“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.
If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.
If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
– Sun Tzu, THE ART OF WAR, 5th Century B.C.

Most people only know the first part of Sun Tzu’s quote.  But on July 25, 1945 – the official date that the use of the atomic bombs was ordered, it is clear that someone in the Truman Administration and the War Department understood and respected all three.

As was pointed out in an excellent interview that the New York Times conducted with Christopher Nolan, the director of the recent biographical epic Oppenheimer, nuclear dread is a feeling that comes and goes.  When Nolan began writing the film in 2020, his son pointed out that no one worries about it anymore.  Two years later, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, that changed.

“Nuclear war,” at least in the way we think about it, is more of a funny idea than it is a specific reality.  That idea comes from the Cuban Missile Crisis, where a Russian armada faced an American naval blockade around Cuba, and everyone seemingly everywhere thought that the two countries were about to order a simultaneous launching of nuclear missiles from nearby bases that would fall on cities perhaps at random like V-2 rockets and wipe out tens of millions.  It also comes from the Space Race, where satellites, space stations, military outposts, manned spacecraft, and astronauts around the Earth and to the Moon might all be conceivably used as nuclear launch pads and gunners.  When people talk about “nuclear war,” this is usually what they’re imagining.

While this isn’t necessarily wrong, the part we always forget is that we have, in fact, already seen a nuclear war.  That war was World War II.  Everyone remembers that six-year conflict (though in the Pacific, it was actually either an 8-year war or a 14-year war depending on when you start counting), in which America fought for just shy of four, but World War II was a very real nuclear war for a total of 27 days.

To understand World War II this way is to admit that the nuking of Japan was, in reality, one of the least horrible things that happened in that period.  That conflict has perhaps the most lopsided casualty rate in history, where the losing side was responsible for 75% of the 70 million people killed.  It was also a war against the unarmed.  About 55 million (80%) of the total number of people killed were noncombatants.  Germany killed 32 million people in Russia and across Eastern and Western Europe.  Japan killed 20 million people in China and across East Asia and the Pacific Islands.  The Allies themselves killed a far smaller aggregate number, and their targets were overwhelmingly military.  Forget Pearl Harbor, D-Day, and Iwo Jima for a moment; the story of World War II is the story of your favorite modern car developers – Germany and Japan – killing civilians by the tens of millions until the Allied Powers stopped them.

Throughout the entire course of the war, Japan lost only 3 million people.  Over 2 million of those were military.  The two atomic bombs together killed 250,000.  Here’s a way to put that in perspective.  If the bomb was ready before Pearl Harbor and was dropped on Tokyo by Jimmy Doolittle on April 18, 1942 (and assume for the sake of argument that it would have killed the same number of people as both bombs did), the Japanese Rape of Nanjing and the Three Alls policy (look it up) alone would have already killed at least six times that number.  Of all the nations that learned how to kill during World War II, none did it “better” than Japan.  It killed seven for every person it lost.  The brutality an ordinary Japanese soldier committed was so egregious that it could only be described as a sport.  They tested out how many katana cuts it could take to kill someone.  They launched newborn babies into the air and kept bayonet impalement score as they came down.  They peeled off their prisoners’ fingernails with bamboo.  They tested chemical weapons on villages.  And in Bataan, they marched nearly a hundred thousand prisoners (American and Filipino) 65 miles under the 110 degree scorching sun and disemboweled anyone who even hinted at slowing down.

This was known but not appreciated in the early naval war with Japan in 1942.  When the First Marines encountered the Imperial Army on Guadalcanal, they wrote home about how little regard a Japanese soldier had for his own life.  Before Japan embraced the kamikaze pilot as its official policy in late 1944, an ordinary Japanese soldier was observably suicidal.  They didn’t care if you killed one of them, or a squad of them, but were most offended if you successfully attained a wartime objective.  The Three Alls policy wasn’t a response to the Chinese army’s ability to kill Japanese soldiers, but rather its success at taking strongpoints.  Japan doubled down and killed another quarter million Chinese civilians in the months following the Doolittle Raid, not because civilians in Tokyo had been killed, but because it was a successful and humiliating bombing campaign.

But in 1942, Americans knew neither the enemy nor themselves.  Not the way Sun Tzu would have required.  A two-year island hopping campaign in the Pacific – where each island is its own little theater of ground, naval, and aerial war, and where Americans lost more on any individual island over a handful of months than they lost in all of the wars in the 21st century combined – doesn’t make much sense except as a conventional exercise of two enemies slowly getting to know each other and one building to a steady advantage.  By early 1945, Americans understood themselves well enough to know how to wage an effective strategic campaign across the great Ocean and the islands.  But just as Sun Tzu predicted, every victory in the Solomon Islands, in the Gilbert and Marshall Islands, and in the Marianas and the Philippines through 1944 was met with staggering numbers of dead and wounded.

