Tucker Carlson, having decided he has provided enough cover for contemporary adversaries such as the Kremlin and Hamas, has pivoted to defending Imperial Japan. In the telling of the commentator, the Allied powers of World War II were not just unjustified in dropping the atomic bomb over Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, but they were outright “evil.”
“I love by the way that people on my side — I’ll just admit it, on the Right — have spent the last 80 years defending dropping nuclear bombs on civilians,” Carlson said on the latest episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast. “Like, are you joking? That’s just prima facie evil. If you can’t — ‘Well, if we hadn’t done that, then this, that, the other thing, that was actually a great savings’ — no. It’s wrong to drop nuclear weapons on people, and if you find yourself arguing that it’s a good thing to drop nuclear weapons on people, then you are evil. It’s not a tough one, right? It’s not a hard call for me. So, with that in mind, why would you want nuclear weapons? It’s like just a mindless, childish sort of exercise to justify, like, ‘Oh no, it’s really good because someone else could get’ — how about, no? How about spending all of your effort to prevent this from happening.”
For starters, the Allies were not the ones to trigger the prisoner’s dilemma that culminated with the deployment of the Little Boy and the Fat Man. It was the Germans who began the atomic arms race with the Nazis’ discovery of nuclear fission, and thanks to the rampant racism of the Nazis, it was Jewish emigres from Nazi-controlled territories like Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard who ran to warn the West and help the Allies develop our own atomic bomb. Contrary to Carlson’s canard here, there is no counterfactual in which the Allies initiated nuclear weapons development unprompted, nor was merely destroying the Axis progress on their program in Central Europe a possibility.
But the real idiocy of Carlson’s irony is not just that the West wound up saving more lives in total by dropping the atomic bombs over Japan, but also that the United States specifically saved more American lives by doing so.
For starters, the Japanese were not remotely ready to surrender to the Allies, and the alternative to dropping the bombs was a full-scale land invasion of the islands. Conventional attacks, including regular bombing, would have resulted in widespread civilian casualties, as well as the long-term destruction of Japanese infrastructure, and without the stunning demonstration of Allied power, it’s unlikely that Emperor Hirohito would have succeeded in securing an unconditional surrender. Recall that the military attempted a coup when Hirohito wanted to surrender after the atomic bombings. It’s not hard to see that the war would have gone on for much longer. In the short run, this obviously would have cost many more lives of both Japanese civilians and American soldiers. Recall that American military strategists estimated up to an extra million American casualties if the Allies had to resort to a ground invasion of Japan, leading us to produce so many Purple Hearts in the lead-up to the atomic bombing that war heroes today still receive medals made during World War II.
The more important counterfactual, the one that proves we saved more American lives in the long run, relates to the Soviets, who declared war on Japan right after the bombings. A Soviet invasion of Japan, which likely would have persisted absent the bombings, could have resulted in the island’s division, much like that of Germany or North Korea. A communist half of Japan would only add to the death toll of the ideology, which killed 100 million in a century of execution. Furthermore, the mere threat of nuclear war kept the Cold War just that, cold. Although it was the defeated Nazi Party that was the closest of the Axis powers to coming close to a nuclear weapon, there’s no reason to believe that a similarly evil power would later become the first to deploy an atomic bomb had we not first.
Carlson’s argument defies his own previous contention that caring about other countries renders an American unpatriotic. Recall that after American Jews like Ben Shapiro expressed concern over Hamas terrorists murdering thousands of Jews and holding dozens of American citizens hostage, Carlson claimed they “don’t care about the country at all” because “they’re focused with laser intensity on foreign conflict.”
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OK. Well, during the valuable real estate of the most listened-to podcast on the planet, Carlson decided to introduce, unprompted, an extended diatribe in defense of a people who are not just “foreign” but also a foreign people from nearly a century ago who were at total war against our own country. By Carlson’s logic, wouldn’t this mean that he doesn’t care about Americans of either the past, who made the tough decision to save the rest of the world from fascism, or the present, who benefit from the warning shot that has reverberated across the decades?
Sure, if there was some way the West could have rendered the mere possibility of nuclear weapons nothing but a fantasy, it is arguable that would have been preferable. But the fascists fired first in the nuclear arms race, and by the time the Japanese were ready to overthrow their emperor to continue their reign of terror, our decision to drop the atomic bombs was not a necessary evil but rather a positive good.