- Willie Tomg
- Feb 2, 2006
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I genuinely think a lot of the change in tenor toward American military adventurism post-WW2 despite the damage to the country being confined mostly to Pearl Harbor is the bombs' two uses in what for the sake of conversation i'll call "combat" making it unavoidably obvious how pointless the exercise of waging a war to overthrow or prop up whatever regime. Past that point the USA has had a lot of difficulty explicitly stating what the fuckin' objectives were in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, etc, because when you're a nuclear power you're either killing people or you aren't and everything else is just bizarre flailing.
quote:It was just another secret of the war. We forget now just how pervasive the atmosphere of classified activity was, but there was hardly anybody, in all of the war's military bureaucracies, who could honestly claim to know everything that was going on. The best information -- whole Mississippis of debriefings and intelligence assessments and field reports and rumors -- went up the line and vanished. And what returned, from some unimaginable bureaucratic firmament, were orders -- taciturn, uncommunicative instructions, raining down ceaselessly, specifying mysterious troop movements, baffling supply requisitions, unexplained production quotas, and senseless rationing goals. Everywhere were odd networks of power and covert channels of communication. No matter how well placed you were, you were still excluded from incessant meetings, streams of memos were routed around your office, old friends grew vague when you asked what department they worked in (a "special" department, they always said -- nobody liked coming out and saying "secret"). Everybody was doing something hush-hush; nobody blinked at the most imponderable mysteries.
So there was barely a ripple when, in the spring of 1943, all the leading physicists in America disappeared. Overnight their offices were closed up, their colleagues professed ignorance, the deans of their colleges dismissed all inquiries with a bland shrug. There was a rumor of course: they had been summoned to some kind of base in the southwest, one of those military installations so classified that nobody who went in ever came out. But you were an insider beyond inside if you so much as knew the code name for the base -- though it was as blankly uninformative as all of the war's code names. It was just a phrase that might turn up inadvertently in a classified budget paper, or on some requisition form for scientific equipment, or at the bottom of a routing order for an enigmatic load of ore; something new was needed by "the Manhattan district."
What was it about? Nobody could say. It was obviously a radical new research project of some kind or another. But there were countless projects just like it; every side was after a superweapon, and every rumor of a superweapon on the other side had to be countered by a desperate race for its match. Weird new gadgetry was introduced in almost every campaign. This was the first war where troops in the field carried portable radio transmitters and receivers, the first where air forces attempted precision bombing, the first with jet engines, the first with napalm. The British had begun the war by stringing their coasts with a new device they thought would make them invulnerable to enemy bombers -- radar. At the end the Germans were hoping for a last-minute reversal with their own astonishing invention -- the ballistic missile. And all sides were obsessed with SIGINT -- signals intelligence, the encrypted electronic messages weaving through the battlefields and up the hierarchies of command. Axis secrets were being revealed not by spies or resistance groups (despite their popularity in Hollywood, they'd proved largely useless in the high-tech environment of the war), but by another new ultrasecret gadget: the electronic computer.
In this sense the Manhattan project was unremarkable. Maybe it was more ruinously expensive than any of the other projects, but it was just as speculative. The only thing that made it noticeable to the cognoscenti was that it didn't produce any results. Month after month, year after year there was silence from that base in the desert. Maybe what they were after was impossible -- after all, the project had been funded in the first place only because of frantic rumors early in the war that Nazi scientists were conducting similar experiments, and the Allies had since learned that the Nazis had dropped the idea as too difficult and improbable. But the U.S. project had its own momentum. By the summer of 1945 the Nazis had fallen, Europe was securely under martial law, and Hitler was missing and presumed dead somewhere in the wreckage of Berlin -- only then did the Manhattan scientists inform their superiors that they were ready to test their weapon for the first time. If the war had been over by then the test might never have happened.
But the Japanese still hadn't surrendered. It seems obvious now that they must have been about to -- their situation was hopeless, and they couldn't have endured the overwhelming fury of the American firebombing raids much longer. But the Americans didn't see it that way. The logic of the war had taught them to expect the exact opposite. Japanese soldiers had routinely responded to hopeless situations by fighting to the death and to the last man, and Japanese civilians throughout the Pacific had typically committed mass suicide rather than allow themselves to be captured. Their resistance had grown exponentially as the Americans approached the home islands. Why should anybody think it would break down now?
