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Home – Founding Fathers & American History – Victor Davis Hanson: The Atomic Bombs Dropped in Japan Were Not Satanic

Victor Davis Hanson: The Atomic Bombs Dropped in Japan Were Not Satanic

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal. 

It’s August, so we have the annual debate over the dropping of two atomic bombs, one on Aug. 6, 1945, the uranium bomb called “Little Boy” that was dropped on the dual-use target, military and industrial Japanese city of Hiroshima, and then three days later on Nagasaki with a plutonium bomb, although it was not quite as powerful as the uranium bomb. 

Both of them killed somewhere between 100,000 and 130,000 Japanese soldiers and civilians. 

So, for the last eight decades, people have said, “We didn’t need to do it. This isn’t indicative of America. This is the only time in the history of nuclear warfare capability that anybody’s actually deployed it in anything other than a test.” 

So, why did we do it? 

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Well, one thing was the European theater had been closed with the surrender of Germany on May 9, 1945, and then we thought the war in Japan would quickly end. And, of course, it didn’t. It went on all of May, all of June, all of July, and all of August, four months. 

We should remember another thing. 1945 was the year closest to the surrender. Japan formally surrendered on Sept. 2, 1945. But, counterintuitively, it was the worst year of the Pacific War, in which more Americans died in that year than in all the other years combined, 1945. 

Why, then, did we drop the bomb? 

Well, one of the reasons was that, in that terrible year, we had just landed on Okinawa. We thought Okinawa would be an easy target because it was near the end of the war, and we had learned a lot from near catastrophes by invading Peleliu, Tarawa, and Iwo Jima. 

But the opposite happened. 

Okinawa was the bloodiest island invasion of the entire war. Fifty thousand Americans were killed, wounded, or missing. Twelve thousand were killed, that we know of. Japan lost probably 120,000 to 130,000 Japanese soldiers, and Okinawa militia, and civilians. 

And people said, “If this happened right near what we thought would be the end of the war, can you imagine what the planned invasion of Japan is?” 

Japan had 20 times the resources........

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