確固たる立場

アメリカの立場は、原爆によって本土上陸作戦を実行しなくて済んだので、多くの米兵や日本国民を救うことができたというものでしょうか。保守的とされるFOX NewsやWSJはこの立場を堅守しているようです。

WSJでは、コラムニスト、歴史家、日本軍の捕虜になった軍人がそれぞれ原爆によって戦争が終わり、多くの命が救われたという主張をしていました。

（コラムニスト）
Thank God for the Atom Bomb
Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren’t merely horrific, war-ending events. They were lifesaving.
By BRET STEPHENS
Aug. 3, 2015 7:02 p.m. ET

In all the cant that will pour forth this week to mark the 70th anniversary of the dropping of the bombs—that the U.S. owes the victims of the bombings an apology; that nuclear weapons ought to be abolished; that Hiroshima is a monument to man’s inhumanity to man; that Japan could have been defeated in a slightly nicer way—I doubt much will be made of Fussell’s fundamental point: Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren’t just terrible war-ending events. They were also lifesaving. The bomb turned the empire of the sun into a nation of peace activists.

（歴史家）
The Lives Saved by the Bomb
Only by breaking Japan’s resolve were countless innocents spared a prolonged war.
By ANDREW ROBERTS
Aug. 5, 2015 12:55 p.m. ET

Human-rights activists, antiwar campaigners, left-wing politicians and others argue that Japan was about to surrender and that therefore it was morally wrong to deploy this most destructive of weapons against unarmed civilians. Some even deny that many American lives would have been lost in an invasion of the Japanese mainland.
Yet in his memoirs, “Year of Decisions,” Truman wrote that he believed an invasion of Japan would have cost half a million American lives. This estimate was considered too conservative by both Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and Secretary of State James Byrnes, who in their own memoirs estimated one million casualties overall. These high figures are backed up by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff study of August 1944, which projected that an invasion would “cost half a million American lives and many more that number in wounded.”

（日本軍の捕虜になった軍人）
The end of the Japanese Illusion
The moment the sky over Nagasaki lighted up, I made a bet with my fellow POW that we would soon be set free. I was right.
By LESTER TENNEY
Aug. 5, 2015 12:50 p.m. ET

Japan’s surrender saved us. The dropping of the bombs, as Emperor Hirohito himself acknowledged, was the only thing that made that surrender possible. As he explained to his subjects, “Should we continue to fight, it would only result in the ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation.” The bombs’ indiscriminate, total devastation, as no battle or bombing before it, showed the consequences of trying to fight to the end. The bombings destroyed hope and glory, past and future.

ただし、世論調査では興味深い傾向がみてとれます。時代とともに原爆使用の指示が落ちていっているそうです。年齢が若くなるほどその傾向は顕著のようです。

APRIL 7, 2015
Americans, Japanese: Mutual Respect 70 Years After the End of WWII
Neither Trusts China, Differ on Japan’s Security Role in Asia

One event during WWII – the U.S. dropping atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 – has long divided Americans and Japanese. Americans, in surveys with similar wording, have consistently approved of this first and only use of nuclear weapons in war and have thought it was justified. The Japanese have not.

In 1945, a Gallup poll immediately after the bombing found that 85% of Americans approved of using the new atomic weapon on Japanese cities. In 1991, according to a Detroit Free Press survey conducted in both Japan and the U.S., 63% of Americans voiced the view that the atomic bomb attacks on Japan were a justified means of ending the war; only 29% thought the action was unjustified. At the same time, only 29% of Japanese said the atom bombing was justified, while 64% thought it was unwarranted.

In the current Pew Research Center survey, 56% of Americans still believe the use of nuclear weapons was justified; 34% say it was not. In Japan, only 14% say the bombing was justified, versus 79% who say it was not.

Not surprisingly, there is a large generation gap among Americans in attitudes toward the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Seven-in-ten (70%) Americans 65 years of age and older say the use of atomic weapons was justified, but only 47% of 18- to 29-year-olds agree. There is a similar partisan divide: 74% of Republicans but only 52% of Democrats see the use of nuclear weapons at the end of WWII as warranted. Men (62%) more than women (50%), and whites (65%) more than non-whites (40%), including Hispanics, say dropping the atomic bombs was justified.

Despite this lingering disagreement over the justification for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, few Americans or Japanese believe Japan owes an apology for its actions during WWII.