'But if anyone has one,' he added, 'I want to have one more than my enemy.' 'I personally think there shouldn't be any atomic bombs in the world - I'd like to see them all abolished. 'And atomic weapons don't settle anything,' he said. Most of the lives saved were Japanese.'īut VanKirk said the experience of World War II also showed him 'that wars don't settle anything.' 'I honestly believe the use of the atomic bomb saved lives in the long run,' VanKirk told The Associated Press in a 2005 interview.
Whether the United States should have used the atomic bomb has been debated endlessly. Six days after the Nagasaki bombing, Japan surrendered. That blast and its aftermath claimed 80,000 lives. Three days after Hiroshima, a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. The blast and its aftereffects killed 140,000 in Hiroshima. The bombing hastened the end of World War II.