The bomb, the decision - and the benefits?

Der Spiegel is running a two-part English-language article on the atomic bomb:

The Bomb that Was Meant for Hitler by Klaus Wiegrefe 08/01/05

"My God, What Have We Done?" by Klaus Wiegrefe 08/01/05

Here is Wiegrefe's description of the effects of the bomb on the inhabitants of the target cities:

The devastation caused by "Little Boy" surpassed everything that American scientists, military personnel and politicians had expected. The nuclear explosion left behind death and destruction within an area of 13 square kilometers, or about five square miles. On August 6, there were about 350,000 people in the city, the country's eighth largest. Most were Japanese, but there were also tends of thousands of Korean and Chinese forced laborers, a few American prisoners of war and at least a dozen German Jesuits who had come to Hiroshima because they felt relatively safe there against US air attacks.

By the end of 1945, about 140,000 of those had died -- in horror-inspiring ways. The first victims were essentially vaporized in the epicenter of the fireball, at temperatures of more than a million degrees centigrade, or burned to death in a wave of heat hot enough to scorch trees a dozen kilometers away. Still others were crushed by the debris from buildings collapsing as a result of the massive wave of pressure. Those at a somewhat greater distance from ground zero were killed by direct exposure to radiation. Many were poisoned when they drank the radioactive rain -- turned black by dust and debris -- that began falling about 20 minutes after the explosion. An Australian journalist visiting Hiroshima in September 1945 dubbed the disease he observed -- hair falling out, bodies covered in reddish-purple spots, victims dying of internal bleeding -- the "atomic plague."

Three days after the inferno, the Americans dropped a second bomb -- "Fat Man" -- on Nagasaki, almost completely destroying the venerable commercial city.

The exact number of victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will never be known. What we do know is that thousands are still dying today from the delayed effects of malicious radiation. It's almost as if the punishment pronounced in the Second Commandment of the Old Testament, that of a jealous God punishing the unfaithful "to the third and the fourth generation," had been meted out by human hands. Even the children and grandchildren of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will suffer the consequences of their parents' and grandparents' exposure to radiation. In many cases, their genetic material has been so severely damaged that they now suffer from leukemia, breast cancer and neurological disorders.

Wiegrefe shares the analysis of those who think that nuclear weapons have actually limited the destructiveness of war:

But it was the atom bomb, the biggest destructive force known to man, that ultimately put an end to this spiral of death and destruction. It was the cosmic destructive force of the new nuclear weapons that forced the world's superpowers, for the first time in history, to deal with their rivalries with primarily peaceful means. Despite the fact that Soviet communism and Western democracy were diametrically opposed to one another, World War II wasn't followed by a third world war, but by the Cold War, which in fact was -- as US historian John Lewis Gaddis calls it -- a "long peace."

It was precisely the ability to extinguish one another and, in the future, all of mankind, that deterred the Americans and the Russian from resorting to what US President Harry Truman called the "energy of the sun" to settle their rivalries.

This strikes me as one of those arguments that's plausible on its face, but is really based on wild optimism.  The next atomic explosion aimed at military or civilian targets will evaporate this notion for most people.

(Plus, I have a special grievance against John Lewis Gaddis; he has described Bush's foreign policy as "Jacksonian."  Which surely has Old Hickory thrashing violently in his grave.)

The second part focuses on the decision to drop the bomb itself:

Does Truman have any alternatives to using the atom bomb? A naval blockade, for instance? The Japanese fleet has been destroyed, the country's weakened air defenses pose only a minor risk to US bombers, the weapons industry is in ruins, and the Japanese people are starving. Food shortages and outbreaks of disease would likely force Tokyo to capitulate by year's end.

Of course, many more Japanese would die in an invasion -- experts say a million -- than were killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But, more importantly, an invasion scenario would run straight against the strengthening tide of public opinion. Japan's war cost 15 million Chinese, Koreans, Britons, Americans and Filipinos their lives in the Pacific theater and the American public wants a quick end to the war. No president would have been able to refrain from using a weapon on the grounds that it would save Japanese lives.

It's certainly important to take a critical view of this entire process.  But one factor that has to be considered carefully is the strong indications that Japan intended a protracted war, even in mid-1945 after Germany's surrender:

In the spring and summer of 1945, after US intelligence cracks the Japanese code, the Americans are able to intercept and read telegrams sent by the foreign ministry in Tokyo to the Japanese embassy in Moscow. The exchanges suggest to Truman that there is a small but growing number of officials and politicians in the Japanese imperial government who would consider ending the war. But Nippon's powerful military leaders reject all overtures, still hoping for victory or at least a conditional peace that will enable them to retain their power. They order their troops to engage in hand-to-hand combat in the event of an invasion and, if necessary, to kill women, children and the elderly and use the corpses as shields.

And he returns to his plausible-but-flawed argument about the stabilizing effects of the bomb:

Since those fateful days in early August 1945, the inhabitants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been considered by many as Adolf Hitler's last victims. Without the Nazis' rise to political power in Germany, the Szilards, Tellers and Einsteins would not have emigrated. Without Hitler, the Americans would never have built the bomb. And if the war in Europe hadn't ended in May 1945, Tibbets' "Little Boy" would probably have been dropped on Berlin, Hamburg or Munich.

It is one of the paradoxical twists of world history that the Germans were able to benefit, only a few years later, from the existence of those weapons that were originally intended for the "Third Reich." Because of the memory of Hiroshima, the border between West and East Germany became one of the most stable segments of the Cold War front -- until, in 1989, East Germans took to the streets and brought down the ruling SED, or Socialist Unity Party.

On the day the Berlin Wall came down, more than 1.2 million NATO and Warsaw Pact troops stood facing one another along the entire border between the two Germanys, from Flensburg in the north to Berchtesgaden in the south. Tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, together millions of times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, could have destroyed the entire world, and certainly Germany.

But not a single shot was fired.