EIGHTY YEARS AGO.

Sometimes, an air mission can change the course of a war.

Eighty years later, the Manhattan Project remains controversial.  Town Hall columnist Arthur Schaper asks the right questions.

How do you break an enemy whose civilians threw themselves off cliffs, with their children? How do you defeat an enemy prepared to lose their lives and the lives of all their loved ones to defend the empire?

Truman could. He would stop this war. He would win.

Truman gave the order. He dropped the bomb.

It was not a necessary evil, as the self-righteous claim. It was a necessary good.

There was no better means to victory than by dropping the bomb. The sheer destruction of one nuclear device outstripped all the blood, sweat, and tears of kamikaze pilots and [banzai] jingoism.

It was still a close-run thing.  Mr Truman promised a rain of ruin.  After Little Man and Fat Boy, there were no more marbles in the fish bowl to deliver a third blow.

If you're the subject of an empire that starts a war, argues National Review's Charles C. W. Cooke, prepare to face the consequences.  "The expenses necessary to end the war had to be paid by the instigators."

I believe that, had the United States attempted to end the war by invading Japan, millions of people would have died in the fanatical fighting and the famines that resulted — and that most of those dead would have been Japanese and Chinese. I believe that, absent the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Soviet Union may well have invaded northern Japan, divided the country in two, and changed the remainder of the 20th century for the worse. I believe, too, that, if Truman had opted to greenlight Operation Downfall, the war in the Pacific could plausibly have lasted for another two years — which, given that the conflict in the East began in 1937, after Japan brutally attacked China, would have pushed that catastrophe into its tenth year.

But, in all honesty, those considerations are subordinate to my primary calculus here — which is that there is no good reason that the terrible cost of concluding a war that was started by another nation ought to have been borne by its victims. By the conclusion of operations, any Allied invasion of Japan would have required the deployment of up to 7 million American men. Per contemporary estimates, the U.S. government expected that between 500,000 and 1 million of those men would have died. That being so, my question is this: In what possible universe would the president of the United States — a man who was elected to represent America, not the world — be morally justified in choosing that option, when the war could have been ended (and, indeed, was ended; that’s neither a hypothetical nor a counterfactual) by dropping two enormous bombs on the aggressor?

Power Line's Scott Johnson reprises "Why We Dropped the Bomb" from 2016.  He concludes, "While we’re at it, please see Paul Fussell’s classic 1981 New Republic essay: 'Thank God for the atom bomb.'"  And contemplate, dear reader, that in the Pentagon's inventory of Purple Hearts are more than a few reconditioned medals struck in the summer of 1945 in anticipation of the losses the War Department anticipated invading Japan.

None of which is likely to pacify the pacifists at Common Dreams, who, when they're not predictably fretting about the children of Hiroshima who died painful deaths (as Mr Schaper acknowledges) and yet might have been spared a different sort of painful death when their parents jumped off cliffs rather than be captured by the forces of OLYMPIC the way their cousins on Saipan did, traffic in fear mongering.

This year marks 80 years since the U.S. dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing between 110,000 and 210,000 people. Yet, despite the lessons of this dark chapter of history, more countries are investing in expanding their nuclear arsenals as we face the threat of a renewed nuclear arms race.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock, a symbol that represents the estimated likelihood of a human-made global catastrophe, is now only 89 seconds to midnight—unacceptably close to disaster. Global military spending approaches $3 trillion, fueling violence across the world. This spending pays for the Russian bombs dropped on Ukraine, the U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza, and the escalation of militarized violence across the world. Meanwhile, nuclear development and expansion continue in all nine nuclear-armed states alongside growing fears of nuclear war in Ukraine, Taiwan, India, Pakistan, or the Korean Peninsula. We’re adding fuel to the fire.

Dear reader, all you have to do to disabuse yourself of the notion that the Trump presidency is a fascist regime is to check that Common Dreams is active and that the atomic scientists are fretting about everything but atomic science.

Once upon a time, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was, well, a publication written by atomic scientists.  They understood that in nuclear fission they had released great destructive power, as well as, if properly managed, an energy source of great potential.  To call attention to the consequences of misusing the destructive power, in 1947 their bulletin introduced the notorious Doomsday Clock.  "The scientists created the clock in 1947 using the imagery of apocalypse (midnight) and the contemporary idiom of nuclear explosion (countdown to zero), to convey threats to humanity and the Earth."  After the Soviet Union closed up shop, the people who set the clock turned it back to a quarter before midnight.  (And the self-styled progressives who always made "turning the clock back" into a pejorative wet themselves, but I digress.)  The problem, though, with setting the clock in such a way as to suggest the Threat Level is Way Down, is that people will go about their lives without being afraid, and that way lies organizational extinction.  Thus, in the same way that the Southern Poverty Law Center no longer has anything to do with Southern Poverty, and the March of Dimes shifted focus from a polio vaccine to prenatal health generally, the people who set the clock set their sights on new ways to frighten people and keep the fundraising going.

But if you're Austin Headrick, you might as well double down on fantasyland.

To prevent the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki from ever happening again, and to realize the full aspirations of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), leaders must actively pursue a world free of nuclear weapons. The only world safe from nuclear war is one where nuclear weapons no longer exist. That world is possible—if we choose it.

It is no more possible to rid the world of nuclear weapons than it is to rid the world of Marxism or what Mr Headrick would call "capitalism."  The ideas exist.  Extirpating, or implementing them is a separate matter.