by Victor Davis Hanson
The atomic bomb was not created by demons, but by scientists trying to end a war before even more people died.
Did Demons Create the First Atomic Bombs?
Every August, debate renews over both the wisdom and the morality of dropping the two American atomic bombs, 81 years ago, on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) and Nagasaki (August 9, 1945). This August has been no exception.
As ever, many critics have faulted the United States for the bombings: two gruesome blasts—aimed at dual-use military and industrial targets in both cities—that may have caused some 100,000–120,000 immediate deaths among combatants and civilians. And not all these critics are on the Left. Two years ago, podcaster Tucker Carlson blasted the Truman administration’s decision, alleging that the atomic bomb was not the result of decades of sophisticated nuclear physics research or the dividend of a two-billion-dollar Manhattan Project investment to rapidly develop an atomic weapon in a race to beat the Axis powers’ nuclear programs before they themselves developed such existential weapons.
Instead, Carlson claimed the atomic bombs were demonic, tools of innate evil, and thus apparently created through the supernatural intervention of dark powers. Unlikely—but perhaps Tucker was echoing themes from Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the Manhattan Project. After the first successful test of the bomb on July 16, 1945, Oppenheimer quoted (and mistranslated) a famously chilling line from the great Hindu epic, the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Why Did the United States Drop Two Atomic Bombs on Japan?
Indeed, from the moment the bombs were dropped, there has been an intense, 80-year debate, from which all sorts of conspiracy theories have since emerged.
No one denies that the two bombs, dropped within three days, shocked the Imperial Japanese junta into conceding surrender on August 15—a decision ratified formally and officially on September 2, 1945, ending the Pacific War. Nonetheless, almost immediately, contemporary critics objected to their use on a variety of grounds.
Many claimed the bombs were unnecessary. They argued that the previous devastation of Japan by the U.S. Army Air Forces and the U.S. Navy had made a quick surrender inevitable. Some declared that racism had prompted their use against the Japanese alone.
Of course, all these arguments were only offered with the benefit of hindsight, and they often failed to consider the dire conditions that U.S. military planners were confronted with at the time.
First, the bombs were originally envisioned to stop the Third Reich and end the costly conventional Allied bombing campaign over Germany (over 80,000 dead British and American airmen, along with some 15,000 bombers lost). But producing a deliverable bomb took far longer than anticipated and was realized only after Germany surrendered.
Second, the military, the Truman administration, and the American public were still in a state of shock over the devastating losses suffered at Okinawa, declared secure just six weeks before Hiroshima. The invading U.S. land, sea, and air forces had suffered 50,000 casualties, including 12,000 dead—in what had initially been expected to be the least costly of a half-dozen bloody American amphibious landings.
Before Okinawa, planners believed they had learned from the overconfidence that had nearly proved to be catastrophic at Iwo Jima, Peleliu, and Tarawa. Yet despite those lessons, a weakened Japanese military, and total U.S. air and naval supremacy, Okinawa became the deadliest island operation of the entire Pacific war. And because it was the last major land battle, stunned U.S. planners in summer 1945 shuddered about what might come from a planned invasion of the entire Japanese mainland. As a general rule, the closer the Americans got to the Japanese homeland, the more they died.
Okinawa had been defended by about 120,000 Japanese soldiers and Okinawan conscripts, most of whom fought to the death. The defenders had launched about 2,000 kamikaze suicide-attack aircraft—each a veritable cruise missile—sinking 26 ships and killing nearly 5,000 Navy personnel.
Given some 2.3 million Japanese troops on the home islands, fully mobilized for an American invasion and backed by 12,000 combat aircraft (including 9,000 kamikazes), as well as a militia of some 25 million combatants, American planners believed the invasion of the Japanese homeland would easily cost one million casualties—the equivalent of 20 Okinawas.
That fear of massive American casualties, combined with growing public weariness after four long years of Japanese diehard ferocity and atrocities—the Germans had surrendered three months earlier in May 1945—prompted the Pentagon to explore alternatives against an enemy that, despite being almost entirely defeated, still had no intention of surrendering unconditionally. We now forget that 1945—the last year of the war—was the deadliest to the U.S. military in the Pacific Theater of Operations.
