Seeing the Big Picture
Remembering Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Aftermath
"There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people" ~ Howard Zinn
On a sunny morning in August 1945, 65 years ago, the world changed forever. Eleven men in a B-29 bomber built by Lockheed Martin dropped a single bomb, built by a coalition of the most brilliant American, Canadian and British scientists, on the ancient Japanese city of Hiroshima. The horrific initiation rite of the atomic age killed 80,000 people instantly and nearly that many died soon after of their wounds and radiation poisoning. Three days later a second bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki. Over 40,000 died instantly and tens of thousands more died soon afterwards. In less than three days, the atomic age had killed or would cause to die nearly half-a-million people, the vast majority of them civilians. They had been given no warning and had no idea what had happened to them even as it happened.
The intense energy released from the exploding of these two bombs was nothing like the world had ever experienced before. The first thing anyone saw was an intense flash of white light. Those who had actually looked at the flash had their retinas burned out and were permanently blinded. After that came the blast wave, moving at over two miles per second. At ground zero and for a mile radius, virtually nothing remained. Every living and non-living thing was vaporized, incinerated in the intense 5000 degree heat and blown away by the 600 mph winds. Outside that zone, most survivors suffered horrible burns that left their flesh hanging from their bodies when it wasn’t carbonized and burnt black. People within half a mile of the fireball caused by the bomb were burned to bundles of black char in a fraction of a second; their internal organs boiled away. Survivors found thousands of small black bundles stuck to the streets, bridges and sidewalks of the city.
In Hiroshima, the blast ignited a firestorm that raged through the mostly wooden town, burning everything and everyone in its path. Survivors tried to make their way to one of the seven tributaries of the Ota River, to find water, to escape the fire, to sooth their burning flesh. The rivers became literal rivers of bodies, dead and alive. Eye witness accounts from survivors horrified the world. A five-year-old girl recounted: People came fleeing from the nearby streets. One after another, they were almost unrecognizable. The skin was burned off some of them, and was hanging from their hands and from their chins; their faces were red and so swollen that you could hardly tell where their eyes and mouths were. It was a horrible sight.
Although both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were identified as “military” targets, the vast majority of inhabitants and casualties were civilians: innocent old men, women and children. Many foreigners, especially priests, nuns, and doctors were killed. Over 6,000 schoolgirls were near the center of the city that day, clearing debris for firebreaks. Although some military targets were destroyed, the atomic bomb was really a means used to force the immediate, unconditional surrender of the Japanese government.
President Truman, who ordered the dropping of the bomb, understood its terrible nature. Years later, Truman confided some private thoughts on the atomic bomb to Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission David Lilienthal, who recorded Truman's words in his diary:
Truman says: "I don't think we ought to use this thing unless we absolutely have to. It is a terrible thing to order the use of something that is so terribly destructive, destructive beyond anything we have ever had. You have got to understand that this isn't a military weapon. It is used to wipe out women and children and unarmed people, and not for military uses." This sounds eerily like the acts of terrorism we see utilized today by so many extremist groups.
Hubris on both sides perpetrated this great crime against humanity: Japanese cultural axioms, which dictated suicide rather than defeat, coupled with imperialistic campaigns into China, Korea, Formosa and other Asian countries led to a national attitude of invincibility, and the almost religious belief it would be better to all die rather than accept defeat. A complex and long revered Japanese military class had control of the government and dictated its course.
America was anxious to show the world, especially Stalin, the new power it had developed and had control of, even if it meant killing hundreds of thousands of civilians in its first use. Truman knew the Russians coveted areas in Asia under Japanese control and were poised to move in after surrender. Truman and his government were determined to warn Stalin that would not be allowed.
Over the years, much debate has ensued as to whether the US should have dropped the bomb on these cities. Surrender talks were already underway. The Japanese had a long list of conditions, mainly focused on preserving the status of the god-identified Emperor and the sovereignty of their land. The Western Allies, having witnessed conditional peace and the ensuing troubles after WWI, were determined to have an unconditional peace with Axis nations, even though when Roosevelt and Churchill met in Casablanca in January 1943 to discuss the terms of surrender, the word unconditional was not included in the joint press statement. It was accidentally and unintentionally ad-libbed by Roosevelt in a later press statement, and the other Allies, not wanting to challenge the President’s language, embraced it . . . and so “unconditional” became the official position. This unplanned and seemingly minor error may have resulted in the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians. If the United States and the Allies had accepted the conditional surrender of Japan, the bomb would never have been dropped.
Many of the scientists who worked on the Manhattan project were horrified at the use of the technology they had developed, as were many politicians and generals. General Eisenhower expressed his concerns openly:
"In 1945, Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and, secondly, because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives."
