The Myths of Hiroshima
By Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin
The Los Angeles Times
August 5, 2005
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Sixty years ago tomorrow, an atomic bomb was dropped without warning on
the center of the Japanese city of Hiroshima. One hundred and forty
thousand people were killed, more than 95% of them women and children and
other noncombatants. At least half of the victims died of radiation
poisoning over the next few months. Three days after Hiroshima was
obliterated, the city of Nagasaki suffered a similar fate.
The A-Bomb dome viewed from the Peace Park
in Hiroshima, Japan.
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The magnitude of death was enormous, but
on Aug. 14, 1945 - just five days after the Nagasaki bombing - Radio Tokyo
announced that the Japanese emperor had accepted the US terms for
surrender. To many Americans at the time, and still for many today, it
seemed clear that the bomb had ended the war, even "saving" a million
lives that might have been lost if the US had been required to invade
mainland Japan.
This powerful
narrative took root quickly and is now deeply embedded in our historical
sense of who we are as a nation. A decade ago, on the 50th anniversary,
this narrative was reinforced in an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution
on the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first bomb. The exhibit,
which had been the subject of a bruising political battle, presented
nearly 4 million Americans with an officially sanctioned view of the
atomic bombings that again portrayed them as a necessary act in a just
war.
But although
patriotically correct, the exhibit and the narrative on which it was based
were historically inaccurate. For one thing, the Smithsonian downplayed
the casualties, saying only that the bombs "caused many tens of thousands
of deaths" and that Hiroshima was "a definite military target."
Americans were also
told that use of the bombs "led to the immediate surrender of Japan and
made unnecessary the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands." But
it's not that straightforward. As Tsuyoshi Hasegawa has shown definitively
in his new book, "Racing the Enemy" - and many other historians have long
argued - it was the Soviet Union's entry into the Pacific war on Aug. 8,
two days after the Hiroshima bombing, that provided the final "shock" that
led to Japan's capitulation.
The Enola Gay exhibit
also repeated such outright lies as the assertion that "special leaflets
were dropped on Japanese cities" warning civilians to evacuate. The fact
is that atomic bomb warning leaflets were dropped on Japanese cities, but
only after Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been destroyed.
The hard truth is
that the atomic bombings were unnecessary. A million lives were not saved.
Indeed, McGeorge Bundy, the man who first popularized this figure, later
confessed that he had pulled it out of thin air in order to justify the
bombings in a 1947 Harper's magazine essay he had ghostwritten for
Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson.
The bomb was dropped,
as J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of the Manhattan Project,
said in November 1945, on "an essentially defeated enemy." President
Truman and his closest advisor, Secretary of State James Byrnes, quite
plainly used it primarily to prevent the Soviets from sharing in the
occupation of Japan. And they used it on Aug. 6 even though they had
agreed among themselves as they returned home from the Potsdam Conference
on Aug. 3 that the Japanese were looking for peace.
These unpleasant
historical facts were censored from the 1995 Smithsonian exhibit, an
action that should trouble every American. When a government substitutes
an officially sanctioned view for publicly debated history, democracy is
diminished.
Today, in the
post-9/11 era, it is critically important that the US face the truth about
the atomic bomb. For one thing, the myths surrounding Hiroshima have made
it possible for our defense establishment to argue that atomic bombs are
legitimate weapons that belong in a democracy's arsenal. But if, as
Oppenheimer said, "they are weapons of aggression, of surprise and of
terror," how can a democracy rely on such weapons?
Oppenheimer
understood very soon after Hiroshima that these weapons would ultimately
threaten our very survival.
Presciently, he even
warned us against what is now our worst national nightmare - and Osama bin
Laden's frequently voiced dream - an atomic suitcase bomb smuggled into an
American city: "Of course it could be done," Oppenheimer told a Senate
committee, "and people could destroy New York."
Ironically,
Hiroshima's myths are now motivating our enemies to attack us with the
very weapon we invented. Bin Laden repeatedly refers to Hiroshima in his
rambling speeches. It was, he believes, the atomic bombings that shocked
the Japanese imperial government into an early surrender - and, he says,
he is planning an atomic attack on the US that will similarly shock us
into retreating from the Mideast.
Finally, Hiroshima's
myths have gradually given rise to an American unilateralism born of
atomic arrogance.
Oppenheimer warned
against this "sleazy sense of omnipotence." He observed that "if you
approach the problem and say, 'We know what is right and we would like to
use the atomic bomb to persuade you to agree with us,' then you are in a
very weak position and you will not succeed.... You will find yourselves
attempting by force of arms to prevent a disaster."
Kai Bird and
Martin J. Sherwin are coauthors of
American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,
published earlier this year by Knopf.
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