Few now remember that, of all the belligerents in World War II, it was the Japanese military that achieved the highest kill-to-loss ratio. Japan suffered total fatalities of somewhere between 2.5 and 3 million combatants and civilians, but it caused the deaths of between 15 and 20 million Allied soldiers, Chinese, other Asians, and Pacific Islanders. By summer 1945, the Japanese military abroad was executing, killing, or starving 15,000 people a day. There was therefore an understandable desire to end the war as quickly as possible, by any means necessary, to save thousands of lives. Each day of war was literally a matter of life and death for thousands.
Other postwar critics claimed the bombs were dropped only as a gratuitous signal to shock and awe and deter Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union from further communist aggrandizement. But between Nagasaki (August 9, 1945) and the first Soviet atomic bomb test four years later (August 29, 1949)—when America alone had a viable atomic weapon—Stalin was certainly not deterred. By 1948, he had already broken his word and turned all of the Soviet-occupied nations of Eastern Europe, as well as North Korea, communist. And by summer 1949, it was clear that the USSR had helped ensure the impending communist takeover of China.
Moreover, U.S. intelligence and investigative agencies were already surmising by August 1945 that Soviet spies were embedded within the Manhattan Project and the UK government, along with captured German physicists sent back to Russia.
In other words, the Pentagon had already accepted that dropping atomic bombs would likely not deter its then “ally,” Joseph Stalin, from acquiring his own nuclear weapons. The United States therefore expected soon to face a deadly nuclear rival—and one eager to retaliate in kind if America had used or threatened to use its nuclear monopoly to thwart Soviet agendas.
Were the Bombs Really Necessary?
Still other critics claimed that the U.S. government should have frightened Japan into surrender by detonating one atomic bomb in Tokyo Bay. But earlier ideas to drop a demonstration bomb in an uninhabited area were scrapped over fears of what would ensue if the bomb proved to be a dud, leaving only a single bomb available for combat use. Would one atomic bombing of a Japanese target prompt total surrender? After the two available bombs, at most one additional atomic bomb was likely to be delivered to the Pacific before October or November.
Atomic bombs, in fact, did not simply emerge complete and intact from the head of Zeus—or Satan. Building and delivering still-experimental bombs to the front was not easy, safe, or assured. The tricky enriched-uranium Hiroshima bomb (“Little Boy”) had never been tested. It was so dangerous to handle that it was armed only in the air to prevent an atomic blast if the Enola Gay crashed on takeoff.
The later B-29 Bockscar that bombed Nagasaki almost ran out of gas because of a failed fuel-transfer pump, a 45-minute rendezvous delay, and the fact that the initial target was obscured by clouds. Nagasaki, the alternate but similarly cloud-obscured target, was a last-minute adjustment that almost ended in failure, if not total catastrophe.
The cruiser Indianapolis, which delivered components of the 9,000-pound “Little Boy” to the B-29 base on Tinian in late July, was blown up by a Japanese submarine just four days later on its journey back to the fleet—killing nearly 75 percent of the crew. Only luck had prevented the Japanese from sinking the Indianapolis days earlier, along with the atomic-bomb components on board.
Yet even after the moonscape at Hiroshima, the Japanese high command still argued over capitulation, with some generals convinced that the bluffing Americans might not have another bomb. And, in a way, they were right. After the second bombing at Nagasaki three days later, the tiny American nuclear arsenal was temporarily exhausted.
Nor had even the second atomic bomb convinced the Japanese military to surrender. Instead, on August 15, 1945, disgruntled dead-ender officers launched an attempted military coup to prevent Emperor Hirohito from addressing the nation about Japan’s intention to surrender unconditionally.
Some of Truman’s top generals and admirals later expressed criticisms of the bombings. But often their objections arose because they felt their own forces had already doomed the Japanese. A dramatic atomic end to the war had thus overshadowed the hard prior work of their conventional forces in defeating the Japanese military.
