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Sniffy4 t1_j0y9p7p wrote

Reply to comment by redditor3000 in When President Truman met Oppenheimer by redditor3000

I'm fully aware of all the arguments for and against deploying the atomic bomb in Aug 1945 exactly as was done, but putting that aside, the fact that Truman was completely personally unaffected by all the civilian lives that were annihilated is fairly despicable.

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2rascallydogs t1_j0z6n9z wrote

4000 Chinese non-combatants had been killed every day for the past eight years, and another 4000 non-combatants (Filipinos, Indonesians, Burmese, Rōmusha) were being killed every single day for the past 44 months. The non-combatants killed in two atomic bombs didn't equate to an average month of non-combatant deaths during WW2 in the Pacific, and yet the Japanese seem to be the only victims of the war despite only suffering ~5% of non-combatant deaths.

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shantipole t1_j12s4w2 wrote

IMHO, there's a difference between being unaffected and refusing to dwell on "what might have beens." If Oppenheimer was as fixated on his own guilt (or "guilt") as the quote suggests, I can see a Truman who had made the hard decision to use the bombs being disgusted by a man who had made the decision to create them and after the fact constantly second-guessed the entire idea.

[edited to fix a typo]

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Sniffy4 t1_j12vp3d wrote

>Truman who had made the hard decision to use the bombs being disgusted by a man who had made the decision to create them and after the fact constantly second-guessed the entire idea.

The technical term for someone unaffected by 200k deaths they personally ordered is "sociopath."

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shantipole t1_j14cadm wrote

You're assuming your conclusion. There's still "a difference between being unaffected and dwelling on 'what might have beens.'" IOW there is a middle ground between sociopath on the one hand and endlessly rehashing important decisions on the other. It's actually a very large middle ground where you accept you did the best you could and you deal with the consequences. Oppenheimer seems to have gotten stuck in the "endless rehashing" end of the spectrum and Truman (and many others) think/thought less of Oppenheimer for it. None of which imply that Truman was a sociopath.

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andonemoreagain t1_j0yg6wj wrote

In a radio interview after his final term in office Truman would claim he had been misled about where they were going to drop the atomic bombs. He said he was told they would be dropped on Japanese naval bases, rather than on the residential areas almost entirely filled with sleeping women and children. I think this indicates that he did in fact experience remorse for what he and many other men were responsible for doing.

Even the most cursory reading of modern military history will show that there was no good reason at all to murder all these hundred of thousands of civilians when we did. And that’s not some liberal revisionist history. It’s the assessment of scholars at places like the army war college in Carlisle. It was a repugnant and unnecessary act.

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