Robert Besser is a news editor who has worked in television and newspapers in the United States, Asia and the Middle East.
Israel’s going to war against Iran inevitably raises the question of the use of nuclear bombs, with those paid to talk --journalists, politicians, professors--reaching for something to say that they hope will be meaningful. Of course, their words rarely are.
For me, I confess, these concerns are simpler, as I have an extremely intimate relationship with America’s 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which ensured that my father survived World War II and 23 of his descendants are alive today.
Simply put, my sisters, nieces, nephews, children and grandchildren are alive---in Israel and America---only because atomic bombs were dropped on Japanese cities in 1945.
And today, it is just such weapons that might, for a second time in 80 years, save my family and our future generations.
My father, a grandson of Polish Jews from Lvov who came to the United States in the 1880s, was serving in the American army on May 8, 1945 when World War II ended in Europe.
He was then stationed at a military base 40 miles south of Paris when a fellow soldier borrowed an army truck, which quickly filled with 20 year-old Americans, including my father, and sped to Paris so these young warriors could fraternize with the natives at the spontaneous city-wide party to celebrate the end of the war. As we all know, those French won’t fight to save themselves, but they sure know how to throw a party.
Many times I asked my father how long he remained at that Paris street party, and only in his final years did he admit that he had been AWOL---a court martial offense--- for “at least a week, maybe more.”
Returning to his base, and after being reprimanded by weary officers, my father was handed orders for him to report to yet another military base to begin training for the invasion of Japan.
He must have been especially pleased to have memories of those seven days (or more!) in Paris, since his war was not going to end with the German surrender, and his surviving the war in Japan was increasingly less certain.
However, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 brought World War II to an end, and the dreaded invasion of Japan was canceled.
Sixty years later I stood on beaches in Japan, many of them U-shaped and surrounded by very high cliffs, and I was horrified by the vision of the enormous number of American boys who would have died during the invasion of Japan, but instead owed their lives to those atomic bombs.
Growing up, I was always aware that my father had been saved by the atomic bombs and that my sisters and I owed our very existence to those bombs.
So it is with a special irony that I find myself faced with the prospects of my family again being saved by similar weapons, to possibly be used against Iran.
Part of the leftist takeover of western culture has included the brainwashing of the public, many of whom believe that the use of nuclear weapons will mean the end of human life on earth. Professors and Hollywood writers---an equally useless lot--- speak of nuclear winters blotting out the sun and of the inability to grow crops, which would cause a worldwide shortage of food and the extinction of mankind.
Because these “truths” are spouted by professors, it seems appropriate to mention what they do not know or say: That World War II was, itself, the equivalent of dropping one Hiroshima bomb per week for six years, with 75 million having died.
And dying in a single flash at Nagasaki might have been considerably more merciful than how most victims of World War II met their fates.
It is then worthwhile asking, is there really a difference between the deaths of 150,000 Japanese by atomic bombs and the deaths of 100,000 residents of Tokyo during one night of US fire bombings on March 10, 1945?
What about the over one million lost at the 1942 Battle of Stalingrad or the 750,000 deaths at the 1943 Battle of Kursk? Or the loss of 180,000 dead and a half million wounded during the 1945 Battle of Berlin?
What is the difference between such battlefield losses and the use of nuclear arms?
On a practical level, if the use of nuclear weapons against Iran will prevent even one Israeli soldier from having to die on Iranian soil, and shield Israeli pilots from being shot down over Iran, is it not well worth considering their use?
After what we in Israel suffered since the Iranian-planned October 7 massacre, with 1,300 civilians dead, over 700 soldiers killed, the rapes, the beheadings and the kidnappings, why not use our weapons against Iran, rather than risk the lives of more Jewish young men and women?
Of course, the question staring us in the face is how can Israel possibly sit still as Iran builds a stockpile of hundreds of missiles carrying nuclear warheads?
The frightened west will scream at Israel that it must do nothing because a nuclear Iran can be “managed.” The truth, of course, is that Iran says they will use these weapons to destroy Israel, and we know that they will certainly try.
For the Iranians are thoroughly contaminated by their poisonous hatred of Jews, as are the Palestinian Arab Moslems. And we have learned that such toxic madness must always explode, causing the deaths of Jews.
Indeed, Iran has loudly proclaimed that they will destroy Israel every day since US President Jimmy Carter, a thoroughly inept president with no international experience, expelled the Shah in 1979 and, acting out a leftist fantasy, happily turned Iran over to the blood-soaked ayatollahs.
And let’s not forget the lunatic words from that time of Carter’s UN Ambassador Andrew Young: “Khomeini will be somewhat of a saint when we get over the panic.” Young also demonstrated the usual State Department incompetence about world events (those State guys graduated from Harvard, you know) claiming that it was “impossible to have a fundamentalist Islamic state” in Iran.
We also are aware that those in the west who will make the loudest demands on Israel to not strike Iran are the same countries that are unwilling to fight for their own freedoms. In truth, we have little to talk about with such cowards.
Much about war revolves around statistics. So I must ask, were the 150,000 Japanese who died in the dropping of the atomic bombs a fair trade so that my father and his 23 descendants lived?
Without a doubt, I am sure it was.
Today, perhaps every day, the leaders of Israel face the question as to whether to use our most lethal weapons against Iran.
So I again ask, is it an equitable trade-off to destroy Tehran and its 12 million residents to save Israel? To save our 7 million Jews?
Is it a fair trade to wipe Tehran off the face of the Earth so that my grandchildren live?
And I know, without a doubt, that the answer is yes, over and over yes, 100-times yes.
Jewish American Jacob Besser, a member of the flight crew that dropped the American atomic bombs on Japan in 1945, was often asked whether he felt any guilt for dropping such weapons? His answer was always the same:
“No, I feel no sorrow or remorse for whatever small role I played. That I should is crazy. I remember Pearl Harbor and all of the Japanese atrocities. I remember the shock to our nation that all of this brought. I don't want to hear any discussion of morality. War, by its very nature, is immoral. Are you any more dead from an atomic bomb than from a conventional bomb?”
May each of us pray that the leaders of Israel are granted strength, cunning and wisdom during this, our generation’s most fateful moment for the Jewish people.