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# Ask Obama about Hiroshima
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/ask-obama-about-hiroshima/
- Published: 2008-06-24T15:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-25T00:17:38.000Z
- Author: Guest Author
- Tags: Opinion, Santa Monica, #archive-import

*By David Benkof Your column here*

NOW THAT BARACK OBAMA IS THE presumptive Democratic nominee for president, his opinions about the pronouncements of his mentor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, have become much more important.

While nobody seriously thinks Obama wants God to damn America or that he believes “the government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color,” there is one Wright opinion that Obama must be asked about, because it directly relates to the question of whether he has the judgment necessary to be president.

“We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye,” Wright said in a sermon shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Actually, President Harry S. Truman did bat an eye over the choice between invading Japan or dropping bombs on it, which he called his “hardest decision to date.”The most important presidential decisions are never easy. But Truman’s call saved millions of American and Japanese lives, and allowed the United States to move on to confront its next, even greater opponent — the Soviet Union.

Truman’s military advisers had told him that an invasion of Japan would cost hundreds of thousands of American lives, along with millions of Japanese military and civilian deaths. The Japanese cabinet was considering a measure to draft 15-year-old boys and 60-year-old men to fight any American invasion. American intelligence had also learned that the Japanese were planning to execute as many as 100,000 American prisoners of war if the Americans launched an invasion.

Last year, Japanese Defense Minister Fumio Kyuma, who is from Nagasaki, acknowledged that the nuclear bombs had been a necessary measure to end World War II and save many lives. Even Emperor Hirohito acknowledged in 1975 that the bombings “couldn’t be helped.”

Hiroshima played significant military functions for Japan, and Nagasaki was an industrial seaport important to the Japanese war effort.But certainly,both cities were home to many civilians, whose deaths President Truman and his advisers felt were necessary to convince the Japanese to surrender.

With the threat of a nuclear Iran and unpredictable nuclear states in North Korea and Pakistan, a President Obama may face tough decisions about the use of military and even nuclear force. It is very easy for a presidential candidate to declare, like Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) did, that “peace is a civil right.”

A president who refuses to drop bombs can always congratulate him or herself for loving peace. But we need a president who loves peace but also has the courage and strength of character to be willing to drop bombs, even nuclear ones — including if it means civilians will die — when that is the decision that best protects America.

Would Obama be such a president? I don’t know. My Google searches don’t show that he’s ever said what he thinks of President Truman’s decision to use atomic weapons against two Japanese cities.

We do know that the clergyman who has been one of the most important influences on Obama’s life thinks Hiroshima and Nagasaki were worse crimes than the Sept. 11 attacks. It is completely fair game for journalists to ask Obama if he agrees, and how he would have approached the most important decision made by America’s 33rd president, who is consistently ranked by historians as one of the nation’s greatest.

Even if Wright’s words didn’t raise questions about Obama, it would be legitimate to ask any presidential candidate what he or she thinks of previous momentous executive decisions — from the bombing of Hiroshima to the invasion of Iraq. We know what Obama thinks of the latter. Shouldn’t someone ask him what he thinks of the former?

DAVID BENKOF is a doctoral student in American Jewish history at New York University. He

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on June 24, 2008.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/062408.pdf?ref=smdp.com)