They call it the A-Bomb Dome. It’s what’s left of the former Industrial Hall, the building closest to the hypocenter of the detonation. It looks pretty much like any other bombed-and-burned building, just brick and steel, scorched and twisted and slightly melted in spots. The thing is, all around it you have the river and the assorted monuments and memorials and the museum, and beyond that is the rebuilt city. So when you go into the museum and look at the black-and-white pictures of a giant burnt plain with a few stubs of trees or buildings standing like random scarecrows in winter, it doesn’t seem real.
The aftermath is worse, of course. The lucky ones got blown to pieces right away; the rest were left with burns and fallout and throwing up internal organs and microcephalic offspring. All in all, pretty horrifying stuff, especially when you think about how we really didn’t know just how the thing would work out. After all, there had been exactly one detonation of a test device, and the production design was the Mark 1 that was dropped from the Enola Gay. They weren’t even sure if the thing would detonate, let alone what would happen.
Was it the right thing to do? We did it again three days later to Nagasaki – and even then, as the emperor was preparing to broadcast his rescript of unconditional surrender, there were officers plotting a palace coup to prevent it so that the army could fight on. And the US had enough fissionable material for one, maybe two more bombs at most – so what then? Tokyo? Kyushu, to try to pave the way for the invasion forces? Hold it in reserve just in case things really turned ugly?
And then there’s that invasion itself. Scheduled for November 1, 1945, less than six months after V-E day, the first landing to establish a base for the eventual assault on the Kanto Plain outside Tokyo four months later. The biggest invasion force in human history, one projected to lead to a million Japanese casualties and more American deaths than the rest of the war put together. And I think about the fact that today, in 2015, there are American officers in Afghanistan and Iraq with Purple Hearts in their kit bags, ready to award on the spot, because in seventy years we still haven’t awarded all the Purple Heart medals that were manufactured in anticipation of that invasion.
War is hell. We firebombed the very shit out of Dresden and Tokyo. We caused more casualties in Tokyo than in Hiroshima, simply because the city was mostly built out of wood and paper and went up like a torch when General Curtis LeMay switched to incendiary bombing. If everything in Osaka and Yokohama and Tokyo looks like it went up around 1960, well, I have a stunning coincidence to report. About the only thing we didn’t pound into rubble was Kyoto, simply because some of the higher powers in the US command were unwilling to destroy the historic capital and cultural center of Japan; otherwise it probably would have taken the A-bomb instead of Hiroshima.
In the end, it was probably necessary. It probably saved close to a million Japanese lives that would have almost certainly been lost in a protracted invasion, especially when middle-schoolers were being handed sharpened screwdrivers and told to aim for an American soldier’s abdomen. The Marines who’d fought their way through the islands for over three years were counting on another three; the sullen motto was “Golden Gate by ’48.”
But if there’s a lesson here, this is it: you can do the wrong thing for the right reasons, but that doesn’t make it the right thing to do. And if you decide to do it, you’d better be prepared to accept and live with the consequences.