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"Now we have to put that in context. If that proposition had been accepted during the war generally, the Allies would not have bombed Germany, and we would not have made earlier strikes against Japan. Remember, at least 35,000 were killed in one night in Dresden. Our fire bombing of Tokyo [in March 1945] killed 83,000 in a single night. They all were deliberate bombings of civilian areas. MacArthur, you see, was a soldier. He believed in using force only against military targets, and that is why the nuclear thing turned him off, which I think speaks well of him.
"But looking at it another way, in terms of whether or not the bombing of Hiroshima saved lives in the long run, most observers agree that it did. If we had invaded the main islands, it would have cost perhaps a million American casualties, certainly more than a million Japanese. How many civilian deaths did the nuclear bomb cause? Well, it cost a total of 200,000 in two places, and that's terrible. But it may have saved ten times that number.
"Of course the Bomb had a traumatic effect on the Japanese. I was in Hiroshima in the 1960s, speaking at a dinner of the country's leaders. The Japanese are excellent hosts. They drink pretty good, as we say. All through my speech there was clapping and laughing, and then I mentioned the bombing, something to the effect that it should never happen again--and the light went out of their eyes. All the smiles went. It was as if somebody had [he makes the gesture of cutting the air with a sword]. Like that. Hiroshima was simply too horrible to think about."
In saying that the Hiroshima bombing saved ten times as many lives as it claimed, Nixon may actually be understating the issue. In fact, estimates at the time were that as many as 10 million Japanese would have been lost in an American invasion, as well as a million U.S. troops. In the summer of 1945, Japan had more than 2 million soldiers and 30 million citizens prepared to choose death over dishonor. The kamikaze pilots and the Japanese troops who fought at Okinawa and Iwo Jima had already established the point. This is not just the American view. Kawamoto and most other Japanese today feel that Japan's military government never would have surrendered without an absolute catastrophe.
Whether or not America used the atom bomb solely to effect that surrender is another question. After Europe, the nation had its bellyful of war, and the assumption of the times was if the Bomb could bring peace in one shot, then use the thing. But a strong impulse for retribution must have applied as well. Harold Agnew was not alone in feeling that the Japanese "bloody well deserved" Hiroshima. There is also a theory that the U.S. used the Bomb as much to frighten the Soviets, with whom it was about to divide the world, as to win the war with Japan. More have dismissed this theory than embraced it. The Soviets, however, believe it to this day.