Have things really gotten that bad? → U.S. government is cruel, despotic, a threat to people → civilian casualties, urban bombardment, etc. → echoes of Hiroshima, earlier uses of aerial bombardment

60 years ago, the crew of the Enola Gay hit the city of Hiroshima with the first of two nuclear weapons that have been used in wartime.

At The Picket Line I spend a lot of words waxing opinionated about ethics and responsibility and the relationship between people and institutions, especially as these issues come out in wartime. The bombing of Hiroshima is a well-worn case study in these areas, and I hoped to have something useful to say today to mark the occasion.

I’ve spent several hours over the past few days trying to reacquaint myself with what’s been said before on the subject. Now, while I’m writing this, I have a headache and I’m feeling sick to my stomach. Reading doesn’t usually affect me this way, and I can’t point to anything specific that I read that hit me particularly hard.

But I feel more confused and helpless now after wrestling with this. Today’s Picket Line entry ends with someone else’s decades-old unanswered question, which is also mine: “What can a man do about it all?”

That awful thing

Hiroshima does represent a dividing line of sorts and the dawn of a new era and so forth, but from the point of view of personal ethics and war there isn’t really much new or qualitatively different in the decision to drop the bomb there. The line had already been crossed, and mass slaughter had already become commonplace. There still were, of course, the individual ethical decisions of whether or not to personally become involved in this slaughter, but there too nothing really changed on August 6^th 1945.

The serious arguments given in favor of the decision to bomb, then and today, are typically utilitarian ones. The decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the decision to maim, burn and kill tens of thousands of innocents — but, goes the argument, the alternatives were even worse.

I don’t know whether or not that is true, but it is certainly arguable. Even critics of the bombing sometimes concede the point inadvertently, like one Hugh “D.J.” Carlen, who was quoted in the Guardian recently: “I don’t think we really needed to do it. We darn near had the country starved to death. We could have effected a blockade.”

Sure enough, starvation had taken hold by that time in Japan and what was left of its empire. The first to starve to death were, naturally, not the Japanese but their captives — but before long the rest could have been starved into submission too. The allies even named one of their campaigns “Operation Starvation.”

One alternative to the Hiroshima bombing that is suggested by today’s back-seat generals is a campaign to destroy the rail centers and paralyze food transport within Japan (the ports were already mostly destroyed).

But if you advocate mass starvation as a way of defeating Japan, what about the atom bomb offends you?

Plenty of people in Japan’s ruling class probably knew they had lost the war by the summer of 1945, another argument goes, so why not let them surrender on something more like their terms rather than inflicting more and more suffering to gain an unconditional surrender?

But the junta in charge of Imperial Japan had been and continued to be inflicting tremendous suffering. It is a good thing, at least, that they were not simply defeated but were crushed.

All of these arguments aside, at the time the bomb was dropped the case actually seemed much less clear than its modern defenders can make it seem. Those who were horrified at the bombing of Hiroshima and who disapproved of it were not just the usual pacifist suspects.

On August 8, 1945, two days after the bombing, former Republican President Herbert Hoover wrote to a friend that “[t]he use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul.” General Eisenhower thought “it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.” White House Chief of Staff Admiral William Leahy thought that “the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan” and that “we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.”

More telling are the contemporary accounts of the people who defended the bombing.

“The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.” That was President Truman, on August 9^th 1945, in a radio address to America.

“We have used [the bomb] against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor,” Truman said, “against those who have starved, beaten and executed American prisoners of war, and against those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international laws of warfare.”

Of course Hiroshima was a city, not “a military base.” And though the tens of thousands of victims may have included some who brutalized American prisoners of war or who committed crimes against what was left of the laws of war, these were certainly outnumbered by schoolchildren, or Korean slave laborers, or other completely undeserving people.

I say this not to try to begin forming an argument against the bombing, but to point out that even those who were defending the decision to bomb at the time found it necessary to grossly distort what had happened in order to do so.