Whether or not we should have dropped the bomb will be debated forever. In my opinion, the issue of concern now is that the United States and its allies let the Genie out the of the Bottle, opened Pandora’s box, to used some mixed metaphors . . . and as we are finding, it’s very, very hard to get the genie back in the bottle, and when we opened Pandora’s box, we unleashed on our planet a host of dangerous, radioactive isotopes that were hitherto unknown to the natural world: elements like Plutonium, Americium, Neptunium which are deadly for tens of thousands, and in some cases millions of years. Those two atomic bombs, and the hundreds of nuclear tests that followed, released significant amounts of toxic, carcinogenic, radioactive isotopes, things like Cesium 137 and Strontium 90, which can be found in all our bodies today and in all living things through the wide; indeed, we re-wrote the periodic table with the splitting of the atom.
After Hiroshima, the Cold War began, with a major focus on gaining atomic technology in the great arms race. One after another, the major powers acquired some form of nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union, through espionage and its own research was able to build and detonate its first bomb in 1949. The soviets went on to develop and test bigger and more powerful hydrogen and other types of bombs, including devices like the Tsar bomb, whose explosion was hot enough to induce third degree burns at 100 km distance. A few years later, in 1952, Great Britain detonated its bomb, followed by France in 1960 and China in 1964. Pressured by Ireland and Finland, a non-proliferation treaty, or NPT, was proposed and signed by the five major nuclear powers and 184 other states. The treaty’s three main agreements centered on non-proliferation, disarmament and the right to peacefully use nuclear technology.
Peacefully using nuclear technology, or the Atoms for Peace Program, is what ushered in the production of electricity by nuclear fission in nuclear power plants. In an effort to counter the horrors of nuclear weapons, scientists and governments rushed to find some perceived positive use for the powerful destructive genie circling the globe; however, it was through the Atoms for Peace program that the rest of the nuclear club gained their access to nuclear bomb material.
In 1974, India, using technology and materials it gained from commercial nuclear reactors supplied by Canada, detonated the Smiling Buddha nuclear bomb, and immediately created new questions about how civilian nuclear technology could be diverted secretly to weapons purposes. The Indians claimed they needed the bomb as a deterrent to the aggression of their neighbor, Pakistan. Soon it became apparent that, in response to India, Pakistan was also developing their bombs, again using technology and materials gained from commercial nuclear power. Both India and Pakistan possess significant numbers of nuclear weapons, mostly aimed at each other.
North Korea had been a member of the NPT, but withdrew in 2003 after the United States accused it of having a secret uranium enrichment program (Uranium coming out of the ground is mostly the isotope U 238 and must be “enriched” or changed through one of several processes into the more highly fissionable isotope U235. This enrichment is needed for both nuclear weapons and nuclear power fuel). In 2006, North Korea reported a successful nuclear weapons detonation. It then tested a second, higher yield bomb in May of 2009. We now believe North Korea has several nuclear weapons.
Israel is suspected of having nuclear bombs but has opted to keep their existence secret for fear of introducing an arms race into the political cauldron of the Middle East. Israel will neither confirm nor deny their existence, but the Federation of American Scientists believe Israel has between 75-200 weapons, making Israel the world’s sixth largest nuclear power. Neither Israel, Pakistan nor India have signed the NPT.
These days a lot of attention is being focused on Iran. The nuclear program of Iran was launched in the 1950s with the help of the United States and is another product of the Atoms for Peace program. The support, encouragement and participation of the United States and Western European governments in Iran's nuclear program continued until the 1979 revolution that toppled the Shah of Iran. The new regime disengaged itself from the United States and began its own “peaceful” nuclear program, developing uranium mining, research reactors, several research sites, and of course, a uranium enrichment facility. Where Iran got into trouble with the West was in its failure to declare sensitive enrichment and reprocessing activities to theInternational Atomic Energy Agency. Since enriched uranium can be used in either commercial or military nuclear programs, this is a troubling point. Iran says its nuclear program is peaceful and has enriched uranium to less than five percent, consistent with fuel for a civilian nuclear power plant. But herein lies the dilemma of all things nuclear: the blurring of the lines between commercial and military uses of nuclear materials.
Here in the United States, we blur the lines all the time between military and commercial nuclear programs. Commercial reactors that are part of the publicly owned TVA are used to make tritium, a radioactive isotope needed for nuclear warhead triggers and to boost yield of nuclear bombs. There is a Tritium Production Facility at the SRS where tritium from the Watts Bar nuclear reactor is made into bomb components. The MOX Mixed Oxide fuel plant, under construction at SRS, will take weapons grade Plutonium and make commercial nuclear fuel to be burned in one of several proposed commercial reactors. We shouldn’t be surprised when other countries blur these lines as well, unless we are trying to hold a “do as we say, not as we do” philosophy of nuclear power.