The Americans still believed there was only one way they could put an end to the war: invade Japan and depose the emperor. Throughout the summer of 1945 they worked out the details. It would be a two-front invasion, like the one in Europe. The Soviet army, already massing on the Manchurian border, would in late summer move overland to the Chinese coast. The American forces, greatly augmented by the armies about to be transferred from Europe, would land on the southernmost of the home islands, Kyushu, and island-hop toward Tokyo. The American landing was scheduled for November 1, with the Russian landing to follow, and the whole campaign was expected to last through the following spring. Everybody knew it was going to be a nightmare -- maybe the single most violent campaign of the war. The figure floating around the American planning sessions was one million Allied casualties. That seems preposterously high, but the planners were still in shock over casualty figures from battles like Okinawa; Truman himself said that the invasion was likely to be Okinawa from one end of Japan to the other. Japanese casualties, if the same ratios held, would be in the millions.
It was in the midst of these desolate calculations that the news arrived that the Manhattan device had been successfully detonated in the deserts of New Mexico. What can we fairly say about what happened next? Senior American decision makers knew that they'd just been handed an extraordinarily destructive new weapon, one that could kill tens of thousands of people instantly. It seems impossible to believe that this didn't faze them -- but why should it have? Tens of millions of people had already died, a significant percentage of them as the direct result of American action; one or two atomic bombs wouldn't grossly alter that total. A firebombing raid in Tokyo that past April had killed more than 200,000 people, twice the number who would die at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, and nobody afterward used words like "war crime" or "genocide" to describe it.
But weren't they told about the nightmarish effects of the new bomb? Probably. At the least, the Manhattan scientists knew that radiation sickness would be a horrible way to die. But again, what difference would that have made? We forget just how many horrible ways to die the war had already created. Any visitor to a burn unit could see torments that made hell a redundant concept. There was no sense that the bomb was worse than any other weapon of the war. And the long-range consequences, the generations of genetic damage they were about to visit upon their victims? Not discussed, too speculative.
It has to be remembered that few of the scientific breakthroughs of the war had yet made an impact on the civilian world, even the civilian world in Washington. Troops in the field were contending daily with radical innovations in electronics and medicine; the folks back home were living as they always had, in a world of glacial technological change. Less than half the households in America had been wired for phone service, and the government was still underwriting rural electrification projects to bring the vast areas outside big cities onto the power grid. People thought theoretical physics was as as eccentric and harmless as the study of Egyptian hieroglyphics. The standing joke in those days was that only six people in the world could understand Einstein -- the implication being that nobody else needed to.
So what it came down to was this: American planners didn't understand and didn't much care what the bomb did. They just wanted some big, nightmarish weapon that would break Japanese resistance once and for all -- the bigger and the more nightmarish the better. And now they had it.
The timetable can be followed closely. The first test of the bomb was on July 16, 1945. The ultimatum to the Japanese -- surrender or face "prompt and utter destruction" by a wholly unprecedented form of weaponry -- was issued by the Americans on July 26. The Japanese rejected the ultimatum on July 28. The two bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9. They were dropped in close succession because the Americans were trying to bluff the Japanese into thinking there was an unlimited supply of atomic bombs (there wasn't; the next bomb wouldn't be ready for several months). The Japanese surrendered on August 10.
In other words, the war was ended by a weapon few had known existed less than a month before, and nobody at all had known would work. The Americans hadn't talked through the implications of what they were doing because there wasn't time. They had used it as soon as they knew they had it, and they had no thought other than to force the Japanese to surrender and avoid millions more deaths. It was, in a sense, an act of mercy.
But of all the words expended over Hiroshima in the last 50 years, that word "mercy" sounds the most obscene. Nobody who was in Hiroshima on August 6 ever thought of what happened then as merciful. One of the commonplaces of current discussion about the atomic bomb is that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were wholly gratuitous. It's taken for granted that the Americans knew the Japanese were about to surrender but rushed to use the bomb anyway. Why? The explanation offered by Gar Alperovitz's recent, exhaustively prosecutorial study The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb is that the bombing had nothing to do with Japan; rather the Americans were already looking past the war to the new structure of power in the world and intended the bombing as the opening shot in the cold war with the Soviet Union. The writer of the catalog for the Smithsonian's commemorative exhibit suggested that the reason was more ancient and primordial -- it was a straight-line example of the basic white male lust for genocide; Hiroshima was bombed for the same reason the Indians were exterminated. Robert J. Lifton's Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial is even more absolute in its assessment: the real reason was simply that Truman and his advisers were insane, evil men in love with death.
