Hiroshima at 50

By G. Pascal Zachary, deleted. Posted April 26, 2001.

destroyed sixty percent of Hiroshima
with a single atomic bomb, killing
nearly 100,000 Japanese civilians.
Fifty years later, the U.S. remains
the only nation to have ever used
nuclear weapons in war. The question
of why is passionately debated today
by those who see Hiroshima as a
symbol of American morality. But
just what kind of symbol isn't
always clear. "Americans continue to
experience pride, pain, and
confusion over the use of the atomic
bomb against Japan," Robert Jay
Lifton and Greg Mitchell write in
Hiroshima in America, a
perceptive, new history of American
responses to the bombing over the
past half-century. "Part of each of
us wishes to believe that the
decision to use the bomb was
reasonable, but another part remains
uncomfortable with what we did."
Even at this late date, the battle
over the collective memory of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki (bombed three
days later, on August 9, 1945)
matters greatly. Those who defend
the bombing cite it as justification
for brandishing our nuclear arsenal
today. Those who view Hiroshima as
the most shameful event in our
nation's history see the U.S. as a
nuclear bully whose still vast
arsenal worsens the prospects for
world peace. It is all too easy to
leave unresolved our thinking about
the bomb. Yet it is important that
we make up our minds, a notion that
will probably not garner much
consideration this August, when many
Americans will unapologetically
celebrate the 50th anniversary of
the atomic bombings. To condemn the
atomic bombings of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki should in no way limit our
comprehension of the decision to
bomb these cities. To explain the
bombings doesn't explain them away;
it doesn't excuse these deplorable
actions. We can't undo history, of
course, but we can influence the
future. How we think about Hiroshima
today will determine how we think --
and act -- about the next
nuclear war. And we may face another
Hiroshima sooner than we think. For
decades, the U.S. has threatened its
enemies, from Vietnam to Iraq and
North Korea, with nuclear
obliteration. There's always a
chance a rogue nation may push the
U.S. too far. Or a terrorist gang
might explode a stolen nuclear bomb,
raising the issue of the proper U.S.
response.

A swift end In rethinking
the bomb, it's important to give the
nuclear proponents their due. The
destruction of Hiroshima, brought
World War II to a swift close,
prompting Japan to abandon plans for
an all-out defense of its land and
hastening its unconditional
surrender. And by the grim standards
of that war, the most murderous
episode in human history, the
bombings weren't especially
horrible. The incendiary bombing of
Tokyo in March 1945, for instance,
killed more people than the Nagasaki
bomb. But the very banality of
Hiroshima's evil is a weak defense,
so proponents justify the mass
killing of Japanese civilians by
citing simple retribution for
Japan's own horrid acts. As critics
of the Smithsonian Institution's
doomed Enola Gay exhibit loudly
proclaimed, the Japanese were
terribly cruel in conquering parts
of China in the 1930s. They also
drew the U.S. into World War II with
a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in
December 1941. Finally, the
Hiroshima-niks argue that the
Japanese only have their own leaders
to blame for the atomic rain.
Indeed, had Japan surrendered in
early 1945 -- or at least after the
bloody loss of Okinawa in June,
which made defense of the home
islands a long-term impossibility --
it would have robbed the U.S. of any
chance to drop an atomic bomb, which
wasn't even tested until July 1945.
So disdainful of their people were
Japan's leaders that they preferred
the face-saving excuse of
annihilation to the prospect of an
effective anti-war, anti-military
movement at home. As one Japanese
leader wrote a few days after
Nagasaki's destruction, "I think the
term is perhaps inappropriate, but
the atomic bombs ... are, in a
sense, gifts from the gods. This way
we don't have to say that we have
quit the war because of domestic
circumstances." The craven disregard
for its citizenry by Japan's ruling
elite provided a convenient excuse
for dropping atomic bombs on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Indeed, it
informed President Truman's own
rationale for dropping the bomb,
stated bluntly in a letter to
theologians soon after the attacks:
"The only language they [the
Japanese] seem to understand is the
one we have been using to bombard
them," wrote the only President to
have ordered an nuclear assault.
