Have things really gotten that bad? → U.S. citizens aren’t rising to the challenge → public acquiescence / approval / collaboration → even Hiroshima not seen as an atrocity

I went to the library with my friend, the Techno-Pagan Octopus Messiah, who was doing some research on classical mythology. I didn’t have much to do myself except to admire the mild earthquake that hit just across the bay and rattled the books in their stacks, but in browsing I came across The Cold War and the Income Tax: A Protest by Edmund Wilson (). So today: a longish book review.

Wilson was an American literary critic and author who followed the familiar political arc of being an idealistic communist sympathizer who came to be disillusioned and horrified the more closely he looked at the Soviet experiment. “By when he finally published his epic history of socialism, To the Finland Station, seven years in the making, he had completely repudiated Russian socialism.”

His tax resistance was strangely half-hearted and muddled, and it’s strange to me that he devoted a book to it. The way he tells the story, “, I did not file any income tax returns.” Why? Not for any ideological or ethical reason. “I thought that this obligation could always be attended to later. I had no idea at that time of how heavy our taxation had become or of the severity of the penalties exacted for not filing tax returns.”

Wilson finally seeks out “an old friend of mine, an extremely able lawyer,” who told him that he was in danger of heavy fines and jail time and was in his opinion “in such a mess that he thought the best thing I could do was to become a citizen of some other country.” He instructed the lawyer instead to make out the returns for the years he had failed to file, along with a $9,000 down payment on whatever it was that he owed.

Subsequent chapters tell of Wilson’s struggles with what was already a labyrinthine and Kafkaesque IRS bureaucracy, which Wilson compares with those in the Soviet Union. The $9,000 he offers is laughably inadequate to pay what he owes, his fines, or even his eventual legal fees.

His troubles lead him to investigate the history of the income tax in the United States, and to write extensively on how the assumptions the IRS makes about how and when people earn income map poorly to the actual way a literary man like Wilson makes a living. He dives into the tax code and discovers that “[t]he question of what ought to be taxed and how much and which deductions ought to be allowed has reached a point of fine-spun complexity that — working in terms of a different set of values — recalls the far-fetched distinctions of medieval theology.”

And here what starts out looking like a literary man’s attempt to squeeze some wry observations out of an unfortunate and naïve encounter with the government at its bureaucratic best starts to turn. Wilson takes a long, hard look at the federal government’s budget and notices that huge hunks of it go to pay for wars past present and future and (this is , remember) the program to put a man on the moon. After a brief detour to contrast the lunar project with a project he thinks underfunded and more valuable — to publish collected editions of some of America’s finest authors (Wilson’s a literary guy, remember) — he dives a little deeper into the military budget.

He’s shocked and alarmed at the sums spent to fuel the arms race with the Soviet Union, and upset also at how enthusiastically his government pursues chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons technology — what now gets lumped under the “Weapons of Mass Destruction” banner. He determines, finally, that

When the stakes in games become so serious — when everybody’s life is at stake — they ought not to be played at all, and the taxpayers should not support them. But the taxpayers do support them, and that is why we cannot halt these activities.

And later:

I have said that it was difficult to understand, in what we call our free world, how it can come about that a scientist who has been working on CBR [Chemical, Biological, and Radiological weapons] but is dubious about the morality of what he is doing should not find it in his power to resign. But how free are we citizens of this free world to resign from the gigantic and demented undertakings to which our government has got us committed?

He makes also an interesting observation about how because of the importance of these problems, and because of the difficult and compelling moral demands they make on us, they have paradoxically disappeared from conversation — a strategy similar to not talking about a family member’s drinking problem in the hopes that this will make it as though it never existed in the first place:

[T]he United States, for all its so much advertized comforts, is today an uncomfortable place. It is idle for our “leaders” and “liberals” to talk about the necessity for Americans to recover their old idealism, to consecrate themselves again to their mission of liberation. Our national mission, if our budget proves anything, has taken on colossal dimensions, but in its interference in foreign countries and its support of oppressive regimes, it has hardly been a liberating mission, and the kind of idealism involved is becoming insane and intolerant in the manner of the John Birch Society. Even those who do not give much conscious thought to what has been taking place are discouraged and blocked in their work or alienated from their normal ambitions by the paralyzing chill of a national effort directed toward a blind dead end which is all the more horrifying and haunting for being totally inconsecutive with their daily lives and inapprehensible to their imaginations. The accomplished, the intelligent, the well-informed go on in their useful professions that require high integrity and intellect, but they suffer more and more from the crowding of an often unavowed constraint which may prevent them from allowing themselves to become too intelligent and well-informed or may drive them to indulge their skills in gratuitous and futile exercises. One notices in the conversation of this professional class certain inhibitions on free expression, a tacit understanding that certain matters had better not be brought into discussion, which sometimes makes one feel in such talk a kind of fundamental frivolity.

