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Hiroshima Day 2004
Posted on August 5, 2004 in Accountability War
Forty nine years ago today, America was spinning towards midnight when a lone B-29 crossed the Pacific between Iwo Jima and Japan. The silver plane’s nose was almost pure glass, giving the pilot a nearly 360 degree vision of the world in front of him. The city of Hiroshima loomed up. Down below, the first to rise saw the bomber approaching and thought nothing of it. Just the weather plane coming to see if Japan was fit for another day of fire bombing. No one ran to shelters. What could this single airplane do?
When Americans rose on their own August 6, President Harry Truman spoke to them on the radio about the new explosive power which that airplane had demonstrated over Japan. He talked of a new kind of weapon, a bomb which used the power of the disintegrating atom, which leveled the city of Hiroshima in a matter of seconds. One bomb to rule them all, was the message. He had done this to save American lives. Many hoped that war had ended forever.
No one saw the first hand images from Hiroshima until weeks or many years later. No one saw the patterns of flower kimonos burned to the skin, the black rain that fell on people who fled into the harbor, or the shadows seared into the walls by the outline of the first flash. Truman didn’t tell the American people that this bomb — consisting of scrapings of U-235 — was an untested kludge, a gamble. America featured two models of the atomic bomb, one using the last bits of fissionable uranium and the other the currently more common Plutonium. The second had been tested in the New Mexico desert. This first bomb was an unknown that could have flopped.
But it didn’t and for years the people of Hiroshima suffered from its lingering after effects. Hiroshima became the world’s City of Peace, a living testament to the horror of war. Every August 6, the people gathered between 8:00 and 8:45 am to remember the annihilating flash of light and to call for an end of nuclear weapons development.
One year ago today, I wrote my annual protest against nuclear weapons and war in general. One year ago today, other bloggers wrote about how tough it must have been on President Truman to make the Decision and how, ultimately, it proved to be the Right One.
There’s a problem with this kind of reasoning: we have no control study for what would have happened if Truman had balked, if he had seen that the Bomb would open up a new era of state terrorism. Blind and thoroughly untested optimism is the source of this thinking. We do know what happened because of the development and deployment of the bomb, of the years of Cold War with Russia and the consequent development of ever more powerful conventional weapons as public opinion grew more and more against the use of the Bomb. Despite the years of public outcry against nuclear weapons, the Bomb remains with us. Mutually Assured Destruction failed to keep the peace in Vietnam, Korea, and elsewhere. When the Soviet Union disintegrated, the United States became arrogant and launched small wars against tinpot dictators who had been empowered or encouraged by Cold War policies.
These things we know because they are history. We cannot know if they would have happened anyways or if world history would have turned out worse or better if we had not dropped the Bomb. As I noted, there are no control studies. This is the only planet we know about.
Can the Bomb still be used? Many look to terrorists and to the Usurper resident in the White House as possible agents of nuclear destruction. They talk about crazy men with no scruples who even now make dirty bombs or actual nuclear devices to spring on American cities. Every so often, the “terror level” rises to Orange and we are told to fear attacks on our way of life — the way of life that created much of the conventional and nuclear capabilities which cause us to lose sleep. Evil, we think, exists out there in Osama Bin Laden and, perhaps, George W. Bush, but it doesn’t exist in us. We wouldn’t wreak horror on civilians now, would we?
After reading Hannah Arendt’s account of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem Thomas Merton wrote :
The sanity of Eichmann is disturbing. We equate sanity with a sense of justice, with humaneness, with prudence, with the capacity to love and understand other people. We rely on the sane people of the world to preserve it from barbarism, madness, destruction. And now it begins to dawn on us that it is precisely the sane ones who are the most dangerous.
It is the sane ones, the well-adapted ones, who can without qualms and without nausea aim the missiles and press the buttons that will initiate the great festival of destruction that they, the sane ones, have prepared….No one suspects the sane, and the sane ones will have perfectly good reasons, logical, well-adjusted reasons, for firing the shot. They will be obeying sane orders that have come sanely down the chain of command. And because of their sanity they will have no qualms at all. When the missiles take off, then, it will be no mistake.
Today, on Hiroshima Day, as the nation faces a choice between an “insane” George W. Bush and a “sane” John Kerry, I point out that there isn’t much difference between the two men. John Kerry voted for the Iraqi fiasco. John Kerry voted for the Patriot Act. John Kerry promises to broaden the war on terrorism. Most people today would say that George W. Bush is undeniably crazy and John Kerry quintessentially sane. But their policies on war and terrorism are much the same. I suggest that John Kerry’s sanity is every bit as dangerous to America and World Peace as George W. Bush’s insanity. Remember that Tony Blair has been following Bill Clinton’s advice. A vote for sane John Kerry might turn out to be a vote for a man like Harry Truman, willing to make the difficult decision to bring horror to the world.
We like to look at despots as people who are not like us. But now I refer to the example of Lindsie England. Is she crazy? The evidence of concentration guards suggests that she may be more like us than dislike us. Many of us thrust into the same situation would find ourselves acting much the same, either succumbing to peer pressure or a simple desire to please our superiors. It may come out that Lindsie England did not like what she did but she did it anyways. Just like Harry Truman didn’t like telling the Army Air Force to drop Little Boy on Hiroshima on that August morning 49 years ago. The lesson of Truman, of England, of concentration camp guards, Adolf Eichmann, and John Kerry is to stop looking at the insane for evil, but to take a hard look at ourselves. Just what are we ready to do in defense of “liberty”? Many reasonable people went along with the Patriot Act. They never once questioned their own sanity. What they must learn to do is question the results and to learn that evil is not a force that controls other people, but a possibility that exists inside even the best of us.
This is the only way to fight it, from the inside.
