WHEN it was known that US president Barack Obama was due to visit Hiroshima, where in 1945 the US Air Force dropped the first of two atomic bombs on Japan, the clamor went up that he should take the opportunity to apologize for the world’s first and mercifully so far only nuclear attacks.
But Obama refused and he was absolutely right to do so. He said that instead he would use the visit to remember all the dead of the Second World War, particularly those who died in the Far Eastern campaigns where primarily the US, British and Chinese Allied powers took on the Japanese.
When on August 6, 1945, a US B29 dropped that first nuclear device, the devastating explosion destroyed 90 percent of the city and immediately killed 80,000 people. Tens of thousands more would die later of radiation poisoning. The Japanese government was called on to surrender. It refused. Three days later another B-29 dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki,
incinerating a further 40,000 people and condemning thousands more to a slow, cruel death from radiation. The government in Tokyo reeled in horror.
It seemed that the capital could be next. But it was another seven days before Emperor Hirohito spoke of a “new and cruel bomb” and announced his country’s unconditional surrender and the war finally came to an end.
The atomic bombs were undoubtedly cruel and they had been used cruelly. The great majority of victims was civilians. But Americans reasoned that had they not killed some 120,000 people outright, many more would have died in the invasion of Japan that Allied generals were poised to launch. Tens of thousands of US and other Allied troops would have perished in the fighting. The Japanese had proven in their stubborn resistance as US forces rolled up the Pacific islands Japan had overrun in 1941 that they would take a heavy toll in American lives. Few Japanese soldiers surrendered, their honor code dictating they fight to the death. The same would have happened on mainland Japan and it would likely have involved civilian resistance as well. The final death toll could have run into millions.
Thus for Obama to have said “sorry” for using the fearsome atomic bombs to bring the conflict to an immediate end would have been ridiculous. Indeed, had the Americans developed the A-bomb and decided not to use it, it would have been more appropriate for a US president to apologize for causing unnecessary further bloodshed.
The trend for politicians to apologize for things their countries did in the historic past is ludicrous. Slavery is a case in point. There have been calls for apologies and reparations to be paid to the descendants of slaves taken by Europeans to the Americas. In 1833, the British were the first to outlaw slavery. Today the idea of seizing people, treating them as property to be bought and sold and made to work for nothing is abhorrent. But great empires that advanced civilization were built on slavery. Athens, the cradle of democracy, survived on slaves. The truth is that what seems wrong today was once acceptable. History and opinion move on. But it is idiotic to believe that anyone should apologize for what was done in times past.
Obama was quite right not to make any formal apology for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
