Long ago, there was a small country consisting primarily of a few large islands. It sometimes had wars with nearby countries. During some periods of time, it owned small parts of a large nearby continent. During other periods, it was limited entirely to its islands. As time passed and the world changed, larger countries started to assert authority over smaller ones. Several countries began to work together to maintain the status quo. These countries eventually decided that this small country of the large islands should not have any territory outside of the islands. Even when this country did manage to regain territory outside of the islands, the other countries intervened and gave that land to its enemies. This small country began to feel mistreated. On the world stage, it was marginalized. It was treated as a vassal, not as a sovereign nation. Its leaders began to feel frustrated.
Eventually, an opportunity arose for this small country to assert dominance over its neighbors. Too long had the land that once belonged to it been controlled by others. A war of epic proportions was brewing. There were other countries that had grown tired of the iron fist of the alliance that was attempting to rule the world. The small country recognized that the timing was perfect for it to show the world that it was a sovereign nation, not some submissive vassal. While the war proceeded on other fronts, it could retake the lands it had lost so many times before. The leaders of this country made one fatal mistake though. They decided that a show of force against their most prominent oppressor would be appropriate.
A devastating attack was planned and carried out against an important military establishment. The attack had two intents. The first was revenge for decades of oppression. The second was the strategic destruction of forces that might be used to intervene in the recapture of their territory. Unfortunately, they underestimated the power, determination, and brutality of their oppressor. Full scale war was launched against them. The naval fleets of the oppressor far outmatched those of the small country. Because the war did not have strong support from the civilians of the small country, and even its soldiers were beginning to loose morale, the government felt it necessary to force many of its soldiers to fight. The only way they could successfully destroy the enemy ships was by flying air planes directly into them. In desperation, pilots were welded into the cockpits of planes and ordered to crash into enemy ships or be executed. In reaction to this, the oppressor used advanced weapons to destroy two major cities. Over 100,000 civilians were brutally killed in these attacks. Only around 20,000 military personnel died in the attacks. The small country was ultimately not allowed to retain any recaptured territory. The oppressor maintained a military presence in the country for many years afterwards.
Before or after this time, there has never been a country so brutal as the oppressor. When the Romans attacked their enemies, they gave civilians the opportunity to swear allegiance to Rome, instead of killing them. There have been countries that have murdered their own civilians for various reasons, but no other country has caused so much death and destruction, so callously, in such a short amount of time. Even the oppressor in this story has condemned the wanton murder of civilians in wartime.
Now, the oppressor lives in fear of others who have developed the advanced technology used to cause this mass murder of innocent civilians. Other countries have discovered and developed this technology, many out of fear of the oppressor. The oppressor, more than ever, still believes that it has the right to dictate how other countries should use this technology. It has persuaded or manipulated other countries into destroying their technology for this weapon. Those countries that refuse are punished with embargoes and other economic sanctions. And, this is all despite the fact that the only country that has ever used this technology to cause harm is the oppressor. Many have developed it, but only one has ever been brutal enough to actually use it.
In case it is not obvious, the oppressor is the United States, and the small country is Japan. The advanced technology is nuclear explosives. To be clear, I am not trying to justify anyone here, and I am not trying to demonize anyone. I am trying to provide some perspective to what happened between the US and Japan during World War II. Most Americans do not fully understand the situation. They believe that Japan attacked without provocation, and they do not understand the massive civilian toll of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These were not attacks against military targets. The US deliberately killed over 100,000 innocent civilians as a show of force. Support for the war among the Japanese civilian population was weak enough that the government felt it necessary to spread propaganda to its own people to increase support. Killing the civilians had no strategic military value. It was entirely a show of force.
Japan did not attack us unprovoked. Bad feelings had been building between our countries for a long time, and it was almost exclusively our fault. Russia, China, Korea, and Japan had been fighting over land for centuries. Japan had, at multiple times in the past, held territory currently owned by all of these countries. Starting in the early 1900s (maybe earlier), the US and European nations began to intervene in disputes over these territories, consistently awarding control to everyone except Japan. Japan was treated as an invader, despite the fact that they had a legitimate, though not exclusive, claim to these territories. Japan's sovereignty was regularly subsumed by US mandate. They were our enemy before the war started, because we treated them like a vassal. We made Japan our enemy, and that is why they chose to attack us.
To date, the US is the only country in the world to actually use a full scale nuclear weapon against an enemy target. Further, these were not tests. We had already extensively tested them, and we were fully aware of the damage they would cause. The reason Pakistan, China, India, Korea, Iran, and many other countries want nuclear weapon technology is because they fear that we will use it again. Of all of these, only Iran's motives are significantly suspect. Pakistan, China, India, and Korea have all had nuclear weapon technology for some time, and if they had wanted to use it against us, they could have already done so. There is some fear that terrorists in Pakistan will manage to steal or capture the country's nuclear weapons, but that fear seems to be subsiding, as we are making progress against the terrorists.
The point here is that outside of the US and the European Union, the world has good reason to fear the US. We go around telling sovereign nations what to do, and if they seek reprisal, we murder their civilians in massive numbers (from their perspective). We try to control sovereign nations by imposing economic sanctions against them when they don't obey our commands. We try to keep them weak by preventing them from developing weapons as powerful as our own. From our perspective, we just think we are protecting ourselves. We justify murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians by pointing out that we might have lost a few thousand more soldiers if we had not done it. From their perspective, we brutally murdered many of their peaceful and innocent civilians to prove a point that could have been proven better by destroying a military base or two. We used a weapon on their civilian living spaces that left fallout that is worse than even salting the earth to prevent crops from growing (admittedly, we did not know the full effects of this when we did it). We did billions of dollars worth of damage to non-military structures. To them, what we did amounts to mass murder and mass vandalism. When other countries develop nuclear weapons, they are not doing it so they can nuke us. They are doing it so that we know that they are powerful enough to do equal damage to anything we do to them. They are setting up a mutually assured destruction, because they know that if we value our own lives and they have nukes, then we won't nuke them. The only defense against nuclear weapons is to have your own, and since we have them, they know that they must have them as well, if they want to be able to defend themselves against us. And, they cannot trust us, because we have used them before.
Again, the point here is to provide perspective. It is easy to say that what we did was an absolutely horrible war crime, and by today's standards, that is totally true. We also need to keep in mind, however, that most of the people who made that decision are no longer alive, and it is easy to make bad decisions when you feel desperate. Further, I was not there, so I cannot judge the thought processes that went into the decision. I personally think targeting military establishments would have been a much better decision, but I am not going to condemn those that thought otherwise. I still think that those who do condemn us are not being unreasonable though. Regardless of the justification, what we did was abominable.
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