We didn’t need to drop the bomb — and even our WW II military icons knew it

[struggle4progress]

41. It's easy to look back and second guess what should have been done

WWII cost somewhere between 50 million and 80 million lives, maybe 2% or maybe 3.5% of the world population

Even before Germany invaded Poland in the fall of 1939, the prospects for the war were sufficiently terrifying that several other physicists convinced Einstein -- himself a committed pacifist who had been appalled at the role his German colleagues played in weapons-design in WWI -- to sign a letter to Roosevelt warning that Germany might be working on atomic weapons and encouraging the US to secure uranium supplies and begin related nuclear research

While early attacks on civilian populations -- such as the 1937 German attack on Guernica -- shocked many, general attacks on cities later became common: because high altitude bomb drops were simply too inaccurate to have effect if limited to military and industrial targets, area bombing became popular; and most of the high-density parts of Hamburg, Dusseldorf, Cologne, Dresden, Dortmund, Frankfurt and many other cities were destroyed. We can, of course, quite legitimately refer to such attacks as war crimes; but there seems to have been wide agreement among the Allies at the time that this was necessary and therefore appropriate

Similarly, on any objective view, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were war crimes: the targets were chosen, not for immediate military reasons, but because they had escaped much damage during the war so their destruction by single bombs would be convincingly demonstrative. The actual effect was the immediate end of the war. There is no doubt Japan would have been defeated without the atomic deployment, but that might have been much later, and the human costs could have been quite high

Seventy years later, the best we can do is to attempt to understand the circumstances of the time and how matters then appeared to those involved