Victor Davis Hanson Challenges Tucker Carlson: Show Me Where I Called Hiroshima ‘Glorious’

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal. 

About a month ago, I talked about the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and I made the argument for why the United States did that, used those devastating weapons. Not that I was happy about it, of course, but we all were commemorating the date. 

In reaction to that and to a column I wrote to the same effect, Tucker Carlson recently said that I had called the dropping of the atomic bombs “glorious.” I will just take a little parenthetical here and say if he can produce the quote where I said glorious, I will pay him a thousand dollars, or better yet, maybe he can have a wager. I will say I never used the word glorious. He says I did. If he wants to back that up with a thousand-dollar bet, I’ll be happy to do it, and I’m not a wealthy person by any means. 

What I said was that we dropped the bomb for three reasons, and the reasons were not those that the paleo right is alleging or the Left. We did not do it because we wanted to impress the Soviets. They got the bomb four years later, almost to the week. And they were in the process of assembling the information from espionage when we used the bomb. We knew they were going to get the bomb. 

Nor did we do it to justify the expense of the Manhattan Project, nor did we do it because we don’t like so-called Asian people. We did it because we had just suffered 50,000 casualties on Okinawa, and we did not want to repeat that on the Japanese mainland, where there were up to 20 million militia, impressed civilians, and army personnel and 7,000 or 8,000 kamikazes. 

And if you do the math of the defenders on Okinawa versus the losses of 50,000 dead, wounded, and missing and apply that to Japan, we may have lost, as planners had feared, 1 million. One million. 

That was why we tried to use the bomb. 

In addition, other people pointed out that the Japanese were killing somewhere between 15,000 and above Chinese, Asians in general, and Pacific Islanders per day. 

Of all the armies and militaries in World War II, as far as those who killed the most of their enemies and suffered the least doing it, the fewest, it was Japan. 

So we did that to save American lives, to save Allied Asian lives, and to save Japanese lives. There would’ve been 2 million or 3 million Japanese killed. 

Another thing to remember is the atomic bombs, contrary to what Tucker Carlson said, were not the most devastating weapons in World War II, nor are they necessarily even today. They have the potential to be, but so does AI, so do enhanced gain-of-function viruses. There’s a lot of ways, unfortunately, that people die through the use of dangerous weapons. 

The point I’m making is in World War II, the incendiary napalm attacks on the Japanese cities killed far more than the two bombs. 

And more importantly, with the acquisition of Okinawa and the end of World War II in Europe, Curtis LeMay was trying to shorten the war by increasing his bomber fleet with new bombers from the American factories, B-29s, and assembling a massive armada of, say, 6,000 or 7,000 bombers, both in the Marianas and the much shorter distance from Okinawa with B-17s and British Lancasters, as I said. 

The point is it would have been an inferno had those two bombs not been used to preclude further death and to shorten the war. 

I don’t know why Tucker Carlson does this. He also said Donald Trump is considering using nuclear weapons. Donald Trump has said one thing continuously. He does not want to use nuclear weapons. He does not only not want to use nuclear weapons, he wants to have the major powers who own them and possess them agree to downgrade their arsenals. 

But he’s very worried about the Chinese. He’s very worried about North Korea. He’s very worried about Iran. He’s very worried about Russia. He’s very worried, as I said earlier, about China. 

So it’s not so much the possession of a nuclear weapon. We’re not worried about Britain, and we’re not worried about France because these are democratic countries. We’re worried about those countries under dictatorships. 

And Donald Trump is trying to both deter them with a preeminent American arsenal, but also, once that preeminence is established, to downgrade the use of them by limiting the size of our arsenals. Build up to build down. If that sounds ironic, it is. 

Finally, Tucker Carlson has done a lot of strange things since he left Fox News that are out of the ordinary. One of them is this emphasis on World War II. 

He brought on the podcaster and blogger Darryl Cooper, said he was one of the most renowned writers on World War II. Of course, he’s never written a single published article or book. Not that that’s necessarily requisite, but he has said things that were demonstrably untrue that gained the approval of Tucker Carlson. 

He said that Winston Churchill was the greatest terrorist of World War II. That’s not true. Winston Churchill was alone of all the Allied powers, alone from the fall of France in May 1940 to June 22, 1941, when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. There were no other allies, and his country was the only country that went to war on the principle of the integrity of another country. 

It wasn’t attacked. It was in response to the German attack on Poland. It was the only country that fought from the first day of the war to the last. And as I said, had Churchill not been able to withstand all of Nazi Europe and Italy and Japan, there wouldn’t have been a chance to save the democracies in World War II. 

The idea that you would even say that, that you would defend, as Mr. Cooper does, the Axis powers that all started the war, were all fascist autocracies, and you would favor them or try to rationalize them over the conduct of Great Britain or the United States, the only two consensual systems in the entire war among the major powers, is absolutely insane. 

In conclusion, I’ll just finish. I don’t know what has come over Tucker Carlson. I was on his show a great deal of the time for years, and he made eloquent arguments that I didn’t always agree with, but they were rational. 

He was worried about radical Islam. He recently all but endorsed Abdul El-Sayed over Mike Rogers, the Republican candidate in the Michigan Senate race. He had not remarked in an anti-Semitic fashion about Israel. 

Recently, he had a guest on, and I mentioned that, who essentially said to Tucker, with his nodding approval, that there was no real purpose or value to algebra, an ancient mathematical contribution that involved Arabs, Persians, Greeks, Jews, and Egyptians. 

And without alphabetic use in a mathematical equation denoting variables or uncertainties and having such formulas, you can’t conduct higher math or higher physics, even though the guest said he didn’t need it, and Tucker said it was kind of superfluous, and the guest also said that it was sort of a trick of the Jews on the goyim. 

All of this is absurd and it’s shocking, but I want to just finish by clearing the record. If Tucker says that I was glorifying or I used the word that the use of these horrible weapons was glorious rather than necessary to save lives, I challenge him to produce that quote. 

And if he can’t produce that quote, I suggest he apologize. 

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

More from this network:
Domains for Sale · GOTPeople.org · TheDSAPlatform · The Truth About Socialism

Donate to GOTPeople.org