Today, August 6th, marks the fifty-eighth anniver­sary of one of the sad­dest events in human his­to­ry: the use of weapons of mass destruc­tion against a civil­ian population.
There’s much that’s been writ­ten about the atom­ic bomb­ing of the Japan­ese city of Hiroshi­ma. At the time, U.S. lead­ers said that use of such over­whelm­ing force would prompt a quick Japan­ese sur­ren­der that would save the thou­sands of Amer­i­can and Japan­ese casul­ties that would sure­ly result from an inva­sion. We have since learned the Japan­ese were secret­ly suing for peace even as the bomber planes took off.
We have learned that Pres­i­dent Tru­man was look­ing ahead. He used the bomb­ing (and the attack on Nagasa­ki a few days lat­er) to demon­strate the weapon to the Sovi­et Union. In the post-war world emerg­ing, it was clear the U.S. and the Sovi­et Union were on a col­li­sion course and Tru­man want­ed to start the com­pe­ti­tion off with a bang. The les­son the Sovi­et lead­er­ship learned from the blast was that they’d bet­ter get their own atom­ic weapons and the arms race was on, strain­ing the economies of both coun­tries for the next fifty years.
Amaz­ing­ly, those two bombs remain the only atom­ic weapons ever to be used against peo­ple in an act of war. Through all the years of the Cold War and the break up of the Sovi­et Union, and despite the mul­ti­ply­ing mem­bers of the “nuclear club”:www.fas.org/irp/threat/wmd.htm, no one has ever done what the U.S. did all the Augusts ago. It is a fact that the world should be grate­ful for.
But there is no guar­an­tee that the human race will go anoth­er fifty-eight years with­out mush­room clouds of human ash­es. Or that devel­op­ment of super-bombs that pack Hiroshima-like charges won’t be used to equally-devastating effects. The U.S. is busy devel­op­ing all sorts of low-yield exot­ic nuclear weapons to make their use more palat­able to a queasy pub­lic. “As the cur­rent may­or of Hiroshim Tadatoshi Aki­ba said ear­li­er today”:http://mdn.mainichi.co.jp/news/20030806p2a00m0fp022000c.html :
bq. A world with­out nuclear weapons and war that the vic­tims of the atom­ic bomb have long sought for is slip­ping into the shad­ows of glow­ing black clouds that could turn into mush­room clouds at any moment. The chief cause of this is the Unit­ed States’ nuclear pol­i­cy which, by open­ly declar­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a pre-emptive nuclear strike and by start­ing research into small ‘use­able’ nuclear weapons, appears to wor­ship nuclear weapons as God.
On the Non​vi​o​lence​.org Board, there’s a live­ly com­men­tary on this anniver­sary of “Human­i­ty’s dark­est hour approaching”:www.nonviolence.org/comment/viewtopic.php?t=3976