Eighty years ago, atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Up to 250,000 people, mostly civilians, lost their lives. Since then, many have been sincerely and others purposefully moralizing about the bombing of both cities. The reality is that the death of 250 000 people averted the deaths of many millions of the Japanese, but also of many Americans, Europeans, Chinese, and others. Including Ukrainians, Russians and other Moscow controlled peoples.

The moralizing about nuclear weapons begins with their development. Supposedly, American scientists and engineers should not have developed them at all. That sounds good, but only if we ignore the possibility that Hitler or Stalin would have gotten their hands on the atomic bomb before the Americans did. It was the Germans' work on its development that led to the writing of the famous Szilárd-Einstein letter, which launched the Manhattan Project.

The second argument of the moralizers is that once atomic bombs were already in existence, they should not have been used. Even more so since their victims were mainly civilians. Unfortunately, the widespread bombing of cities became a common part of warfare during World War II. Shortly before Hiroshima, a British-American air raid burned down the centre of Dresden and killed 25,000 people in February 1945. In March 1945, a raid by 279 B-29 bombers killed 100,000 people in Tokyo and made a million homeless.

The B-29 Superfortress strategic bombers were, in addition to the atomic bomb itself, a technological prerequisite for the use of nuclear bomb. B-29s were put into service only in June 1944, and their development cost 3 billion dollars (about 60 billion today), more than was the cost of the Manhattan Project.

While mass raids on major German cities had been underway since the spring of 1942, the possibility of large-scale raids on distant Japan only opened up in July 1944, when the Americans captured the island of Tinian, 2,400 km from Japan, and had B-29 ready. In the spring of 1945, widespread incendiary bombing of Japanese wooden cities became a strategy. These raids alone had the potential to make millions of Japanese homeless and kill hundreds of thousands. However, in the spring of 1945, an even more effective and cheaper idea for the use of strategic bombers emerged: Operation Starvation, a plan to starve the Japanese by aerial mining of canals and harbours, was born. Only 6% of the B-29s were assigned to this task, but they quickly laid 90% of all naval mines in the Japanese waters, thus destroying Japanese shipping and commerce. Within weeks, the air mines sank or damaged 670 Japanese ships with a total tonnage of 1.25 million tons. The transport of materials and food in Japan, then completely dependent on shipping, quickly fell to a small fraction. The US brought the economy and population of Japan to its knees, while losing only 16 aircraft and 103 airmen.

Millions of Japanese were already experiencing hunger in 1944. By the summer of 1945, malnutrition among soldiers and civilians was already a mass phenomenon, and in Japanese garrisons isolated on islands in the Pacific Ocean, the Japanese soldiers were eating prisoners of war. Operation Starvation brought the country to the brink of famine. If the shock of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had not forced the Japanese government to capitulate, it is virtually certain that many millions - according to some estimates, up to 10 million! - of Japanese women, men, and children would have died of hunger in the winter of 1945-46.

Without Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not only millions of Japanese people would have died. In May 1945, Washington approved a plan for the invasion of Japan, Operation Downfall. The plan was to have two phases. In the first, Americans, British, Australians, and Canadians were to land on the island of Kyushu in November 1945. The Tokyo area invasion would follow in the spring of 1946. Both would be the largest landing operations in the history, eclipsing D-Day in Europe. Five million American and one million Allied soldiers, sailors, and airmen were to be involved in the final defeat of Japan. Army estimates said that between 400,000 and 800,000 of Americans would be killed, and more than a million would be wounded or maimed. Estimates of the number of Japanese dead were 5 to 10 million, depending on the level of civilian involvement in the fighting.

We know today what the planners of May 1945 did not know: namely that as a result of Operation Starvation, in the winter of 1945 and the spring of 1946 the Americans and the Allies would land on islands strewn with emaciated skeletons. Fortunately for all, the nuclear mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki broke the pride of the Japanese and led to their surrender. Instead of an invasion and bombs, food supplies began to flow from America to Japan after the surrender. As in Germany before, chocolate became one of the symbols of the Americans’ arrival in Japan.

When President Truman decided to use the atomic bombs, he knew the estimates of the number of Americans who would die in the invasion, and probably also the estimates of the number of Japanese casualties. But even those numbers were not final: if the war continued, huge numbers of people in China, Korea, Indonesia, Philippines and Southeast Asia, still occupied by the Japanese, would also die. Many Russians, Ukrainians and other people under control of Moscow would die too fighting in Manchuria and elsewhere. And also 30 to 50 thousand American, British and Dutch prisoners of war tortured in Japanese camps.

Dear moralizers, hand on heart: Would you really send hundreds of thousands of your fellow citizens and many millions of Japanese to their deaths if you had in your hands a weapon capable of ending the war in a few days? If you believe that, you are victim of decades of cheap Russian and anti-American propaganda. You are lying to yourself.

Juraj Mesík