[BRIEF NOTE] On Hiroshima Day
Aug. 6th, 2005 10:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldToday is the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The book Shockwave, rightly positively reviewed in the book section of today's Globe and Mail for its powerful hour-by-hour examination of the lives of the people caught up Hiroshima--the victims, the pilots, the politicians--and should be read concurrently with today's Globe and Mail powerful interview with Setsuko Thurlow, victim and survivor. For a broader view, I recommend Tsuyoshi Hasegawa's Racing the Enemy, which provides a much-needed overview of the decision-making surrounding the dropping of the bomb in proto-Cold War politics.
The debate on the ethics of the American attack have been debated extensively. As an anonymous editorialist at The Globe and Mail noted, the blame question is something that is as the least bad option. The American government didn't drop the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at a whim. Those two Japanese cities were considered for attack at all only because they were located in a country that had been waging an enthusiastic war in Asia with the intent of colonizing Asia without much regard for the lives of Asians. It wasn't exactly as if the decimation of cities and the gratuitous use of weapons of mass destruction were foreign to Japan's warmaking tradition; indeed, the Rape of Nanjing and the testing of biological weapons upon civilians by Unit 731 were almost quotidian events, though worthy only of somewhat more note than the unremarkable starvation and massacre of Chinese and Vietnamese and Burmese civilians by the tens of millions. Hasegawa convincingly demonstrates that the Japanese government at the time had not only ignored previous opportunities to surrender, it was enthusiastically planning to implement Okinawa's pattern of the mass death in the Home Islands when the time came for Operation Downfall, the American invasion of Japan planned on 1 November 1945. Did the bomb save Japan from further decimation at home, this and the contemporary Soviet invasion of Manchuria forcing militarists in the Japanese government to agree to peace? I suspect so.
Hiroshima's suffering shouldn't be denied. Hiroshima's suffering also shouldn't be abstracted, subtracted from the context of a war that Japan had happily launched and brutally waged.The 150 thousand dead of Hiroshima are the equivalent of a month's worth of Chinese civilian dead. The Sino-Japanese theatre of the Pacific War lasted for a hundred months. By the standards set by the Japanese military Hiroshima got off lightly, its inhabitants avoiding horrors like, say, enemy soldiers enthusiastically gang-raping the wounded to death. The ethics of whether or not Hiroshima can't be separated from the ethics of the Second World War and of total war in general. I'm just not convinced that Hiroshima constitutes anything but another example of the horrors of war, and that as a strategic choice by Truman it's anything but the least bad scenario. Your outcome may vary, of course.
Hasegawa calls the removal of Hiroshima part of a complex of "inverted nationalism" in Japan, manifested not in a proclamation of Japanese superiority per se but in terms of exceptional Japanese victimhood. The nuclear bombings of August 1945 and by the Soviet annexation of the Kuril Islands are equally important in this complex, starting as it does with the assumption of a unique depth of suffering. Writing (as I acknowledge ahead of time) with little specialist knowledge, I wonder if this mindset might explain why many Japanese have such a hard time recognizing the suffering of their country's wartime and colonial victims, with needed apologies being repeatedly undercut by provisos or by contradictory statements from other responsibles.
That said, Hiroshima's suffering was unique in that its suffering was such an easy thing to cause, created as the outcome of a highly bureaucratized and scientific technocratic culture that culminated in a single primitive fission warhead. Hiroshima's suffering was easy, and this ease is worrying. At the peak of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union and the United States possessed tens of thousands of nuclear warheads, I suspect that the Soviets, perhaps aware of having reached overkill levels with existing targets and having warheads to spare, planned to attack Prince Edward Island, sparing a warhead or two for Charlottetown (Prince Edward Island's capital and home to an airport) and Summerside (home to the CFB Summerside military base). Why not? It would be easy enough to spare a warhead or two for this task, and it wouldn't be good form to leave the Island untouched, a strategic asset for post-Third World War North America. When a technology enables a strategy that includes, as a secondary or even tertiary element. the intensive bombardment of Prince Edward Island and the immediate death of one-third of the province's population, you know that this technology is extraordinarily dangerous.
The debate on the ethics of the American attack have been debated extensively. As an anonymous editorialist at The Globe and Mail noted, the blame question is something that is as the least bad option. The American government didn't drop the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at a whim. Those two Japanese cities were considered for attack at all only because they were located in a country that had been waging an enthusiastic war in Asia with the intent of colonizing Asia without much regard for the lives of Asians. It wasn't exactly as if the decimation of cities and the gratuitous use of weapons of mass destruction were foreign to Japan's warmaking tradition; indeed, the Rape of Nanjing and the testing of biological weapons upon civilians by Unit 731 were almost quotidian events, though worthy only of somewhat more note than the unremarkable starvation and massacre of Chinese and Vietnamese and Burmese civilians by the tens of millions. Hasegawa convincingly demonstrates that the Japanese government at the time had not only ignored previous opportunities to surrender, it was enthusiastically planning to implement Okinawa's pattern of the mass death in the Home Islands when the time came for Operation Downfall, the American invasion of Japan planned on 1 November 1945. Did the bomb save Japan from further decimation at home, this and the contemporary Soviet invasion of Manchuria forcing militarists in the Japanese government to agree to peace? I suspect so.
Hiroshima's suffering shouldn't be denied. Hiroshima's suffering also shouldn't be abstracted, subtracted from the context of a war that Japan had happily launched and brutally waged.The 150 thousand dead of Hiroshima are the equivalent of a month's worth of Chinese civilian dead. The Sino-Japanese theatre of the Pacific War lasted for a hundred months. By the standards set by the Japanese military Hiroshima got off lightly, its inhabitants avoiding horrors like, say, enemy soldiers enthusiastically gang-raping the wounded to death. The ethics of whether or not Hiroshima can't be separated from the ethics of the Second World War and of total war in general. I'm just not convinced that Hiroshima constitutes anything but another example of the horrors of war, and that as a strategic choice by Truman it's anything but the least bad scenario. Your outcome may vary, of course.
Hasegawa calls the removal of Hiroshima part of a complex of "inverted nationalism" in Japan, manifested not in a proclamation of Japanese superiority per se but in terms of exceptional Japanese victimhood. The nuclear bombings of August 1945 and by the Soviet annexation of the Kuril Islands are equally important in this complex, starting as it does with the assumption of a unique depth of suffering. Writing (as I acknowledge ahead of time) with little specialist knowledge, I wonder if this mindset might explain why many Japanese have such a hard time recognizing the suffering of their country's wartime and colonial victims, with needed apologies being repeatedly undercut by provisos or by contradictory statements from other responsibles.
That said, Hiroshima's suffering was unique in that its suffering was such an easy thing to cause, created as the outcome of a highly bureaucratized and scientific technocratic culture that culminated in a single primitive fission warhead. Hiroshima's suffering was easy, and this ease is worrying. At the peak of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union and the United States possessed tens of thousands of nuclear warheads, I suspect that the Soviets, perhaps aware of having reached overkill levels with existing targets and having warheads to spare, planned to attack Prince Edward Island, sparing a warhead or two for Charlottetown (Prince Edward Island's capital and home to an airport) and Summerside (home to the CFB Summerside military base). Why not? It would be easy enough to spare a warhead or two for this task, and it wouldn't be good form to leave the Island untouched, a strategic asset for post-Third World War North America. When a technology enables a strategy that includes, as a secondary or even tertiary element. the intensive bombardment of Prince Edward Island and the immediate death of one-third of the province's population, you know that this technology is extraordinarily dangerous.
