Hindsight, Hiroshima, and a Hypothetical Hot War

I've been reading a lot about nuclear weapons. I have since had a very scary thought. We'll turn that very scary thought to a very brief thought experiment.

Let's suppose for a moment a single, seemingly slight alteration to our own history. Let us imagine a scenario where we, the United States of America, won the war in the Pacific without resorting to nuclear weapons. Pretend that Harry Truman went the other way and chose to win the war the old fashioned way, a la Operation Downfall. Or alternately, pretend that the Manhattan Project was unable to complete its aims until after the end of the war. Or imagine a successful assassination plot against Emperor Hirohito. Or a seemingly implausible scenario where Japan surrenders of its own accord for a reason of your choice.

We have of course been told countless times about the Japanese bushido code and their supposed reluctance to surrender even in the face of inevitable defeat. I am not going to debate this here as it is beyond the scope of this thought experiment. Whatever rationalizations you decide to employ are up to you -- all I ask is that you attempt to imagine an end to the Second World War that does not involve the deployment of nukes. The details of that end are not terribly important to my argument here.

Now then, the war is over. And the world has entered the nuclear age. The first nations to develop this power are of course, just as in our own history, the United States and the United Soviet Socialist Republics. And tensions between these powers are still every bit as strained as in our postwar history, as of course the war in Europe concluded in precisely the same manner.

Except in this particular history, no nuclear weapons have yet been used in wartime. Nobody has seen their effect on human life firsthand. And in such a case, might the trigger fingers of our superpowers have been perhaps a bit itchier?

Might Truman have been willing to give MacArthur more leeway with atomic warfare during the Korean War?

Might the Cuban Missile Crisis have resolved itself in an entirely different manner?

If you wish to delve into more detail and make this perhaps a bit more frightening, let us imagine a Harry Truman who refused to bomb Japan and allowed the Pacific Theater to drag on into 1946 and 1947. A Harry Truman who, as a result, lost the 1948 election to a candidate far more hawkish and conservative than Thomas Dewey. Imagine a United States in the late 1940s who was both deeply resentful of letting the war with Japan drag on while sitting on its budding nuclear stockpile, and simultaneously oblivious of the actual consequences of nuclear devastation. Such a superpower would not have allowed the Cold War to proceed as it did.

Now, to be perfectly clear, I am not attempting to rationalize our bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On the contrary, I have always been rather skeptical of this country's justifications of its use of atomic power to end the war. I understand the stakes were quite high. But I am simultaneously repulsed by the scale of devastation wrought, particularly against civilians. The traditional debate on this subject is somewhat of an aside to my own argument, but I feel it is important to state my feelings on it nonetheless.

A history where nuclear weapons were never developed, or never deployed, would of course be preferable to any of these histories, and I invite you to imagine one.

However, if we are to assume that the deployment of nuclear weapons in wartime is inevitable -- and I am not necessarily convinced that it is. Or if we are to allow their wartime deployment as a "given" for the sake of logical argument. Then I am suddenly struck with the notion that the world as a whole got off rather light. That we were, in a sense, lucky.

Lucky -- and I don't use that word lightly -- that at the point in history where those nuclear weapons were deployed in a theatre of war, there was only a single nuclear power on our planet.

We saw their wartime devastation at a time when there was nobody to retaliate. Had their development been delayed a mere five years, that would not be the case. The USA and the USSR would be two powers sitting on a grand new display of power and no real-life example to dissuade them from deploying it.

If nothing else, Hiroshima and Nagasaki taught us lessons. I am sure that brings little solace to the victims and their families. But I am nonetheless horrified at the idea of a pair of superpowers who never learned from them.