Tomorrow is the sixtieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, and while I will continue to carry my veteran status with pride and uphold the righteous projection of American power worldwide, I have to admit that Gregory Pavlik’s essay, posted on the Foundation for Economic Education’s website today, makes me sit back and think for a minute.
In reality, the Japanese were willing to end hostilities with the United States as quickly as they began. Startlingly neglected is the January 1945 offer of the Japanese government to surrender. As the eminent English jurist Frederick J.P. Veale pointed out in Advance to Barbarism,
Belatedly it has been discovered that seven months before it [the atomic bomb] was dropped, in January 1945, President Roosevelt received via General MacArthur’s headquarters an offer by the Japanese Government to surrender on terms virtually identical to those accepted by the United States after the dropping of the bomb: In July 1945, as we know, Roosevelt’s successor, President Truman, discussed with Stalin at Bebelsburg the Japanese offer to surrender.
Clearly, then, the bomb did not have to be dropped to save the lives of American soldiers. The war in the Pacific could have ended prior to the European conflict. One suspects that the conflagration’s extension beyond the confines of necessity had more to do with the politics of war than military strategy. The fact that consultation with Stalin played a key role in the decision tends to implicate both what historian William L. Neumann pointed to as ?the historic ambitions of Russia in Asia? and ?the expansionist element in Stalinist Communism.?
I don’t know if I agree with his entire argument yet, but it’s worth considering.
