tomroushonline.com

Conflict is inevitable. Nature enters into conflict as a part of its natural design. The fundamental elements of chemistry conflict. The weather is a product of competing forces. The flora and fauna conflict, more often than not, violently, and there are winners and losers. The world as we know it is the outcome of conflicts from the past, and the future is made by the conflicts of today.

The potential for conflict is infinite, but the responses to conflict are not. There can be a war, with a winner or loser. There can be a negotiation, with the competitors deciding the negotiated outcome is better than the cost and risk of a war. There can be appeasement, where one side gives in to avoid a war. And there can be deterrence, where one or both sides see the conflict, but decline to move forward to open war because the cost is too great.

In this short series, we shall look at examples of each of the outcomes of human conflict.

Victory

US President Harry Truman

Abraham Lincoln had the beginnings of a war thrust upon him at the very beginning of his presidency, and he spent the next four years fighting it. Harry Truman, on the other hand, had the end of a war thrust upon him, and he had to make some of the most critical and difficult decisions ever made by any man just weeks after assuming the office. Truman had been the vice president under Franklin Roosevelt, and in the American system, the vice president has few responsibilities and very little power. When Roosevelt died in April of 1945, Truman was elevated to the presidency, and he had the office for the rest of World War 2.

It is worth noting that President Franklin Roosevelt ditched his 1940 running mate, Henry Wallace, in the 1944 contest and put Truman in his place. Wallace went on to be the Progressive Party candidate in 1948, and he lost to Truman, who was reelected. Wallace was far, far to the left of Truman, and it is difficult to tell what Wallace might have done had the end of World War 2 had fallen to him. He was far friendlier to the Soviets, and toured the Soviet Union in 1944.

Roosevelt died in office in April of 1945, and a few weeks later, Adolf Hitler committed suicide to the sound of Soviet artillery outside his bunker complex. The German government surrendered shortly after. The American attention shifted to the Pacific, where the Japanese showed no sign of surrender. Truman was informed about a new weapon the American military had developed, which was the first atomic bomb, and it was Truman, in his capacity as the Commander in Chief, who had to decide how to use this new weapon.

Truman decided to drop this new bomb on fully populated Japanese cities. On August 6, 1945, the first landed on Hiroshima, and it killed at least 100,000 Japanese civilians in an instant. On August 10, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, and by the next day, the Japanese government managed to send the message that they would accept unconditional surrender.

Then as now, the decision to use those two bombs is contemplated and questioned. Was it necessary? Was there any alternative? Did those cities have to be destroyed to bring about an American victory? What, beyond the Japanese surrender, did the bombings bring?

The American view was that the Japanese needed to be completely defeated, and that the bombing precluded an invasion of the Japanese mainland, which, had it occurred, would have been bloody and possibly not determinative. The United States may not have been able to fight city to city, all the way through Japan. Shock, Truman thought, was the best weapon. A determination to show the Japanese that the United States could and would kill masses of Japanese where they lived was the only way to get through to them and convince them, their leadership, and their Emperor, to give up, completely and unconditionally. No other situation, including a demonstration of the bomb over the ocean, would have made the Japanese surrender. That was the reasoning, and so, the only two nuclear weapons ever used in war were used by the Untied States on what is now a close US ally.

It is worth noting that just 5 years later, the region was thrust into war again by the North Koreans, and the same president, Harry Truman, declined to use nuclear weapons on the Chinese when it became clear they had entered the war. That war ended not with victory, but with settlement, and the North Korea and China of today is the result.

Truman declined to enter another total war, but when the enemy was well known, and the path to victory clear, Truman didn’t flinch when it came to using absolute force, even though that meant death for thousands of civilians.

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