Seventy-five years is a long time. Lots of people who were born in 1945 are already no longer with us.
That includes those born after, but affected by, the atomic bomb blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II, the 75th anniversary of which took place about a month ago. Though their mothers survived, they were distorted by the radiation from the attacks, which got inside their mothers' wombs. Along with those injured and/or permanently damaged who managed to get up and walk again, they are called hibakusha, or bomb survivors (h/t Progressive magazine).
It is yet another warning: This could happen anywhere else. There are nine countries with nuclear, not just atomic but nuclear, weapons now. In Progressive's latest issue, Helen Caldicott, the founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985, describes what a modern attack would be like:
A nuclear 'exchange' between [Russia and the U.S.] would take little over one hour to complete. A twenty-megaton bomb (the equivalent of twenty million tons of TNT) would excavate a hole three-quarters of a mile wide and 800 feet deep, converting all buildings and people into radioactive fallout that would be shot up in the mushroom cloud. Within six miles in all directions, every living thing would be vaporized. Twenty miles from the epicenter, huge fires would erupt, as winds of up to 500 miles per hour would suck people out of buildings and turn them into missiles traveling at 100 miles per hour. The fires would coalesce, incinerating much of the United States and causing most nuclear power plants to melt down, greatly exacerbating radioactive fallout.
Potentially billions of people would die hideously from acute radiation sickness, vomiting, and bleeding to death. As thick black radioactive smoke engulfed the stratosphere, the Earth would, over time be plunged into another ice age--a "nuclear winter," annihilating almost all living organisms.
How do we know this? We know it because we have already attacked two Japanese cities with bombs the size of about 20,000 tons of TNT, a mere pinprick of an attack a thousand times greater. But we have, and that destruction was incredible to start. We have a measuring stick, and we provided it to an enemy.
I will not be so lax as to say that, therefore, the attacks were a good thing, the way Betsy DuVos says that the pandemic is a good thing because in her mind, good things have come from it. The attacks were beyond awful. They were the ultimate ambush.
But we now know what the improvement, if that's what you want to call it, of weapons into nuclear form can yield. We have established a base line of destruction. And, ironically, even though we have formed a kind of participatory madness in creating them--the above-mentioned yield of a modern bomb is not the largest in anyone's arsenal--what we continually need to avoid.
The immediate benefit of the attacks has borne evidence in history. They clearly ended the war. Emperor Hirohito called for a cease-fire within days after the second attack. Gar Alperovitz, among others. has noted that the Japanese, through back channels, had already reached out to the Americans to begin negotiating for an armistice. But that might have taken weeks to finish, Japanese kamikazes were still attacking Allied ships awaiting the order to begin an invasion. Cities were still being bombed conventionally by American planes.
Beyond that, there is a document sent to Army Chief of Staff George Marshall with what was believed to be the Japanese plan to resist an invasion, tentatively scheduled for November, 1945. I have seen it. To put it mildly, it describes a suicidal zeal. It was estimated that the Americans alone would have lost half a million dead--and, unquestionably, a number far superior in Japan to those lost by the bombs (totaling, probably, 200,000).
With that spector in mind, knowing that, President Truman had no choice. Ironically, the most humane thing to do was to order an atomic attack and hope the Japanese would cry uncle. That they did was fortunate: We have since learned that we had fifty of those bombs. And we would have used them.
Partly because Truman became convinced that that's what it would take. Since Japanese military leaders had an enormous number of soldiers available for home defense, they were ready to take the Americans on. It took the emperor to overrule them after the second bomb had been dropped. That was fortunate, because in Teheran in 1943, then president FDR and British prime minister Winston Churchill had demanded the "unconditional surrender" of Germany and Japan.
We tried to hide the destruction as long as we could, says the author Lesley M.M. Blume in her new book "Fallout," in which she gives great credit to journalist John Hersey, whose work in The New Yorker first alerted the public to how horrible the damage had been. (It was later converted into a paperback. I and others taught it to students in Cedarburg.) Hersey dodged U.S. restrictions to do his work. When he was finished, there was no question about the kind of devastation the bombs had caused. And his racist attitudes had disappeared.
The military leader of the Manhattan Project, General Leslie Groves, basically lied to hide the radiation fallout as harmful. He called it a "very pleasant way to die." It is not; victims get nausea, fever, diarrhea, and lesions in the mouth, colon and rectum, writes Thomas E. Ricks. But Groves told a Senate committee that there was no radioactive residue, wrote James L. Nolan Jr. (The above quotes are taken from the latest edition of the New York Times Book Review, which devoted its entire issue to World War II books.)
So was it all worth it? In the immediate aftermath of the war, the world's worst war with by far the most destruction and loss of human life, exhaustion and horror that had already been established won the day. Something, anything, to end that terrible conflict one day faster was welcome. But it unleashed the forming of stockpiles that go on today in nine countries. That nobody has dipped into it, despite near misses, in 75 years owes to incredible luck and, one incident at a time (the Cuban Missile Crisis being the most noticeable but not the most possible Armageddon), a moment when someone said to themselves, we can't be the first to do this. Even only because a counterattack was too horrible to imagine--a concept known as MAD, or Mutually Assured Destruction--we have managed to ward it off. That is not a very high moral level--mere preservation with no real consideration of that of others.
Then again, as Caldicott put it at the end of her Progressive article, "How come the physicists, engineers, and military personnel who have laced the world with nuclear weapons ready to launch never factored into their equations the probability that an immature, petulant man-baby could hold the trigger for our destruction in his hands?" Especially one for whom safety concerns are already arranged, deep inside some mountain, away from D.C.
Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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