LETTER: Quick end to WWII justified A-bombs

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by Bolie Williams

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Without getting too much into the moral issues involved in dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I would like to point out some problems with the "Anniversary of V-J Day, A-bombs reminds us of nuclear horror" article ( Thresher , Sept. 8).

First, Hiroshima was a military target. The city housed a Japanese military headquarters as well as a shipyard and manufacturing facilities which made military hardware used to kill people.

Second, the many soldiers who died at Pearl Harbor were not "guilty" in contrast to the "innocent" civilians. We were not at war with Japan when they ambushed us.

None of those soldiers were involved in trying to attack or kill any Japanese. We didn't even want to enter the war at the time.

Continuing on in the article, I can't find anything about nuclear weapons in the Geneva Convention before 1963, which is after we used the A-bomb.

I don't really understand the "Two wrongs did not make a right in this case" as the A-bomb was a weapon we used to end the war.

Certainly it killed a lot of people, but we had been firebombing Tokyo and other cities in both Japan and Germany, killing more people than the A-bomb killed.

While all of this killing is bad, the A-bomb was primarily different in that it was a single bomb with a much more dramatic effect.

The dead are just as dead, whether killed by an A-bomb, napalm or a bullet.

War is hell, but that doesn't mean that one shouldn't fight back when attacked.

I personally feel that the A-bomb was justified in that it drastically reduced the number of U.S. casualties by forcing an early Japanese surrender.

The second bomb was only dropped because the Japanese still refused to surrender after the first bomb was dropped.

I realize that many Japanese died, but if we had had to take Japan island by island, many Japanese would have died as well.

Bolie Williams IV

System Administrator

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

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