"When you have to deal with a beast
you have to treat him as a beast."
To the believers in the
inevitability of Hiroshima, the
Japanese were the enemy, a force to
be destroyed, and nothing more. To
these atomic believers, there is no
painful paradox in fighting evil
with evil; U.S. motives were pure,
even when its actions weren't.
Moreover, the atomic bombings had a
good side: to wit, the saving of an
untold number of American lives,
which would have been lost in an
invasion of Japan. Realistic
estimates put the number of deaths
at under 25,000, well below the
popular yet unfounded figure of
500,000, but still an awful toll.
Because an invasion was avoided, the
atomic believers ask us not only to
accept the bomb but love it too. Or
as essayist Paul Fussell once wrote,
Americans should "thank god for the
atom bomb." This is stupidity on a
grand scale. This is patriotism rum
amok. That both the invasion of
Japan and the imagined casualties
could have been avoided -- by a
combination of alternate military
and diplomatic tactics -- is
conveniently ignored by these
myth-makers. One compelling
scenario: a U.S. naval blockade of
Japan, supported by continued
conventional bombing and the
willingness to allow Emperor
Hirohito to retain his throne, would
likely have led to Japan's surrender
before November 1, the date of the
planned invasion. Allowing the
Emperor to retain a symbolic role in
Japanese affairs, in the end the
lone condition insisted upon by
Japan, was ultimately agreed to by
the U.S. after the war, though it
was flatly rejected during the war.
Russia's declaration of war against
Japan, which was issued between the
Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings,
also might have prompted Japan's
surrender, even in the absence of an
atomic attack. Japanese records
indicate that the country's leaders
were perhaps more shaken by Russia's
actions than by the two atomic
bombs. While it is impossible to
prove the inevitability of that
which never happened, there is every
reason to conclude that all of these
factors, taken together, would have
forced Japan to capitulate. As
Barton J. Bernstein, a leading
scholar of the atomic age, writes in
the current issue of Diplomatic
History, "There was, then, more
probably than not, a missed
opportunity to end the war [with
Japan] without the A-bomb and
without the November invasion." To
be sure, defenders of Hiroshima will
insist that this is pure
speculation. Yet they have a harder
job dismissing the terrible cost of
Hiroshima for succeeding
generations. It is a cost we are
still very much bearing.

The price of success Let
us tally the burden of dropping the
bomb. To start with, Hiroshima
marked the opening act of a grim,
expensive Cold War that for decades
defined America's relations to the
rest of the world and sapped its
national spirit. Much of the
enthusiasm for Hiroshima, among U.S.
political leaders, was its perceived
value in convincing the Soviet Union
that we meant business. With the
"bomb in our hip pocket," to
paraphrase Truman's Secretrary of
State, the U.S. could bully the
Soviets into staying on their side
of Europe. The price of impressing
the Russians, of course, was a
spiraling arm's race. Even before
Hiroshima, a few of the Americans
who knew of the bomb's existence
privately warned of the dangers of
unleashing this genie. Vannevar
Bush, organizer of the Manhattan
Project and President Roosevelt's
science advisor, pointedly predicted
in late 1944 that Russia and other
industrial powers could build their
own atomic weapons, perhaps in as
little as a few years time.
Perversely, these rivals would be
aided by the very demonstration by
the U.S. of the bomb's feasibility.
