Rising Sun: 64th anniversary of nuclear warfare

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020461900457432437335280...

Today is the anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. Once a year, we have the opportunity to pause and reflect on the devastation dropped upon Japan in 1945. 260,000 dead. A city burnt to the ground by firestorms. A nation's pride and psyche damaged in a way firebombs couldn't.

War is, and always will be, "politics by other means." Or more accurately, politics is war by other means. Japan was already economically ravaged, and Japan was already militarily defeated. But Japan was an ethnically homogeneous island, whose religious and political leaders wielded all the power of the society. There were two options with Japan: unconditional surrender, or months of limited peace negotiations. The later was politically nonviable.

What could the US hope to accomplish from Okinawa in terms of negotiations? A communist Manchuria and Korea? Claim on thousands of sparsely inhabited Pacific Islands? Returning Taiwan to the Kuomintang? This was an imperialist power that could and would rebuild like Germany had after World War 1, except that no Allied troops were ever going to breach the mainland Japanese defenses. There would be no conquering Japan - not without causing the US so many casualties that public support for the war would end.

There's a reason Operation Sealion (Hitler's invasion of Great Britain) never occurred - an amphibious invasion of such a well prepared defender would have devastating losses if you have both naval and air superiority. The invasion of Normandy was 3:1 attackers to defenders, the Allied attackers were liberating home soil in France, and they were only 130 km from the home logistical base, their home airbases, and their home naval bases. Naha to Kagoshima is 660 km, more than five times longer journey undefended against air and naval attacks. Okinawa was cordial to the Allies, but not as friendly as Portsmouth, England. Manila, Honolulu, Hong Kong, Singapore, Jakarta, and Darwin were all pretty damn far from Kyushu. The command and control would have been terrible. Japan was staking its peace negotiations on the fact that it could decisively defeat the US when they invaded Kyushu. No good would have come to America from invading Japan.

A single atomic bomb had the destructive power of 2000 bomb loads from B-29's. The US had been relentlessly firebombing Japan's cities since February. For example, on March 9th, 1945, the US firebombed Tokyo, burning down 16 square miles of the city, and killing 100,000, and destroying around 300,000 buildings where around 1.5 million people lived. The atomic bombs were merely more efficient at a task the US was doing by other means.

"Strategic bombing" and "area bombing" and "precision bombing" were very intentional euphemisms for what was called "terror bombing" when it was done to Great Britain. These bombing attacks rarely hit within a mile of the declared target, which itself was rarely hit even by an armada of bombers. The real strategic reason is to be a "counter value" strike - to make staying in the war as painful as possible for the civilians and politicians, who then would see surrender as a more viable option. It is inherently an act of brutality, of psychological warfare, of doing what no one wants to ever see done.

As Mr. Kozak as published in the Journal before, Curtis LeMay could be considered a war criminal today for ordering the mass executions of so many civilians from the air. But war is a strange world where killing a hundred thousand people may save two hundred thousand lives. Of course, we'll never know LeMay himself said, long after the war: "I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal."

Today, we have nukes. Nuclear weapons aren't so much more powerful than conventional weapons, though the mystique remains a powerful psychological force. Most nukes are relatively tiny compared to popular imagination, but at least they symbolize correctly the horror of mass destruction.