Cuando se planificaba el ataque nuclear a Japón, Kyoto era la primera opción. Fue perdonada por una intervención personal: El Secretario de Defensa Henry L. Stimson no quería bombardearla. Esta historia ha sido contada con frecuencia, como ejemplo de la fina línea entre la vida y la muerte, la piedad y la destrucción. Pero hay un ángulo de la historia que ha sido ignorado: cómo el debate sobre atacar Kyoto probablemente ocasionó un serio malentendido por parte de Truman sobre el verdadero alcance de la bomba.
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independent.co.ukA raíz del comentario quise buscar más información sobre la anécdota de por qué Stimson se involucró personalmente en la defensa de Kyoto y encontré este artículo del verano pasado que arroja bastante luz sobre el tema en general.
Destaco esto especialmente (las negritas son del blog):
But what did Truman take away from this meeting? We can look at Truman’s own diary entry from July 25th:
This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th. I have told the Sec. of War, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop that terrible bomb on the old capital or the new.
He and I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender and save lives. I’m sure they will not do that, but we will have given them the chance. It is certainly a good thing for the world that Hitler’s crowd or Stalin’s did not discover this atomic bomb. It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful.
This passage reflects an incredible misconception. Truman appears, here, to believe that Hiroshima was “a purely military” target, and that “soldiers and sailors” would be killed, “not women and children.” But of course every city on that list was inhabited primarily by civilians. And by the calculus of war being waged, every city on that list had a military connection — they produced weapons for the military.
This is not to say that there isn’t a distinction between the targets, just that it is slighter than Truman’s diary entry suggests. Stimson was probably trying to say that the cultural value of Kyoto outweighed its value as a strategic target. Stimson was no doubt aware that Kyoto had war industries inside of it, but thought these were worth overlooking. The lack of a large military base in Kyoto made it more of a “civilian” target in his mind than Hiroshima or Nagasaki. But Truman seems to have come away from this discussion with the understanding that it was a stark contrast between a “civilian” target and a “military” one. As J. Samuel Walker has noted, if Hiroshima had been a more important military target, it likely would have already been bombed much earlier — the fact that it was still intact was in part a reflection of its lack of military presence.