Bush and his aide, Harvard
University president James Conant,
recommended the creation of an
international organization to
regulate atomic technology and
forestall a race for supremacy in
nuclear weapons. The proliferation
of weapons had dogged human
civilization for centuries, but
nuclear arms marked a radically
different chapter in the sorry
history of war, the two scientists
believed. Machine guns killed dozens
of men at once, but only those
unlucky enough to get in the gun's
path. Airplanes sowed terror, but
with ample warning civilians found
refuge in underground shelters. But
there was no hiding from atomic
bombs, which for the first time in
history inflicted mass
destruction on their targets. We
are so familiar with the image of
the mushroom cloud and the
possibility of nuclear annihilation
of the planet that it is hard to
appreciate the shock to familiar
ways of thinking engendered by the
first use of the bomb. Against the
backdrop of the carnage of the war,
the devastation of Hiroshima might
seem almost unremarkable. But even
with their senses dulled by the
deaths of millions of civilians,
contemporaries immediately saw the
use of the atomic bomb as a
watershed in history. The day after
hearing the news, the philosopher
and writer Albert Camus wrote in the
French newspaper, Combat that:
"[O]ur technical civilization has
just reached its greatest level of
savagery. We will have to choose, in
the more or less near future,
between collective suicide and the
intelligent use of our scientific
conquests." "Even before the bomb,"
Camus added, "one did not breathe
too easily in this tortured world.
Now we are given a new source of
anguish; it has all the promise of
being our greatest anguish ever.
There can be no doubt that humanity
is being offered its last chance."
Despite many intellectuals'
preoccupation with the devastating
implications of the bomb, politics
went on as usual. Proponents of
world government seized the
opportunity to press their case.
Bush and Conant, who knew enough
about atomic science to realize that
there was no "secret" to protect,
urged that the U.S. share its
knowledge of the atomic bomb with
Russia and other nations in exchange
for their promise not to develop
atomic weapons themselves. Their
advice to President Truman went
unheeded, but their prediction of a
nuclear arm's race proved chillingly
correct. Four years after Hiroshima,
Russia detonated its first atomic
bomb. The U.S. countered with the
far-more destructive hydrogen bomb,
which the Russians quickly matched.
The British developed their own
bombs, with little U.S. help. Later
the French and Chinese went nuclear.
By the 1980s, the Indians, the
Pakistanis, the Israelis and the
South Africans were poised to join
the "nuclear club." Today, several
nations are trying to add nuclear
weapons to their arsenals, including
Iraq, Syria, and perhaps North
Korea.

The gravest consequence
The Cold War and the ongoing
prospect of nuclear war have taken
there a cumulative toll over the
past 50 years. Yet immediately
following World War II, even some of
America's top military men saw the
bomb in a different light. "My own
feeling was that in being the first
to use [the bomb], we had adopted an
ethical standard common to the
barbarians of the Middle Ages,"
wrote William Leahy, chairman of the
august Joint Chiefs of Staff. Dwight
Eisenhower, who led the D-Day
invasion that took back Europe from
the Germans, told his civilian
masters that the bomb itself was
"unnecessary," and "no longer
mandatory [even] as a measure to
save American lives." Why these war
heroes were ignored is best
understood by examining the most
insidious effect of the atomic age:
The rise of a secret government and
the mortal wounding of the American
democracy. To understand how the
Manhattan Project and the decision
to use the bomb on Hiroshima became
the model for a government run by
experts and not the people, we must
return again to the summer of 1945.
By then, any pretense that Americans
hewed to a higher standard of
morality in war had vanished. For
months the Air Force had
relentlessly bombed Japanese cities.
Indeed, the U.S. was leveling so
many "targets" in Japan that
military planners actually feared
they would run out of them before
the war officially ended.
The dwindling number of targets lent
a perverse quality to the final push
to ready a few atomic bombs for use.
In mid-June, a month before the
successful "Trinity" explosion in
the desert of New Mexico, John J.
