The horror of nuclear weaponry is not just a matter of the distant past but continues to form power relations between current governments
“That fateful summer, 8:15. The roar of a B-29 breaks the morning calm. A parachute opens in the blue sky. Then suddenly, a flash, an enormous blast – silence – hell on earth. The eyes of young girls watching the parachute melted. Their faces became giant charred blisters. The skin of people seeking help dangled from their fingernails. Their hair stood on end. Their clothes were ripped to shreds. People trapped in houses toppled by the blast were burned alive. Others died when their eyes and internal organs burst from their bodies. Hiroshima was a hell where those who somehow survived envied the dead.”
Excerpt from the memorial statement on 6 August 2007 by Hiroshima mayor, Tadatoshi Akiba, in a plea to rid the world of all nuclear weapons.
“A woman who covered her eyes from the flash lowered her hands to find the skin of her face had melted into her palms…Hundreds of field workers and others staggered by, moaning and crying. Some were missing body parts, and others were so badly burned that even though they were naked, Yoshida couldn’t tell if they were men or women. He saw one person whose eyeballs hung down from his face, the sockets empty.”
Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War by Susan Southard (Viking, 2015)
Seventy years ago the United States became the first and only country to ever use nuclear weapons.
On 6th August 1945, an American bomber dropped a nuclear device over a hospital in Hiroshima, a Japanese city with little military significance. The bomb was attached to a parachute and set to go off high in the air to maximise the number of people who would be exposed to lethal radiation. About 140,000 city residents were either killed or so badly injured that they died within a few months.
When informed about the blast he had ordered, U.S. President Harry Truman gleefully exclaimed, “This is the greatest thing in history.” To show just how “great” the atomic bomb was, three days later, on 9th August, the U.S. dropped another one, destroying the city of Nagasaki and killing another 70,000 people. Many years of suffering from the effects of the radiation continue to lie ahead for the survivors and their children, which Susan Southard outlines in the interviews contained in her new book. As 192,000 of the victims are still alive, these events are not ancient history for our generation.
Shortly after the war ended, the U.S. occupied Japan and suppressed any news articles recounting the horror that had occurred. Instead, newspapers like the New York Times parroted official lines denying the existence of radiation sickness, and downplaying the seriousness and special nature of the devastation caused by atomic weapons – which, as it happens, the U.S. government was also considering using on the USSR. The general in charge of developing the atomic bomb told Congress that death by radiation was “a very pleasant way to die”.
In the closing days of the second world war, America had unleashed the nuclear era. Germany had already surrendered, and Japan’s economy had been destroyed, its capital fire-bombed into ashes and its military dealt decisive defeats. Many historians believe that Japan would have surrendered without the atomic bombing. The purpose of the bombing was not just to make sure that the U.S. and its allies won the war, but more significantly, to make sure that the U.S. and the U.S. alone would benefit from Japan’s surrender.
The U.S. government was determined not to let the Soviet Union prevent it from stepping into Japan’s shoes as the top colonial power in Asia. The USSR was still a socialist country then, although a decade later it would take a different path. It had been allied with the U.S. during the war against Germany and Japan, but before the war was even over, the U.S. began baring its teeth to the USSR and setting out to dominate much of the world.
The USSR is no more, but the U.S. and other countries still threaten the world with nuclear holocaust. The U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel hold thousands of nuclear warheads, as well as the missiles, aircraft and submarines to use them. (Note: This list does not include Iran, despite the hysteria stoked by Truman’s successor as U.S. president, Barack Obama.)
When Obama was campaigning for presidency in 2008, he promised he would seek nuclear disarmament. The committee that awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize the following year cited the agreement for a “nuclear-free world” which he signed with Russia. (Incidentally, if Obama deserved the Nobel Peace Prize for this, so did Russian president, Vladimir Putin). Yet the treaty between the two countries sought no such thing. It permitted both sides to each retain 1,550 strategic nuclear weapons, deployed and ready to go, not counting those in storage. Many are vastly more powerful than the bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The thousands of tactical nuclear weapons not covered by the treaty are, in some ways, even more dangerous than the strategic ones because their use is envisioned in ordinary official military doctrine, and once a nuclear exchange begins, no one can say how it will end. A nuclear world war is not currently on the horizon as it was several times during the height of the U.S.–Soviet conflict in the latter part of the 20th century, but one would assume the only reason to have such weapons is to be able to use them.
Although the arms race between the U.S. and Russia today is no longer about an ever-accumulating stockpile of nuclear bombs, Obama has launched a trillion-dollar campaign to modernise his country’s atomic bomb-making facilities, produce new or refurbished missiles, submarines and bombers to use them, and update existing warheads. Russia is also reported to be updating its nuclear delivery vehicles and similar efforts are being invested into the UK Trident missile programme and France’s air-to-ground nuclear-tipped missile system. Rather than working to consign nuclear weapons to the past, these programmes seek to ensure their usability far into the future.
When asked to explain Obama’s apparent turn-around on his nuclear agreement, an advisor alluded to “Putin’s invasion of Ukraine”. This is a perfect example of the posture reminiscent of the Cold War: imperialist superpowers ready to risk destroying the world rather than lose the contest to run it. The implicit threat to use nuclear weapons to “protect” Ukraine – in other words, to keep Russia from challenging U.S. geo-political interests – seems completely polarised from the interests of Ukraine and the global population.
As for combating Islamist terrorism, which is the current pretext justifying U.S. and European military interventions in the Middle East, there has seldom been a terrorist act more horrendous in its consequences or on a bigger scale than the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The wounds are still gaping for the survivors of these atrocities, and as global superpowers turn towards their most recently defined enemy, reflection on one of history’s most horrific and shameful acts should stop us creating the premise for another massacre for future generations to mourn.
If you’d like to get involved in the campaign for nuclear disarmament, please follow this link: http://www.cnduk.org/.
Image from: http://www.huckmagazine.com/perspectives/activism-2/anti-nuclear-protest-art-will-stop-tracks/