EEE会議（Re:「ヒロシマ原爆の責任」：New York Times論文）.............................................2003.8.6
今日はヒロシマ原爆５８回目の記念日です。イラク、イラン、北朝鮮問題などのせいか、米国内でも原爆使用の歴史的、倫理的意味を問う論調が例年になく多いようです。しかし、結論的には、やはりあの時点では使用せざるを得なかったという意見が大多数のようです。その１例として、本日のNew York Times掲載の著名コラムニスト、ニコラス・クリストフの論説をご紹介します。米内光政（海軍大臣）や迫水久常（内閣書記官長）が言ったように、（陸軍が徹底抗戦を叫ぶ状況下では）原爆投下は「天祐」であった、もし使わなければ、もっと悲惨な結果を齎したであろう、と彼は結論つけています。
ただ、小生は不勉強で知らなかったのですが、８月８日（広島の２日後、長崎の１日前）に爆撃で墜落した戦闘機パイロットのマーカス・マクディルダ(Marcus McDilda)という男が、自らは原爆のことは全然知らなかったにも関わらず、日本軍の厳しい尋問で、「まだ１００発原爆が残っており、数日後に東京にも落とす計画だ」と喋ったことが、情報として天皇周辺に伝わり、それが降伏の決断につながったというのは、初耳です。実際には長崎の後は１発も残っていなかったと、戦後リリエンソール（初代原子力委員長）は証言しています。因みに、愛知県三河生まれの小生は、長篠合戦(1575年）の際、武田方に捕らわれた鳥居巣強右衛門勝商が「織田の大軍が今すぐ応援に駆けつけるぞ」と大見得を切ったという故事を思い出しました。原爆論議は諸説紛紛ですが、１つのご参考として。 --KK
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Tomorrow will mark the anniversary of one of the most morally contentious events of the 20th century, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. And after 58 years, there's an emerging consensus: we Americans have blood on our hands.
There has been a chorus here and abroad that the U.S. has little moral standing on the issue of weapons of mass destruction because we were the first to use the atomic bomb. As Nelson Mandela said of Americans in a speech on Jan. 31, "Because they decided to kill innocent people in Japan, who are still suffering from that, who are they now to pretend that they are the policeman of the world?"
The traditional American position, that our intention in dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and then Nagasaki was to end the war early and save lives, has been poked full of holes. Revisionist historians like Gar Alperovitz argue persuasively that Washington believed the bombing militarily unnecessary (except to establish American primacy in the postwar order) because, as the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey put it in 1946, "in all probability" Japan would have surrendered even without the atomic bombs.
Yet this emerging consensus is, I think, profoundly mistaken.
While American scholarship has undercut the U.S. moral position, Japanese historical research has bolstered it. The Japanese scholarship, by historians like Sadao Asada of Doshisha University in Kyoto, notes that Japanese wartime leaders who favored surrender saw their salvation in the atomic bombing. The Japanese military was steadfastly refusing to give up, so the peace faction seized upon the bombing as a new argument to force surrender.
"We of the peace party were assisted by the atomic bomb in our endeavor to end the war," Koichi Kido, one of Emperor Hirohito's closest aides, said later.
Wartime records and memoirs show that the emperor and some of his aides wanted to end the war by summer 1945. But they were vacillating and couldn't prevail over a military that was determined to keep going even if that meant, as a navy official urged at one meeting, "sacrificing 20 million Japanese lives."
The atomic bombings broke this political stalemate and were thus described by Mitsumasa Yonai, the navy minister at the time, as a "gift from heaven."
Without the atomic bombings, Japan would have continued fighting by inertia. This would have meant more firebombing of Japanese cities and a ground invasion, planned for November 1945, of the main Japanese islands. The fighting over the small, sparsely populated islands of Okinawa had killed 14,000 Americans and 200,000 Japanese, and in the main islands the toll would have run into the millions.
"The atomic bomb was a golden opportunity given by heaven for Japan to end the war," Hisatsune Sakomizu, the chief cabinet secretary in 1945, said later.
Some argue that the U.S. could have demonstrated the bomb on an uninhabited island, or could have encouraged surrender by promising that Japan could keep its emperor. Yes, perhaps, and we should have tried. We could also have waited longer before dropping the second bomb, on Nagasaki.
But, sadly, the record suggests that restraint would not have worked. The Japanese military ferociously resisted surrender even after two atomic bombings on major cities, even after Soviet entry into the war, even when it expected another atomic bomb ・ on Tokyo.
One of the great tales of World War II concerns an American fighter pilot named Marcus McDilda who was shot down on Aug. 8 and brutally interrogated about the atomic bombs. He knew nothing, but under torture he "confessed" that the U.S. had 100 more nuclear weapons and planned to destroy Tokyo "in the next few days." The war minister informed the cabinet of this grim news ・but still adamantly opposed surrender. In the aftermath of the atomic bombing, the emperor and peace faction finally insisted on surrender and were able to prevail.
It feels unseemly to defend the vaporizing of two cities, events that are
regarded in some quarters as among the most monstrous acts of the 20th century.
But we owe it to history to appreciate that the greatest tragedy of Hiroshima
was not that so many people were incinerated in an instant, but that in a
complex and brutal world, the alternatives were
worse.