In truth, the Japanese were the aggressors, responsible for millions of deaths and uncounted war crimes. They aspired to be the very colonialist, imperial power that progressives claim to loathe, but the ironclad rules of intersectionality make them the victim when the United States is involved.
Earlier this month, the Oscar winning film Oppenheimer premiered in Japan to necessarily more mixed reviews than the United States given both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the targets for the only two nuclear bombs ever dropped for military purposes. As compassionate human beings, we can certainly understand the sensitivity, especially to those who might still be alive and lost loved ones, or their immediate descendants. Being on the receiving end of the most devastating weapons ever devised, cannot be an easy thing by any means regardless of whether or not the attacks were justified. When lives are lost, especially in a country that has since become a staunch ally, we can simultaneously grieve for the tragedy and understand why the tragedy occurred in the first place, honoring and mourning the dead even as we believe the United States had a right and a duty to end the most horrific war in human history as quickly as possible. Progressives, however, are pathologically incapable of doing so, and instead took the opportunity to attack the United States, completely ignore the context of our actions or the Manhattan Project in general, and whitewash the untold atrocities committed by Japan that ultimately lead to using the atomic bomb. In their view, Japan was a helpless victim that we unjustly attacked for almost prurient purposes. The progressive “explainer” website Vox.com neatly encapsulates this perspective in a recent article, “Oppenheimer won Best Picture. Its new reception in Japan was very different.” They begin with the rather odd mention that a film which takes place primarily in the United States and is centered on the biography of an American citizen doesn’t feature Japanese “perspectives,” “It does not directly show the fallout of the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and it also does not feature any Japanese perspectives in the form of major characters or testimonials.” Somehow, this leads directly to “reinvigorating questions about whose stories get told, and whether the ones that Hollywood chooses to focus on offer a limited understanding of the world and gloss over major harms.” “Some Japanese people who saw the film,” you see, “questioned both the lack of Japanese perspectives as well as the tone of the movie, which they saw as lauding both Oppenheimer and his work on the Manhattan Project.” “The sense of excitement among people celebrating the experiment and the dropping of the atomic bomb. I felt incredibly disgusted,” explained Erika Abiko, an anti-nuclear activist. “Of course this is an amazing film which deserves to win the Academy Awards,” Kawai, a viewer in Hiroshima, said. “But the film also depicts the atomic bomb in a way that seems to praise it, and, as a person with roots in Hiroshima, I found it difficult to watch.”
Of course, the irony of the Manhattan Project has always been that it was among the greatest triumphs in the history of the known universe and the unleashing of a radically more destructive force than mankind had ever seen before. Simply because the force was destructive – though not entirely if you consider atomic energy – doesn’t minimize, much less negate the triumph of what Oppenheimer and his team at Los Alamos achieved. The achievement, in and of itself, remains so astounding and unprecedented that – to this day, over 70 years later – nothing like it even comes close and there is no analog in all of human history. The closest we might come is the space race in the 1960s, when newly minted President John F. Kennedy famously challenged the scientific community to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, greatly expanding the funding for NASA to do so. As he put it “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project…will be more exciting, or more impressive to mankind, or more important…and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.” The program ultimately succeeded on July 21, 1969, requiring eight short years to do what had never been done. At the same time, the Soviet Union had successfully launched a satellite as early as 1957, and carried the first man into space, Yuri Gagarin, in April 1961. After these achievements, there was no reason to believe that landing on the moon was impossible. Many of the pieces to do so were already in place. The physics were well established and had been for decades if not centuries. The rocket technology to achieve orbit was based on work completed during World War II itself, much of it from Nazi scientists who we scooped up after the war. The basic design of a capsule and a space suit was proven by the Russians. The complexities were enormous, but it was a question of when, not if. President Kennedy’s challenge was primarily about beating the Soviet Union during the Cold War, not whether getting to the moon was possible in the first place. This was not the case with the Manhattan Project, however, when no one, up to and including Oppenheimer himself, had any idea if building a nuclear weapon, much less one that could be transported by plane, was possible and even if it was, no one had ever even come close to refining the amount of uranium or plutonium required to do so.
