Timmon Wallis’ guest column “The big lie in the Nuremberg film” [Gazette, Jan. 31] evinces some common, and very modern, misconceptions about the U.S. atomic bombing of Japan.
That Hermann Göring (in the film) would try to minimize the industrial murder of the Holocaust by making bogus comparisons between Auschwitz/Dachau and Hiroshima/ Nagasaki makes sense for someone guilty of genocide and facing the hangman.
But it is spurious. First off, just imagine: If the U.S. had had to drop the bomb on Berlin, would Israel today mourn that act? I hardly think so. The writer could have easily looked up opinion polls in, say, China, Korea, Vietnam, Burma, the Philippines or Malaysia on how people today view dropping the atomic bomb. He would find few who might agree with him.
The United States did not need the atom bomb in Europe because the Allies were willing to let the Soviet Union lose 500,000 soldiers taking Berlin, while the U.S. lost more than 400,000 in the entire war. And yes, the U.S. was not prepared to lose hundreds of thousands of more troops invading Japan, which might also have caused far more civilian deaths than the two bombs. (As it did in firebombing a nation built of wood.)
International fascism was the enemy in World War II. And 75 million humans died over it. And yes, once the bomb was invented it would be used — that is the insanity of big power politics.
The nuclear age Hiroshima and Nagasaki gave birth to was, and is, a new and far more dangerous world. But that age was born in the same instant it destroyed an evil that otherwise might still prevail in the world. Sometimes we have to live with such contradictions.
Joe Gannon
Easthampton