Japan Wouldn't Have Surrendered Without the Bombs

This August marks the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the end of World War II in Asia and the Pacific. President Harry Truman’s decision to use these weapons remains one of the most controversial decisions of the war. A number of military commanders at the time, including Dwight Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur, claimed that it was unnecessary, as Japan was about to surrender regardless. Some of the most vehement critics of the atomic bombings were Christian thinkers; for example, in one of his television broadcasts Bishop Fulton Sheen called it “our national sin.” “When we dropped the bomb,” he continued, “we dropped it not only on the Japanese–we dropped it on ourselves, in the sense that we killed something in our moral consciousness.” On the Protestant side, the Federal Council of Churches in March 1946 issued a statement labeling use of the bomb “morally indefensible” and “unnecessary for winning the war”. Japan, after all, was an “already virtually beaten foe” so to use such a weapon against its civilian population opened the United States to “judgment before God and the conscience of humankind.”