It’s the 81st anniversary today of the dropping of an atomic bomb by the U.S. on the Japanese city of Nagasaki (above). Three days earlier on August 6, 1945 a first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. The two bombings, which took place in the final days of World War II, killed between 110,000 and 210,000 people, according to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
In commemorating those who perished in these terrible bombings, I share today the following excerpt from “The Crime of Nagasaki: The 'Forgotten’ A-Bomb City,” Greg Mitchell’s 2011 article published in The Nation. Mitchell is the author of numerous books about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, including Atomic Cover-Up: Two U.S. Soldiers, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Greatest Movie Never Made.
In many ways, Nagasaki is the modern A-bomb city, the city with perhaps the most meaning for us today. For one thing, when the plutonium bomb exploded above Nagasaki it made the uranium-type bomb dropped on Hiroshima obsolete.
And then there’s this. “The rights and wrongs of Hiroshima are debatable,” Telford Taylor, the chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, once observed, “but I have never heard a plausible justification of Nagasaki” — which he labeled a war crime. Kurt Vonnegut Jr., who experienced the firebombing of Dresden at close hand, said much the same thing. “The most racist, nastiest act by this country, after human slavery, was the bombing of Nagasaki,” he once said. “Not of Hiroshima, which might have had some military significance. But Nagasaki was purely blowing away yellow men, women, and children. I’m glad I’m not a scientist because I’d feel so guilty now.”
. . . When they’d learned of the Hiroshima attack, the scientists at Los Alamos generally expressed satisfaction that their work had paid off. But many of them took Nagasaki quite badly. Some would later use the words “sick” or “nausea” to describe their reaction.
As months and then years passed, few Americans denounced as a moral wrong the targeting of entire cities for extermination. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, however, declared that we never should have hit Japan “with that awful weapon.” The left-wing writer Dwight MacDonald cited America’s “decline to barbarism” for dropping “half-understood poisons” on a civilian population. His conservative counterpart, columnist and magazine editor David Lawrence, lashed out at the “so-called civilized side” in the war for dropping bombs on cities that kill hundreds of thousands of civilians. However much we rejoice in victory, he wrote, “we shall not soon purge ourselves of the feeling of guilt which prevails among us. . . . What a precedent for the future we have furnished to other nations even less concerned than we with scruples or ideals! Surely we cannot be proud of what we have done. If we state our inner thoughts honestly, we are ashamed of it.”
To read Mitchell’s article in its entirety, click here.
Related Off-site Links:
Nagasaki Marks 81st Atomic Bomb Anniversary as Mayor Says Nuclear Deterrence Only Increases Risk – Mari Yamaguchi (The Associated Press, August 9, 2026).
The U.S. Should Apologize for Bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki – Olivia Alperstein (Institute for Policy Studies, August 5, 2020).
See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Christianity and Nagasaki
• Commemorating the Lives Lost in Hiroshima 80 Years Ago Today
• Remembering Dorothy Day’s Response to the U.S. Bombing of Hiroshima
• Chris Hedges: Quote of the Day – August 6, 2012
• Prayer of the Week – August 7, 2011
• The Challenge of Peace
• A Dangerous State of Mind
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