Obama’s nuclear option

Announcing that Barack Obama will become the first sitting President to visit Hiroshima, the White House said he would not “revisit” America’s decision to use atomic bombs there and at Nagasaki to end World War II. Thus, Obama appears determined to convey ambiguity as to the essential morality of his predecessor Harry Truman’s anguished order to unleash a nuclear monster that took the lives of 20,000 enemy soldiers and, by some estimates, more than 100,000 Japanese civilians.

Inevitably, as he uses the setting to argue for limiting nuclear weaponry, Obama will ruefully recount the devastation produced by the twin fireballs. It is right and proper for America’s leader to mourn the losses of war; that is what civilized nations do when civilians are killed even in necessary combat.

But expressing regret at Hiroshima without also presenting America’s well-founded justification for inflicting death on a massive scale would be a blot on the national honor.

The war, in both the European and Pacific theaters, had killed 70 million souls on all sides — more than 50 million of them civilians. More than 400,000 Americans had paid the ultimate price.

A leader of a war-weary nation that had saved Western civilization, Truman weighed the largest of burdens:

Incinerate enormous numbers of Japanese, subjects of the empire that had started the war and was defiantly determined to fight to the end, or initiate a ground invasion leading to American casualties projected at more than one million, plus exponentially larger numbers of Japanese fatalities.

Obama must convey truths that many in Japan, and many Americans, may prefer not to hear.

Polls show that in 1945, 85% of Americans supported the atomic bombings. By 1991, only 63% of the succeeding generations said the strikes were justified, with the number falling to 56% in 2015. The shift in opinions suggest a nation that is slipping into amnesia as the decades pass.

The levelings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the most fateful events of the 20th century. Obama must “revisit” both their unvarnished horror and agonized rightness.