The stupidity, parochialism, and greed in the international mismanagement of the whole nuclear challenge should not tempt us to misimagine the circumstances of the bomb’s first “use.” Nor should our well-justified fears and suspicions occasioned by the capture of the nuclear-power trade by the inept and the mendacious (who have fucked up the works at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, etc.) tempt us to infer retrospectively extraordinary corruption, imbecility, or motiveless malignity in those who decided, all things considered, to drop the bomb. Times change.
The Return to Nothingness
Felix Morley reports that although officials have portrayed the development of the atomic bomb as “eminently laudable,” the general reaction to news of the atomic bomb has been “unconcealed horror.” Published in Human Events on August 29, 1945, Morley’s “Return to Nothingness” shares the author’s darkest apprehensions over the atomic bomb and its impact on humanity.
From “The Return to Nothingness”
BY FELIX MORLEY
The fear that has gripped men’s hearts, since the blasting of Hiroshima, is not primarily due to anticipation that our cities will eventually meet the same fate, logical though such outcome would be. Our fear is much more akin to that which still accompanies the sense of personal and collective sin. Expectation of retribution is only a part of the fear which springs from consciousness of sin. The sense of shame and degradation is only a part of this fear. Most important in this unease is the loss of individual dignity and spiritual peace—the consciousness of being hopelessly adrift; of having lost contact with those standards by which men really live.
Long before our age of science there were men who foresaw its coming and who sought in advance of the necessity which now confronts us to lead human intelligence to the service of principle rather than that of passion. One such prophet was Thomas Aquinas, who in the thirteenth century worked out that universal Christian synthesis which the atomic bomb destroys. Few today will deny surpassing insight to that passage in the Summa Theologica where St. Thomas wrote, almost 700 years ago, “in all created things there is a stable element, even if this be only primary matter, and something belonging to movement, if under movement we include operation. New things need governing as to both, because even that which is stable, since it is created from nothing, would return to nothingness were it not sustained by a Governing Hand.”
Great effort has been made to picture the atomic bomb as an eminently laudable achievement of American inventiveness, ingenuity and scientific skill. On the day of the destruction of Hiroshima the floodgates of official publicity were swung wide. Rivers of racy material prepared in our various agencies of Public Enlightenment poured out to the press and radio commentators whose well-understood duty is to “condition” public opinion. Puddles of ink confusedly outlined the techniques whereby we have successfully broken the Laws of God.
Never has any totalitarian propaganda effort fallen more flat. Instead of the anticipated wave of nationalistic enthusiasm, the general reaction was one of unconcealed horror. Even the immediate Japanese surrender, even the joy of “going places” on unrationed gas, even the universal sense of relief over the ending of the war, has not concealed an apprehension which reflection does less than nothing to diminish. Many who cannot voice their thoughts are nonetheless conscious of the withdrawal of the Governing Hand, are well aware that at the crossroads we have chosen the turning which leads back to Nothingness.
In London, last week, Parliament ratified the Charter of the United Nations. Consideration was as perfunctory as that given the subject by our Senate. Emphasized was the futility of this elaborate mechanism in the light of announcement that two major Allies intend to withhold the secret of the atomic bomb from the third most powerful partner. So a country dedicated by its founders to individual enlightenment now controls a secret which makes the individual look as does the insect in respect to D.D.T. Quite naturally our new scale of values loses its moral grandeur and shifts to insect values—“full employment” or “security” within the meticulously organized anthill of the expanding State. We have won the war. Now what is our purpose for the Power we control?
The Bomb in National Memories
Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, an international Cold War historian, presents another view of the history of the atomic bomb. In his book, lauded as “the first international history of the end of World War II in the Pacific,” Hasegawa examines the myths and simplified histories that the United States, the Soviet Union, and Japan have adopted to justify their decisions at the end of the war.
From Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan
BY TSUYOSHI HASEGAWA
The Bomb in American Memory
After the war was over, each nation began constructing its own story about how the war ended. Americans still cling to the myth that the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki provided the knock-out punch to the Japanese government. The decision to use the bomb saved not only American soldiers but also the Japanese, according to the narrative. The myth serves to justify Truman’s decision and ease the collective American conscience. To this extent, it is important to American national identity. But as this book demonstrates, this myth cannot be supported by historical facts. Evidence makes clear that there were alternatives to the use of the bomb, alternatives that the Truman administration for reasons of its own declined to pursue. And it is here, in the evidence of roads not taken, that the question of moral responsibility comes to the fore. Until his death, Truman continually came back to this question and repeatedly justified his decision, inventing a fiction that he himself later came to believe. That he spoke so often to justify his actions shows how much his decision to use the bomb haunted him.
