The President sees a moral equivalence between an aggressor and a defender. In his Hiroshima address, the President said that “the [Second World] war was fought among the wealthiest and most powerful of nations.” He makes it sound as if both sides were equally responsible for the war or we had no good reason for dropping the bomb. A trip through the late 1930s and early 1940s might provide the context that the President ignores: Mussolini’s Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935; militaristic Japan invaded China 1937; Hitler’s Germany invaded Poland in 1939 (after militarizing the Rhineland in 1936, seizing the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia in 1938; taking most of the rest of that nation in 1939; forcing a union with Austria in 1938; and finally, after signing a non-aggression pact with Stalin’s USSR, invading Poland in September 1939. (Stalin’s USSR invaded Poland from the opposite direction about two weeks later). Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and France all fell before Hitler’s conquering armies by June of 1940; meanwhile, Hitler had taken Denmark and Norway, Mussolini attacked Albania and Greece and Japan launched its attacks on Singapore, the Philippines and the raid on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, and soon had conquered Indochina, Burma, Malaya, and large chunks of the Dutch East Indies and many islands in the Pacific.
The President stated that “the image of the mushroom cloud that rose into [the] skies[of Hiroshima]” is our [starkest] reminder of humanity’s core contradiction.” Oh, please – Not the Nazi blitzkrieg storming across an inadequately prepared Europe? Not Japanese dive bombers and torpedo planes destroying American, British and Dutch power in Asia? Not the Italian army gassing and strafing opponents whose most powerful weapon often was a spear? The mushroom cloud in President Obama’s nightmare did not start the war – it ended it. Atomic weapons have been used twice in conflicts: once at Hiroshima and again three days later at Nagasaki. They brought the war to an end – and perhaps it is their awesome power that has prevented direct shooting wars between the major powers since then. Several hundred thousand people were killed in the cites where atomic bombs were dropped, but tens of millions of people were killed in the war. The use of the bombs was decisive, because it convinced Japan to end the war, which foreclosed the need to invade the home islands. Had the bombs not existed, or had they not been dropped, the casualties that would have resulted from a US/British Empire invasion of Japan would have been enormous; perhaps a million among the invaders and maybe five to ten times as many among the defenders.
Choosing to “avoid conflict" works if both sides work to avoid it, but when one conquers by subversion or revolution or invasion (such as the Communist takeovers of Eastern and Central Europe, Indo-China, Cuba, and some other places) and the other side desires to avoid conflict until it is too late, it is a recipe for defeat. For an historical example, check the rise of the aggressors in the 1930s. For a current example, study the rise of ISIS.
Rather than lamenting the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as being evil and fearsome, we should view it as a means by which we won the most costly war in human history in terms of lives; a war that the losers started and one that the winners tried not to fight.
We are glad that the President did not apologize, for the US has nothing to apologize for. President Truman made the correct decision to drop the bomb, and his decision did not cost lives, it saved them.