“As the bomb fell over Hiroshima and exploded, we saw an entire city disappear. I wrote in my log the words: ‘My God, what have we done?”.
That was Captain Robert Lewis, co-pilot of the Enola Gay (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enola_Gay (2017)), the bomber plane which dropped the atomic bomb Little Boy on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on 6 August, 1945.
Imagine being a pilot, steering your bomber plane over a city full of children. Imagine opening up your plane’s fuselage and dropping a bomb. Then imagine a child; someone's son or daughter, burning underneath.
The bombing of Hiroshima is, at first glance, a controversy about morals, ethics and justice. That is a big part of it. But another largely ignored part of it is how, in it’s core, it is not just a controversy about right or…show more content… And why was Hiroshima dropped if Japan was going to surrender because of the aforementioned Soviet involvement ?
America needed to detonate Little Boy on Japan (as explained in my last argument), and the Soviets were on the verge of causing the Japanese surrender, rendering their plan to drop the bomb useless.
Had Soviet intervention in Japan immediately triggered a Japanese surrender, America’s battle in the Pacific would be a) pointless and fruitless and b) their lost opportunity to detonate Little Boy. Hiroshima was the first move in the Nuclear Arms Race, Cold War and even, to an extent, the Space Race.
Onto my third point: the bomb was a perversion of justice, and a war crime
According to international law, Hiroshima is a war crime by a) intentionally killing civilians and b) destroying civilian property. This is also supported by the Geneva convention (War crime. (2017, November 06). Retrieved November 12, 2017, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crime#Geneva_Conventions). From a judicial perspective, Hiroshima was an unjustifiable war crime then, and