kyūshū port city of Nagasaki.
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki represent the first, last, and, thus far, the only combat deployments of nuclear weapons in history.
Yet, the deployments of Little Boy and Fat Man have been contentious across the last eight decades. Generations of Americans and Japanese alike have been born, lived their lives, and died under the shadow of nuclear terror. As the late former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has observed; in effect, we have yet to adequately integrate the reality of nuclear weapons into our thinking.
And because we have yet to get our mental arms adequately around the potentialities, vel non, of nuclear arms, it has become disturbingly easy to have recourse to simplistic thinking about the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.
Indeed, it has become a virtual trope on the American and European Left to see the Hiroshima and Nagasaki operations as morally indefensible acts of “mass murder,” singular and sui generis. The American and European right, by contrast, celebrate the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki without any real sense of compunction.
Yet, at the acknowledged risk of being flamed to a well done Hiroshima-like crisp for so saying, permit me to suggest that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while singular and ominous, may actually have had a moral dimension that we shudder to contemplate and quail from thinking about.
The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings have often been justified in American political discourse by noting that a land invasion of Japan would probably have cost somewhere in the vicinity of a million American dead and wounded. A land invasion of Japan alone might well have cost this country more casualties than she suffered in all of her other wars combined.
Yet, for many on the academic and historical Left, even speaking of potential American casualty numbers has been held inadmissible because ostensibly racist. So, permit me to preempt any claim of racism in sketching out a moral case for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by taking, in part, the Japanese point of view.
By the late spring and early summer of 1945, it had become clear to the upper reaches of the Imperial government and the military high command at Imperial headquarters that the war had taken a catastrophic turn. If, as Professor Akira Iriye has suggested, the primary emphasis of Japan’s diplomacy after roughly November, 1942 was to bring about an end to the war on the best possible terms Japan could obtain, then the Japanese record on that score must be accounted one of utter and complete failure. To borrow the Shōwa Emperor’s unforgettable euphemism from the Gyokuon-hōsō surrender broadcast, “the general war situation [had] developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.”
Putting aside the periphrastic and euphemistic tone of the Court Japanese in which the Gyokuon-Hōsō surrender broadcast was drafted, Shōwa was speaking an understated but powerful truth. Japan’s Outer Defense Perimeter had been shattered: Saipan, the front gate of the Empire, was gone, taken almost a year prior by the Americans in June, 1944. Iwo Jima, an island under the direct jurisdiction of the City of Tokyo, had been in American hands since March, 1945. Okinawa Prefecture had fallen to the Americans in the latter part of the spring of that same year.
Above Japan, the Imperial skies were now the happy hunting ground of the United States Army Air Force and the United States Navy. Incendiary bombings had leveled much of Tokyo and carried off scores of thousands of Edokko (Tokyo residents). And if the Americans controlled the skies over the Empire, they also controlled the waters off its coasts. By the late spring of 1945, US battleships were carrying out routine coastal bombardments of targets from Hokkaido south to Chiba Prefecture.
A land invasion was expected in short order. East of Tokyo, where Imperial headquarters expected the initial landings to occur, defenses were being built along the beaches at Kujukurihama, but little actual work had been accomplished. Against this background, the Allies, on July 26, 1945, a week after the Trinity tests had provoked J Robert Oppenheimer’s invocation of the Bhagavad-Gita, when he had quoted Lord Krishna’s remark to Arjuna, “Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds,” had issued the so-called Potsdam Declaraton, calling upon Japan to surrender unconditionally, warning the Japanese that failure to surrender would result in the prompt and utter destruction of the Japanese polity, and advising the Japanese government in no uncertain terms that the Allies would “brook no delay.”
The Japanese government, (which has the distinction of being the only government of a major belligerent during World War II to have had an orderly changeover of Prime Ministers during the conflict -Tōjō Hideki' Koiso Kuniaki and Yonai Mitsumasa, and Baron Suzuki Kantaro) was advised of the Potsdam Declaration, but, in the event, did not yet have a polished Japanese translation to consult.
Nevertheless, if the Empire lay so horribly open to invasion, why, then, would Washington have opted to go forward with using nuclear weapons? Some in the Left have suggested that the use of nuclear weapons was intended as a shot across the bow of the Soviet Union. Yet, what makes such a view unsustainable and even borderline racist is that it does not take into account the culture of Japan, only the politics of Iosif Stalin’s Soviet Union.
Again, looking at the situation not from the point of view of the Soviets, or from the point of view of cosseted Manhattan Mensheviks or Berkeley Bolsheviks, but, rather, from the point of view of the Japanese themselves, there existed strong reasons for the Allies to want to bring the war to a close by administering what could be called a shock to the Japanese system. If, as a common cliché holds, it is easier and less painful to take off a Band-Aid quickly, then it would be easier to bring the war to an end by deploying a weapon against which the Japanese had no powers of resistance.
For Washington was well aware of Japan’s potential powers of resistance to a land invasion of the home islands of the Empire. Having before it the examples of Saipan and Okinawa, where Japanese civilians had destroyed themselves in appalling numbers, the US government cannot have looked forward with equanimity to the prospect of a similar hecatomb occurring in the Japanese homeland proper. By way of example, it is almost impossible to go boonie stomping in Saipan, even today, without coming across the skeletal remains of Japanese civilians who opted to take their own lives rather than face the possibility of capture.
Moreover, Washington’s concern was also justified by some of the more unhinged rhetoric that had begun to emerge from Imperial headquarters. As Japan faced the possibility of invasion, some of the more over-the-top diehards within the Japanese government and military began to entertain seriously the idea of national suicide, that “one hundred million die together.”
One. Hundred. Million. Die. Together.
Who, in Washington or London, might even dare to contemplate, let alone become complicit in, so vast an act of national self-destruction? Who, in Washington or London, might not actually take seriously such rhetoric and believe that the Japanese might actually choose so horrifying a Götterdammerung, going out in a blaze of Yamato Damashii (Yamato Spirit)? Something had to be done, therefore, to talk the Japanese off the metaphorical ledge, to preempt the possibility of self genocide. Forasmuch as the civilization of the West abhors the concept of suicide or genocide, and tends to prefer to preserve life when and where possible, the prospect of 100 million Japanese dying together on a vast national funeral pyre was not one even the most bloodthirsty war planners on the Allied staffs were prepared to deem admissible.
Of course, the Japanese must take responsibility for some of the periphrasis in which their initial response to the Potdsam Declaration was couched. When asked by reporter from Dōmei (the Japanese state news agency) what the response of the Imperial government would be to the Declaration, Prime Minister Suzuki replied “Potsudamu Sengen o mokusatsu shimasu.” (“We shall conduct a wise and silent review of the situation.”) This response, not uncommon among Japanese politicians accustomed to the use use of, and the ins and outs, of the Japanese Imperial Diet, meant, to a Japanese hearer, that the politician in question would undertake a wise and silent review of the situation, practicing what in Japanese is known as haragei (the “stomach game”).
Haragei has been defined as concept involving “non-verbal communication and implicit understanding, particularly in social and business settings. It involves conveying thoughts and feelings through subtle cues, intuition, and shared understanding, rather than explicit verbal communication.” Among the Japanese, haragei is a useful concept, which enables the Japanese to avoid speaking too clearly, especially when to do so might cause offense or lead the other side to an improper conclusion.
However, in his offhand response to the reporter from Dõmei, Suzuki had been gulty, as it were, of a dangerous kind of monoculturalism, assuming “shared understandings” that his Allied hearers simply did not possess. Suzuki had, in effect, not bothered to consider the impact that his statement might have upon his Allied hearers. Thus, while for Japanese listeners, Suzuki’s response carried with it a Japanese domestic political meaning, to the Allies, who had only Japanese dictionaries to go on, their translation of Mokusatsu was taken from, among others, Kenkyusha’s Japanese – New Japanese- English dictionary at page 1129, which glossed Mokusatsu as: “take no notice of; treat (anything) with silent contempt; ignore [by keeping silence]; remain in a wise and masterly inactivity.” The second definition under the translation refers to the haragei which Japanese politicians were, and are, so accustomed to practice.