Later that year, Truman was more frank: “It occurred to me that a quarter million of the flower of our American youth were worth a couple of Japanese cities, and I still think they were and are.”

The quarter million figure was probably already highly exaggerated when Truman brought it out, but it is a number that grows with each telling. Soon it became “at least half a million,” then “a million” and then “over a million.” More recently, George H.W. Bush said that the bombings were justified because they “spared millions of American lives.”

The common, vulgar defenses of the Hiroshima bombing are of this sort — they find it necessary to defend a Hiroshima bombing that never happened, presumably because they find the one that did happen hard to defend.

The worst of these lines of defense carry on the tradition of Truman’s claim that the attacks weren’t really on the people who actually lived in Hiroshima, the ones who suffered and died in the attacks, but against some abstract and evil They which was itself guilty of the collected crimes of Imperial Japan:

What did they expect… They started it.… They deserved payback for their “sneaky” little attack on Pearl Harbor.… They would have done it to us if they had had the chance.… The Japanese atrocities in China, Korea, and Southeast Asia including rapes and pillage of civilian populations deserved some kind of retribution.… How can the bomb be criticized considering what the Japanese did to their war prisoners. They broke every civilized rule of war.… If the bomb was so bad, why didn’t they surrender after Hiroshima. Why did they make us drop a second bomb?… It is a bit much to have them talk about the sanctity of life. Kamikaze isn’t exactly an American word. It was they who had the suicide bombers.

Machines and morals

The Hiroshima bombing is an ethical landmark not because of the decisions that were made on that day sixty years ago. Any ethical lines that were crossed then had already been crossed many times over.

But the development of nuclear weapons put enormous destructive power into the hands of just a few people. Hundreds of thousands of our lives have been enjoyed only at the whims of the powerful.

Anyone in the chain of decision to launch a nuclear missile is performing acts that defy the restraint of ethical instinct. Someone turns a key or presses a button or nods his head, and somewhere else a fireball erupts in a city center.

Here’s one argument from a critic of the utilitarian defense of the bombing of Hiroshima: “Suppose that, when we invaded Germany in early 1945, our leaders had believed that executing all the inhabitants of Aachen, or Trier, or some other Rhineland city would finally break the will of the Germans and lead them to surrender. In this way, the war might have ended quickly, saving the lives of many Allied soldiers. Would that then have justified shooting tens of thousands of German civilians, including women and children? Yet how is that different from the atomic bombings?”

This argument highlights that our ethical instinct is to be revolted when presented with the senseless deaths of individual innocents, killed face-to-face, but somehow this same instinct is not triggered by the incineration of thousands from a distance. (Or, as Stalin is said to have noted: “a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.”)

From a utilitarian standpoint, the ethical challenge would have been the same for the pilot of the Enola Gay as for some imaginary invulnerable paratrooper dropped into Hiroshima with a perpetual flamethrower, going from house to house and burning his victims one by one.

(Maybe Paul Tibbets would have volunteered for just such a mission. He is proud of his role as the pilot of the Enola Gay, and unsentimental about civilian casualties: “If the newspapers would just cut out the shit: ‘You’ve killed so many civilians.’ That’s their tough luck for being there.” He has his own website, theenolagay.com that celebrates the bombing and offers for sale a hot sauce called “CaBoom!” in a grenade-shaped bottle.)

Our instinctual ethical judgment is too primitive to guide us in the decisions that we are now capable of making. These instincts were designed for face-to-face encounters with people, and fail us where we need them most today.

Our instincts were designed to guide us in the environment we evolved in. In that environment, they work well. We don’t rely on instruments to tell us how to swing our arms while we walk, but we also aren’t foolish enough to “just eyeball it” when landing a jet. We know that our instincts fail when our bodies and our senses are exposed to conditions they did not evolve in.

Almost a month before the bombing of Hiroshima, Truman wrote in his diary “I fear that machines are ahead of morals by some centuries.” We have extended with technology our abilities, but we have not found any equivalent way of amplifying, extending, or enhancing our ethical instincts. The same mental faculties that have to make the decision of whether or not to get in a fist-fight over an insult now are being called on to decide whether or not to call in an airstrike. Someone who must decide whether it is right or wrong to extinguish a hundred thousand lives with the push of a button must rely on just eyeballing it.

