Sunday Read: August 9 - The Second Bomb
Three days after Hiroshima, on August 9, 1945, the United States dropped a second atomic bomb on Japan. The target was originally Kokura, a city with major weapons production facilities, but cloud cover obscured that city. The B-29 bomber "Bockscar," piloted by Major Charles Sweeney, diverted to its secondary target: Nagasaki. At 11:02 AM, "Fat Man" - a plutonium bomb more powerful than "Little Boy" - detonated over the Urakami Valley. An estimated 40,000 people died instantly. By year's end, the toll reached 70,000, with tens of thousands more dying in subsequent years from radiation sickness and cancer.
Nagasaki had deep Christian history. When Portuguese traders arrived in 1543, Jesuit missionaries followed, and by 1600, Nagasaki had become Japan's center of Christianity with tens of thousands of converts. Then the Tokugawa shogunate banned Christianity in 1614, launching brutal persecution. Twenty-six Christians were crucified in Nagasaki in 1597 - martyrs still honored as saints. Others were tortured until they recanted. Christianity went underground for 250 years, with secret believers passing faith through families while pretending to be Buddhists. When Japan opened to the West in the 1850s, Catholic communities emerged from hiding, having preserved their faith through centuries of persecution.
The bomb detonated directly over the Urakami Cathedral, Nagasaki's largest church. Built over decades by contributions from poor Catholics, it had been completed in 1925 and could seat 6,000. The blast destroyed it completely, killing several thousand Catholics who lived in the surrounding neighborhood. About half of Nagasaki's 20,000 Catholics died that day. The cathedral that represented centuries of faithful endurance through persecution was vaporized in seconds by a bomb dropped by a Christian nation.
This creates moral complexity. Was it just to drop a second bomb three days after the first, before Japan had time to surrender? Defenders argue that Japan's War Council remained divided even after Hiroshima, with military leaders insisting on continuing the war. The second bomb, combined with the Soviet Union's declaration of war on Japan the same day, finally convinced Emperor Hirohito to surrender. Without the second bomb, they argue, Japan might have fought on, costing millions more lives in an invasion.
Critics counter that the second bomb was unnecessary and arguably criminal. Japan was already devastated, cut off from supplies, facing starvation. The Soviet declaration of war was the decisive factor in Japan's surrender, not the second atomic bomb. Dropping it on a city with Japan's largest Christian population three days after the first bomb didn't allow time for surrender negotiations - it was deliberate escalation to terrorize Japan into submission through mass civilian death.
The uncomfortable truth is that both atomic bombs targeted civilians deliberately. The Target Committee specifically chose cities that hadn't been heavily bombed yet so the atomic bomb's effects could be clearly measured. They wanted psychological impact - to break Japan's will to fight by demonstrating overwhelming destructive capability. Military targets were secondary to the goal of terrorizing the population into demanding surrender.
This violates traditional Christian just war theory, which requires discrimination between combatants and civilians. Augustine argued that war might be morally acceptable if it protected innocent people from aggressive attackers, but only if it targeted combatants and avoided civilians. Medieval theologians developed this into detailed criteria: just cause, right authority, right intention, proportionality, discrimination, last resort. Deliberately targeting civilian populations fails the discrimination criterion regardless of military objectives.
But real war is never as clean as theory. Hiroshima had military headquarters. Nagasaki had munitions factories and weapons production. Civilian workers built weapons used to kill Allied soldiers. Children would grow into soldiers. Where exactly is the line between combatant and civilian in total war? And if ending the war faster saved millions of lives - both American and Japanese - does that justify methods that just war theory would otherwise prohibit?
These questions don't have easy answers, which is exactly why war is such profound moral evil. It forces impossible choices between competing goods, making you choose lesser evils when no good options exist. This is why Jesus said "blessed are the peacemakers" (Matthew 5:9) and taught his followers to love enemies, not kill them. War might sometimes be unavoidable, but it's always tragedy, always moral compromise, always evidence that sin has corrupted human society so thoroughly that sometimes justice requires violence.
On this August day in 1945, over Nagasaki's Christian community, a second atomic bomb created a second flash of devastating light. The cathedral built by faith over decades through poverty and persecution was destroyed in seconds by power that dwarfed anything humans had previously wielded. Christians who had survived 250 years of persecution were killed by weapons built by Christians in a Christian nation. War's moral complexity becomes unavoidably personal when you realize that followers of Jesus killed other followers of Jesus, justified by reasoning that seemed necessary at the time but looks increasingly questionable in hindsight.
You'll likely never make decisions about nuclear weapons. But you make decisions constantly about how to respond to evil, whether to use power coercively, how to balance justice with mercy. Jesus calls you to love enemies, to pray for persecutors, to overcome evil with good. This doesn't mean passivity in the face of wickedness - Jesus drove moneychangers from the temple. But it does mean refusing to become like your enemies in fighting them, resisting evil without adopting evil's methods, pursuing justice without forgetting mercy.
War makes these principles impossibly difficult to apply. Thank God you probably won't face those choices. But the underlying question faces you constantly: when you have power to harm those who've harmed you, what will you do? When someone wrongs you and you can wrong them back, will you? When your enemy is vulnerable and you could destroy them, should you? The same Jesus who calls you to forgive also promises to judge evil. Can you trust him to handle justice so you can practice mercy? Even when mercy feels like weakness and justice feels like power, which will you choose?
