Sixty-two years ago today the first atomic bomb was dropped by the Enola Gay, a specially modified B-29 Superfortress American bomber, against a major Japanese urban area, the city of Hiroshima.
A terrible decision with terrible consequences for the unwitting citizens of Hiroshima, many of whom would die, either from the initial fireball and blast effects or from radiation sickness in the days and weeks following the attack. Estimates of as many as 200,000 deaths are attributed to this one attack. In Hiroshima each year there is a ceremony commemorating the victims of the world’s first atomic bomb attack, with the hope that such a fate will never again befall any city and its people anywhere in the world.
Yet, under the Bush administration we have moved ever closer to using nuclear weapons again, in a first strike capacity. We know (because Seymour Hersh told us in his New Yorker reports) that Bush and Cheney originally demanded the inclusion in the Pentagon’s Iran war plan of tactical nuclear strikes against hardened targets believed to be hiding Iran’s secret nuclear weapons program. Some have reported that the use of such weapons is now “off the table” in the event of an American military strike against Iran, but we have no real assurance that such is the case.
Last week, Barrack Obama was roundly criticized in the media for saying he would not condone a first use of nuclear weapons in the War on Terror. His political opponents (including Hillary Clinton and others) have claimed it is naive for the United States to take any option “off the table” including a first use of nuclear weapons, despite the frightful nature and destructive power of these weapons.
Frankly, I’m appalled that such sentiments are considered mainstream these days. Anyone who witnessed the destruction of Hiroshima (which was attacked with a weapon we would now classify as a tactical nuke in terms of its destructive force) would tell Senator Clinton and the others who assailed Senator Obama for his remarks that it is they who are being naive in thinking that nuclear weapons are just another item in our arsenal, just another option with which to confront our enemies. I’m sure the victims of Hiroshima would have a word or two to say about the blithe manner in which are politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, throw around threats of nuclear attacks against Islamic countries, as if they were par for the political course, even something of which to be proud.
The best evidence that a nation is losing power is its willingness to mount aggressive wars of conquest. And the best evidence that a nation’s military is weakening is when its leaders consider the use of mass murder to be a viable military strategy. We have moved too far down this road in the last seven years with the Bush administration’s efforts to make the use of nuclear weapons in war a reality once more. For the sake of our children and grandchildren let us go no further. Indeed, we need to immediately take as many steps away from this abyss of horror as possible, before someone sitting in the oval office feels the need to commit another dark crime against humanity, one for which the world will blame all Americans, and not just the button pushers at the Pentagon.
The dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki haunt us still. Let us not be responsible for adding any more deaths to their number.
All of our candidates should be willing to say that they will not use our Nuclear capacity unless another nation uses nuclear weapons against us.
They should, but they won’t, will they? And that is the direct result of the takeover of the media by the right, and of the last 6 and a half years of the Bush war agenda. Now every candidate believes (or their consultants do) that they have to talk tough, no matter how insane and/or immoral that makes them appear to any rational observer.
I’m sorry, but I think that even a nuclear response to a nuclear bomb is wrong. Someone has to take the high road and starting a nuclear winter or what not is just wrong.
I do not support the use of nuclear weapons ever and I will have a really hard time voting for anyone who would ever even consider nuclear bombs an option. In fact it could well tip me over from one candidate to another.
I understand wanting to get even, but I don’t want to see the end of the world. Anthrocentric of me, I know.
True, but admitting that removes the whole principle of Nuclear deterrence.
In the early ’80’s I was crewing on a sailboat that stopped over in the Japanese islands. The first stop I remember was a quiet little town in the south end. Our eagerness to step foot on land was quickly swept aside as we discovered that the town was home to many of the survivors of Hiroshima…people maimed and disfigured, now old and weary. I remember their eyes. Ours were ignorant and yet curious as we arrogantly ambled their quiet haven, theirs black and cold with the pain my kind had inflicted on them. Consequences live on.
As abominable as I find contemporary politicians who advocate the use of nuclear weapons in any fashion, I can’t bring myself to make the same characterization of President Truman and his decision to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Given that the United States was going to invade and occupy Japan, and also given that Curtis Lemay’s tactics of incendiary bombing of large Japanese cities (the kind that killed over 100,000 human beings in Tokyo) would have continued right up to the November 1945 invasion, I think an argument can be made that the use of the two nuclear weapons actually resulted in fewer deaths of both American sericemen and Japanese civilians. However, I don’t disagree that it is an obscene kind of debate.
After 52 years, given what we know about nuclear weapons and their use as a weapon of terror and deterence, any politician who doesn’t call for their complete elimination borders on surrendering their humanity in favor of their nationality. Ask the Japanese if this is a good exchange, or the Germans, or 21st century tired-as-hell-of-Bush Americans.
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Thanks Steven! Western powers went through d’etant and nuclear disarmament treaties, until very recent . Now first use is back on the table after Barry Goldwater in 1964.
Obama says no nuclear weapons to fight terror
WASHINGTON (AP) Aug. 2 – Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said he would not use nuclear weapons “in any circumstance” to fight terrorism in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."when the Japanese discuss the history of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere and the Nanking thingie in Japanese textbooks. They can also discuss the issue of “comfort women”.
