Did demons create the first atomic bombs?

Every August, debate renews over both the wisdom and the morality of dropping the two American atomic bombs, 81 years ago, on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) and Nagasaki (August 9, 1945). This August has been no exception.

As ever, many critics have faulted the United States for the bombings: two gruesome blasts — aimed at dual-use military and industrial targets in both cities — that may have caused some 100,000-120,000 immediate deaths among combatants and civilians.

And not all these critics are on the Left. Two years ago, podcaster Tucker Carlson blasted the Truman administration's decision, alleging that the atomic bomb was not the result of decades of sophisticated nuclear physics research or the dividend of a two-billion-dollar Manhattan Project investment to rapidly develop an atomic weapon in a race to beat the Axis powers' nuclear programs before they themselves developed such existential weapons.

Instead, Carlson claimed the atomic bombs were demonic, tools of innate evil, and thus apparently created through the supernatural intervention of dark powers. Unlikely — but perhaps Tucker was echoing themes from Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the Manhattan Project. After the first successful test of the bomb on July 16, 1945, Oppenheimer quoted (and mistranslated) a famously chilling line from the great Hindu epic, the Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

Why Did the U.S. Drop Two Atomic Bombs on Japan?

Indeed, from the moment the bombs were dropped, there has been an intense, 80-year debate, from which all sorts of conspiracy theories have since emerged.

No one denies that the two bombs, dropped within three days, shocked the Imperial Japanese junta into conceding surrender on August 15 — a decision ratified formally and officially on September 2, 1945, ending the Pacific War. Nonetheless, almost immediately, contemporary critics objected to their use on a variety of grounds.

Many claimed the bombs were unnecessary. They argued that the previous devastation of Japan by the U.S. Army Air Forces and the U.S. Navy had made a quick surrender inevitable. Some declared that racism had prompted their use against the Japanese alone.

Of course, all these arguments were only offered with the benefit of hindsight, and they often failed to consider the dire conditions that U.S. military planners were confronted with at the time.

First, the bombs were originally envisioned to stop the Third Reich and end the costly conventional Allied bombing campaign over Germany (over 80,000 dead British and American airmen, along with some 15,000 bombers lost). But producing a deliverable bomb took far longer than anticipated and was realized only after Germany surrendered.

Second, the military, the Truman administration, and the American public were still in a state of shock over the devastating losses suffered at Okinawa, declared secure just six weeks before Hiroshima. The invading U.S. land, sea, and air forces had suffered 50,000 casualties, including 12,000 dead — in what had initially been expected to be the least costly of a half-dozen bloody American amphibious landings.

Before Okinawa, planners believed they had learned from the overconfidence that had nearly proved to be catastrophic at Iwo Jima, Peleliu, and Tarawa. Yet despite those lessons, a weakened Japanese military, and total U.S. air and naval supremacy, Okinawa became the deadliest island operation of the entire Pacific war. And because it was the last major land battle, stunned U.S. planners in summer 1945 shuddered about what might come from a planned invasion of the entire Japanese mainland. As a general rule, the closer the........

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