In fact, when the project first began, the theoretical underpinnings of nuclear physics were so new that Oppenheimer himself founded the first department to teach it in the United States in 1936. By 1942, the possibility that the atom could be split at scale had been reasonably established by earlier experiments, but up until the Trinity test was successful in July 1945 many people aware of the program believed it was doomed to failure. As a White House Chief of Staff described it, “This is the biggest fool thing we’ve ever done. The bomb will never go off and I speak as an expert in explosives.” The project itself required Oppenheimer to recruit thousands of scientists and support staff and build what was essentially a small town in the middle of nowhere. At its peak, the lab in Los Alamos, New Mexico was home to 4,000 people who lived in 300 apartment buildings, 50 dorms, and 200 trailers, all of which was created from nothing. The overall project employed about 129,000 workers including approximately 84,500 in construction, 40,500 in plant operations, and 1,800 in military personnel. Further, the very idea of a lab that integrated the theoretical with the practical, featuring on premise workshops that could manufacture prototype components in almost real time was a relatively new concept, first established by Thomas Edison barely 70 years earlier. Oppenheimer’s lab was organized into divisions for theoretical physics, experimental physics, chemistry and metallurgy, and ordinance, each headed by its own scientist. The main facility at Los Alamos has received the most attention, but it was only a part of a tremendous undertaking that included more than a dozen other sites, many of which were built purely for the Manhattan Project. These facilities included groundbreaking centers at Oak Ridge and Chicago to refine uranium and plutonium on an industrial scale, using centrifuges, electromagnetic separation, gaseous diffusion, and thermal diffusion because no one knew which would be most effective. All told, approximately $2.5 billion was spent, the equivalent of over $42 billion today, and all if it occurred in absolute secrecy. Oppenheimer himself was subject to almost continuous surveillance for the rest of his life, and everyone at Los Alamos essentially gave up anything resembling privacy for more than two years. They did this on a journey into the unknown, developing technology that didn’t exist, and even as it came to fruition, proved especially dangerous and difficult to predict.
Oppenheimer’s personal transformation was equally miraculous in a sense. Prior to leading the project, he enjoyed the relaxed lifestyle of an academic in beautiful California, holding court with his students and colleagues at his comfortable, well-furnished home until the early hours of the morning, frequently not starting work until 11:00 AM or later. As an already eminent physicist and the eldest son of a wealthy family in the garment industry, Oppenheimer generally had the freedom to do what he pleased, when he pleased, up to and including what projects he chose to work on and what he chose to think about in the first place. He gave all of this up and more to lead the project, somehow transforming himself from a man who had never led anything in his life – indeed, one who was not known for any skill with experimental physics or manufacturing of any kind – into one of the most effective managers in the world at the time or perhaps ever. Instead of partying late into the evening, he was now at his desk at 7 AM. Rather than choosing what to work on, he reported into the military hierarchy, answerable to General Leslie R. Groves, he subjected himself to the intelligence community and their endless interrogations, and buried himself in paperwork and personnel issues given that leading a team of egotistical scientists convinced of their own genius presents its own unique challenges. “Oppenheimer at Los Alamos was very different from the Oppenheimer I had known,” explained Hans Bethe, the head of the theoretical physics division. “For one thing, Oppenheimer before the war was somewhat hesitant, diffident. The Oppenheimer at Los Alamos was a decisive executive.” “It was a different problem, a different attitude,” he added, “and he completely changed to fit the new role.” “He made you do the impossible,” explained Dorothy McKibbin, who helped provide housing and food for the staff. His work ethic became voracious, almost impossible to describe how quickly he absorbed and processed information. “He could read a paper – I saw this many times – and you know, it would be fifteen or twenty typed pages, and he’d say, ‘Well, let’s look it over and we’ll talk about it.’ Oppie would then flip through the pages in about five minutes and then he’d brief everybody on exactly the important points…he had a remarkable ability to absorb things so rapidly…I don’t there was anything around the lab of any significance that Oppie wasn’t fully familiar with and knew what was going on, ” explained Lee Dubridge. David Hawkins, a philosophy student who became Oppenheimer’s assistant, described his ability to lead this way, “One would listen patiently to an argument beginning, and finally Oppenheimer would summarize, and he would do it in such a way that there was no disagreement. It was a kind of magical trick that brought respect from all those people, some superior in terms of their scientific record.”
