9:40 AM
70 Years Later, The Bomb Still Casts Fear
On Aug. 6, 1945, the U.S. dropped a "super weapon" on Hiroshima, Japan, and launched a fundamental shift in the way we wage war.
At 2:45 on the fateful morning of Aug. 6, 1945, the Enola Gay took off from the tiny Pacific island of Tinian and began its journey into history. After a six-hour flight that covered more than 1,500 miles, the American B-29 bomber began circling over the Japanese mainland, reaching 31,000 feet. At 8:15 a.m., the crew dropped the first atomic bomb used in wartime, nicknamed "Little Boy," on the city of Hiroshima. What military leaders called the "super weapon" detonated at 1,900 feet and leveled 60 percent of the city, sending a mushroom cloud rising ominously into the sky; 70,000 people died in a matter of seconds.
This was the dawn of the atomic age, one of the most dangerous epochs in history.
From the beginning 70 years ago, The Bomb generated a profound sense that something fundamental had changed and something dreadful had happened. Robert Lewis, the Enola Gay's co-pilot, wrote in the flight log, "My God, what have we done?" When J. Robert Oppenheimer, a physicist who was considered the father of the atom bomb, saw the results of an earlier test, he was awed and frightened by what he and the other scientists had wrought. He referred to a Sanskrit morality tale when he quoted from the Bhagavad-Gita holy text: "I am become death, destroyer of worlds."
Sixteen hours after the first nuclear attack, President Harry Truman, who had authorized it, captured the moment. "It is an atomic bomb," he explained solemnly to the world in his unemotional Missouri monotone. "It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East."
But the Japanese military would not give up.
Three days later, on Aug. 9, a second bomb, "Fat Man," was dropped on Nagasaki, killing an estimated 70,000.
On Aug. 15, Japan's governmentsurrendered.
The 70th anniversary of Hiroshima is being marked in various ways around the world and the most noticeable will be the many anti-nuclear protests. To this day, Truman's decision to use the bomb remains hotly debated and widely criticized.
But Truman didn't second guess himself in the years that followed. He argued that he used the super-weapon justifiably to avoid an invasion of the Japanese home islands and prevent the immense casualties that would have resulted to both U.S. soldiers and Japanese armed forces and civilians. Most Americans agreed with him.
Certainly Paul Tibbets, the 30-year-old pilot of the Enola Gay (an aircraft he named for his mother), had no remorse. "Do you have any idea how many American lives would have been lost had we launched a ground invasion of Japan, instead of dropping the bomb?" Tibbets once said. "And how many Japanese lives? I sleep so well because I know how many people got to live full lives because of what we did."
The context of the times is important in considering Truman's decision. The war in Europe had ended in May 1945, but the conflict against Japan remained brutal, with Japanese soldiers digging in and inflicting massive casualties on American forces at Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
Some of Truman's critics say he could have ordered a blockade of the Japanese islands and didn't really have to insist on a land invasion, so use of the bomb wasn't necessary. Others say Truman should have dropped the super weapon on an unpopulated area as a demonstration of its devastating effects.
But Truman had only two atomic bombs ready for use, and he and his advisers couldn't be sure they would both work, or that a demonstration blast or two would bring Japan to its knees. They also had little sympathy for Japanese leaders or the Japanese people because Japan had launched what was widely called a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, drawing the United States into the world war. Most Americans appeared to agree that the Japanese, as with the Germans, deserved whatever they got.
Certainly there was little second-guessing about the U.S. military's firebombing of Tokyo weeks before the Enola Gay completed its fateful mission, conventional attacks that killed more than 120,000 civilians. The United States had used this same firebombing tactic against Germany before the Nazis surrendered, with no big public outcry. So the bomb seemed to Truman simply a more efficient way than firebombing to force Tokyo to give in.
In addition, Truman wanted to show the Soviet Union the extent of U.S. power in order to discourage military advances by Kremlin ruler Josef Stalin.
