This month marks the 78th anniversary of the first atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima, so it seems appropriate that one of the summer’s blockbuster films is Oppenheimer, the story of the scientist who led the Manhattan Project that developed the bomb.

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Philip Cross: Oppenheimer’s implicit lesson — trust technology more Back to video

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In his new book, Road to Surrender, journalist/historian Evan Thomas adds perspective to the never-ending debate about the politics and morality of using the atomic bomb on a civilian population. On the American side, he writes, there was “no discussion at the higher levels of government about not using the bomb.” The public would have insisted on its deployment to save American lives.

But Thomas goes on to argue that dropping the bomb ultimately saved more Japanese than American lives. Japan’s determination to continue fighting was evident in how, even after Hiroshima, it did not surrender. And in the following days, despite Russia declaring war and another bomb being dropped on Nagasaki, Japan’s six leaders remained evenly split on whether to surrender. The Japanese military wanted to pursue its strategy of maximizing U.S. casualties — even though continuing the war was killing more Asians than Americans, with an estimated 250,000 people a month dying in China, Southeast Asia and Indonesia. It eventually took the rare intervention of Japan’s Emperor to break the impasse — and even then the military attempted a last-minute coup to stop the Emperor from surrendering.

The Japanese military strategy of maximizing U.S. losses might not have worked anyway, because the Americans were developing alternatives to invading Japan. After its bloody conquest of Okinawa, the U.S. was shifting to a strategy of starving Japan into surrender, a tactic that would have cost many more civilian than military deaths as Japan’s army had already begun hoarding food supplies for just such an eventuality. Far more civilian lives could have been lost in an Allied naval blockade than died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The development of the atomic bomb also is revealing about our changing attitude to trusting technology to solve major challenges. The Manhattan Project was conceived by Allied war leaders to help defeat the Axis powers, which it ultimately did. In 1961, President Kennedy promised to put a man on the moon years before the technology to do that existed. More recently, we put our faith in the technology of vaccines to end the COVID pandemic, just the latest instance in which modern medicine has contained or even eradicated diseases. In our everyday lives, we have quickly come to trust computers to manage everything from our work and social lives to our travel (all but seven minutes of the typical airplane flight is operated by computers, according to Kevin Kelly’s book, The Inevitable).

Yet when it comes to climate change, our society is reluctant to embrace technological solutions, which may in the end prove the only practical ones available. It seems increasingly clear that the cost of raising energy prices to achieve net-zero emissions is simply too high a price for most Canadians to pay. For example, a new Nanos Research poll for the University of Ottawa’s Positive Energy initiative found that Canadians ranked affordable energy as more important than reducing emissions. And of the 70 per cent of Canadians concerned about energy prices, nearly half rated their concern as “10” on a scale of 1 to 10.

It is time our leaders stopped pretending climate change can be affected by mouthing “soporific, self-deluding eco-agitprop” as one wag put it, as if forcing consumers to give up plastic bags or switch to electric vehicles makes a big difference for the planet. The solution has to lie in technology, either with a cheap, emissions-free energy source or by capturing and neutralizing emissions or influencing global weather patterns.

Average people reject the wholesale reordering of their lifestyles imagined by environmentalists and unelected bureaucrats who would force Canadians to live in self-sustaining and isolated communities, venturing outside them only in public transit that is proving to be increasingly unreliable and unsafe.

People have the right to insist their leaders and the scientific community work on a technological solution to climate change. If we had faith in technology to split the atom to end World War II and curtail the COVID pandemic, we should also be confident it can find the solution to climate change.

Philip Cross is a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.