What the revisionists get wrong about America’s nuclear bombings

The use of nuclear weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki is hardly a festive subject. But given that in recent conversations with President Macron, Vladimir Putin has referenced Hiroshima as a precedent that he could use to justify the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine, it seems a timely moment to evaluate the subject. And this is especially the case when the case for America using the bomb against Japan has more and more come under attack.

The debate about the use of nuclear weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been increasingly won by America’s revisionist historians. In 1945, 85 per cent of Americans thought that the use of these atom bombs was justified. Sixty years later that level of support had fallen to 57 per cent. In 2020 a YouGov America poll showed that 52 per cent of young Americans thought that the United States should apologise to Japan. In the age of woke it is perhaps not surprising that opinion has turned hostile to American use of the atom bomb and that it is considered immoral and imperialistic.

After the war the ‘traditional’ reason for dropping the atom bomb ­– ending the war and saving American lives – came under heavy attack from liberal and New Left historians of the 60s and 70s such as Gar Alperovitz, Barton Bernstein, Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird.