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Counting the dead at Hiroshima and Nagasaki

This is a very long, well-researched, and amply illustrated article. Below are a few snatches to give a sense of the work involved in seeking an answer to this question.

Bulletin, By Alex Wellerstein, August 4, 2020

How many people died as a result of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

There is one thing that everyone who has tackled this question has agreed upon: The answer is probably fundamentally unknowable. The indiscriminate damage inflicted upon the cities, coupled with the existing disruptions of the wartime Japanese home front, means that any precise reckoning is never going to be achieved.

Earliest estimates……………………………………………………………………………………….

Occupation estimates………………………………….

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. One of the most useful sources they consulted was also one of the most grim: schools and schoolchildren, which kept meticulous attendance records. Not only were there good records, but “the headmasters in many instances had made earnest efforts to trace families by letter, messenger, or personal contact.” Even better, the researchers found that many of the children were not in their classrooms at the time of the bombing, but had been detailed into “patriotic work parties” throughout the city, working in factories or working on firebreaks. So this provided data for many different distances from the bombing, and different types of structures. In this tragic fashion, the most vulnerable of those who died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki played a key role in establishing the total death counts…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Japanese-led reconsiderations………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

So what numbers should one use?

Given all of the above, and the disagreements about source terms that can dramatically alter the totals, what numbers should people who want to discuss the victims of the bombings use when doing so?

There is, I think it should be clear, no simple answer to this. In practice, authors and reports seem to cluster around two numbers, which I will call the “low” and the “high” estimates. The “low” estimates are those derived from the estimates of the 1940s: around 70,000 dead at Hiroshima, and around 40,000 dead at Nagasaki, for 110,000 total dead. The “high” estimates are those that derive from the 1977 re-estimation: around 140,000 dead at Hiroshima, and around 70,000 dead at Nagasaki, for a total of 210,000 total dead. Given that the “high” estimates are almost double the “low” estimates, this is a significant difference. There is no intellectually defensible reason to assume that, for example, an average (105,000 dead at Hiroshima, 55,000 dead at Nagasaki) would be more accurate or meaningful.

My qualitative sense is that historians who want to emphasize the suffering of the Japanese (and the injustice of the bombing) tend to prefer the “high” numbers, while those who want to emphasize the military necessity of the attack tend to prefer the “low” numbers. And therein lies the real question: What do these estimates do for us, rhetorically? It is clear that numbers, stripped from their technical contexts, are deployed primarily as a form of moral calculus. And this should not surprise us, given that so much of the argument defending the atomic bombs relies on another casualty estimate: how many people might have died in a full-scale land invasion of Japan (numbers that have been similarly contested for decades, ranging from tens of thousands of casualties, to the more imaginative millions).

Separately, the number of dead at Hiroshima and Nagasaki have also been explicitly compared to the estimated dead from the devastating firebombing attacks against both Germany (notably Dresden) and Japan (notably Tokyo) that preceded them. This argument is again part of the justification of atomic bombings, an attempt to show that they were not “special” in any particular moral sense when put up against “conventional” Allied activity. Whether this is or isn’t a strong argument is out of scope for this article, but it is just worth keeping in mind what work the “low” numbers do, for they pale in comparison with the highest estimates of the Tokyo bombing dead, and with the estimates for a land invasion of Japan.

Given that there is no satisfactory way to decide whether the “low” or “high” estimates are more accurate, it is fairly clear there is no “neutral” choice to be made. It ultimately comes down to which sort of authority one wishes to go with: the official estimates of the United States military in the 1940s, or the later estimates by a group of anti-nuclear weapons scientists, largely spearheaded by Japan. Both made legitimate points in making their estimations; neither show any apparent perfidy or obvious intellectual dishonesty.

Short of choosing one or the other, is there an elegant way to talk about the range? Saying “between 70,000 and 140,000 people died at Hiroshima” captures some of it, but does not really capture the reasons for the variance in these numbers. I might suggest, if there is space to do so, saying something like:

“The United States military estimated that around 70,000 people died at Hiroshima, though later independent estimates argued that the actual number was 140,000 dead. In both cases, the majority of the deaths occurred on the day of the bombing itself, with nearly all of them taking place by the end of 1945.”

This makes the authorship claims more explicit (even as it generalizes quite a bit into “the United States military” and “independent estimates”), and also makes it clear that this range is the cause of two entirely different assessments, not the errors of a single assessment. And it clarifies the question of timing, if the latter clause is allowed in. It is a wordy explanation—journalists will no doubt question whether it is worth the space in an article where they probably just wanted a simple number to quote—but if we are going to invoke such uncounted dead, it is worth the effort to do it in a way that is respectful of the uncertainties involved.

 https://thebulletin.org/2020/08/counting-the-dead-at-hiroshima-and-nagasaki/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=MondayNewsletter08072023&utm_content=NuclearRisk_CountingDeadHiroshimaNagasakiMag_08042020
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August 8, 2023 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Japan, Reference, weapons and war