On August 10 the Japanese government sent a letter of protest through the Swiss legation to the United States government. This letter declared the American use of the atomic bombs to be a violation of Articles 22 and 23 of the Hague Convention Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land, which prohibited the use of cruel weapons. It declared “in the name of the Japanese Imperial Government as well as in the name of humanity and civilization” that “the use of the atomic bombs, which surpass the indiscriminate cruelty of any other existing weapons and projectiles,” was a crime against humanity, and demanded that “the further use of such inhumane weapons be immediately ceased.” Needless to say, Truman did not respond to this letter. After Japan accepted the American occupation and became an important ally of the United States, the Japanese government has never raised any protest about the American use of the atomic bombs. The August 10 letter remains the only, and now forgotten, protest lodged by the Japanese government against the use of the atomic bomb.
To be sure, the Japanese government was guilty of its own atrocities in violation of the laws governing the conduct of war. The Nanking Massacre of 1937, biological experiments conducted by the infamous Unit 731, the Bataan March, and the numerous instances of cruel treatment of POWs represent only a few examples of Japanese atrocities. Nevertheless, the moral lapses of the Japanese do not excuse those of the United States and the Allies. After all, morality by definition is an absolute rather than a relative standard. The forgotten letter that the Japanese government sent to the United States government on August 10 deserves serious consideration. Justifying Hiroshima and Nagasaki by making a historically unsustainable argument that the atomic bombs ended the war is no longer tenable. Our self-image as Americans is tested by how we can come to terms with the decision to drop the bomb. Although much of what revisionist historians argue is faulty and based on tendentious use of sources, they nonetheless deserve credit for raising an important moral issue that challenges the standard American narrative of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The Stalinist Past
Soviet historians, and patriotic Russian historians after the collapse of the Soviet Union, justify the Soviet violation of the Neutrality Pact by arguing that it brought the Pacific War to a close, thus ending the suffering of the oppres
sed people of Asia and the useless sacrifices of the Japanese themselves. But this book shows that Stalin’s policy was motivated by expansionist geopolitical designs. The Soviet leader pursued his imperialistic policy with Machiavellian ruthlessness, deviousness, and cunning. In the end he managed to enter the war and occupy those territories to which he felt entitled. Although he briefly flirted with the idea of invading Hokkaido, and did violate the provision of the Yalta Agreement to secure a treaty with the Chinese as the prerequisite for entry into the war, Stalin by and large respected the Yalta limit. But by occupying the southern Kurils, which had never belonged to Russia until the last days of August and the beginning of September 1945, he created an intractable territorial dispute known as “the Northern Territories question” that has prevented rapprochement between Russia and Japan to this day. The Russian government and the majority of Russians even now continue to cling to the myth that the occupation of the southern Kurils was Russia’s justifiable act of repossessing its lost territory.
Stalin’s decisions in the Pacific War are but one of many entries in the ledger of his brutal regime. Although his imperialism was not the worst of his crimes compared with the Great Purge and collectivization, it represented part and parcel of the Stalin regime. Certainly, his conniving against the Japanese and the blatant land-grabbing that he engaged in during the closing weeks of the war are nothing to praise. Although the crimes committed by Stalin have been exposed and the new Russia is making valiant strides by shedding itself of the remnants of the Stalinist past, the Russians, with the exception of a few courageous historians, have not squarely faced the historical fact that Stalin’s policy toward Japan in the waning months of the Pacific War was an example of the leader’s expansionistic foreign policy. Unless the Russians come to this realization, the process of cleansing themselves of the Stalinist past will never be completed.
The Mythology of Victimization and the Role of Hirohito
It took the Japanese a little while to realize that what happened to the Kurils during the confused period between August 15 and September 5 amounted to annexation of Japan’s inherent territory, an act that violated the Atlantic Charter and the Cairo Declaration. But the humiliation the Japanese suffered in the four-week Soviet-Japanese War was not entirely a result of the Soviet occupation of the Kurils. The Soviet occupation of the Kurils represented the last of many wrongs that the Soviets perpetrated on the Japanese, beginning with the violation of the Neutrality Pact, the invasion of Manchuria, Korea, southern Sakhalin, and the deportation and imprisonment of more than 640,000 prisoners of war. The “Northern Territories question” that the Japanese have demanded be resolved in the postwar period before any rapprochement with the Soviet Union (and Russia after 1991) is a mere symbol of their deep-seated resentment of and hostility toward the Russians who betrayed Japan when it desperately needed their help in ending the war.
Together with the Soviet war against Japan, Hiroshima and Nagasaki have instilled in the Japanese a sense of victimization. What Gilbert Rozman calls the Hiroshima syndrome and the Northern Territories syndrome are an inverted form of nationalism. As such they have prevented the Japanese from coming to terms with their own culpability in causing the war in Asia. Before August 14, 1945, the Japanese leaders had ample opportunities to surrender, for instance, at the German capitulation, the fall of Okinawa, the issuance of the Potsdam Proclamation, the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and Soviet entry into the war. Few in Japan have condemned the policymakers who delayed Japan’s surrender. Had the Japanese government accepted the Potsdam Proclamation unconditionally immediately after it was issued, as Sato and Matsumoto argued, the atomic bombs would not have been used, and the war would have ended before the Soviets entered the conflict. Japanese policymakers who were in the position to make decisions—not only the militant advocates of war but also those who belonged to the peace party, including Suzuki, Togo, Kido, and Hirohito himself—must bear the responsibility for the war’s destructive end more than the American president and the Soviet dictator.