The Americans, however, defaulting, in the monocultural way so often customary among English speakers, particularly speakers of American English, opted, perhaps understandably, for the first definition, that of “treating something with silent contempt,” rather than the haragei definition of “remaining in a wise and masterly inactivity.” In short, Suzuki gave the kind of response that a minister responding to a question outside Number 10 Downing St. or in the House of Commons might give in English as “I have no comment at this immediate moment.” For the Americans however, defaulting to that first definition, and thinking of a literal, word-for-word, meaning, and not of anything resembling idiomatic Japanese language or culture, assumed that Suzuki was rejecting the Declaration, when Suzuki’s actual intent was to “kick the can down the road” until a Japanese translation had been prepared.
Having inferred from Suzuki’s idiomatic “shared understanding” reference to haragei, that the Japanese were rejecting the Potsdam Declaration, and having also Soviet and Swiss information to the effect that the Japanese military proposed that One Hundred Million should Die Together, the Americans, not being adequately informed of the factional infighting within the Japanese government, went to Harry Truman and requested a presidential green light for the deployment of Little Boy and Fat Man, the prototypical products of the Manhattan Project.
The American decision was, given the facts that had developed at Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, not entirely unjustified. U.S. planners realized that the successful Trinity atomic bomb test at White Sands/Alamogordo, New Mexico, had given them a tool by which the self-destruction of the One Hundred Million might be averted. Certainly, it may seem bloodless and calculating to think in terms of trading the lives of 100,000 for those of 100 million, but can we truly say that it is always immoral and inadmissible to accept lesser casualties to avoid greater ones?
Of course, it can and should be argued that the calculus of sacrificing a few lives to save many creates a moral conundrum. Yet, to all intents and purposes, the Theology of the West is based on exactly such a swap. Christian theology has long postulated that God became Incarnate in Jesus Christ Who offered Himself upon the cross, a Perfect Sacrifice, Oblation and Satisfaction for the sins of the whole world. Now it may not be politically correct or rhetorically fashionable to invoke the death of Christ upon the Cross, but as unfashionable as such an invocation may be, it is so deeply rooted in the Weltanschauung of the West as to have become a philosophically convenient shorthand. Under such circumstances, we cannot really count it immoral to accept casualties on the magnitude of a Hiroshima or a Nagasaki to countervail the possible destruction of the Japanese people altogether. Descendents of the One Hundred Million who did not die together opposing an American land invasion of the Empire may owe a debt they cannot even realize to Harry Truman, who swallowed hard and gave the green light.
And so, while we look at the historical facts from the Japanese point of view, as persons of the West, we must nonetheless ultimately judge the morality of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the standards of the West; with the power to bomb comes the duty to explain, to give account, and to justify before God and the Planet.
To save the One Hundred Million and to prevent appalling American and Allied casualties, we may have had little moral choice but to rip the metaphorical Band-Aid away as quickly as possible. Because in the end, all life matters, even if we must from time to time acknowledge that not all life can be saved.
Still, while the one time deployment of atomic weapons to bring the Pacific War to an end and to terminate the appalling suffering of the planet may have had some moral justification, there can be no justification whatsoever for doing it again.
As I was visiting the Shino Point in Kii,
clouds were drifting far over the sea.
-The Shōwa Emperor, 1936.
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This post is an update of one originally written 20 years ago. Because we have still not integrated into our thinking the horrifying reality of nuclear weapons, I have updated it, and will continue to do so right up until the hundredth anniversary of Gyokuon Hoso, assuming I am still alive at that point.
Nothing in the foregoing is intended as and nothing in the foregoing should be construed as, legal advice of any kind or character.