As General Omar Bradley said in his 1948 Armistice Day speech: “We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.”

Nuclear giants and ethical infants

These nuclear giants and ethical infants go by names like Mao, Nixon, Kim, Sharon, Stalin, and Dubya. This ought to terrify us, but for the most part it seems like we’ve gotten used to it. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union we’ve been “carrying on as if the nuclear stockpiles amassed during the Cold War had all been converted into solar panels and parakeet swings under Boris Yeltsin’s kindly gaze.”

In fact, we may very well be in as much danger now as we were then. An antagonistic rival Soviet Union has been transformed into a cranky also-ran Russia, but one in which “WMD facilities [are] protected only by padlocks, and top-tier weapons scientists kept in Russia only by starvation wages.”

The dangers of keeping nuclear forces on a high-alert, launch-on-warning footing were real enough during the Cold War, when U.S. and Russian command and control systems were reliable and followed a strict line of authority. This is no longer the case. Not only do Russian generals today have the power to launch Russian missiles independent of their political masters, Russia’s ability to accurately detect incoming missiles has eroded badly since the early 90s, adding to Russian insecurity and increasing the likelihood that confusing radar data could lead to a nuclear launch order.

The most famous example of this danger occurred on Jan. 25, 1995, when Norway launched a weather research rocket to explore the Northern Lights phenomenon. When Russia’s radars picked up the missile trajectory, it seemed to have been fired from a U.S. submarine in the Norwegian Sea — long suspected by the Russians as a likely first move in a U.S. surprise attack. Russian nuclear forces scrambled into position and bunker commanders inserted their launch keys, awaiting the order to turn them. Yeltsin, reportedly fuming drunk at the time, opened his nuclear briefcase and consulted with the frenzied General Staff. With their nerves screaming, together they watched the missile trajectory slowly turn away from any conceivable Russian target. When the crisis finally ended, they had less than two minutes to make a decision. (U.S. submarine-launched missiles can reach Moscow in 10 minutes.)

The Norwegian government had warned the Russian embassy in Oslo in advance about the test, but the information never made it to the Russian General Staff. As described by former CIA analyst Peter Vincent Pry in his book War Scare, it was “a clerical error” that brought the world closer to nuclear war than at any time since October 1962.

And while Americans don’t wring their hands in public about nuclear weapons like they used to in the days of Dr. Strangelove and Do the Russians Love Their Children Too?, the U.S. government and military/industrial complex haven’t heard that the arms race is over:

Measured in “real dollars” (that is, adjusting for inflation), this year’s spending on nuclear activities is equal to what Ronald Reagan spent at the height of the U.S.-Soviet standoff. It exceeds by over 50 percent the average annual sum ($4.2 billion) that the United States spent — again, in real dollars — throughout the four and a half decades of the Cold War.

U.S. policy & Osama’s creed

In the wake of the September 11^th attacks, Dubya asked America to forget Hiroshima, and Osama asked the world to remember it.

Dubya said: “Americans have known the casualties of war, but not at the center of a great city on a peaceful morning. Americans have known surprise attacks, but never before on thousands of civilians.”

Osama said: “When people at the ends of the Earth, Japan, were killed by their hundreds of thousands, young and old, it was not considered a war crime; it is something that has justification.”

Since the late 1980s and certainly since 1991, bin Laden has seen the United States as the principal invader of the Muslim world because of its support for the Saudi royal family, Israel and other Middle Eastern governments he labels apostate. In often tedious debates with comrades during the 1990s, he has argued that only by attacking distant America could al Qaeda hope to mortally wound the Middle East’s frontline authoritarian governments.

His inspiration, repeatedly cited in his writings and interviews, is the American atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which he says shocked Japan’s fading imperial government into a surrender it might not otherwise have contemplated. Bin Laden has said several times that he is seeking to acquire and use nuclear weapons not only because it is God’s will, but because he wants to do to American foreign policy what the United States did to Japanese imperial surrender policy.

