HiroshimaMaimon Schwarzschild

Jules Crittenden reflects on the anniversary of the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki:

[S]tart with what the ousted Japanese defense minister, Fumio Kyuma, a native of Nagasaki, said in his speech in late June:

The atomic bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima couldn t be helped and was inevitable.

It remains one of the most misunderstood events of modern history. The retrospectives you hear around this anniversary period are going to focus heavily on the undeniable suffering of Japanese civilians, 214,000 of whom were killed on Aug. 6 and Aug. 9, 1945, precipitating the sudden about-face and unconditional surrender of the previously suicidally intransigent Japanese high command. The reports you hear, out of a sense of fairness, may touch briefly on those who didn t die: the estimates of hundres of thousands of American soldiers not killed in the invasion that never happened.

Let s consider the hypothetical American dead. Some estimates run as high as 800,000, twice the number of America s World War II dead by the time it was over a few days later. More conservative estimates run as low as about 200,000 & roughly the number of Japanese killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a neat one-for-one calculation.

Estimates of Japanese civilian and military dead if the United States were forced to invade run from 1 million to 10 million. Those estimates are based on what happened at places like Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Readers will recall that at Iwo, as on some other islands, Japanese soldiers fought virtually to the last man, taking out as many Americans with them as they could. You may have seen the haunting color footage no safe historic black-and-white distance in these images kimono-clad Japanese women on Okinawa throwing their babies off cliffs and jumping themselves.

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