To describe this success as anything less than a personal and national triumph, one which remains unequaled in all of history, is simply to deny what thousands of people sacrificed, personally and professionally, in a desperate gamble to win the most catastrophic war, also in all of history. This leads directly to the next point, where Vox.com segways seamlessly into depicting the Japanese as innocent victims of a United States atrocity, as if we developed and dropped atomic bombs simply for the fun of it. “I was uncomfy watching yet another movie about tortured white male genius when the victims of the atrocities glossed over by the script — Japanese people, interned Japanese Americans, and Native Americans — had no voice,” declared Li Lai, a Taiwanese American media critic when the film was first released last July. “The film was only about the side that dropped the A-bomb,” Tsuyuko Iwanai, a Nagasaki resident, told NPR. “I wish they had included the side it was dropped on.” “Hollywood is a powerful tool for white perspectives,” explained Ponipate Rokolekutu, a professor of race and resistance studies at San Francisco State University. “They don’t want other histories to be known.” The history here, however, is exceedingly simple and the exact opposite of what they are claiming: Japan conducted a completely unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor, slaughtering 2,430 Americans without warning and injuring 1,178 others. They began the war and then proceeded to conduct it with a viciousness that is almost impossible to conceive at this point. In Okinawa alone, the Japanese unleashed over 250 suicide planes in a single raid. There were suicide boats and even suicide swimmers. Soldiers hid in booby trapped tunnels fighting to the last man and some 2,700 Americans were killed in the first nine days of fighting. Over 41,500 US soldiers died in the Pacific theater with over 23,000 marines and sailors, literally fighting over every inch of land for days on end. The dead might have been the lucky ones, however. Japan was not a signatory to the Geneva Conventions, and routinely treated prisoners of war worse than even the Nazis. This included outright executions, in addition to beatings, denial of food, and lack of treatment for injuries and disease. The Red Cross wasn’t allowed to deliver aid until January 1944, and even then the Japanese removed all drugs and medical supplies. Prisoners were also frequently forced into slave labor, barefoot and wearing only a loincloth. Daniel Crowley, a prisoner of war in the Philippines described it this way, “You worked, or you were beaten; if you objected, you were beaten to death.” “Whether they are destroyed individually or in groups or however it is done, with mass bombing, poisonous smoke, poisons, drowning, decapitation, or what, dispose of them as the situation dictates,” one set of orders for the treatment of prisoners read, urging Japanese soldiers “to annihilate them all, and not to leave any traces.”
The treatment of Americans was relatively civil compared to the atrocities committed by Japan in Asia, where Japanese soldiers “routinely raped, tortured, and murdered civilians in China, the Philippines, Korea, Burma, Indonesia, and other Asian countries,” according to The New Republic. During the “Rape of Nanking” 300,000 Chinese civilians were murdered – about 50% more than the combined death toll of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – and 20,000 women were raped in the first month. Other women were enslaved as sexual objects for Japanese forces, known as “comfort women,” many of whom were teenagers at the time. Japanese war crimes also included experimentation on human subjects, a program known as “Unit 731” focused on bacteriological warfare. Unit 731 intentionally spread the plague, cholera, and anthrax, killing an unknown number of people measured in the thousands or more. This is the reality of the war Japan conducted, both that they began in it by their own choice and prosecuted it ferociously and at times barbarically. They were also unrepentant up until the very end. Even after Germany surrendered, Japan continued to fight, at times even fiercer than before. The nuclear bombs were dropped while preparing for a land invasion known as Operation Downfall that was expected to result in casualties on a scale unseen even in World War II. In late July 1945, shortly before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the War Department estimated between 1.7 and 4 million US casualties, 400,000 to 800,00 of them dead along with an incredible 5 to 10 million Japanese. While it has become commonplace to believe Japan was on the verge of surrender and President Harry S. Truman proceeded with nuclear weapons almost entirely to intimidate Russia, a view that Oppenheimer himself embraced later in life, this is a counterfactual that cannot be proven.
What can be proven is simple: Truman warned Japan about the bomb beforehand and urged them to surrender. On July 26, 1945, the Potsdam Declaration was issued, calling “upon the government of Japan to proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces, and to provide proper and adequate assurances of their good faith in such action. The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction.” They refused to yield, and they refused again even after the first bomb was dropped, acting like they are innocent victims and were the aggressors is a vile slander, a complete upending of what actually happened. The goal, unfortunately, is obvious: Progressives loathe the United States in particular and the Western World in general. Therefore, all things must be twisted to that end, whitewashed if you will. In truth, the Japanese were the aggressors, responsible for millions of deaths and uncounted war crimes. They aspired to be the very colonialist, imperial power that progressives claim to loathe, but the ironclad rules of intersectionality make them the victim when the United States is involved. We can, in retrospect, grieve the lives lost, but if any country can ever be said to deserve no mercy, it was Japan in 1945.
On a side note, director Christopher Nolan has responded to the criticism of not featuring Japanese perspectives by stating the obvious. “To depart from [Oppenheimer’s experience] would betray the terms of the storytelling. He learned about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the radio — the same as the rest of the world,” providing yet another example of the perils of woke art criticism.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 