Listening to him on tape after tape, it is difficult to doubt bin Laden’s intent. There is evidence that he and his allies have experimented with chemical and biological weapons, typically low-level toxins. But in public, bin Laden talks mainly about nuclear bombs.

If circumstances are desperate enough, if the alternatives are terrible enough, and if a utilitarian calculation justifies it, using a nuclear weapon against a city is justified. This is the creed of Osama, and the policy of the U.S. government.

What can I do?

What can a man do about it all? If, as Carlyle once remarked, “The end of man is an action and not a thought, though it were the noblest,” thinking and writing and reading ought to be followed by something else.

But is there any individual “act” in relation to war which has a real meaning — a meaning for war, as much as for the individual? A month or so ago, a writer in the Memphis Press-Scimitar told of his experience in serving in the late war under a major general who had been a regular army man for twenty-eight years. The time was August, 1945; the occasion, the news that an atom bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. As the Press-Scimitar reporter tells it:

In that first excitement, I gave no thought to the consequences. I just ran into the office of my chief, Maj. Gen. Archer L. Lerch, and blurted out to him the confused story that I had heard.…

He was sitting at his desk, working on some papers when I entered. He listened to what I had to say and then leaned back in his chair and stared off into space for a few minutes.

Then he looked back at me — and very slowly and very softly said:

“I hope that report you have heard isn’t true.”…

How many individuals are there who, behind the facade of military resolve, and despite their impotence as individuals, are staring off into space, today, and wishing that the things they know to be true weren’t true?

What does that wish really mean? How do you start turning such wishes into acts? In a world where moral responsibility is supposed to count for something, there ought to be a way in which individual feelings can make themselves felt. Lest conscience make us cowards, shall we let war make zombies of us all, and, until the end of our days, stare sadly off into space?

The subject of war crimes has been on my mind lately. The concept of “war crimes” seems to me to have a false dignity. For one thing, because war crimes prosecutions are typically visited only on the losing party of a war — making them more like a theatrical extension of the triumph of the winners (like a victory dance or a taking of scalps) than an impartial judicial proceeding. And secondly because so little of the deliberate and premeditated cruelty and evil of war falls under its statutes.

If you drop a bomb from an airplane that burns a young boy, rips his arms off and leaves him bleeding and screaming in the rubble, you’re infinitely more likely to be awarded a medal than to be indicted for your actions. If you were to surgically remove his arms one-by-one in order to coerce his father into revealing state secrets, but you lose the war anyway, you might very well be brought up on charges.

The boy is no better off in either case, and the intentions of the perpetrator are not as different as they may appear. We’re constantly being told that civilian casualties are an unavoidable consequence of aerial bombardment — usually by people who think that this constitutes a good reason not to raise a fuss when it happens — but to me this is evidence of premeditation and intent.

If you know that aerial bombardment is going to result in civilian casualties and you do it anyway, then you have intended to kill civilians. You may believe that the cost in innocent lives was worth the results of this approach, but just to automatically declare this as if no evidence or argument were necessary doesn’t represent a defense.

I’ve heard the following sort of statement many times: “Of course we did not deliberately target civilians when we bombed the city. Civilian casualties are inevitable in any campaign of this sort.” The two phrases are in logical contradiction.

On 6 August 1945 the U.S. bomber Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, Japan in an attack that, if successful, could not have had any result that did not include thousands and thousands of civilian casualties. Everyone who took part in that mission who cared to consider its results knew that they were going to be burning children alive, for instance.

