Was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima justified?

Authors Avatar

The bombing of Hiroshima

The movie “Hiroshima” documented the entire process of the Atom bomb attacks on the largest island of Japan in August 6th, 1945. Although there are many scenes in this movie which shows that Hiroshima is a military city with a lot of solders and a huge number of military industries, Hiroshima had also thousands of civilians who were actually the major victims of that attack. Those people’s fates just changed in few seconds and even the survivors also experienced through a hell-like environment which is hard to image for everyone else. This movie makes me change my opinion on this event from ‘the attack is justified’ to ‘the attack is reasonable, but not necessary’.

Based on the aspect of the interests of US, it is reasonable and justified to drop the A-bombs in Japan. The strategic bombing campaign significantly shortened the length of the World War II. This Strategy not only saved the lives of thousands of American solders by not repeating the battle of Peleliu and Iwo Jima, but also saved a huge number of lives of Japanese army and civilians because many of them are ready to be scarified if US planned to land.  However, the only question is – why US wanted to put forward to end the war in such a hurry pace? Japan is an Island country which is relatively hard to attack but is also easy to be forced to surrender by cutting off all of their supplies, which was implied by one of the Japanese survivors at the end of the movie. I think the important reason why U.S. made decision to drop a atomic bomb  was that they don’t want to Soviet Union (former Russia) got involved in. The movie implied a little about U.S. facing a direct threat from Russia since it started its war against Japan quickly after the Potsdam Declaration. Both U.S. and Russia knew that Japan was no longer a big threat and they all wanted a better position after the war. Therefore, from United States’ point of view, ending the war quickly in this kind of way would be very important and using the Atom bombs was obviously the best choice to achieve this goal.

Join now!

Whether Hiroshima is a military target or not actually is not a big issue since at that time, the entire Japan is military-oriented. Hiroshima is the largest island of Japan.  Even though Hiroshima was a major army base that housed the headquarters of several Japanese armies, most of people were still civilians, which can be seen throughout the movie. US chose this city because of its location, size, and the possible impact to the Japan ‘Emperor’. Since the US headquarters knew well about the power of the Atom Bomb, they carefully chose this city as a proper target much earlier ...

This is a preview of the whole essay