Pacific B-29 forces commander General Curtis LeMay, hardly a dissident, objected that his B-29 fleet had already destroyed half of Japan’s urban areas and much of its industry—and could easily and rapidly force a surrender through further conventional incendiary bombing.
Indeed, LeMay had planned to supplement his then-current force of 1,000 B-29 bombers stationed on the Mariana Islands, some 1,500–1,700 miles distant from most Japanese targets, with a huge new force of additional B-29s—at war’s end, some 5,000 were on order. Veteran bomber crews from the Eighth Air Force, reassigned from postwar Europe, were to augment this massive force.
After the German surrender, the British, in Operation “Tiger Force,” also planned to send over some 150 to 200 heavy Lancaster bombers to join the Americans at their new bomber bases on newly conquered Okinawa—a mere 1,000 miles from Tokyo.
With such a huge bomber armada and flight times cut nearly in half, LeMay assumed that he could have ended the war within weeks without the atomic bombs, albeit at a far higher cost to the Japanese people and his own air crews.
LeMay’s March 9–10 firebombing of Tokyo remains the deadliest single day of warfare in human history, likely accounting for more than 100,000 Japanese deaths; moreover, it was far more lethal than either Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Indeed, the incendiary bombing campaigns killed at least twice as many Japanese as died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
Chief of Naval Operations Ernest King also joined LeMay in regretting the use of atomic bombs. On similar personal grounds, he argued that his vast fleet of submarines, destroyers, cruisers, battleships, and carriers—by 1945 larger than all the navies of the world combined—had already blockaded all of Japan’s ports. They had mined its waters, sunk most of its merchant marine, and destroyed the Japanese navy. Thus, King believed his ships could starve the Japanese into surrender.
Saving, Not Destroying, More Lives
Yet, despite these even more ruthless alternative proposals, the real reason the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the Truman administration’s sincere belief that the new weapon was the only way to shock the Japanese into ending the war as quickly as possible and thereby prevent—as it had announced at the time—the likely horrific invasion of Japan that otherwise would have been needed. Indeed, it is likely that the two bombs saved tens of thousands of Allied and millions of Japanese lives by averting a two-pronged, two-year invasion of the Japanese homeland.
All controversies about the atomic bomb’s initial creation aside, in the 81 years since the end of World War II and its 70 million deaths, there has not been, as feared and often predicted, a World War III. The Cold War was not hot because shared fears of mutually assured nuclear destruction deterred the first use of the massive Russian arsenal.
The current worry about nuclear proliferation is not so much an inherent terror of these horrific weapons themselves. None of the current nine nuclear nations have used any nuclear weapons since their inaugural appearance in 1945. The real fear is instead that rogue states, autocracies, and dictatorships—without voter, media, or opposition oversight—will acquire or have already obtained them and are more likely to do something stupid by launching a preemptive nuclear strike.
In other words, the world does not actually believe that the democratic United States, France, the United Kingdom, Israel, or India will start a nuclear war. It is more concerned that a nuclear-armed strongman in China, North Korea, Pakistan, or Russia—or a terrorist group that gains this unchecked power—will do the unthinkable. The problem, historically, has not always been the appearance of a new deadly weapon but rather the type of state or ruler who possesses it.
Still, despite all this, nuclear weapons are now seen as taboo and associated with national or even global annihilation. And so the world currently scorns even the mere talk of deploying them. But what is truly frightening at the moment is not so much the eight-decade-old nuclear age as what might follow from it.
In our globally connected, post-biolab-spawned-pandemic era—full of Star Wars-like lasers, AI-controlled drone swarms, nearly 17,000 active satellites overhead, and sophisticated biological and chemical agents—terrorists, rogue nations, and delusional autocratic governments may well conclude that nuclear weapons are just one deployable asset in their multifarious arsenals of mass death: sometimes vulnerable to antimissile defenses and often not unique in their lethality.
In short, we may consider nuclear weapons, along with other weapons that are just as deadly, to be Satanic, but they certainly were not first created by the devil.
Rather, on balance, good people sometimes invented bad weapons to stop far worse people from killing innocents.
Victor Davis Hanson
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/08/25/were-the-bombs-of-august-1945-demonic/
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