Tuesday, President Barack Obama announced he would visit Hiroshima, which no sitting president has done. His decision is bound to reopen the debate over President Harry Truman’s use of nuclear weapons, the first and last time they were ever detonated in war.
The case that Truman erred is familiar. Critics say Japan would have surrendered soon anyway, that the entry of the Soviet Union into the war was the real reason for its capitulation, and that Truman was acting as much to block Josef Stalin from a postwar role in East Asia.
Other experts differ. Steve Chapman looks at the arguments, how the nuke may have saved his own father’s life, and how the choices involved remind Americans that we need a president that has a sense of restraint.
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