The Daily Signal - Victor Davis Hanson: The Atomic Bombs Dropped in Japan Were Not 'Satanic'

Episode Date: August 27, 2026

It's August, so we have the annual debate over the dropping of two atomic bombs, one on August 6, the uranium bomb called "Little Boy" that was dropped on the dual-use target, military and industrial Japanese city of Hiroshima, and then three days later on Nagasaki with a plutonium bomb.    “The dropping of the atomic bomb, it was not a satanic enterprise...Good men made a bad weapon to stop far worse men from killing innocents,” argues Victor Davis Hanson on today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In a Few Words.”  🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸The Counterrevolution: The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA MovementThe Daily Signal, the proud producers of “Victor Davis Hanson: In a Few Words,” has a special limited time offer:  With a monthly donation $28, you’ll become BOTH a Signal Elite Supporter AND receive a copy of “The Counterrevolution: The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement”Click here to order: https://secured.dailysignal.com/support-daily-signal-today/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=podcast&utm_campaign=signalelite&utm_content=260824-vdh-book-podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Daily Signal podcast, where we provide intelligence for the intelligent. Now, without further ado, here's today's take. It's August, so we have the annual debate over the dropping of two atomic bombs, one on August 6th, and then three days later on Nagasaki with a plutonium bomb. Both of them killed somewhere between 100 and 130,000 Japanese soldiers and civilians. People have said, we didn't need to do it. isn't indicative of America. This is the only time in the history of nuclear warfare capability

that anybody's actually deployed it in anything other than a test. So why did we do it? Hello, this is Victor Davis-Hanson for the Daily Signal. It's August, so we have the annual debate over the dropping of two atomic bombs, one on August 6th, the uranium bomb called Little man that was dropped on the dual-use target, military and industrial Japanese city of Hiroshima, and then three days later on Nagasaki with a plutonium bomb, although it wasn't not quite

as powerful as the uranium bomb. Both of them killed somewhere between 100 and 130,000 Japanese soldiers and civilians. So for the last eight decades, people have said we didn't need to do it. This isn't indicative of America. This is the only time in the history of nuclear warfare capability that anybody's actually deployed it in anything other than a test. So why did we do it? Well, one thing was the European theater had been closed with the surrender of Germany on May 9, 1945, and then we thought the war in Japan would quickly end. And of course, it didn't. It went on all of May, all of June, all of July, and all of August, four months. We should remember another thing.

1945 was the year closest to the surrender. I mean, Japan formally surrendered on September 2, 1945, but counterintuitively, it was the worst year of the Pacific War in which more Americans died in that year than in all the other years combined, 1945. Why then did we drop the bomb? Well, one of the reasons was in that terrible year we had just landed on Okinawa. We thought Okinawa would be an easy target because it was near the end of the war and we had learned a lot from near catastrophes by invading Pelelu, Tarawa, Iwojima. But the opposite happened. Okinawa was the bloody island invasion of the entire war.

50,000 Americans were killed, wounded, or missing. 12,000 were killed that we know of. Japan lost probably 120 to 130,000 Japanese soldiers and Okinawa militia and civilians. And people said, if this happened, right near what we think, thought would be the end of the war. Can you imagine what the planned invasion of Japan is? Japan has 20 times the resources they had on Okinawa, the homeland. We were going to invade in 1945 and 1946, the two main islands of Japan. And given the resources they have that are 20 times larger than Okinawa, we can expect a million casualties. 20 times the 50,000 who perished or were

casualties on Okinawa. Now, there's a lot of confusion about that exegesis. People said, well, Japan was defeated. Why did we do it? Curtis LeMay said, I have burned down 50% of the industrial and civilian urban core of Japan. My B-29s, I have 1,000 of them, and I've got 5,000 ordered, and we're going to put them on Okinawa, and that's only 900 miles from Tokyo. It's not 1,500 like the Marianas, and we'll use both bases and we'll burn the whole city of city structure or urban core of Japan down. He would have. In other words, the atomic bombs saved Japanese lives and American lives because if we wanted to avoid an invasion, we would have just kept the incendiary raids. I should remind everybody on March 9, 1945, the first firebombing of Tokyo was the most deadly attack.

