« Pesky General Tells the Truth and a Church Steps Up | Main | Volunteers to Clear Landmines? Lock Him up and Throw Away The Key! »
February 07, 2005
Nuclear Warhead in Thine Own Eye
This weekend, the Washington Post ran an article titled "What Bin Ladin Sees in Hiroshima," by Steve Coll, former managing editor of the Post. I first thought it would be an article about how Bin Ladin constantly brings up the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as examples of U.S. immorality. Well, it certainly wasn't that. The article was only about how Bin Ladin and his followers were after nuclear weapons:
His inspiration, repeatedly cited in his writings and interviews, is the American atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which he says shocked Japan's fading imperial government into a surrender it might not otherwise have contemplated. Bin Laden has said several times that he is seeking to acquire and use nuclear weapons not only because it is God's will, but because he wants to do to American foreign policy what the United States did to Japanese imperial surrender policy.
You would've thought just typing or reading that paragraph would get some people thinking... Osama Bin Ladin, the master terrorist, looking to us for inspiration; examining our methods in order to copy them.
Worse, Bin Ladin's reading of our motivations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki is pretty charitable; historians have put forth a pretty convincing argument that the U.S. knew Japan was going to surrender but used the bomb anyway, and later manufactured the myth that it was the least bad choice:
Gar Alperovitz: The use of the atomic bomb, most experts now believe, was totally unnecessary. Even people who support the decision for various reasons acknowledge that almost certainly the Japanese would have surrendered before the initial invasion planned for November. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey stated that officially in 1946.We found a top-secret War Department study that said when the Russians came in, which was August 8, the war would have ended anyway. The invasion of Honshu, the main island, was not scheduled to take place until the spring of 1946. Almost all the U.S. military leaders are on record saying there were options for ending the war without an invasion. So minimally, as Hanson Baldwin, The New York Times writer, put it, if the goal of the bombing was to end the war without an invasion, that was unnecessary, so it was "a mistake." That's Baldwin's phrase.
Now, did American policy-makers know this at the time? That's a slightly different question. Many scholars now believe that the president understood the war could be ended long before the November landing. J. Samuel Walker, a conservative, official government historian, states in his expert study, perhaps with slight exaggeration but not much, that the consensus of the scholarly studies is that the bomb was known at the time to be unnecessary.
Sojourners: How do you explain the large gap between that consensus and the prevailing popular opinion, which is that the bombing was necessary to prevent the invasion?
Alperovitz: The popular myth didn't just happen, it was created by several official acts, and by many things President Truman and Secretary of War Henry Stimson did. During the early postwar period, there was a slow growth of criticism of the bomb, including from the religious community and from some of the important radio spokespersons of the time. Many conservatives at that point, actually more than liberals, were raising serious questions about the bombing. The Calhoun Commission of liberal Protestant theologians for the Federal Council of Churches-Reinhold Niebuhr and John C. Bennett were members-criticized the bombing, both as unnecessary and as immoral, a sin demanding some sort of contrition.
As the criticism grew, there was an organized, semi-official response to put it down. The argument was that the bomb was the least abhorrent choice we had available. The documents available show that isn't true-but it was an extraordinarily successful propaganda effort.
(Here's a little example of how much the propaganda system that trains us to limited attention spans affects our ability to understand the world. As I was choosing a quote from an interview with historian Gar Alperovitz, I thought to myself that it was a bit too long. Would people read it to the end? But, then again, this is about couple of hundred thousand people that were killed by a decision that we are taught was without alternative, so what's a few long paragraphs?)
And just so you don't think this propaganda machine only worked in the past, consider this: just recently, a federal program has quietly begun designing "new generation of nuclear arms meant to be sturdier and more reliable and to have longer lives." It was reported in science section of the New York Times; I bet not much more will be heard of it for a few years. Who's paying attention? Let's talk about the upcoming Michael Jackson trial, during the break we'll discuss how hateful and irrational they are.
Posted by zeynep at February 7, 2005 10:26 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.underthesamesun.org/mt-tb.cgi/391
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Nuclear Warhead in Thine Own Eye:
» People Saying Things from A Tiny Revolution
Rather than linking to lots of things myself, I'm going to link to Bob Harris linking to them. And: can this be a real picture? My apologies if not and I've been easily taken in. Also, here's a little Zeynep.... [Read More]
Tracked on February 8, 2005 09:04 PM
Comments
Often people have said that the nuclear bombings of Japan saved lives, since the invasion would have killed even more people.
Big problem with that - the final death toll from nuclear bombs has not been tallied yet.......
Posted by: Susan - USA at February 8, 2005 12:31 AM
Yeah...
I was in a class about genocide a year ago with a military officer. He was trying to make the point that Hiroshima couldn't be considered genocide because of the same reasoning and rationale.
After twenty minutes of defending myself, he grew frustrated and started yelling about how my information was inaccurate and how my "liberal privilege" gave me a distinct "bias."
People really believe this shit to be true, even when faced with undeniable evidence to the contrary. I even provided him with some references to Einstein's notes where he briefly addressed his misgivings about the bomb itself and the style that it was designed, which was pretty crude and dirty considering that in about 7 months a team of scientists had come up with better designs that allowed for a more (if there is such a thing) precise strike capable delivery device.
Posted by: Solidarious at February 8, 2005 01:14 AM
When the Post article referred to states being deterrable "even when led by madmen," I was reminded that Saddam Hussein in power was just Dick Cheney freed from external political constraints.
To get specific on the post-WWII propaganda to justify the nukings, they came up with a real careful estimate of one million U.S. casualties resulting froom an invasion of the Japanese homeland.
Posted by: Dan Kritchevsky at February 9, 2005 05:06 AM
And why were either the bombs or an invasion necessary? By June of 1945, the Japanese had been forced out of much of the territory they had conquered in 1941-42, and their ability to continue the war had been largely destroyed. And even if one buys the "necessity" of a "demonstration" at Hiroshima, the Nagasaki bomb was still pure genocide.
Posted by: Bob at February 9, 2005 03:07 PM