Hiroshima 5

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we do not devise some greater and more equitable
system, Armageddon will be at our door." The decision to drop the
atomic bomb on Japanese citizens in August, 1945, as a means to
bring the long Pacific war to an end was justified-militarily,
politically and morally.

The goal of waging war is victory with minimum losses on one's
own side and, if possible, on the enemy's side. No one disputes the
fact that the Japanese military was prepared to fight to the last man
to defend the home islands, and indeed had already demonstrated this
determination in previous Pacific island campaigns. A weapon
originally developed to contain a Nazi atomic project was available
that would spare Americans hundreds of thousands of causalities in an
invasion of Japan, and-not incidentally-save several times more than
that among Japanese soldiers and civilians. The thousands who have
died in the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were far less
than would have ...

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a war
which we had vainly hoped to avoid. We could no longer "do nothing"
but were compelled to "do something" to roll back the Japanese
militarists. Victims of aggression have every right both to end the
aggression and to prevent the perpetrator of it from continuing or
renewing it. Our natural right of self defense as well as our moral
duty to defeat tyranny justified our decision to wage the war and,
ultimately, to drop the atomic bomb. We should expect political
leaders to be guided by moral principles but this does not mean they
must subject millions of people to needless injury or death out of a
misplaced concern for the safety of enemy soldiers or civilians.
...

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