In the rush to counter global warming with perceived non-greenhouse gas emitting energy sources, nuclear is being touted as the best solution . . . yet how will we deal with these issues of proliferation? Any country that can obtain or develop enrichment technology, which is becoming easier and easier, can obtain the kind of highly enriched uranium used in the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Any country that decides to reprocess its used or spent nuclear fuel can get the kind of Plutonium that was used to make the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki. In fact, commercial reprocessing of spent nuclear power fuel by the major nuclear countries of Great Britain, Russia, France and Japan has resulted in a worldwide stockpile of over 215 metric tons of weapons usable plutonium. There is a major push to begin reprocessing in this country, at our very own SRS. Boosters claim this is the best way to deal with nuclear waste, yet no other country has successfully dealt with its commercial OR military nuclear waste and, in general, worldwide efforts to use reprocessing as a way deal with waste have created additional major environmental problems and mountains of weapons usable materials in the process.
How safely is this material guarded? Russian officials are on record saying that potatoes are guarded better than nuclear materials. Countless arrests have been made of those trafficking nuclear materials. Both Uranium and Plutonium are easily hidden and virtually undetectable. Only grapefruit sized amounts are needed of either material to make a bomb powerful enough to level any major city.
The French routinely move nuclear materials around their country. The environmental group Greenpeace has demonstrated how easy it is to identify routes and travel schedules and to physically access the plutonium trucks. On 19 February 2003, a group of twenty-five activists blocked a shipment and chained themselves to the vehicle carrying a substantial amount of plutonium. Global inventories of weapons materials are sketchy at best and there have been known thefts. In a disturbing revelation a few year ago, the CIA revealed it believed that the nuclear explosives in Israel's first several bombs, about one hundred kilograms of bomb-grade uranium in all, came from material that was missing from a United States naval nuclear fuel plant operated by the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC) in Apollo, Pennsylvania.
Every president since Kennedy has tried to move towards eliminating nuclear weapons. Kennedy knew the danger when he told the United Nations, in 1961: Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.”
In his inaugural address Reagan stated: We seek the elimination one day of nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth. President Jimmy Carter is still today working on disarmament and world peace campaigns. In 1991, George Herbert Walker Bush worked with Russian President Boris Yeltsin to reduce our missile inventory. Under Bill Clinton, the Senate ratified the START II agreement, initiated by Reagan and signed by Bush in 1993. Over the past three decades, we have managed to move from over 60,000 nuclear warheads, to where we are today, still at the astonishing number of 23,000. President Obama has made it a priority to keep moving forward dramatically in the disarmament campaign.
In April 2010, he and President Medvedev signed the latest new START, or Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. It caps the number of deployed or ready to launch warheads at 700 and delivery vehicles at 300. It establishes a state of the art verification program and lays the groundwork for further disarmament and deterrence for nuclear acts of terrorism. It’s an important treaty that needs to be ratified if we are to continue making progress in getting rid of nuclear weapons, something that should be at the top of our national list of priorities.
As for the proliferation issues associated with commercial nuclear power, well, you know how I feel. I think there are better, cheaper, safer, faster, cleaner and proliferation free ways to make electricity. How will we control the spread of nuclear materials if we continue to promote and sanction more “peaceful atoms” programs? Will we try to police a world built on electricity produced by the same terrible energy that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki? What kind of police states will be necessary to fuel a world by nuclear materials? How many civil liberties will be lost after next, and inevitable, act of nuclear terrorism? And do we really believe that leaving this legacy of toxic, long lived radioactive waste for our descendents to oversee and pay for is morally defensible?
As in the old mythological tale, there is always Hope left inside Pandora’s box . . . Hope that we may learn to live in peace, hope that we will countdown to zero weapons, hope that we will capture all the radioactive terrors we unleashed, and lock them up forever. Hope that we will find energy sources that do not threaten to pollute and destroy our beautiful planet.
I leave you with one of my favorite quotes, by writer E.F. Schumacher: "No degree of prosperity could justify the accumulation of large amounts of highly toxic substances which nobody knows how to make safe and which remain an incalculable danger to the whole of creation for historical or even geological ages. To do such a thing is a transgression against life itself, a transgression infinitely more serious than any crime perpetrated by man. The idea that a civilization could sustain itself on such a transgression is an ethical, spiritual, and metaphysical monstrosity. It means conducting the economical affairs of man as if people did not matter at all." – E. F. Schumacher “Small is Beautiful”
