May 31, 2016 l Nukes Help Keep the Peace! l High Frontier

“The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid many fold . . . If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.” From the first Public Statement on August 6, 1945 (Public Papers of the Presidents, Harry S. Truman, 1945, pg. 197, 199).

It was ironic that President Barak Obama chose the day that many Americans were leaving on a Memorial Day weekend to make the first visit by an sitting American President to Hiroshima, to focus attention on the first Atomic Bomb, dropped on August 6, 1945 and followed by a second Atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki on August 9 — leading immediately to the unconditional surrender of Japan and the end of World War II.

Click here for the text of President Obama’s speech, which began with these words: “Seventy-one years ago, on a bright cloudless morning, death fell from the sky and the world was changed. A flash of light and a wall of fire destroyed a city and demonstrated that mankind possessed the means to destroy itself.”

Then he lamented alleged great evils associated with nuclear weapons, and by implication America’s first and only use of them in war — actually to end a war that, had it continued, would have cost many more lives than those casualties from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.

Actually, more Japanese died in the preceding air raids on Tokyo with conventional high explosives than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki — and that number would have surely grown several fold had World War II not so abruptly ended. And this past weekend we would have remembered up to a million more Americans, who would have fallen in fighting Japan to the end with conventional weapons. For example, click here for an interesting Wikipedia summary of these matters, with further references.

President Truman’s decision was right on this basis alone. These Atomic bombs saved lives.

My friend Jim Martin wrote an excellent summary article in last weekend’s USA Today: “My Uncle Leveled Hiroshima—We’re Not Sorry.” His uncle, Major Tom Ferebee, was the bombardier on the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped “Little Boy” on Hiroshima. (For those concerned about nuclear proliferation, the Little Boy “gun device” had not been previously tested, so confident were the Manhattan Project scientists that it would work. The Fat Man “implosion device” was first tested in New Mexico before it was dropped on Nagasaki.)

Jim has sound reasoning as well as family pride in his important accounting of the event pictured below. You can visit The Enola Gay at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum near Dulles International Airport.

As Jim points out, the advance of nuclear weapons also was important as a deterrent in underwriting President Truman’s “Containment Policy” which contributed mightily to holding the Soviet Union at bay throughout the Cold War. Indeed nuclear weapons were a centerpiece in NATO’s ability to keep Western Europe free from Soviet and Warsaw Pact threats of conventional attack — and all of us from World War III.

I was a small farm boy when the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan — learning to repair synthetic rubber tires, carefully consuming rationed goods, wearing clothes my mother made from feed sacks, going with my dad to drill with other men at weekly “Home Guard” sessions on the streets of our county seat and listening in the evenings to radio reports on the war abroad. I well remember the joy that followed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, at least in America, and especially that our “boys” were coming home.

With rare exceptions, we collectively held no long-term grudges. And as I grew older, I especially remember reading of the visionary efforts under General Douglas MacArthur’s leadership that brought peace to Japan and led them to democracy and to become a treasured American ally. Similar efforts led to a lengthy period of peace in Europe.

These successes were punctuated with tensions and conflicts precipitated by our World War II ally and Cold War enemy, the Soviet Union — and its sometimes ally China. The Soviets entered the Pacific conflict shortly after Hiroshima and Nagasaki — and also created trouble in that region of the world — witness Korea and Viet Nam. These conditions continue to this day, now as Russia’s President Putin apparently seeks a new Cold War and China builds its military capabilities and creates tensions in its “near abroad.”

One important manifestation of our cooperation with our World War II enemies is that I often credit our Japanese friends with enabling our ballistic missile defense (BMD) efforts — particularly our Navy’s Aegis BMD ships, with some 33 at sea today and more to come. And the Japanese also have four Aegis BMD ships, with more to come. In my opinion these are the most capable BMD systems in the world today — and they are particularly helpful in defending against rogue states like North Korea and Iran.

In Europe, we are deploying the components of the Aegis BMD system in Aegis Ashore configurations to defend against Iranian ballistic missiles — the system in Romania is now operational and in Poland is planned to become operational in 2018.

Because of U.S. strategic alliances and our commitment to our allies, including with our nuclear weapons, we have led in keeping the peace — and blocking proliferation that might otherwise have been promoted by growing threats. For example, both of our World War II enemies now rely on the U.S. nuclear deterrent rather than in seeking their own.

Regrettably, this condition is not so stable among other states — particularly in the Middle East where the terrible Nuclear Deal with Iran fostered by President Obama’s interest in making a deal, any deal, with Iran actually has increased the likelihood of nuclear proliferation in that already most unstable region of the world. It certainly has not stopped Iran from getting nuclear weapons — and that fact and their lack of faith in U.S. leadership brings pressures on others in the region to seek their own nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them.

President Obama was right last Friday to point out that war has been part of the human condition since “violent conflict appeared with the very first man.”

But he was and is wrong to push for the elimination of all nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons have been key to our safety in a dangerous world since their invention and their first — and so far only — use.

President Obama’s Hiroshima speech was a “bookend” to that made when accepting his 2009 Nobel Prize. It was more about his policies intended to rid the world of nuclear weapons — a tale spun with wishful and wistful ideas that diplomacy without demonstrable and demonstrated strength can bring forth a peaceful world.

This misguided perspective for nearly eight years has left us with atrophying military forces, warriors lost and wounded, mistreated veterans and a much less peaceful world. It correlates with the President’s disdain for all who think of America as “exceptional” and his agenda to “transform America” from that commonly accepted view to have us sink into a mire of global mediocrity.

Hopefully, this tragic period will soon end without an intervening disaster.

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