The reasons don't actually matter much when the point is the outrage. But while it might be thought that these books are simply part of the standard line in popular history these days, in which the motives of any American government are invariably put in the worst possible light, the truth is that from the beginning people thought there was something strange and singular about the bombing of Hiroshima. Partly this was a kind of optical illusion induced by the visibility of what happened there; the images of the radiation victims circulated throughout the world, while the grisly sights from more conventional battlefields remained unseen. But there was also the overriding sense that this atrocity was beyond the limits of what victory should have cost. It was a kind of metaphysical event -- it remade everybody's sense of the war in a single subliminal flash of horror.
That's the tacit point of the best book about the dropping of the atomic bombs -- in fact, one of the few enduring classics of American journalism about the war: John Hersey's Hiroshima. It was originally published in August 1946, on the first anniversary of the bombing. It holds up exceptionally well today. My respect for it was only increased by the way I've just reread it -- after plowing through hundreds of pages of American wartime reporting (including several gung ho pieces by Hersey himself). It's a genuine shock to see Hersey's seven representative citizens of Hiroshima treated with such respect and compassion: "Mrs. Nakamura" and "Miss Sasaki" and "The Reverend Mr. Kyoshi Tanimoto" and the rest come off as figures of intricate humanity, compared to the caricatures of Nips and Japs that had infested American newspapers and magazines. In fact, the only difference Hersey finds between the Japanese and the Americans is that the Japanese are kinder and more courteous. They bore up under the nightmare of what happened to them on that August morning with a kind of bewildered decency well beyond the reach of the typical citizen of the heartland.
You can't help but admire Hersey's own evident decency, his determination to shake free of the hatreds of the war. On the other hand, there's no denying that his vivid picture of Hiroshima before the bomb fell is essentially a work of fiction. It artfully thins out or omits altogether the hysteria and desperation that was sweeping Japan in the summer of 1945, as everyone awaited the inevitable American invasion. In the real Japan millions of schoolchildren were being instructed in how to kill American soldiers with sharpened bamboo sticks, and the propaganda machines were proclaiming that the Japanese people were ready as one to sacrifice themselves for their emperor. But in Hersey's Hiroshima people are still going about their lives much as they always have, except for some vague "jitters," some nagging "anxiety" about the prospect of an American air raid. His Hiroshima becomes the transfigured image of small-town America before Pearl Harbor.
But then Hersey sees no point in going into what the war might really have been like for his seven subjects. What did that matter? Whether they were proud or ashamed of Japan's military conquests, whether they hated Americans and all other foreigners, whether they were contemptuous, curious, or had no opinion about the outside world -- all of that had instantly been rendered irrelevant. It didn't even matter what they thought about the atomic bomb itself; any mere attitudes for or against would have seemed like obscene distractions compared with the "soundless flash" that blasted their world into nightmare. "Shigata na gai," Mrs. Nakamura says about what happened to her city that day; Hersey glosses: "A Japanese expression as common as, and corresponding to, the Russian word nichevo: It can't be helped. Oh well. Too bad."
Hersey doesn't say so directly, but he appears on the surface to agree. He presents the bombing neutrally, without commentary, as though it's a new species of natural disaster, motiveless and agentless. As far as any reader of Hiroshima can tell, the bomb came out of nowhere, was dropped by nobody, and had no purpose. This allows Hersey to avoid any explicit debate about the morality of dropping the bomb -- which would just get in the way of his desire to record what it meant to the ordinary people who were its targets, rather than to the usual subjects of military history, the godlike decision makers who were safe from its effects on the other side of the world.
But this silence, deliberate or not, still amounts to a kind of debating position. Page after relentless page carefully and unhysterically records the grotesque damage done by the bomb -- the radiation burns, the alien rot of radiation sickness -- and as you read, an unambiguous message comes through: there's no point talking about the reasons for the bombing because no reason could possibly be good enough. Victory in the war wasn't worth such cruelty. The bomb should never have been dropped on Hiroshima.