Utilitarian debates continue over whether burning children alive is ever an appropriate thing to do, and if so under what circumstances, and whether the circumstances faced by the people who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima were among these. Along with these debates is a good deal of convenient forgetting and denial of reality. Today the Enola Gay is being exhibited by the Smithsonian:

[A] group of scholars, writers, activists and others have signed a petition criticizing the exhibit for labeling the Enola Gay as “the largest and most technologically advanced airplane for its time” without mentioning that the Boeing B-29 dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.…

The Enola Gay is exhibited at the Steven Udvar-Hazy Center near Dulles International Airport in Virginia, with other vintage warplanes. Its explanatory placard is two paragraphs long and includes the restored airplane’s dimensions and the information that, while it was originally built to be used in the European fighting theater, it found “its niche on the other side of the globe.”

Update: A 7 November 2003 press release from the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum denies that the Enola Gay exhibit doesn’t mention the Hiroshima bombing. The complete text of the exhibit display is included in the press release and explicitly mentions the Enola Gay’s role in both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.

I don’t know whether to consider it a good sign or a bad sign that America is blocking out its memory in this way. Is it bad, because in continuing to deny these awful facts it may behave as though they never happened — or is it good, because in trying to hide from this it exposes that there is still a conscience that can be upset? (The denial of reality started early: President Truman, when he announced the bombing, called the city of Hiroshima “a military base” that was chosen “because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.”)

Several weeks after Hiroshima was bombed, the Nuremberg war crimes trials began. I’ve spent some time in recent days reviewing some of the history and the transcripts from these trials, and also that of Adolf Eichmann which happened many years later in Israel.

Eichmann, who as the head of the Jewish Office of the Gestapo was instrumental in implementing its mass-extermination policy, did not in retrospect think of himself as a war criminal, a murderer, or even particularly hostile to Jewish people. He was merely carrying out policies which represented the enthusiasms of people higher than him in the chain of command, over whom he had little influence. In a closing statement in his defense, he said: “My life’s principle, which I was taught very early on, was to desire and to strive to achieve ethical values. From a particular moment on, however, I was prevented by the State from living according to this principle.”

To me, this is a good summing up of our problem. I’m tempted to make more of it than I should. But after all, here’s Eichmann, head of operations for the Final Solution, on trial in Israel. He’s been confronted with so much evidence and testimony that there aren’t enough lampposts to hang him on as many times as he clearly deserves, and he’s asked: “what’s your side of the story?”

It’s no surprise that his defense is pathetic. On the other hand, I get this weird, perverse wish reading his testimony that he’d put forth something more vigorous. He’s played a crucial role in the cold-blooded murder of millions of people — how could you do that without a passionate need, an urgent mission that you could now try to convey?

Instead, his testimony is day after day of “I was just passing on the policies of my superiors” and “the responsibility for what happened to the Jews once they got to the camps was in somebody else’s department” and “I can’t be blamed for that — the choice was never mine to make” and so forth.

You get the impression of someone who never really wanted to butcher millions of Jews, but just happened to have been transferred into a department where such work was, he would say, an unavoidable part of the job. Why would a guy like me have wanted to commit such a ghastly crime? No, that was someone else’s idea.

To some extent, this defense is just plain unbelievable. There’s plenty of evidence that Eichmann not only knew what he was doing, but approved of it, and applied his expertise enthusiastically to making the butchery more efficient. But the very fact that he clings so completely and pathetically to these excuses as the trial goes on is enough to make me believe that at some level he’s telling the truth about his motives or absence of motives. He was willing to commit these acts of evil not because he thought they weren’t evil, and not because he was intentionally being evil, but because the protocol of his position did not allow for a consultation of his conscience to be part of his decision-making process and that was good enough for him.

This week is the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Japan. Groups across the country are stepping up their anti-war and anti-militarist actions this week as part of a two-month campaign that includes another of Cindy Sheehan’s “Camp Casey” encampments in Crawford, which will then follow Dubya back to Washington to become “Camp Democracy”, and which will then culminate in the Declaration of Peace campaign and civil disobedience actions toward the end of September.

Last night I went to a “spokescouncil” where representatives of San Francisco groups were planning an August 9^th action focused on the war contractor Bechtel, which is headquartered in the city.