McCloy, who served on a secret
committee that approved the bomb's
use without warning, complained that
"there were no more [Japanese]
cities to bomb, no more carriers to
sink or battleships to shell." The
implication was obvious: maybe the
bomb wasn't needed at all. But there
was no stopping the atomic bomb by
then. The Manhattan Project,
originally charged with building a
bomb before the Nazis did, had taken
on a life of its own. As it turned
out, German efforts to build a bomb
amounted to almost nothing, and the
Japanese never ever took even the
first steps toward doing so. Yet
still the leaders of the Manhattan
Project were frantic to finish their
job. "If we had not completed the
bomb [before Japan's surrender]
there was a possibility that funds
would have been cut off, that
there'd have been great questions
raised" by the public and that the
entire project might have been
scrapped, Vannevar Bush later
recalled. Bush had good reasons for
fearing the public's reaction to
learning about the Manhattan
Project. Perhaps he alone fully
appreciated the way in which the
Manhattan Project contradicted the
nation's democratic principles.
Billions of dollars in public monies
poured into the project without any
explicit Congressional approval or
oversight. No public debate occurred
over the propriety of using the bomb
-- or the potential consequences,
which even Bush believed included a
terrifying and perhaps lethal arms
race that could consume all
humankind. Not even the decision to
build the bomb was publicly
discussed. In making and using
atomic bombs, a handful of experts
-- shielded by the crisis of war --
usurped the people's rightful power
to govern themselves in matters of
the greatest moment. This is perhaps
the most important legacy of World
War II. After the war, a whole array
of agencies sprung up behind a wall
of secrecy. Much like the Manhattan
Project, the Central Intelligence
Agency and the National Security
Agency hid their budgets and their
activities even from Congress, no
less the citizenry. The Atomic
Energy Commission, charged with
building bombs, secretly laid waste
to dozens of American towns and
irrationally promoted inherently
expensive nuclear power, terming it
"too cheap to meter." Perhaps most
shockingly, the government even
performed radiation experiments on
unsuspecting citizens. No one
considered how this betrayal of
democracy might come to haunt
America. The Manhattan Project was a
brilliant success, after all. Public
interference only mucked things up.
The CIA, the AEC, the NSA and the
rest of the secret agencies shared
the fantasy that their experts knew
best. We have since learned
otherwise. The Aldrich Ames case, in
which the CIA allowed a bungling spy
to guts its Russian operations, is
only the latest reminder of the
bankruptcy of the expert class.
These technocrats, even at their
best, are no substitute for broad
participation of the citizenry in
the big decisions of a democracy. In
approving the use of the bomb
against Japan, Truman ratified the
new technocratic order, handing the
ultimate authority over American
life to an unelected elite. In the
end, this was as big a tragedy as
the destruction of Hiroshima itself.

50 years later Despite
the end of the Cold War (and in some
ways because of it), nuclear arms
proliferation even now darkens the
human prospect. While the U.S. and
the former Soviet Union have reduced
their arsenals, the "nuclear club"
is undiminished. Only South Africa,
in an inspired act of leadership
that deserves the world's attention,
has destroyed all of its nuclear
weapons and the capabilities of
making new bombs. No country has
followed the lead of Nelson
Mandela's government. China
continues to test and build nuclear
bombs. France plans new tests later
this year. Russia leaks both
bomb-grade plutonium and nuclear
experts onto the black market, while
it struggles to control its
missiles. The Ukraine, which
inherited a nuclear arsenal on the
breakup of the Soviet Union, has
pledged to disarm but has yet to do
so. As for the U.S., the signs are
hopeful. Our country's nuclear-arms
factories are more intent on
dis-assembling bombs than adding to
the stockpile. Churches have turned
missile silos into sanctuaries. The
underground nuclear test site in
Nevada lays silent. And the ranks of
weapons designers are thinning at
the Los Alamos, New Mexico and
Livermore, Calif. bomb labs. But the
ghost of Hiroshima still looms.
