Will Media Raise Key Questions About Hiroshima, and Nuclear Legacy, This Year? THE NATION,Greg Mitchell on July 24, 2013 Sixty-eight years ago last week the Nuclear Age began with the first successful test of an atomic weapon at the Trinity site in the New Mexico desert. The test and what surrounded it set the standard for much of what followed in the decades to come: radiation dangers, official secrecy and cover-ups, a nearly endless nuclear arms race, and the triumph of the national security state……
Every summer for the past thirty years I’ve written numerous articles about this and related subjects—because the US media, with the exception of the fiftieth anniversary in 1995, fail to raise new, or even longstanding, questions. I’ve written three books on the subject: Hiroshima in America (with Robert Jay Lifton), Atomic Cover-Up (on the decades-long suppression of shocking film shot in the atomic cities by the US military) and Hollywood Bomb (the wild story of how an MGM 1947 drama was censored by the military and Truman himself).
For now, here’s a kind of summary of the debate of the use of the bomb in August 1945.
One of the persistent—and certainly the most influential—arguments in the media for dropping the bomb over two highly populated Japanese cities is that it saved hundreds of thousands, even millions, of American lives that would have been lost in the “inevitable” US invasion of Japan. Those numbers were grossly inflated from the start, many historians have shown, but any invasion would have been bloody enough. The significance of the Trinity success—which was by no means a slam dunk beforehand—was that it rendered any invasion extremely unlikely.
Why? There is no way any American president, and certainly not Harry Truman, would have gone ahead with an invasion—scheduled for several long months after the Trinity test—knowing that he had an A-bomb in his pocket. This helps account for why his surly mood at the Potsdam summit was transformed overnight by the news of the Trinity success.
The question—on the day after Trinity—was not use bomb or invade (which defenders of the bomb still emphasize), but rather how to use the bomb. ……the issue was not bomb or invade but bomb or negotiate (or bomb and negotiate).
Now, many defenders of the bombing will say that the beauty of using the bomb against Japanese cities is this: it made the Japanese agree to unconditional surrender. This, of course, is nonsense. In fact, we accepted the very strong condition of letting them keep their emperor, which was always assumed to be the main sticking point in a surrender before Hiroshima.
In other words, we demanded unconditional surrender after Trinity—but accepted a key condition after Hiroshima……..
The key historical fact usually ignored by defenders of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that the A-bomb wasn’t the only reason the Japanese quit: the foe the Japanese most feared, the Russians, had finally declared war against them, and were on march, two days after the Hiroshima blast…..
The key point is: We didn’t wait around to find out if the Japanese would have surrendered to us shortly (especially after we let them keep the emperor) to prevent the Russians from invading, or if a strong nudge via use of our bomb would have been required.
So, for me (if not most others in the media), the responsibility has always been on the defenders of the use of the bomb to marshal evidence that all of those other options Truman could have tried after Trinity—plus the Russian attack and letting them keep the emperor—would not have produced a quick surrender.
Yes, we do know that surrender came shortly after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but we also know the awful negatives of the decision Truman did make: the deaths of more than 200,000 civilians (mainly women and children) and lingering illness for thousands more, the staining of the United States with a moral stigma around the world (if not in our own country), plus the setting in motion of the sense of the weapon as desirable and usable, leading to a costly, forty-year nuclear arms race.