While I am not happy about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, my dad sure was at the time. He was a grunt in Europe, and was certainly headed for a very bad time in Japan.
Let me know when we get a little Japanese honesty about history, and I will get more concerned about the situation in Hiroshima. Certainly the Japanese killed more in China, but then what are Chinese lives worth, eh wot?
Hiroshima was the first use of nukes. That makes it important regardless of who was killed by the bomb. The point of the diary is that after Hiroshima and Nagasaki the world had a chance to witness the horrible effects of these weapons on civillain populations. From that horror ultimately came the policy of no first use of nuclear weapons by the United States, and no use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear powers. The non-proliferation movement can also be directly tied in no small part to the horrors of Hiroshima. Now we have officially abandoned that policy. That is why I wrote this diary. Not to obtain sympathy for innocent Japanese civilians now dead for 6 decades but to show the dangerous path we are on, one in which we are making a first use of nukes by the US a very real possibility.
As for the Japanese, whatever crimes you can lay at the feet of their leaders and their military, please remember that they paid for those in the blood of millions of Japanese women, children and old people during the firebombing raids that General Curtis LeMay employed during 1945, which managed to kill far more Japanese than the two nuclear blasts did. Indeed, it was difficult to find appropriate targets for the atomic bomb, because so many Japanese cities had already been destroyed with the use of incendiary weapons.
but really, no one knew with any degree of certainty before the bomb what the effects of the bomb would be. With the clear sight of hindsight from 60 years, this looks bad. But not from the viewpoint of 1945, where the fanatical Japanese population was likely to fight to the death through the entire island.
At the time, it was a very good decision. I have no problem with it whatsoever.
The fanatacism of the Japanese people has been much overstated.
Again and again, the standards of today are mis-applied to the decision of 62 years ago. I am continually amazed that people do that.
Can you cite any 1945 discussions of the effects of nuclear radiation on populations? I would be astonished if you could. To the military of the that time, this was a larger more effective weapon. Today, we see it as a different class of weapon, but I truly doubt that it was seen that way then.
There were many who were concerned about things like ignighting the atmosphere, and so forth. But realistic predictions of the effects were few and far between.
Thus, I find these efforts to engender guilt in today’s Americans by mis-applying contemporary standards appalling really.
Where is your accompanying discussion of Nanking? Of the GEACPS? Of the Japanese atrocities, which the Japanese deny even today? The Japanese make a LOT of noise about Hiroshima, but never discuss Nanking, in which 7 times as many were killed by some estimates.
War is hell, and you won’t find me making these revisionist anachronistic, historically incorrect and extremely one-sided arguments. How about a little balance?
But it’s important to note that the military was opposed to dropping the bomb on Japan, and Truman was well aware of this.
It wasn’t a strategic decision, but a political one, made by civilians in Washington.
The topic was hotly debated then, as now. What’s revisionist is to accept the idea that it was a cut-and-dried decision in 1945. It wasn’t.
not about contemporary policy. No one today under any circumstances can condone any use of nukes. I am certainly not arguing that.
No first use, no second use.
I’m glad you put up this diary Steven. As far as I’m concerned this is the best thing Obama has said so far and as for Hillary and any of the rest of them spouting tough talk of nuclear use-it’s really beyond horrifying isn’t it. If you needed any proof of the dems descent into hell it’s right here in almost casual talk of saying they would use nuclear weapons and against other countries, some that don’t even have nuclear weapons. This isn’t tough talk, this is sick, sorry debased pandering and afraid to look weak or in my book it’s just plain evil to talk of using nukes.
That such “tough talk” seems to be mandatory to show the Beltway elite that you are a “serious” candidate is perhaps one of the grossest distortions of our current political climate.
from a collection of testimonials titled Hiroshima, In Memoriam and Today, Hitoshi Takayama, himself an A-bomb survivor, summarizes the importance of listening to the survivor’s voices:
“The atomic bomb is the most cruel and inhumane thing ever imposed on humanity.”
it is stunning that after 62 years, that we continue have a national posture that continues the cold war concept of mutually assured destruction; and a political atmosphere where talk of taking the nuclear option off the table is tatamount to treason.
orwell, meets dr. stranglelove with a bit of ayn rand for good measure.
lTMF’sA
I think the United States will committ mass murder, and it will be the end of us. I’m glad I live somewhere else.
Good points here tonight. I’m in the middle of a new book released by the the Richard P. Feynman family. I’ve listened to nearly all the audio tapes of his lectures and gleaned much from his insight working as he did in his role in helping develop the atomic bomb.
Until the atomic bomb we humans had only mother nature’s wrath to compare such devastation to. Feynman and his team of researchers did talk amongst themselves of the destruction they envisioned would likely occur. But despite their brillance, their imagination, their fears, what their creation did to obliterate Japan held even their minds in awe of its scope.
If I may, they perhaps had the excuse of not having any precognition of what their bomb would sound like in the screams of children, smell like in burning bodies. Today, we don’t have the luxury of that innocence. That’s why even the threat of a nuclear attack makes me shake and it is, in my view, disingenuous to compare the perspective of the WWII generation with ours that should respect the lesson they gave us.