Sam Harris

I don't know how the book got into my hands, but...

Yeah, and so really for my entire life, longer, for nearly 75 years, we've lived under the shadow of nuclear risk.

The Soviets got the bomb in 1949, which was earlier than we were expecting.

And as everyone knows, we're the only country to have used it in 1945 on August 6th on Hiroshima and August 9th on Nagasaki.

Do you have a sense of the ethics or your beliefs about the ethics there in our first and only use of these weapons?

They're treated somewhat in the film, and I could be wrong about this.

This is a piece of history I thought they were getting wrong, but I could be wrong about it.

Yeah, that's always seemed inexplicable to me that we felt that we needed, I guess the rationale was that to drop a second bomb is to indicate, in this case falsely, that we've got a whole arsenal of these weapons to spare.

Why do you think we didn't drop the first bomb off the coast in the ocean as just a demonstration of its power as opposed to dropping it on civilians?

And again, I could be mistaken about this, but I had thought that the rationale that, and maybe you just indicated, I'm not mistaken about this.

I thought that the rationale that dropping a bomb, at least on Hiroshima, was justified because it saved something like a million lives of infantry that didn't have to invade, that that was a very post hoc epiphany that was not thought at the time, right?

Yeah.

I would just add, anyone who feels that they haven't fully imbibed the details of what happened at Hiroshima, John Hersey's small book that, based on his New Yorker articles, is well worth reading.

Yeah, that's a very important piece of context because it makes all of the ethical risks we ran and ignored seem totally understandable given the context.

I mean, you've just

pointed out two very important pieces of context.

One is we were already committing similar genocides of civilians by firebombing cities and killing tens of thousands of people a day.

And

Not really.

In the aftermath, we second-guessed that a little bit, but it just seemed like we were, especially in the case of Nazi Germany, we had an adversary that was so obviously in the wrong and evil and aspiring to create catastrophic harm globally that we sort of had to throw out the rulebook and our scruples with it.