On August 9, 1945, "Fat Man" exploded over Nagasaki. Unlike
in Hiroshima, where approximately 100,000 men, women and children died
within weeks of the atomic blast - and another 100,000 during the next
few months - the bomb over Nagasaki took but some 74,000 lives by the
end of 1945.
Fourteen-year-old Senji Yamaguchi survived the
Nagasaki blast to recount seeing the explosion "crush a pregnant woman
against a wall and tear apart her abdomen. I could see her and her
unborn baby dying. The blast instantly knocked down many homes and
buildings as well. Mothers and children were trapped beneath the
burning wreckage. They called out each other's names, and the mothers
would cry out, pleading for someone to save their children. No one was
able to help them, and they all burned alive." [p. 69]
Sixteen-year-old Sumiteru Taniguchi was riding his bicycle when "Fat
Man" exploded. Tossed into the air by the blast, he managed to drag
himself into a basement, where he groaned in agony for three nights. "A
grotesque photograph pf Taniguchi's tortured and bloody body was taken
by the U.S. Army. Decades later, when his wounds had yet to fully heal,
the heart-rending and now subversive picture (see
http://users.dickinson.edu/~history/product/steele/taniguchi.htm ) was
banned from the Smithsonian Museum's 50th anniversary commemoration of
the atomic bombings." [p. 68]
Admiral William D. Leahy,
President Truman's chief of staff, opposed the use of nuclear weapons
against Japan. So did General Dwight D. Eisenhower. As Leahy wrote in
his memoirs, "[T]he use of the barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and
Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The
Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender….[I]n being the
first to use it, we…adopted an ethical standard common to barbarians of
the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars
cannot be won by destroying women and children." [Quoted from Gar
Alperovitz, "Enola Gay: Was Using the Bomb Necessary?"
Miami Herald, Dec. 14, 2003]
During the war, General Eisenhower was given to "a feeling of
depression" when Secretary of War Henry Stimson informed him that the
bomb would be used. Writing in his memoirs, Ike asserted: "[S]o I
voiced to him 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." [Ibid]
The debate still rages about whether dropping
the bombs was necessary to end the war. As Tsuyoshi Hasegawa asserts in
his recent book,
Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan,
"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." [p. 299]
In a thoughtful rebuttal,
Barton J. Bernstein asserts: "The basic decision on using the bomb
flowed from overwhelming, long-held assumptions. To Truman and others,
the bomb promised to help end the war earlier than otherwise,
presumably to save some American and other Allied lives, possibly to
force a surrender before the dreaded November invasion, and, as a
potential bonus, conceivably to intimidate the Soviets in future
dealings." [See
http://www.h-net.org/~diplo/roundtables/PDF/Bernstein-HasegawaRoundtable.pdf
, p. 16]
Both scholars agree, however, that to explain why
the bomb was used is not to justify its use. As Professor Bernstein
notes: A "sustained effort at interpretation does not mean approving of
the use of the bombs or refusing to make moral judgments - about the
atomic bombing, and about the lack of a serious quest for likely
alternatives." [Ibid]
If, as Hasegawa suggests, Truman
experienced guilt about the women and children killed by the atomic
bomb, it didn't prevent him, in 1948, from warning the Soviet
ambassador that "Soviet troops should evacuate Iran within 48 hours -
or the United States would use the new superbomb that it alone
possessed." [Gerson, pp. 171-72]
Truman also authorized
General MacArthur's successor, General Ridgeway, to use nuclear weapons
during the Korean War. [p. 82] The possible targets were "Chinese and
Soviet troop concentrations, Shanghai, Chinese industrial cities, and
four North Korean cities." Fortunately, Ridgeway "held his nuclear
fire." [p. 82]
Given the Truman administration's actual use
of nuclear weapons and its willingness to threaten their use in 1948
and authorize their use during the Korean War, President Eisenhower
could come to the presidency without his previous worries about
"shocking world opinion' with such threats or actions. This nuclear
"banality of evil" already had taken hold in the United States.
But "the banality of evil" only partly explains Eisenhower's "election
campaign promise to bring the [Korean] war to an end on US terms by
preparing, threatening, and if necessary proceeding with a nuclear
attack." [p.82] For, as Gerson notes: Both Truman and Eisenhower
"understood that the US had 'a commanding superiority over the USSR in
strategic forces.'" Moreover, "This nuclear supremacy soon came to
permeate every dimension of US Cold War policy and practice. By 1953,
the US had 329 nuclear-capable bombers that, from bases in Japan and
Europe, could kill millions of people and eliminate the economic and
military foundations of both Communist powers." [p. 77]
As
Eisenhower explained in 1963, "It would be impossible for the United
States to maintain the military commitments which it now sustains
around the world…did we not possess atomic weapons and the will to use
them when necessary." [p. 31] Indeed, his administration adopted the
doctrine of "massive retaliation" which linked "local conflicts to the
specter of a global war of annihilation." [p. 78]
Thus, in
addition to threatening to use nuclear weapons to assure that "the
Chinese, Russians and Koreans got the message," the Eisenhower
administration also offered atomic bombs to the French in 1954, in
order to break the Vietnamese siege at Dien Bien Phu. And it twice
threatened China with nuclear attack during the 1955 and 1958 crises
concerning the islands of Quemoy and Matsu.