The meeting, of about 25 people from about as many local activist groups, was uncharacteristically efficient and on-topic. There was an agenda, which was followed, and the meeting finished early, with everyone knowing what the next step was and who would be responsible. Nobody sabotaged things by rambling about the imminent arrival of the benevolent Andromedians, or by complaining about their favorite minority being underrepresented and demanding mea culpas all around.

Keiji Tsuchiya spoke for several minutes, through an interpreter. Mr. Tsuchiya was a 17-year-old draftee training at a base across the bay from Hiroshima when it was bombed. He saw the “boiling cloud” rise from the city and was among the first responders who went over to try to help.

As he spoke, he held up child-like drawings that he had made a few years ago from his memories of the aftermath of the bombing. Here are people with skin hanging from them like sheets walking like ghosts through the city as we clear paths through the debris. Here is the corpse of a horse that smelled so bad we stopped everything else to dig a hole and bury it, towels around our mouths to block the stench. Here is a woman, so badly burned we did not know how she could scream, trapped under the wreckage of a house.

Everywhere people yelling, “Soldier, give me water!” Two charred corpses along the road, probably elementary school students from what was left of their clothes. Everywhere, messages written on stones and walls and fragments of buildings from people who were trying to find their loved ones. The soldiers, who had been given horse meat earlier in the day to supplement their usual rice and soybean meals, pulling corpses from the river (men floating face-down, women face-up) and cremating them on makeshift pyres on-shore. Here’s the river, and those are the corpses, and here are our fires. “One, two, lift!” we would dump the body from a stretcher onto the fire.

On the last day before returning to base, Tsuchiya found a completely-charred body but with a relatively-untouched lunchbox at its feet full of the same food the soldiers usually ate — soybeans and rice (though lately it had been hard tack and water). He cried out in anguish, desperation and anger at a God that would allow such cruelty. Later he learned more about the horrible injuries people had suffered and about the after-effects of the radiation. He himself has had many health problems connected with the radioactive black rain that fell on the city while he worked there.

Now Keiji Tsuchiya is the Vice-President of a chapter of Hidankyo, an organization of atomic bombing survivors that works for global nuclear disarmament. He will be speaking at the Bechtel action as well.

After he spoke, the group began to discuss the possibility of a civil disobedience action at the Bechtel protest. Questions like “do we want to do an action where people risk arrest?” and “who here is planning to risk arrest?” The discussion went on in this vein for a while, with getting arrested seeming to be an end in itself, with no discussion at all of what specific action would be leading to the arrest or what noble goal the people being arrested were going to be thereby thwarted from accomplishing.

I’ve seen this before, this weird reverence for getting arrested doing civil disobedience as if it were itself a magically powerful thing. I’m not sure I fully understand the psychology behind it. I asked the group at that point — the only occasion on which I spoke up, actually — “what is the goal of the civil disobedience action — to get arrested, or to inconvenience Bechtel, or to get press coverage, or what?” The consensus seemed to be that inconveniencing Bechtel — or “shutting down” Bechtel if you allow for hyperbole — was the goal.

And then it got interesting. Two women at the meeting spoke up, saying that they had tried, on their own, to deliver a message to Bechtel’s C.E.O. one day. Bechtel’s security, realizing that some sort of protest action was in the offing, started their standard procedure for such things — which was to shut down the building and let nobody in or out (even employees).

Two people, not intending to be arrested, managed to shut down the Bechtel home office for 45 minutes one day just by showing up and asking to speak with the boss. A civil disobedience action, with a dozen protesters sitting down and locking arms at a police cordon around Bechtel until they are arrested and hauled away, might be just as effective at meeting the same goal.

Nonetheless, people remained enthused about doing the standard civil disobedience action (about two-thirds of those in attendance planned to participate), and the rest of the meeting was spent seeking volunteers for various roles that are useful in such an action — police liaison, convener, communicator, legal/jail monitor, follow-up coordinator.

In general, a very encouraging meeting. People got down to business with appropriate seriousness and efficiency, and what needed to get done got done. My usual complaint about “cargo cult” civil disobedience applies, but perhaps I’m missing something.