“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” said J. Robert Oppenheimer so famously after watching his brainchild, the first atomic bomb, explode in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945.
But had he? President Harry S Truman didn’t think so.
And why does it even matter, going on eight decades after the event?
Well, a weapon that might one day eradicate humanity will always matter.
The Hiroshima and Nagasaki anniversaries are afoot, re-cueing a seemingly eternal debate.
And then there is “Oppenheimer,” the earnestly ambitious biopic filling theaters across America.
Someday soon I might tackle that three-hour epic — but not yet, so there’ll be no spoilers here.
Anyway, the great tension between Truman and Oppenheimer was never a secret: “I don’t want to see that son of a bitch in this office ever again,” the president reportedly said of the physicist after a post-Hiroshima Oval Office meeting went sour.
“I have blood on my hands,” the scientist had told the president — whereupon Truman is said to have handed Oppenheimer a handkerchief and ordered: “Here. Wipe it off.”
No doubt Oppenheimer’s guilt was sincere and profound — as was Truman’s resentment.
The president’s principal concern was a timely end to World War II; he quite reasonably felt he had no choice but to order the attacks — and he never ducked responsibility for that decision.
But one thing is certain: There was no shortage of bloody hands back then — and none were more egregiously stained than those of Michinomiya Hirohito.
The then-emperor of Japan was the man in whose name the deadliest war in human history had begun — at the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing, China, in July 1937.
And nowhere was that war prosecuted more savagely than in its Asian-Pacific theater; the emperor’s soldiers murdered Chinese, Korean, Filipino and Southeast-Asian noncombatants in their millions — and any moral judgment of the atomic bombing of Japan needs to take that history fully into account.
To be sure, Truman’s principal concern in late July 1945 was the price in American blood a seemingly inevitable invasion of the Japanese home islands would have extracted.
In the preceding six months alone, two reinforced Marine Corps divisions had been shredded on Iwo Jima, and thousands of lives were lost at Okinawa — including some 5,000 at sea from kamikaze strikes.
An invasion of Japan — scheduled for November 1945 — would have been infinitely more costly; everybody knew that, and thus any possible alternative was as inevitable as it was morally correct.
But while entirely legitimate, that’s an American-centric take. There were other things going on.
In January 1945, Hirohito’s naval infantry had murdered some 100,000 noncombatants during the Battle of Manila — a horrific, yet relatively modest tally in the extended war on civilians begun eight years earlier.
There were the dramatic events, including Manila, the 1937 massacre at Nanjing (upwards of 300,000 dead) and the murder of some 250,000 civilians in reprisal for aid given to American flyers following the 1942 Doolittle air raid on Tokyo.
But mostly it was unrelenting, day-by-day, low-drama slaughter.
The historian Richard B. Frank, an Asia-Pacific War specialist, estimates 19 million Chinese civilians fell: “On a simple linear projection,” he writes, “some 4,000 Chinese noncombatants perished every day for eight years between 1937 and 1945.”
By that measure, some 36,000 Chinese civilians died between the Hiroshima bombing and Japan’s surrender on Aug. 15 alone — and 720,000 more could have been killed had the war lasted six more months.
Such comparisons seem other-worldly, to be sure. But one thing seems beyond argument: There was no moralistic hand-wringing in East Asia when the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
None of this takes into account, moreover, Japan’s lesser war crimes — the organized sex slavery, especially of Korean women, the forced medical experimentation on civilians and prisoners of war and the generally murderous treatment of POWs among them.
Hirohito’s Axis henchmen — Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini — died in rubble of their own making. And the emperor likely would have as well had the war been concluded by conventional means.
But the A-bombs fell — two of them because one wasn’t enough to compel Hirohito to act.
And when he did act, the Asia-Pacific war ended — demonstrating to reasonable people that he might well have prevented it in the first place.
So it is one of history’s ironies that Hirohito, honored by his people, died peacefully in 1989 while a moral taint still attaches to Harry Truman, the hero who ended the killing.
Credit to J. Robert Oppenheimer as well.
Blessed be the peacemakers.
Email: bob@bobmcmanus.nyc