Still
Under a Cloud
 |
| The 2015 Observance |
Today only charred and mangled bars remain
to mark the spot where the kids poured out of the school that day and raced to climb the monkey bars that stood in the corner of the schoolyard. The children died when The Bomb fell on them that day,
60 years ago this week.
After one A-Bomb landed on Hiroshima and
another fell, three days later, on Nagasaki
The events marking the 60th anniversary of history’s only
nuclear attacks are to be found everywhere this week. In Japan , a “global pilgrimage honoring civilian
casualties of war” called “Stonewalk” will end when participants finish
dragging a one ton memorial stone from Nagasaki
to Hiroshima Hiroshima
 |
| The Day After |
In Europe, an international walk will finish the 250km distance from Ypres , Belgium
(where chemical weapons were first used) past NATO headquarters in Brussels
In Canada , Toronto
In America
And a vigil sponsored by 1300 citizens’ organizations, including the Catholic
Worker, Maryknoll of New York and DC and Pax Christi USA from five different
states will be held at the Oak Ridge (Tennessee Hiroshima and Nagasaki
In hindsight the A-Bomb was a classic case of a new and dangerous
technology where no one asked the basic ethical question: “just because we can do this now, does that mean we should do it?” In fact the historical
evidence is that the intention to use the bomb, at any cost, led to a parade of
pretexts (much like Iraq
Originally, of course, the Manhattan U.S. turned its bombsites on Japan U.S.
postponed the decisive Potsdam conference until
the bomb was ready –and insisted that the Potsdam
declaration include the demand for Japan’s “unconditional surrender.” This
demand deadlocked the Japanese high command, postponing surrender until the
bomb could be dropped. It was still a race however, since the Soviets were
themselves about to declare war and invade Japan
Once the bombs were dropped, Truman and others claimed they had prevented
invasion and saved the lives of a million American soldiers.
[But US
intelligence knew, from code-breaking and from the Russians, that Japan was already
in the process of surrendering in July 1945. Both Supreme Allied Commanders,
Douglas McArthur and Dwight Eisenhower, told President Harry Truman the bomb
wasn’t needed. Later Ike publicly declared “it was not necessary to hit them
with that awful thing.” The US chose to bomb Hiroshima anyway, rather than
concede the single negotiating point that was holding up the Japanese: an
assurance they could keep the emperor (Truman gave this assurance secretly
through the Swiss anyway, but only after the bomb was dropped). Rather than
allow the Japanese to surrender by accepting this single condition publicly,
the US chose to slaughter more than 250,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.]
The Allied demand for “unconditional surrender” delayed the war’s end
because the Japanese were reluctant to surrender the emperor himself. But at
the war’s end, Japan U.S.
[Debate about
invasion statistics continues in 2015, all of it hypothetical. What is NOT debatable
is this: the purpose for which the bomb was dropped was NOT to prevent
invasion, but to enforce the demand for “unconditional surrender” (the invasion
was being planned for the same purpose!). Thus the ethical test becomes: Were the
conditions requested by the Japanese grave enough to justify the bomb—or even to
justify an invasion?]
In this sense, “unconditional surrender” turned out to be the symbolic
“WMD” of WWII: a pretext for attack that turned out not to matter at all. Had
the US
But President Truman was determined to intimidate the Soviets with
American might, which meant the A-Bomb became the first shot in the cold war.
And besides, Truman and many of his advisers shared the widespread popular
desire to get revenge against Japan
for the attack on Pearl Harbor .
President Roosevelt had called that attack a “day that would live in
infamy.” In recent years, Japan
has apologized for that attack, and Japanese public opinion generally believes that
Japan U.S.
The history is debatable, but here’s the bottom line today: those days
began a new age of terror we have not yet escaped. Sixty years later, people
are still dying from those two bombs, and new children are still being born
with defects caused by those bombs. The suffering goes on, sixty years after
war’s end.
The Cold War has come and gone, but we do not have peace. Yet the US has
kept most of its nuclear arsenal, and US policy still clings to threatening our
”first use” of nuclear weapons on our enemies.
[In fact, the
US remains the only country that has ever used nuclear weapons, and the only
major power that has refused to renounce their “first use” in the future.]
The Nukes remain—and they remain (as both John Kerry and George Bush
agreed) the number one threat today. By maintaining its threat to use them, the
US
[The “Nuclear Club” has spread to China, India, Israel, and Pakistan –
proliferating the promise of nuclear weapons before the eyes of all the world’s
angry men. Which is precisely why the Iran deal is a hot political issue now. The
US opened the nuclear Pandora’s Box]
Thus, and perhaps worst of all, a dangerous moral genie escaped the
bottle at the end of World War II, when civilian populations became fair game
for WMDs. It didn’t start with the A-bombs of course—US firebombs had already
killed 900,000, mostly civilians, in Japanese cities—including 85,000 in Tokyo
[As one
participant said: the difference the Bomb made was not that it was so destructive--but
that it was “so easy.”]
Today, every day, somewhere in the world, an average of 2174 people die
from war. Nine out of ten are civilians—and half of them are children. It is a
fine and patriotic thing to support our troops—but it is also a smokescreen obscuring
the moral problem of modern war, because troops are no longer the main victims
of war. Women and children are. It is governments, not armies, that make war
policies—and now it is ordinary people, not troops, who suffer the most from them.
Civilian deaths in Iraq , for
example, outnumber US
Many US Catholics remain unconcerned about our moral liability here,
despite the clear teaching of the Church, which singled out war on civilians
for the only condemnation issued by Vatican Council II:
“Every act of war directed to the
indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants
is a crime against God and humanity, which merits firm and unequivocal
condemnation.”
[Moreover, even
at Vatican II---50 years ago this year—the cost to our planet and people was clearly
named in prophetic language that Pope Francis is finally getting people to
hear:]
The arms race in which an
already considerable number of countries are engaged is not a safe way to
preserve a steady peace, nor is the so-called balance resulting from this race
a sure and authentic peace. Rather than being eliminated thereby, the causes of
war are in danger of being gradually aggravated. While extravagant sums are
being spent for the furnishing of ever new weapons, an adequate remedy cannot
be provided for the multiple miseries afflicting the whole modern world.
Disagreements between nations are not really and radically healed; on the contrary,
they spread the infection to other parts of the earth. …Therefore, we say it
again: the arms race is an utterly treacherous trap for humanity, and one which
ensnares the poor to an intolerable degree. –Gaudium et Spes #80
]
World War II ended the war of battlefields and trenches, and the
A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki linked war and terror forever. Now the
military is merely a cog in the war machine—and civilians are its fuel. Today,
it’s convenient to define “terrorism” as attacks on civilians—but it did not
start on 9/11. It sprouted as Blitzkrieg,
it grew into firebombing, and it finally blossomed as the mushroom cloud that
still hangs over the world and infects the planet with terror.
© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2005, 2015
No comments:
Post a Comment