Lessons from Nagasaki
Saul Landau
Progreso Weekly, 18 August 2005
As the United States tries to force Iranians and North Koreans to forego the construction of nuclear weapons, U.S. citizens should return to events sixty years ago. At 11 a.m. on August 9, 1945, the nervous captain of a B-29 looked for his target. Since clouds covered Kokura that morning and scientists had not yet developed "smart bombs," he and his crew, feeling uneasy about carrying the deadly product, made a rapid decision. Turn the aircraft toward their alternate target.
Three-plus years earlier, in 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt had secretly assembled the smartest scientists and engineers in the non-Axis world to design and build an atomic bomb, a weapon so powerful that it could prevent Adolph Hitler and his Nazis from conquering the world.
Headed by J. Robert Oppenheimer, a passionate anti-fascist, the bomb builders saw themselves preserving western civilization against a barbaric threat. When the Nazis surrendered in May 1945, a few scientists left the project, claiming that the need for such a destructive weapon no longer existed. Most of them, even Oppenheimer and other liberals, remained to see if their experiment would explode.
In July 1945, at Alamogordo, New Mexico, the army tested the results of the scientific collaboration just as President Harry Truman went to Potsdam to meet with his two wartime allies, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet Communist Party Chief Josef Stalin. The war time Allies finished post-war planning begun with President Roosevelt that January at the Yalta summit.
But Roosevelt died soon after the Yalta meeting at which he agreed to divide Europe between East and West. At that time, U.S. policy saw the Soviets playing the role of containing German power in post-war Europe, so that it could not again threaten world stability as it had done twice within 25 years.
In the midst of the Potsdam discussion, however, an aide whispered in Truman’s ear that the U.S. atomic test had succeeded. With such a weapon at his disposal, Truman no longer needed the Soviets to contain Germany, as historian Gar Alperovitz made clear in his two well-researched books (Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam: The Use of the Atomic Bomb and The American Confrontation With Soviet Power and The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb). Truman’s top advisors convinced him to use not just one but two atomic bombs. Post-war political, not military, reasons demanded such a decision. Indeed, notes I found in an old trunk belonging to Col. Bryte, an aide to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, contained a memo from the Joints Chiefs of Staff with elaborate "talking points" to that effect.
But on August 9, 1945 neither politics nor science occupied the minds of the bomber crew as they dropped Fat Man, a reference to the corpulent Winston Churchill. The bomb, 11 feet 4 inches in length, contained the equivalent of 22 kilotons of TNT and weighed 9,000 pounds. Little Boy, the pet name for the first bomb, fell three days earlier on Hiroshima.
Some 30 percent of Nagasaki and most of its industrial district burned or collapsed from the heat generated by the explosion. More than 150,000 died; tens of thousands more suffered serious injuries. Subsequently, thousands more died from the effects of radiation.
The bomber crew followed orders of U.S. policymakers who saw the bomb as a way to issue in the new "American" order. Secretary of State James Byrnes dreaded the thought that the Soviets would have a major say in reconstructing Europe. Think of what this would mean for U.S. investment and trade!
Stalin, who had stood firm at Potsdam on demands for reparations from Germany and on Soviet influence in Eastern Europe, focused on preventing a third horrendous war. Any Soviet leader would have to prevent Germany from doing what he had done twice in 25 years: killing as many as 50 million Russian or Soviet citizens and destroying their country.
Washington’s use of atomic bombs as instruments of "strategic thinking" about Europe cost the Japanese more than 250,000 civilian casualties. The official U.S. position still holds that Truman’s decision saved U.S. lives that would otherwise have been lost in a land invasion of the Japanese mainland. Those stubborn "Nips" – the World War II pejorative expression – forced us into using the bombs.
As retired Spanish General Alberto Piris concluded about Nagasaki: "There was no way to justify the use of such a weapon after having already seen what it did," referring to what Washington had already learned three days earlier from bombing Hiroshima.
General Dwight Eisenhower said that "I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act... I voiced ... my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment, was I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives" (The White House Years: Mandate to Change).
Later, Ike added that "...the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing" (Newsweek, 11/11/63).
General Douglas MacArthur also thought that dropping the bombs were "completely unnecessary from a military point of view" (James, D. Clayton. The Years of MacArthur, 1941-1945).
Japan surrendered five days after the Nagasaki bomb hit. But months before that massacre the key events deciding the war’s outcome had already taken place. The Soviet armed forces had defeated the Nazis at a cost of more than 20 million dead and another 20 million wounded. The Nazis had destroyed 200 major Soviet cities, burned and destroyed everything that crossed their paths as they retreated. The Soviet army lacked food and boots.
Yet, within two years, high officials in Washington and London had designed what became the Cold War. They used media and rhetoric very cleverly to change Uncle Joe (an inappropriate war-time metaphor) into Stalin the Butcher and convert the true image of a crippled USSR into one that planned immediate aggression, an evil empire that intended to invade Western Europe and conquer the world.
In this new post-war "threat" atmosphere, there was little discussion about the morality and legality of nuclear bombing or of the previous fire bombing of major urban areas in Japan and Germany. At the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes tribunals, the winners chose the names of those who would stand in the dock for war crimes.
Now, after 60 years of reflection, it is time for the world to make a judgment. The devastation of Nagasaki served no military or political purpose. But it did show the power and ruthlessness of U.S. leaders, men who placed themselves beside their Axis enemies in terms of willingness to ignore the rules of war.
But the power circles in Washington remain unfazed by world opinion or reflection. Their enthusiasm about nuclear weapons’ potential appears in the Defense Department’s 2001 "Nuclear Posture Review." In this bizarre document, DOD envisions using nuclear options for a wider range of circumstances than ever before – terrorists and "rogue states." It wanted to develop new kinds of nuclear weapons and new tests as well.
The U.S. "addiction" to nuclear weapons, while possessing the world’s most powerful conventional forces, offers strong incentive and rationale for nations to acquire nuclear weapons. President Bush asserts that the United States has the right – in peacetime and on its own authority – to use all means at its disposal to prevent states from acquiring nuclear weapons (Ironically, the fact that Saddam Hussein did not have them made him vulnerable to a U.S. invasion!).
Instead of halting nuclear proliferation, Bush’s actions and rhetoric have done the opposite. North Korea and Iran, India and Pakistan, Israel and South Africa may all have joined or will soon become members of the nuclear weapons club. In December 2003, Syria called for the UN Security Council to declare the Middle East a nuclear-weapons free zone. The United States did not favor this resolution. Instead, Bush continues to threaten to use nukes. In so doing, he has both frightened and antagonized leaders and citizens throughout the world.
The continuity line between the decision to drop atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the threat to use them on contemporary "axis of evil" states runs callously through U.S. policy. In August, the anniversary of the only use of nuclear weapons, citizens should reflect on nuclear weapons. The only way to ensure that states or "madmen" don’t use them is to get rid of them – all of them.
Copyright 2005 Progreso Weekly
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