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Location: Nashville, Tennessee, United States

8/19/2003

The Enola Gay: A Life Saver

The Enola Gay, beautifully restored, has gone on display at the Smithsonian. No single plane did more to save lives in World War II than the Enola Gay, which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, hastening the end of World War II in the Pacific. Except perhaps the second plane that dropped the second atomic bomb, on Nagasaki.

Naturally, some anti-nukeniks in Japan aren't happy. Some are complaining the display is meant as "justification" for the dropping of the A-bomb on Japan. Uh, no, we already had justification. See: 1941, December 7. It's a date that will live in infamy though not, apparently, in Japanese history classes. Here's the deal: Japan attacked the U.S.; we fought back. We were never the aggressor in the Pacific, we were always battling to defeat the aggressor. To win the war conventionally by invading Japan itself would have brought an estimated one million casualties on our side - with Japanese casualties certainly much higher. Instead, we dropped A-bombs on two small Japanese cities, killed about 230,000 people, and lost nobody on our side. After Hiroshima, the Japanese didn't believe we had more A-bombs, and vowed to fight on. After Nagasaki, they feared we might have many more - and might use the next one on Tokyo. Game over.

The Enola Gay saved lives, as did the U.S. Air Force plane that bombed Nagasaki. That plane is on display at the United States Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio. Here's a webpage about that plane and its crew.

President Truman faced a horrifying decision in deciding whether or not to use the atomic bomb. On the one hand, he could order a conventional invasion and eventually win the war at a cost of millions of dead and injured. On the other hand, he could destroy Hiroshima, killing perhaps a quarter million civilians, and hope it induced Japan to surrender. But of course they might not surrender. It might take nuking two cities. Or three. Or four. Or more ...

Can you imagine having to make such a decision? Can you imagine trying to decide which was right, which was most likely to shorten the war and spare the most lives - which was the more moral way to go?

History tells us Truman made the right decision - a decision that vastly shortened the war and vastly reduced the Japanese and American death toll. But had he made the other choice - to forego use of the such a horrifyingly destructive weapon and order a conventional invasion, I couldn't fault him either.

This year, we faced another homicidal regime, Saddam Hussein's tyranny, and another difficult moral question. Should we invade now, and prevent him from ever deploying weapons of mass destruction against Israel, or against us someday? Or should we wait, and risk the failure of economic sanctions, inspections and diplomacy to prevent him from eventually attaining suitcase-sized nuclear weaponry capable of wiping out a few million Americans - or mass-murdering the 6 million Jews who call Israel home - in a single detonation?

And if we waited, what then? Threaten him with mutual assured destruction? As I wrote back on April 10, that is simply not a moral choice if you have another:

George McGovern says we shouldn't have invaded Iraq. One reason: even if Saddam did have "a few weapons of mass destruction," it is assumed that "he would insure his incineration by attacking the United States." In other words, McGovern says, the moral position would have been to threaten to incinerate 5 million people in Baghdad if Saddam ever used WMDs, but it was immoral to remove Saddam now, at the cost of only a few hundred dead Iraqi civilians. Why? Because, to McGovern, striking first is wrong, but striking back after an attack is okay. But it is a sick, sick mind that believes the moral position is to do nothing until the only thing that we can do is incinerate 5 million innocent people - especially when the alternative, the thing we in fact have done, can prevent the 5-million-dead scenario at the cost of only a few hundred civilians dead now.
Yes, a few hundred - perhaps a few thousand - Iraqi civilians died. But had we not acted now, a few years from now - - motivated by anger and revenge rather than aiming for prevention - we might have had to murder five million Iraqis because one madman set off a suitcase nuke that killed millions in Tel Aviv. Or New York. Or your town.

This is not a perfect world. Some moral decisions do not involve black-and-white choices. We made the right choice sending the Enola Gay to Hiroshima. And history will say we made the right choice sending the troops into Iraq.