Arguing over the A-bomb

British historian Frederick Taylor has provided a good overview of the historical discussion over the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings, putting it into the larger context of the "strategic bombing" campaign against Germany and Japan: The Countdown to Annihilation and the Legacy of the A-Bomb Der Spiegel 08/03/05.

This paragraph gives a dramatic illustration of the context:

Air Force Colonel Fisher, the briefing officer, was brutally frank [at a key planning meeting of American officials in April 1945] in his summing-up of the existing air war against Japan: "The 20th Air Force is operating primarily to laying waste all the main Japanese cities ... Their existing procedure has been to bomb the hell out of Tokyo, bomb the aircraft, manufacturing and assembly plants, engine plants and in general paralyze the aircraft industry so as to eliminate opposition to the 20th Air Force operations. The 20th Air Force," he concluded chillingly, "is systematically bombing out the following cities with the prime purpose of not leaving one stone lying on another: Tokyo, Yokohama, Nagoya, Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, Yawate and Nagasaki."

The strategic bombing during the Second World War was highly destructive.  Whether or not it contributed much if anything in damaging the ability of the enemy powers to continue their war efforts is highly doubtful.

The American fire-raid against Tokyo on March 9-10, 1945 involved 334 B-29 bombers that dropped 1,700 tons of bombs. The attack destroyed 16 square miles of the Japanese capital and probably killed about 100,000 human beings. The raid stands as the most destructive conventional air attack in history, dwarfing the Allied devastation of Hamburg and Dresden. In actual casualties inflicted, it equalled and perhaps exceeded the individual atomic attacks of August 1945.

The discussions over these historical issues is not just academic.  Although our sad excuse for a "press corps" hasn't written much about it, Rummy's current "military transformation" is based on an even heavier reliance on air power in fighting wars.  How's that working out in Iraq?  In Afghanistan?

Taylor mentions the major issues in the historical disputes (my emphasis):

The rapidity of events after Hiroshima and Nagasaki led many to conclude that these attacks caused the Japanese surrender and so obviated the need for invasion. But would ruthless conventional fire-bombing have brought Japan to its knees in any case? Was not the Allied naval blockade also strangling the Japanese war effort beyond recovery? Would not Stalin's planned declaration of war against Japan have proved decisive, even without the atomic bomb? When the Soviets actually attacked the Imperial army in Manchuria, 48 hours after Hiroshima but before Nagasaki, Japanese resistance proved far from fanatical. It collapsed within days.

There remains, of course, our suspicion that the use of the atomic bombs was not just a decisive element in ending World War II, but also a foreshadowing act of the East-West conflict. Similar arguments are used to explain the devastation of Dresden, though less convincingly. The enormity of what Allied bombers inflicted on Dresden could not have been fully predicted, whereas the use of atomic weapons was bound to be apocalyptically destructive. One airplane carrying one bomb wipes a city and its people from the face of the earth. The world witnesses the birth of an awesome, dark magic. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific head of the Manhattan Project, would famously declare: "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

I highlighted the part about the Soviet invasion because most of the popular American accounts of those events downplay the significance of the Soviet invasion.  During the Cold War, the US tended to promote the notion that "we dropped the A-bombs, Japan surrendered."  While the Soviets argued that it was the intervention of the Red Army that was decisive in Japan's decision to capitulate, and the atomic bombings of the two cities was mainly meant to intimidate the Soviet Union.