Lessons Learned, Lessons Not Learned

By Matthew Wheeland, AlterNet. Posted August 5, 2005.

Sixty years ago tomorrow, the United States dropped a nuclear bomb on the city of Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, the military dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki.

These are the only two nuclear bombs ever used in war, and with good reason. The devastation from the bombs was unfathomable, and as the extent of the destruction became public knowledge, the bombs themselves became a symbol of the atrocity of war.

Immediately after the bombs, once Japan had surrendered unconditionally, the U.S. military instituted a blanket ban on reporting about the effects of the bombs. It took seven years for the first photos to surface in Japan, and many more for the larger world to learn what happened on those two days.

Sadly, the threat of nuclear weapons seems to have faded from the public consciousness, even as the fear of terrorist attacks looms large. With all the talk of "dirty bombs" and "suitcase bombs," the fact is that more than 30,000 nuclear weapons remain in the arsenals of the eight countries that admit to having any. As Walter Cronkite says in a new radio documentary, "Lessons from Hiroshima: 60 Years Later," "some 4,000 of these are on hair-trigger alert."

"Lessons from Hiroshima" explores the consequences of the bombs, Fat Man and Little Boy, for Japan and the world. Survivors of the blasts, Japanese and American alike, paint a human picture of how the world was forever changed on those two days. Host Walter Cronkite interviews Mohammed El Baradei from the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency about the modern nuclear threat, and shares his own reflections of post-war Japan.

I listened to an advance copy of the program on the way home from work. When I told producer Reese Ehrlich that I sat outside my house for 15 minutes to finish it before going inside, he laughed and said that’s known as a "driveway moment" in the industry.

"Lessons from Hiroshima: 60 Years Later" is full of driveway moments. It is deeply disturbing but offers listeners hope about the future; anti-war activists have come a long way indeed in the last 60 years.

AlterNet: Would you tell me how this documentary came about?

Reese Erlich: Barbara Simmons, the executive producer of the show and head of [Pennsylvania radio show] Peace Talks had been interested in this topic for a long time, and she and Jennifer Beer went to Japan and to Hiroshima and Nagasaki and interviewed the hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors), and that was the beginning of the story and this was already a year and a half ago.

Then they contacted me to put it together and I realized that for the 60th anniversary, this was going to be a really great story. So we added some additional interviews, we tracked down a Japanese WWII veteran who was critical of the Japanese military, and that's not so easy. The Second World War is still very controversial over there in terms of how you look at it. Unlike the Germans, the Japanese government and right wing has continued to justify in some ways what they did and downplay the nature of the atrocities. So it's not easy to find a Japanese war veteran who will be honest about what happened.

It's similar to trying to find, in the military today, somebody who would admit what the U.S. did in Vietnam. It's very analogous, it's "Well, yeah, we fought the good fight, we were fighting Communism, we didn't do such bad things." Forget about talking about torture and mass roundups and slaughter of Vietnamese, you just don't hear about it from official sources. so it's much that kind of thing.

Which brings us to the quote you have from Robert McNamara basically admitting that, yeah, "If we had lost, we were war criminals."

Yeah, that was excerpted from The Fog of War, an excellent documentary, and it's very revealing, he really said, "had we lost the war we would have all been considered war criminals." [Full quote] And he does some fancy dancing around these issues of firebombing.

I think what we do in this documentary, at least for the first time that I've heard, is linking the "total war strategy" that the U.S. used in Germany and Japan that included the firebombing of the cities, with the dropping of the bomb. It was clear that one led to the other. If you can incinerate 100,000 people in a single night in a firebombing, then why worry about killing that many with a nuclear bomb.

And the numbers killed with the two bombs?

Two hundred thirty-thousand at Hiroshima and Nagasaki together. And more people were actually killed in the firebombing, in total, because they went on for a lot longer.

Matthew Wheeland is an associate editor at AlterNet.

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