During that time, the Japanese were thought to be a brutal yet conventional enemy.  They would not teach us who they were and what they were made of until late 1944 into early 1945.  They taught us at Leyte Gulf.  They taught us in the Philippines.  They taught us at Iwo Jima – an island so small it could be hidden by a single speck of dust on a life-size map.  But the most important lessons the Japanese taught us about themselves were during the firebombing campaigns and on Okinawa.

The horrors of Okinawa are itself a subject that has filled up entire libraries.  Over those four months, a quarter of a million people were killed as the Japanese resorted to a form of suicide warfare that has never been seen before in history and will likely never be seen again.  Suicide air attacks, suicide banzai charges, suicide bombing, suicide ship attacks, suicide submarine attacks, and suicide women, children, and babies; Americans bled by the scores of thousands for every inch of the interior of that island while the public’s attention was mostly elsewhere.  No matter how taken that island was, if there existed a single Japanese soldier still alive, the battle was still raging.

Punishing an enemy for this type of warfare seems like an obvious necessity, but it was not until March, 1945 that Americans were even ready to attempt it.  Bombing the Japanese mainland and its capital city in particular, with its 100 mph jet streams, crosswinds, and dense clouds, turned out to be a trickier endeavor than anyone realized.  The American B-29 Superfortress – an air fleet that cost more than the Manhattan Project – had failed.  They would climb like a tortoise to 25,000 feet, fly 3,200 miles to Japan over 8 hours, drop imprecise and ineffective bombs for ten minutes, and then fly 8 more hours back with their crews exhausted and barely functioning. Then Curtis LeMay took over.

The single deadliest day in the history of human civilization is March 9-10, 1945.  A deadlier day than either atomic attack; it is the day of the firebombing of Tokyo.  A fleet of B-29s, loaded up with napalm and white phosphorus, and flying low at merely 5,000 feet, unleashed an inferno of death, destruction, fire, smoke, and lethal gas that melted, boiled, burned, and choked 110,000 people to death, and turned a dozen square miles of wooden buildings into toxic ash in a single day.  Japan did not even blink.  The war continued as though nothing happened.

We bombed Tokyo again in May and June, along with Osaka, Nagoya, Yokohama, Kobe, and Kawasaki.  All told, before the atomic bombs were dropped, Americans had killed a quarter of a million Japanese on the mainland, and the enemy would not give in.  Meanwhile, Americans got a taste of the kind of war Japan was mobilizing to fight on the mainland.  A land invasion would have made the losses on Iwo Jima and Okinawa look like a polite skirmish, and even if you assumed that Americans could have wiped out 3 million more and doubled the Japanese losses of the entire war over a mere three months, that enemy was never going to surrender.

“But Vivek, the Japanese were ready to surrender before the bomb!”  I hear you getting ready to angrily type at me.

There’s surrender and there’s surrender.  When you wage a campaign of genocide and brutality over an entire ocean and across a massive continent, killing and maiming 20 million people, and then opt for a relentless strategy of suicide and terror against your most formidable enemy, and when you treat the charred flesh of your citizens as unworthy of your interest as bodies pile up in your cities by the hundreds of thousands, anything that might permit you to save face amounts to a net victory.  This was the lesson the western powers failed to learn in the First World War, and it goes straight to the heart of Sun Tzu’s quote at the top.  To know your enemy is to respect him, and to respect what he is capable of and willing to do.  To know yourself is to know the same.  And to understand why nothing less than an unconditional surrender by Japan was acceptable is to understand that the meek armistice that abruptly ended World War I on November 11, 1918 followed by a treaty against Germany that was only punitive on paper is the reason World War II was inevitable.  A war that was never fought on German home soil; the German Army had destroyed the Russians and forced a humiliating surrender in the east.  Then suddenly everyone just stopped firing their weapons and decided that Germany and its undefeated army were the sole cause and shameful loser.  To do this was, at least the way a militaristic dictatorship like Japan would see it, nothing less than the most egregious kind of disrespect a rival could impart to another.

Or, to put that another way, don’t ever disrespect a faithful servant of Emperor Hirohito by trying to take him alive, asking him to surrender, or showing him mercy.

I don’t need to mention the other enemy – the one that duplicitously played the role of our ally throughout the war, but was, in fact, of its most aggressive instigators.  It is enough to say that Oppenheimer missed it too.  The diplomatic and political turmoil of the summer of 1945 is perhaps the most complex and impossible in history if you’re anything other than a communist.  When you add on top of that a tenacious enemy like Japan – a proud, unfazed superpower whose soldiers inflict death by the tens of millions, whose men would sooner grenade themselves and you before letting you take him alive, and whose regime can withstand a firebombing campaign with ten times the lethal force of Dresden without breaking a sweat – only something as absolute as an atomic bomb can end the war without the kind of blood on both sides they were daring the Allies to spill.

Dropping the atomic bombs on Japan was not just an efficient way to end the war and force its surrender.  Nor was it merely a political tactic against the Soviets.  It was also the ultimate and most profound gesture of respect for an enemy America has ever extended.  And in our current state of nuclear dread, it is easy to forget that Japan was the only enemy that was worthy of it.

– Vivek