Word: nagasaki
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...indelibly recorded a quarter-century ago this week, are quite different. Hiroshima, Aug. 6, 1945: a weapon called Little Boy, right on target; at least 68,000 dead. The actual number of dead may never be known; several estimates place it higher than 200,000 (see THE WORLD). Nagasaki, Aug. 9, 1945: a weapon called Fat Man, over a mile off target; at least 35,000 dead. In the face of such insistent horror, the question still haunts the mind: Was Hiroshima-and was Nagasaki-necessary...
...Alamos laboratory chief himself, J. Robert Oppenheimer, had estimated that a reasonably sheltered population would suffer "only" 20,000 dead. Four times that number had died in a single night of fire raids in Tokyo. More B-29 incendiary raids might have caused havoc even greater than Hiroshima and Nagasaki...
Might such a demonstration have worked? Historians are divided. It is true that the one-two punch on Hiroshima and Nagasaki propelled the Japanese war party into an untenable position, gave the Emperor a convenient pretext for intervening in the crisis, and made it appear that the U.S. had Bombs to spare (in fact, there were no more immediately available). But the Nagasaki attack seems to have been lamentably premature. Hiroshima was 400 miles from Tokyo, far from the eyes of those who made national war policy. On the day Fat Man exploded, the Supreme Council was just getting...
Revisionist historians have found the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki sinister in another-and less persuasive-way. They see them not so much as the closing acts of the Pacific war but the opening acts of the cold war-intended primarily to impress Stalin. There was a time, indeed, Louis Halle observes in The Cold War as History, when the U.S. had an atomic monopoly and might theoretically have challenged Soviet expansion by interposing a threat of nuclear bombing. Stalin, of course, might have chosen to respond by dispatching the giant Red Army to overrun a then poorly defended Europe...
With or without the heritage of threat and distrust from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a cold war of some kind seems to have been virtually unavoidable, s In fact-and this is one of the few advantages of the Bomb's fatal use-it seems to have helped prevent the cold war from turning hot. Without Hiroshima's brutal demonstration of the Bomb's power, might not one or another of the contestants have been tempted to test it during a military action such as Korea? Perhaps on the U.N. forces streaming toward the Yalu, or the Chinese...