The Ethics of WWII By: Henry Bray

There is an underlying thread of racism as a reason that the United States dropped bombs on both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In a world where America already had a reputation of being racially elite via slavery, through the slaughter of the Chinese in the 1800’s, through the terrorization and segregation of the Native Americans, to ignoring what Hitler was doing to the Jewish people and in the total blind movement of rounding up Japanese Americans and placing them in internment camps, it seems to fit that theory that we dropped the bomb simply because we didn’t like the Japanese people and we wanted to eradicate anyone who was not an American (The Decision to Drop the Bomb). In reality, America, specifically Truman, had no choice but to use extreme measures in order to end the war. A significant factor in prompting Truman to make this decision was that Germany was working on a project very similar to America’s Manhattan Project. (Manhattan Project) and we could not let Germany take this weapon into their hands without inflicting further serious damage. Another large deciding factor was that Truman felt it was a very clear decision based on the facts that Americans and their soldiers were worn out from this war, as well as the fact that the President felt we needed to avoid losing close to 500,000 American lives had we decided to invade Japan. (Beschloss, M. R. 1995)
Even though there are many debates in today’s world about whether Truman should have dropped the atomic bomb or if the reason he gave was in fact legitimate, I don’t believe that is a decision that was made lightly. Some people question as to whether his motivation was really just to send a warning to Stalin and the Soviet Union, but again, sending a message by using an atomic bomb seems like extreme overkill. (What Truman was 2016) "A race was on between the