To the Editor:

Ms. [Niki] VanAller’s says her organization “favor[s] diplomacy, not war, with Iran and North Korea.” [Mailbox, Aug. 29]. Well, so does everyone else, most of all, anyone in harm’s way. But good intentions do not excuse serial misstatements. “Iran has no nuclear weapons to date,” she claims, despite abundant evidence of Iranian-North Korean collusion to transfer nuclear weapon and ballistic missile technology between the two countries. Iran drew on North Korean expertise and used cutouts to construct a defense infrastructure to protect and conceal its military nuclear program. It rejects the 1987 Missile Technology Control Regime, and actively schemes to acquire, develop, and deploy a broad range of ballistic missiles and space launch capabilities.

Nor is it true that “the U.S. has over 7,000 of them,” i.e., nuclear weapons. The correct number is 1,350 warheads says the Arms Control Association, slightly less than Russia’s 1,444. Whether 1,350 is the ideal number “useful for deterrence” is unknowable, but the deterrent effect is indisputable, for which Ms. VanAller should be immensely grateful.

Contention over the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is not limited to “modern historians,” for scholars have debated the counterfactual since the events themselves. No one challenges the horrors that beset Japanese and other victims — including American POWs — on those two fateful days. But it is worth re-reading longtime Princeton resident Paul Fussell’s forceful rebuttal of claims (here, John Kenneth Galbraith’s) that the Japanese government would have surrendered soon.

“He thinks the A-bombs were unnecessary and unjustified because the war was ending anyway. The A-bombs meant, he says, ‘a difference, at most, of two or three weeks.’ But at the time, with no indication that surrender was on the way, the kamikazes were sinking American vessels, the Indianapolis was sunk (880 men killed), and Allied casualties were running to over 7,000 per week. ‘Two or three weeks,’ says Galbraith.”

“Two weeks more means 14,000 more killed and wounded, three weeks more, 21,000. Those weeks mean the world if you’re one of those thousands or related to one of them. During the time between the dropping of the Nagasaki bomb on August 9 and the actual surrender on the fifteenth, the war pursued its accustomed course: on the twelfth of August eight captured American fliers were executed (heads chopped off); the fifty-first United States submarine, Bonefish, was sunk (all aboard drowned); the destroyer Callaghan went down, the seventieth to be sunk, and the Destroyer Escort Underhill was lost. That’s a bit of what happened in six days of the two or three weeks posited by Galbraith. What did he do in the war? He worked in the Office of Price Administration in Washington. I don’t demand that he experience having his ass shot off. I merely note that he didn’t.”

It is fitting to end as Professor Fussell did: “The past, which as always did not know the future, acted in ways that ask to be imagined before they are condemned. Or even simplified.”

John R. Haines

Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy Research Institute

One Palmer Square

Note: The Paul Fussell quote is from the August 1981 New Republic essay, “Thank God for the Atom Bomb.”