Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and the Geography of a Decision

Nagasaki was destroyed because the weather over Kokura was bad. This is not a metaphor or a simplification. It is what happened.

The decision to use the bomb at all was made in London on the eighteenth of September 1944, when Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt signed an aide-mémoire at Hyde Park agreeing in principle that the weapon under development could be deployed against Japan. The agreement was made without public knowledge and without parliamentary or congressional oversight. The Manhattan Project, the programme that produced the bombs, had cost approximately two billion dollars and employed a hundred and thirty thousand people across multiple sites in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. A scientific community of the kind assembled by the project does not keep secrets easily, and letters of protest from physicists and chemists expressing concern about the use of nuclear weapons had arrived in quantity at the appropriate departments. Several of the scientists who had worked on the project, including those who had fled Nazi Germany specifically to prevent Hitler’s regime developing nuclear weapons first, were among those who objected most forcefully to using the result on civilian populations.

The argument that the bombs ended the war and saved lives, the argument that was made in 1945 and has been made consistently since, rests on the assumption that Japan would otherwise have fought a ground invasion of the home islands to the last soldier and the last civilian, and that the casualties on both sides of such an invasion would have exceeded those caused by the bombs. This calculation was made under significant political pressure. The Manhattan Project’s budget required justification. The United States wanted to establish nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union before the postwar period began. A congressional investigation held the following year produced testimony suggesting that Japan had been moving toward surrender through diplomatic channels that the United States was monitoring and that the bombs were not the decisive factor they were presented as being. These are contested claims. The historical record on them is not clean. What is not contested is that the bombs were used and that seventy thousand people died in Nagasaki and eighty thousand in Hiroshima, and that a significant proportion of those people were civilians who had no operational military role and no influence over the decisions that brought the war to this point.

The museum in Nagasaki says all of this. It says it plainly and without theatrical horror, which makes it more effective than theatrical horror would be. The exhibits are specific: a soldier’s helmet with the skull fused to its interior, clothing recovered from the bodies of victims, photographs of injuries that are not easy to look at and which the museum presents without euphemism on the basis that euphemism would be its own form of dishonesty. There is a detailed account of the political and military decisions that led to the bombing. There is a copy of the Nagasaki mayor’s annual letter of protest, sent every time any nation conducts a nuclear weapons test, addressed to the head of state of the testing country and stating, in clear language, that the people of Nagasaki regard the existence of nuclear weapons as an ongoing moral failure of the international community.

Hiroshima, which I visited two days later, is larger and more thoroughly oriented around its history as a site of destruction and reconstruction. The A-Bomb Dome, the skeletal remains of the Industrial Promotion Hall, preserved specifically because its partial survival constitutes evidence that cannot be edited, stands at the northern end of the Peace Memorial Park as a world heritage site. The Memorial Centre has a wall of 140,000 tiles, one for each person who died on the sixth of August 1945. The central museum is comprehensive and relatively balanced in its assessment of why the decision was made and what it produced.

Both cities are worth visiting and one visit is not enough to process either of them. If you go to one, Nagasaki is the place to go first, because it is smaller and quieter and the history sits closer to the surface without the layer of international memorialisation that Hiroshima has acquired over seventy years of being visited by the world. The old man with the bells will not be there forever. While he is, you should listen to him.