While the Clinton Administration
sticks to a ban on testing, rogue
weapons designers and their military
patrons argue for a resumption of
"small" explosions aimed at honing
their nuclear expertise. President
Clinton has wisely resisted the
temptation to mollify the
nuclear-arms complex. Renewed
testing by the U.S. would doom any
chance of a global ban on all
nuclear explosions. The U.S. could
do more, though. The country's
reliance on nuclear weapons as the
ultimate means of insuring military
superiority sets an awful example
for the rest of the world. Why
should smaller, less powerful
nations, even so-called rogue states
such as Iran and Iraq, shun nuclear
arms when U.S. military hegemony
rests on these very weapons? The
50th anniversary of Hiroshima is a
fitting time for the U.S. to finally
foreswear the first use of nuclear
weapons against another nation,
irregardless of the provocation.
Only by vowing to never again be the
first to use nuclear weapons in war
will the U.S. both expatiate the sin
of Hiroshima and set the world on a
course toward nuclear disarmament.
While giving up the nuclear option
would weaken the U.S. militarily,
the risks of doing otherwise are too
great. As the journal Foreign
Policy recently noted, "America's
continued reliance on nuclear
weapons cripples its efforts to
persuade others not to seek nuclear
capabilities."


SIDEBAR: For further reading on
Hiroshima and the atomic age The
literature on Hiroshima is enormous,
and this anniversary year brings a
fresh outpouring. Of the latest
material, perhaps the most striking
is the spring issue of
Diplomatic History, which
devotes seven substantial articles
to "Hiroshima in History and
Memory." This journal, edited by the
Society for Historians of American
Foreign Relations, includes a
sobering reinterpretation of Japan's
reluctance to surrender by Herbert
P. Bix and a fresh examination of
America's "missed opportunities" to
avoid using the atomic bomb by
Barton J. Bernstein, a Stanford
University historian and leading
bomb scholar. Probably the most
influential book on the subject is
Hiroshima by John Hersey, a
moving and beautifully-written
reconstruction of how the lives of a
handful of people were shattered by
the bomb. An unforgettable piece of
journalism, Hersey's account ignores
the messy political, diplomatic, and
bureaucratic issues that drove the U
S. into dropping the bomb. In
Atomic Diplomacy, Gar
Alperovitz provides the most ardent
case for the view that the U.S. used
the bomb chiefly to bolster its
standing in the postwar world.
Alperovitz effectively demolishes
the conventional argument that the
U.S. dropped the bomb for
essentially humanitarian reasons: to
bring the war to a sudden end and
thus save lives. In his zeal to
demonstrate that the war with Japan
could have been ended without using
the bomb and that possession of the
bomb dominated the U.S. approach to
diplomacy in the war's final phase,
however, Alperovitz overstates his
case in places. A useful corrective
can be found in Martin Sherwin's
A World Destroyed, which
presents the chance to intimidate
the Russians with the bomb as an
appealing consequence of finishing
off Japan with an atomic flourish.
If the prospect of building an
atomic bomb infected the thinking of
U.S. leaders, actual possession of
awesomely-destructive bombs left
them giddy with power. Both civilian
and military officials pressed their
views of the post-1945 order, secure
in the knowledge that as long as the
U.S. held an atomic monopoly it
could more or less do what it wished
anywhere in the world. Gregg
Herken's The Winning Weapon: The
Atomic Bomb in the Cold War:
1945-1950 brilliantly details the
crass manner in which the U.S.
brandished the bomb immediately
after the war and the arms race with
the Soviet Union that followed. In
By the Bomb's Early Light,
Paul Boyer brilliantly portrays the
way in which atomic weapons
influenced American thought and
culture during the same period.
Finally, two books to avoid. David
McCullough's massive biography,
Truman, manages to gloss over
the complexities of this President's
seemingly casual endorsement of
using the bomb. Having assumed the
office on Roosevelt's death a few
months before, Truman had yet to
rise above the level of hack
politician when he blundered into
Hiroshima. On the grave consequences
of Truman's thoughtless act,
McCullough is sadly silent. Another
mammoth, prize- winning book,
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
by Richard Rhodes, fails to place
the bomb's use in the proper
political and moral context, instead
placing the technical achievements
above its effects. -- G.P.Z.

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