Crucifying Pandora

Tomorrow, August 6, is the 60th anniversary of the tragic nuclear attack on the city of Hiroshima. That act made my nation the first and only one to have deliberately used a nuclear weapon as an act of war. With the benefit of hindsight, I believe that it was a tragic mistake. The use of the second weapon on Nagasaki compounded that mistake.

However, by calling those attacks mistakes, I do not mean to condemn or necessarily even criticize the multitude of people involved in those attacks. Bounded by circumstances and emotions and with limited knowledge of the full effect of their decisions, I am convinced that those involved for the most part made responsible and reasonable decisions. With hindsight, many lived to express their regret for their involvement in the program - Oppenheimer and Einstein foremost among them.

What really cheeses me off are those who insist on ascribing upon the entire endeavor in general an intentionally evil agenda.

True, designing and creating a weapon of unparalleled destructive power sounds rather sinister, but the increased power of weaponry is not inherently evil when it is done to protect the lives and livelihoods of those one loves. From the first caveman who attached a rock to the end of a stick to those scientists that designed the neutron bomb to kill people without destroying materiel, man has always been compelled towards more destructive power in order to wield the bigger stick. I personally think the whole self perpetuating cycle is dangerously unbalanced, but it is flat out wrong to call those involved evil or inhuman - indeed, it is a very human impulse.

And yet, just today I read one accusation ("It was just against humanity") that the only reason America dropped two different types of bombs (the gun arranged uranium "Little Boy" and the plutonium implosion "Fat Man") was to test them on humans and catalog the aftereffects. I find this sentiment to be narrowminded and reactionary.

Conveniently, the writer neglects to mention that those two bombs were the only two that America had available. The writer neglects to mention that with each passing day hundreds of Japanese and American soldiers were dying in the endgame of a war for no purpose other than Japanese pride and bargaining position. The writer neglects to mention that Harry Truman was weighing an invasion with an estimated one million allied casualties and multiple million Japanese casualties. The writer neglects to mention that these weapons had never been used before, and as a result those in charge had no possible conception of their full effects. The writer neglects to mention that much of the knowledge of why dropping the bombs was a mistake was gained through the study of the effects of the bombs on their victims. Would she rather the US occupation authorities ignored those effects?

Pandora bitterly regretted opening that Box; many scientists in the Manhattan Project regretted their involvement as well. The moral of the Pandora myth is that woe and sorrow are often unleashed by those who have committed no greater crime than to be human. Those who shrilly persecute the Pandoras of this world are lazy, arrogant and ignorant.