By Steve Klinger
Michael Swickard’s column belittling “peaceniks” and thanking God for the atomic bomb evokes in me the kind of sinking feeling that goes along with the question: How can a reasonable person possibly reach these conclusions?
Swickard’s approach to the question of whether the United States was right to unleash atomic weapons on Japan reveals a lot about the biases he brings to his argument. He begins by concluding that the atomic bomb should not have been tested in New Mexico because of unforeseen health consequences, including his suspicion that the resulting fallout caused his own thyroid cancer. But when it comes to whether civilians should ever be targets in a war, Swickard essentially says the ends justify the means, i.e., a nuclear attack was the only way to defeat the Japanese military.
Swickard then makes the tired and unsubstantiated argument that some 800,000 American lives would have been lost in an invasion of Japan, and observes that the losses from the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were “painful” but “minor” in comparison to the alternative. I guess I must be a peacenik to think that roasting 150,000 people alive and dooming another couple hundred thousand to agonizing deaths from radiation poisoning is more than “painful” and relatively “minor.”
By this line of reasoning, Swickard should have no complaint about suffering a cancer as part of the testing that was necessary to save other American lives. Or perhaps he just doesn’t want to say that it would have been all right with him to test such weapons (as the Army later did) on Pacific atolls upwind of civilians whose lives were less important.
Many take issue with conventional wisdom
Howard Zinn, in “A People’s History of the United States,” is only one of numerous historians who take issue with the conventional wisdom from the Pentagon that nuking Japanese civilians was the only way to win the war. He points out numerous inconsistencies in this argument, including the assessment of military analysts that Japan was desperate and ready to surrender by August 1945.
The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, set up by the War Department, concluded after interviewing hundreds of Japanese civilian and military leaders after the war, that “…certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”
Zinn argues American leaders could and did know this back in August 1945, having broken the secret code and learning that the Japanese had instructed their ambassador in Moscow to work on peace negotiations with the allies. It’s true that Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo wired his ambassador in Moscow, “Unconditional surrender is the only obstacle to peace…” But it needn’t have been an obstacle, since the one condition upon which Japan insisted was a ceremonial one – that the holy emperor remain in place. In fact, once the war ended, this is exactly what happened.
The political reality behind the dropping of the bombs was obscure at the time, but Nobel Peace Prize winner and British scientist P.M.S. Blackett suggested in 1949 that the United States was eager to use the bombs before the Russians entered the war against Japan. Indeed, Zinn reports that Stalin had secretly agreed to enter the war 90 days after the end of the European war. Hostilities in Europe ended May 8. Ninety days later, early on Aug. 6, Hiroshima was bombed. It wasn’t publicly discussed, but if Japan surrendered to the United States, this country and not Russia would be the sole occupying power of post-war Japan.
Outmaneuvering the Russians may have been an admirable political objective, but could that be used to justify incinerating several hundred thousand innocent civilians, even those of a non-white, Asian variety?
Our civilians aren’t more valuable than others
What dismays me most, and always has, is the thinking that civilian lives in one nation are more valuable than civilian lives in another, regardless of whether we happen to be at war with that nation. The United States doesn’t have a monopoly on such thinking, of course, but in justifying wartime atrocities against foreign civilians, don’t we surrender the higher moral ground we have claimed (usually invoking the deity) as the self-appointed guardians and proponents of human rights and global democracy?
Unlike the deplorable bloodletting in Vietnam and now Iraq – see The Nation: “The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness” – what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki cannot even begin to be regarded as “collateral damage” or an overreaction by soldiers in the heat of battle, however systematic. When a lone B-29 drops its radioactive payload on an unsuspecting civilian population, it is nothing but an abomination that should never be mentioned in the same sentence as God.
I’m sorry. Just call me a peacenik.
Steve Klinger is editor and publisher of Grassroots Press. He can be reached at sck01@comcast.net.
By Steve Klinger