OK, I can’t resist taking the bait, partly because many younger people do not fully understand the circumstances leading up to our dropping an atomic bomb.
Jon Swan’s Dec. 1 letter, “Baldacci’s Castro criticism could be applied to U.S., too,” ends with the phrase “the needless dropping by the United States of an atomic bomb.”
He can call it “needless,” but I suspect that he doesn’t understand that the Japanese had made it quite clear that with a continuation of conventional warfare, they would fight to the last man with civilians as well as soldiers, probably resulting in over a million Allied casualties and, equally important, many millions of Japanese casualties.
Conventional multi-plane air raids were resulting in about as many casualties as a single atomic bomb but were not enough to convince the Japanese to surrender. The bottom line was that the atomic bombs saved millions of lives.
For a more detailed documentation, I recommend reading Bill O’Reilly’s “Killing the Rising Sun.”
John Parker
Falmouth
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