November 3, 2007
Paul Tibbets II Posted by Alexander Burns at 07:55 PM EST John Steele Gordon notes the passing of Paul W. Tibbets, Jr., the commander on the mission to bomb Hiroshima. Tibbets’s obituary reminds me of this article by Robert Kaplan, in the September Atlantic, about the B-2 bomber, “The Plane That Would Bomb Iran.” The piece is behind a subscription wall, but it’s also posted, perhaps illegally, here. One of the featured characters in Kaplan’s narrative is Paul W. Tibbets IV, a B-2 pilot who is the grandson of the Enola Gay officer. For those familiar with Kaplan’s writing, the article is predictable. But it contains a poignant sketch of the Tibbets family, including Paul Tibbets, Jr., whom his grandson calls “the ultimate warrior . . . the mission was everything, which meant his family suffered.” A brief thought on Tibbets’s most famous mission. It seems to me that there is a growing consensus that using the atomic bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the right thing for Harry Truman to do. I’m not necessarily in disagreement with this consensus, but I’m also not totally comfortable with this position as Mr. Gordon presents it. “Truman really had no political choice,” he writes. “I think he also had no moral choice. The roughly 110,000 deaths from the two atomic bombs is a ghastly number. But it is a tiny fraction of the deaths Truman had every reason to believe would result from the alternative.” Truman’s decision was excruciating, and I envy no leader faced with a similar choice. But part of the reason why the President’s call was so difficult was because he did have choices, both politically and morally. It’s easy to frame the debate over Hiroshima in binary terms—should Truman have used nuclear weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or left them unused altogether? These, however, were not the only options available to the man in the Oval Office. He could have chosen other targets, or issued a warning first, or not dropped the second bomb, or taken any number of alternative courses. I’m not saying America, or the world, would be better off today if Truman had done so. But if one wants to make an effective assessment of the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it makes sense to consider the full range of Truman’s options, and the painful degree of freedom he actually had.
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