In postwar Japan, Hirohito has been portrayed as the savior of the Japanese people and the nation for his “sacred decisions” to end the war. Indeed, without the emperor’s personal intervention, Japan would not have surrendered. The cabinet and the Big Six were hopelessly divided, unable to make a decision. Only the emperor broke the stalemate. His determination and leadership at the two imperial conferences and his steadfast support for the termination of the war after the decisive meeting with Kido on August 9 were crucial factors leading to Japan’s surrender.
This does not mean, however, that the emperor was, in Asada’s words, “Japan’s foremost peace advocate, increasingly articulate and urgent in expressing his wish for peace.” He was, as all other Japanese leaders at that time, still pinning his hope on Moscow’s mediation, rejecting the unconditional surrender demanded by the Potsdam Proclamation until the Soviet entry into the war. After the Soviets joined the fight, he finally changed his mind to accept the Potsdam terms. In Japan it has been taboo to question the motivation that led Hirohito to accept surrender. But the findings of this book call for a reexamination of his role in the ending of the Pacific War. His delay in accepting the Allied terms ensured the use of the bomb and Soviet entry into the war.
Although Hirohito’s initiative after August 9 should be noted, his motivation for ending the war was not as noble as the “sacred decision” myth would have us believe. His primary concern was above all the preservation of the imperial house. He even flirted with the idea of clinging to his political role. Despite the myth that he said he did not care what happened to him personally, it is likely that he was also in fact deeply concerned about the safety of his family and his own security. At the crucial imperial conference of August 10, Hiranuma did not mince words in asking Hirohito to take responsibility for the tragedy that had befallen Japan. As Konoe, some of the emperor’s own relatives, and Grew, the most ardent supporter of the Japanese monarchy, argued, Hirohito should have abdicated at the end of the war to make a clean break with the Showa period that marked anything but what “Showa” meant: enlightened peace. His continuing reign made Japan’s culpability in the war ambiguous and contributed to the nation’s inability to come to terms with the past.
Thus this is a story with no heroes but no real villains, either—just men. The ending of the Pacific War was in the last analysis a human drama whose dynamics were determined by the very human characteristics of those involved: ambition, fear, vanity, anger, and prejudice. With each successive decision, the number of remaining alternatives steadily diminished, constraining ever further the possibilities, until the dropping of the bomb and the destruction of the Japanese state became all but inevitable. The Pacific War could very well have ended differently had the men involved made different choices. But they did not.
So they left it for us to live with the legacies of the war. The question is, do we have the courage to overcome them?
U.S. National Archives, RG 77-AEC
“Little Boy,” the first uranium bomb, was 120 inches long, 28 inches in diameter, and weighed 9,700 pounds.
U.S. National Archives, RG 77-AEC
“Fat Man,” the first plutonium bomb, was 128 inches long, 60 inches in diameter, and weighed about 10,265 pounds.
Hiroshima in History
In this essay, J. Samuel Walker highlights the debate over the standard explanation for President Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb on Japan. As Walker points out, controversy over this complex issue was introduced by the first public announcement of the atomic bomb and may never be resolved in a way that will satisfy all scholars and the interested public.
From Prompt and Utter Destruction:
Truman and the use of atomic bombs against Japan
BY J. SAMUEL WALKER
In the immediate aftermath of the war, the use of atomic bombs received the overwhelming approval of the American people. A Gallup poll conducted on August 26, 1945, for example, showed that 85
percent of the respondents endorsed the atomic attacks while 10 percent opposed and 5 percent had no opinion. Another survey taken in the fall of 1945 produced similar findings. Only 4.5 percent of those questioned believed that the United States should not have used atomic weapons, while 53.5 percent expressed unequivocal support for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Another 22.7 percent wished that the United States had dropped “many more” atomic bombs on Japan before its surrender.
There were, however, a few critics who questioned the need for and the morality of dropping the atomic bombs. Pacifist groups, a number of atomic scientists, some religious leaders and organizations, and a scattering of political commentators, both liberal and conservative, condemned the atomic attacks because of their indiscriminate killing of civilians and/or the failure of the United States to give Japan an explicit warning about the bomb before Hiroshima. As time went on, other voices raised new misgivings about the use of the atomic bombs. Norman Cousins, editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, and Thomas K. Finletter, a former assistant secretary of state, suggested in June 1946 that Truman’s use of the bomb might have been prompted more by a desire for diplomatic gains in the growing rivalry with the Soviet Union than by military necessity. Writer John Hersey, although he did not express an opinion on the bombings, put human faces on six of the survivors and the trials they endured in a widely publicized article in the New Yorker in August 1946.
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