And there was also the pressure Truman felt to continue the legacy of the beloved President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom he had succeeded after FDR's death in April 1945. "Truman could not ignore the fact that the decision to build the bomb at a cost of $2 billion had been Roosevelt's," historian Robert Dallek wrote in "Harry S. Truman," a biography. "If he had decided to rely on an invasion rather than atom bombs to force an end to the war, and this became public knowledge, he would have lost public confidence in his leadership and all that would mean for leading the nation for the next three years. He would have been seen as abandoning Roosevelt's agenda and giving in to sentimental concerns about saving the lives of Japanese civilians at a cost in American lives"--the death of up to 500,000 U.S. soldiers, according the military estimates.
Truman's conclusion was to use the bomb to end the war as quickly as possible, a decision that was really his only recourse, Dallek says. Americans hated the Japanese, and Truman might have been impeached if he hadn't used the bomb to hasten the end of the war and end U.S. casualties, Dallek says. adding: "He had no choice politically in terms of the politics of this country. People wanted the war to end."
Yet even the most articulate defense of Truman's decision has not deterred critics, who say the bomb should never have been used on population centers. Fueling this view were descriptions of the results of the attack, especially "Hiroshima," John Hersey's shocking report on the devastation first published in The New Yorker in August 1946 and released later as a book. It remains one of the most powerful accounts of the horrors of war ever written.
The subsequent nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union generated even more fear and dread for generations. Americans of a certain age--those who were children in the 1950s and 1960s--remember the precautions advised by the government, including the construction of fallout shelters, and the training of children in the now-ridiculed practice of "duck and cover." This called for the kids to duck under their desks at school and cover their heads with their arms in the event of a nuclear attack, as if this woud protect them from the falling bombs and the radioactivity that would follow.
Many people wondered if nuclear war was inevitable, resulting in the end of civilization. The collisions of the superpowers included the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, when the United States and the Soviet Union came perilously close to Armageddon.
Nuclear fears pervaded everyday life in other ways. There were the nuclear nightmares of children reported by their parents. There were the vivid and horrifying television images of open-air nuclear tests with ever more devastating bombs on display, marked by spectacular mushroom clouds that were far more extensive and fearsome than the ones at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There was an endless series of movies about nuclear war and nuclear radiation that gripped the public's imagination, including "The Day the Earth Stood Still," "Godzilla," "Failsafe," "Dr. Strangelove," and "On the Beach."
Today, nuclear fear manifests itself in different ways. "The Cold War has been over since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the threat of nuclear Armageddon has largely faded from public consciousness," Joel Achenbach wrote in the Washington Post July 15. "Yet...nuclear weapons have once again leapt onto the front page, with the controversial agreement between Iran and a U.S.-led coalition that is designed to push back a decade or more the development of the Iranian bomb. The Iranian deal is a reminder that these weapons remain very much a presence on the planet."
In recent years, there have been various arms-control agreements and reductions in nuclear weapons by the United States and the Soviet Union and Russia. And nuclear weapons have never been used again in war since Hiroshima and Nagasaki
But those weapons remain a dire threat. By one estimate, the number of operational nuclear warheads has been reduced from 64,500 in 1986 to about 10,000 today. This leaves an enormous number of such warheads in existence, and there are nine nuclear powers, some of them in very volatile regions with a history of enmity among neighboring nations. The nuclear club consists of the United States, Russia, Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea, according to the Federation of American Scientists and the Arms Control Association and other sources.
Historian Dallek says, "The United States bears the historical burden of having used atomic bombs, used them in anger." And there are so many more nuclear nations today that the concerns about the use of nuclear weapons remains strong. "The nuclear issue won't go away," Dallek says. "It is a threat that hangs over humankind because of the power of those weapons."
This is becoming clear, again, in the debate over President Barack Obama's nuclear deal with Iran, in which the United States and five allies negotiated an agreement with Tehran to reduce or end economic sanctions in return for curbs on the Iranian nuclear program. Many nations fear that program will lead to a nuclear bomb. The deal is now being considered by Congress. And there are many concerns about whether the United States is trusting Iran too much, whether the agreement represents too much of a risk for the United States, and whether it's the best way to prevent a nuclear arms race in the Mideast.
Underlying today's concerns is the vivid image of that deadly mushroom cloud over Hiroshima in August 1945, which changed the world 70 years ago and continues to resonate today.
0 comments:
Post a Comment