It's an argument that stands on the dividing line between two worlds, the world of the war and the world after. Hersey was one of the first to write out of a dawning sense that the dropping of the bomb wasn't the culminating moment of the war -- it was the point at which the war's graph of escalating destructiveness finally went off the scale and rendered everything that had happened before trivial. He draws this moral with typically understated eloquence at the climax of his first chapter, when he recounts what happened to all his characters at the moment of detonation. Strangest of all, he says, was the fate of Miss Sasaki, who was hit by a falling bookcase in the reference library of the factory where she worked: "In the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books."
Well, what of it? All over Hiroshima people were at that moment being pummeled to death by erupting walls, boiled alive by hurricanes of steam, and flashed into nothingness in the glare of a thousand suns. Why does it seem so ironic to be struck by flying books? Because books stood for the past -- they represented the whole of the dead weight of history and culture that had just been annihilated. The bomb wasn't the end of the last war, but the beginning of the final war to come.
That may be why there's something forced about Hersey's compassion for his subjects. He hadn't really surmounted the hatreds of the past decades; he was just so frightened he'd forgotten about them. The moment the bomb went off at Hiroshima, the unbridgeable cultural divisions between Japan and America were erased -- not because their citizens attained some sort of reconciliation or higher understanding, but because they were both now part of the atomic age, where everybody on earth was a potential victim.
This was the deepest shock of the war: just how all-encompassingly destructive the new weapon really was. Hersey probably didn't know it when he wrote -- it wasn't publically disclosed for years afterward -- but the Manhattan scientists had warned their superiors that they weren't absolutely sure what would happen when they set off the first bomb. They were reasonably confident of their predicted yield, but there was a chance -- not a big chance, but it couldn't be ruled out -- that the reaction could grow hot enough to ignite the atmosphere. If that happened, then every living thing on earth would die in a single globe-encompassing firestorm. As it happened, of course, they were right about the odds: the fission bomb was nowhere near hot enough to trigger the runaway combustion of the atmosphere. But the basic issue remains unsettled to this day -- and the impulse to push to the outer boundaries of destructiveness is as much with us now as it ever was. If a fission bomb wouldn't do the trick, what about an exponentially more powerful fusion bomb? What about thousands of fusion bombs going off all at once? Would that finally be enough to unmake the foundations of the world?
Hersey was describing for the first time the war's true legacy: a permanent condition of helpless anger and universal dread. Hiroshima was the end of the line for the archaic idea that war was something that soldiers did on battlefields, somewhere on the far side of the horizon. The great strategic breakthrough of the war had been the targeting of civilian populations with weapons of mass destruction -- so that for the first time in history everybody, soldier and civilian alike, could share equally in the horror of battle. Now the postwar world was elevating this principle, making it the organizing fact of existence. After Hiroshima, Armageddon could erupt anytime, anywhere on earth, without warning, by accident. Even as people walked heedlessly in the streets, the bombs could be spiraling down from an invisible plane passing in the stratosphere; at dinnertime in the heartland, as the local news droned on about the Middle East, the missiles could already be arching over the north pole, like the ribs of a strange new cathedral.
I once saw it begin, about 20 years ago. One evening I was in the backseat of a car, gliding on a freeway out of Chicago, and I glanced out the rear window, my eye caught by an unusual bright light. There in the distance was a brilliant mushroom cloud opening up above the skyline of the city. I think it was the single worst moment of my life: I stared into that orange rose flare, that impossible death's head, and prayed that it would vanish -- and then grew sick with terror when I saw that it wasn't going to. In just another instant, I knew, the first wave of the blast would arrive. The serene suburban landscape around me, twinkling in the evening air, would erupt into a million separate sites of wreckage. The trees would flash away, the houses would vanish, the cars around us would be hurled into the air and melted into an ocean of fire. It was, I realized in those last seconds left to me, what I'd been afraid of my entire life: that the war had never stopped, that it was still escalating to its inevitable end, that everything I'd ever known was a mirage floating in the accidental lull between the detonation over Hiroshima and the shock wave that at last swallowed up the world.
Then something changed. The car took a curve, and the land readjusted itself, as though shaking free of a bad thought. Everything was as it had been; the storm had passed over me and was gone. It was all foolishness anyway -- what war could possibly reach the depths of the American heartland? The suburbs stretched out before the car, invincibly solid and inviting -- an empire of timeless privacy, opening up for me as it always did, beneath the twilight. I turned back again to look at the city and watched the mushroom cloud float dreamily out of the orange smog that hovered along the skyline and turn into the harmless moon.
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