in the history of warfare. Over 100,000 people died from B-29 bombings. I should add another thing is that Ernest King, Chief of Naval Operations, said, we didn't need to drop the bomb because I wanted to keep going. And what keep going meant, he had the biggest fleet in the history of civilization that was larger than all the fleets in the world by 1945. And he had mined the harbors. He had mined the passageways. He had blockaded the exits and entries into Japanese ports. He said, we can starve them out. Again, more casualties than you could dream of. So whether we let LeMay burn the country down or King starve it out, or we invaded, whatever scenario you chose, they were far more egregious in terms of life's loss than the dropping of the atomic bomb. People said, well, we just did it because

we didn't trust Stalin anymore. Our ally, he had shown that all of the Eastern Europe and we just dropped the bomb to deter him. Well, that didn't make much sense because Joseph Stalin, by 1945, it absorbed all of Eastern Europe, 45, 46, 47. And we had the bomb and he didn't. He wasn't deterred. He absorbed North Korea. He ensured that China was going to flip in October of 1949. So from that period of August 6th, when we had the bomb, 1945 to August 20th when Stalin had the bomb, that four-year monopoly on our part of nuclear weapons didn't deter him all. So we didn't drop the bomb to deter him because we knew it wouldn't deter him. He had a huge 12 million man army. And we knew that spies in the New Mexico Manhattan Project

and in the British government and German physicists that went to Russia after the war would ensure that he was going to get the bomb very quickly. So the last thing we wanted to do was to show Stalin we might use the bomb on him when we knew he'd get it anyway in three or four years. Some people said, well, it was racist. Why didn't you drop it on Germany? The bomb was intended to drop on Germany. That's why Einstein wrote the letter to the U.S. government. But nobody thought, A, that Germany would collapse before Japan at that point in the war in 40, 41, 42, and no one thought that the bomb would take so long to develop. And by the time it was deplorable, by the time it was deplorable, Nazi Germany, Italy were out of the war.

Some people said, well, we could have dropped it right in Tokyo Bay and shown the emperor. And General Tojo, this is what's going to happen to. It sounds like a good idea, but we should remember we let off a bomb, the plutonium bomb on July 15th of 19th. 1945 right after the Okinawa conquest, and that was one bomb. We only had two more bombs. We weren't going to have any more bombs until October or November. The Japanese militarists were betting that we didn't have anymore. So even after we dropped the first bomb on Eroshma, the second one on Nagasaki,

there was an attempted coup on August 15th. Think of that. It's just six days after the second bomb was dropped. And the Japanese officer's argument was they don't have any more bombs. And we didn't have any more bombs. They were just lucky that the coup was foiled and the emperor was able to address the country. Another thing, these bombs don't come out of the head of zoos. They're very hard to produce.

They're very dangerous. And they're very unstable. And they're very hard to get from the United States five to six thousand miles. in the Pacific. The USS Indianapolis, a heavy U.S. cruiser, delivered little boy, the uranium bomb, to Tynion Island. And guess what happened? It delivered the bomb materials. Four days later, it was sunk. You remember the reference to it in Jaws. The crew was decimated by sharks in the water. Seventy-five percent of the people on the Indianapolis, the crewmen were killed. if that Japanese sub had torpedoed the Indianapolis just five days earlier,

it would have destroyed one of the two remaining bombs. The second thing is we never tested the little boy uranium bomb. It was very volatile, unstable. We never made another deplorable uranium bomb again of that caliber. The trigger mechanism was very dangerous. In fact, they didn't even arm the bomb until it was in the air because they were afraid of a crash on Tinian would blow up the entire island. And so we had one unstable bomb.

We didn't know if it was going to work. We didn't know what was going on. And it was almost destroyed in transit to Tinian. The second thing, it's very hard to put a 10,000 pound bomb on a B-29 and fly 1,600 miles over the Japanese mainland and then fly all the way back with very slim margin of gas. The second mission to Nagasaki did not have Paul Tibbets, the captain of the B-29 and Goligay. They had a less qualified officer. The plane was called box car.

Guess what happened? There was a fuel mishap, and it was not able to transfer fuel from the reserve tanks into the B-29. It got over Kukura, the primary target. It was cloudy, and they made the decision to circle around weight. for the other observation planes and see if the weather would break, and it didn't. And therefore, they went to Nagasaki, which was not the intended target, and guess what? It was cloudy. And they were going to turn around with an operable plutonium bomb until they found a window.

They missed the target by three or four miles, the exact place on Nagasaki. And after dropping the bomb, they couldn't get to Iwo Jima. They couldn't get home. They had to make an emergency landing on recent. conquered Okinawa. What am I trying to say that dropping of the atomic bomb, it was not a satanic enterprise. It was not demonic, as Tucker Carlson recently said. He said supernatural forces had created it, nuclear weapons. Good men made a bad weapon to stop far worse men from killing innocence. And that's about the story of the atomic bombs of August. Thank you very much.

with Victor Davis-Hansson for the Daily Signal. Thank you for tuning in to the Daily Signal. Please like, share, and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. You can also check out my own website at victorhansen.com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition.