Comments Elsewhere

Dear Mr. Clark:

I have a couple of questions about your recent column on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

You write: “To rational people, the answers are simple enough. President Truman knew them in August 1945. Americans had been dying at about the 320-per-day rate (counting all war-induced deaths) for some three-and-a-half years. Why should more of them die just because a cruel regime had decided to conquer and enslave Asia, for starters, and the rest of the world, in time?”

One of the important differences between the 320 Americans being killed each day and the more than 200,000 Japanese people killed in the atomic bombings was that the Americans being killed were soldiers in uniform, whereas the overwhelming majority of the Japanese people killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were civilians. Many of those killed by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima were schoolchildren. There were also about 20,000 Koreans prisoners killed, who had been forced into labor by the Japanese militarist regime.

Are you seriously suggesting that the United States government was entitled to deliberately kill hundreds of thousands of civilians in order to avoid the death of soldiers in combat?

You also wrote: “Had the Japanese not been defeated, … American women today would be in the ‘Comfort Brigades’ shipped all over the world.”

Are you seriously suggesting that if surrender had not been forced through the atomic bombings in August 1945, Japan would have posed a substantial threat of invasion to the United States? Are you aware of the condition of the Japanese military as of August 5, 1945?