Months after the
peaceful resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis (recklessly initiated
by Nikita Khrushchev), which had brought the US and the Soviet Union to
the brink of nuclear war, the Kennedy administration approached the
Soviet leaders about "'a joint U.S -Soviet preemptive nuclear attack'
against the Chinese nuclear weapons installation at Lop Nor." [p. 90]
(That overture helps to explain why, in 1969, the Soviets could ask the
Nixon administration whether it would object, were they to launch their
own preemptive strike against Lop Nor.)
In 1965, President
Johnson's Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara gave "a background
briefing to warn that the 'inhibitions' on US use of nuclear weapons in
Vietnam 'might eventually be lifted.'" [p. 148] And in February 1968,
General Wheeler "informed senators that the Joint Chiefs would
recommend the use of tactical nuclear weapons, if they came to believe
they were essential to defend the 6,000 besieged Marines" at Khe Sanh.
[p. 152]
By President Nixon's "own count, he seriously
considered first-strike nuclear attacks on four occasions: in a
'massive escalation' if the Vietnam war, during the 1973 Israeli-Arab
'October War,' during 'an intensification of the Soviet-Chinese border
dispute,' and during the 1971 India-Pakistan war." [p. 153]
Gerson exempts President Gerald Ford from the line of presidents who
have threatened to use nuclear weapons. But he notes that, in 1975,
during the collapse of South Vietnam, Defense Secretary James
Schlesinger "advised Ford that there was only one way to halt the North
Vietnamese offensive: tactical nuclear weapons. Ford wisely decided not
to pursue that option." [p.166]
In his 1980 State of the
Union address, President Carter vowed, "Any attempt by an outside force
to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an
assault on the interests of the United States and will be repelled by
the use of any means necessary…" [p. 205] According to Gerson, "this
policy was reinforced by Presidential Directive 59, which moved US
nuclear war-fighting doctrine from mutual assured destruction to
'flexible' and more 'limited' nuclear war fighting." [p. 204]
Surprisingly, Gerson has little to say about the Reagan administration,
except to note how the Nuclear Freeze Movement forced the Reagan
administration "to turn away from the rhetoric of 'winning nuclear
wars' and engage in arms control negotiations." However, readers would
do well to recall that Reagan "did not regard nuclear war as
catastrophic," that officials in his administration contemplated
"firing a nuclear demonstration shot," and that the Defense Guidance
approved by Defense Secretary Weinberger "contained plans for fighting
a 'protracted' nuclear war." [Frances Fitzgerald,
Way Out There in the Blue, pp. 150-51] Recall as well that Reagan "once maintained that submarine-based missiles could be recalled." [Ibid, p. 150]
The first Bush administration threatened to use nuclear weapons against
Iraq, if that country decided to use chemical and biological weapon
against U.S. forces during the 1991 Gulf War. [p. 216] And when the US
made its transition from the air war to the ground war, Defense
Secretary Cheney publicly affirmed his belief that the atomic bombing
of Hiroshima had saved US lives. [p. 217]
Finally, President
Clinton "threatened nuclear attacks against China, Libya and Iraq
before surrendering the Oval Office in 2001 to perhaps the worst and
most destructive president in U.S. history, George W. Bush." [pp.
218-19] "In its 2002 Nuclear Posture Review, the Bush II administration
reiterated its commitment to first-strike nuclear war-fighting, named
seven nations a primary nuclear targets, and urged funding for the
development of new and more usable nuclear weapons." [p. 23]
America's belief in the utility of nuclear weapons, along with its
hypocritical insistence that nearly all other nations abide by the
terms of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) while it ignores the
NPT's Article VI obligation to engage in 'good faith" negotiation to
completely eliminate such weapons, have persuaded other nations that
nuclear weapons are desirable. Witness India, then Pakistan and, now,
North Korea.
Moreover, continued US willingness to plan to
use nuclear weapons since the end of the Cold War ignores a July 8,
1996, advisory opinion issued by the World Court, which concluded:
"[T]he threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally be contrary to
the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, and in
particular the principles and rules of humanitarian law." The court
envisioned but one circumstance in which the use of nuclear weapons by
a state might not constitute a crime against humanity: the "extreme
circumstance of self-defense, in which its very survival would be at
stake."
According to Gerson, among the principles from which
the World Court drew "were that nuclear weapons are genocidal and
potentially omnicidal; they cause indiscriminate harm to combatants and
non-combatants alike and inflict unnecessary suffering; they violate
the requirement that military responses be proportional; they destroy
the ecosystem, thus endangering future generations; they violate
international treaties outlawing the use of poison gas; and they
inflict unacceptable damage to neutral nations." [p. 35]
But,
perhaps, George Kennan said it best in 1982, when he wrote: "[T]he
readiness to use nuclear weapons against other human beings - against
people whom we do not know, whom we have never seen, and for whose
guilt or innocence it is not for us to establish - and in doing so, to
place in jeopardy the natural structure upon which all civilization
rests, as though the safety and the perceived interests of our own
generation were more important than everything that has ever taken
place or could take place in civilization: this is nothing less than a
presumption, a blasphemy, an indignity - an indignity of monstrous
dimensions - offered to God!" ["A Christian's View of the Arms Race,"
The Nuclear Delusion p. 207]
Walter C. Uhler
is an independent scholar and freelance writer whose work has been
published in numerous publications, including The Nation, the Bulletin
of the Atomic Scientists, the Journal of Military History, the Moscow
Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. He also is President of the
Russian-American International Studies Association (RAISA).
Writings 
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