After 75 years, it’s time to for everyone to admit the Hiroshima atomic bombing saved millions of lives

Thomas Lifson  . . . "I have no doubt at all that despite the horrors inflicted on innocent citizens of Japan in Hiroshima (and not forgetting thousands of Koreans imported as virtual slave laborers in the factories of that city), President Harry Truman made the correct decision, after prayer, in deciding to launch the nuclear attack. It was horrible, horrible, horrible, unquestionably. But it averted horrors that would have been much worse, had the United States been forced to invade Mainland Japan, after the bloody conquest of Okinawa."...

Mushroom cloud over Hiroshima photographed from the Enola Gay (via Wikipedia)

. . . "I won’t go in depth on the details of the argument on the tradeoff, though this article** published yesterday in Human Events does a good job for those who wish to familiarize themselves with the argument. " . . . 

. . .  "Instead, I want to recount an anecdote told to me by an old friend who was an 8-year-old boy living in Kyushu, the Mainland island closest to Okinawa and considered the likely first site for the invasion. My friend is very glad that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were A-bombed, causing Japan to finally give up surrender. The reason is that he was trained to dig a hole, crouch in it with an explosive device as it was covered up with vegetation, and wait for an American soldier, or better yet a truck or a tank, arrive over him, at which point he was to act as a suicide bomber IED.

"Because of the suffering of innocents in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, my friend and millions more other Japanese people and Americans were spared.

"Harry Truman* famously had a sign on his desk reading “The buck stops here.” Thank God we had a man of his courage in place to make the fateful decision 75 years ago and bear the burden of it."

*Back when a Democrat had courage.

**The historical context and military realities of 1945 are often forgotten when judging whether it was “necessary” for the United States to use nuclear weapons.