LETTER: Column wrongly condemns role of A-bombs in ending world war

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by Howard Cooper

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I was both impressed and dismayed by James Ling's opinions on the Hiroshima bombings.

I was impressed by his clearly heartfelt plea for world peace but dismayed at his apparent ignorance of the period that he was discussing.

He states that the number of U.S. civilian casualties during the second world war was "probably two." It was a breathtaking statement that shows Mr. Ling's lack of knowledge of the true casualty figures at Pearl Harbor: the Sunday school children killed in the so-called "balloon bombings," the civilian losses in the Philippines and the many thousands of civilian merchant seamen that were lost during the war.

He goes on to state that the use of the atomic bomb was a breach of the Geneva Convention. I question, "Has he read the convention?" If he took the trouble to do so, he would find that the convention (to which incidently the Japanese refused to be party to) deals with the treatment of captured servicemen and civilians.

Mr. Ling protests that attacks should be limited to military bases yet does not mention that Hiroshima was the main port of the Imperial Japanese Navy.

Nor does he define what he would consider a military target: a rifle range, an oil refinery, a factory staffed by women making bullets?

Considering strictly military units, is Mr. Ling aware that the penalty for refusing military service in Japan was death? Are those 16- and 17-year-old boys who were dragged from their Tokyo homes to serve a cause they barely understood less "innocent" than the civilians left behind?

Is it morally better to kill a reluctant conscript than a jingoistic civilian?

Finally, Mr. Ling seems to imply that the the atomic bombing was something uniquely horrible. Is he aware that more than one million Japanese civilians died in routine air raids before the dropping of the two bombs?

Is it somehow morally better that this million died over a five-month period rather than a five-second one?

Mr. Ling's opening story about the little girl was far more saccharine than substance.

The tragedy of war is that it is fought by people on each side who are just like you and me and who, by accident of birth, are separated by language, religion or genetics.

Do you really feel better, Mr. Ling, knowing that there are many rabid Klansmen who are the fathers of cute 2-year-old girls that they love and adore?

The abolition of any one given weapon will not result in world peace. Peace will only be won on the most difficult and treacherous battleground of all: the few inches between a person's ears.

Howard Cooper

Professor

Department of Chemistry

This item appeared in the Opinion section of the September 15, 1995 issue.

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