Wilson then goes on to tell the stories of a few people who were unable to successfully silence the yelps of their own cognitive dissonance. He starts with a case that until now I was unfamiliar with: that of Major Claude Eatherly, who commanded the bomber group that dropped the atom bombs on Japan, capping 13 months of duty in World War Ⅱ. Shortly afterwards, he became horrified by what he had done, and hopeless at the possibility of repenting for or earning forgiveness for willfully extinguishing so many lives and causing so much pain. He tried speaking out with pacifist groups, sending parts of his paycheck to Hiroshima, writing letters of apology, and at a couple of points attempted suicide. At one point “he set out to try to discredit the popular myth of the war hero [by] committing petty crimes from which he derived no benefit: he forged a check for a small amount and contributed the money to a fund for the children of Hiroshima. He held up banks and broke into post offices without ever taking anything.” Eatherly was confined to the Veterans’ Administration Hospital in Waco, Texas, from which he wrote:

Whilst in no sense, I hope, either a religious or a political fanatic, I have for some time felt convinced that the crisis in which we are all involved is one calling for a thorough reexamination of our whole scheme of values and of loyalties. In the past it has sometimes been possible for men to “coast along” without posing to themselves too many searching questions about the way they are accustomed to think and to act — but it is reasonably clear that our age is not one of these. On the contrary, I believe that we are rapidly approaching a situation in which we shall be compelled to reexamine our willingness to surrender responsibility for our thoughts and our actions to some social institution such as the political party, trade union, church or State. None of these institutions are adequately equipped to offer infallible advice on moral issues and their claim to offer such advice needs therefore to be challenged.

“Now, how is one to struggle against this situation?” asks Wilson. “Go on strike and refuse to pay taxes?” And much of the remainder of the book is devoted to people who decided to do just that. He is less interested in the people who are doing it my way (reducing income below the taxable threshold) and more interested in people like Dr. A.J. Muste, Eroseanna Robinson, Walter Gormly, and Rev. Maurice McCrackin all of whom confronted the IRS more directly and bore the brunt of its most vigorous enforcement efforts.

Wilson ends by asking: “And what is the author of this protest to do?”

I am not going to let myself be sent to Leavenworth, as Dr. McCrackin was. I have thought of establishing myself in a foreign country as my lawyer friend suggested and as I thought him rather absurd for suggesting. I do feel that I must not violate the agreement I have signed with the government to surrender for three years longer all the income that I take in above a certain taxable amount. My original delinquency was due not to principle but to negligence; but I now grudge every penny of the imposition, and I intend to outmaneuver this agreement, as well as the basic taxes themselves by making as little money as possible and so keeping below taxable levels. I have always thought myself patriotic and have been in the habit in the past of favorably contrasting the United States with Europe and the Soviet Union; but our country has become today a huge blundering power unit controlled more and more by bureaucracies whose rule is making it more and more difficult to carry on the tradition of American individualism; and since I can accept neither this power unit’s aims nor the methods it employs to finance them, I have finally come to feel that this country, whether or not I continue to live in it, is no longer any place for me.

Wilson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom that The Cold War and the Income Tax was published, strangely. I haven’t been able to find on-line (and haven’t been back to the library to research) how Wilson’s attempts at income limitation worked out, or indeed whether he stuck with his plan at all after the book was published.

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 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. 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 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, , 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.

The Enola Gay’s pilot, Paul Tibbets was interviewed by Studs Terkel in The Guardian. He tells what how the bombing felt from his altitude:

We get to that point where I say “one second” and by the time I’d got that second out of my mouth the airplane had lurched, because 10,000lbs had come out of the front. I’m in this turn now, tight as I can get it, that helps me hold my altitude and helps me hold my airspeed and everything else all the way round. When I level out, the nose is a little bit high and as I look up there the whole sky is lit up in the prettiest blues and pinks I’ve ever seen in my life. It was just great.

I tell people I tasted it. “Well,” they say, “what do you mean?” When I was a child, if you had a cavity in your tooth the dentist put some mixture of some cotton or whatever it was and lead into your teeth and pounded them in with a hammer. I learned that if I had a spoon of ice-cream and touched one of those teeth I got this electrolysis and I got the taste of lead out of it. And I knew right away what it was.

He has no regrets, and offers some advice on how to conduct the War on Terror:

ST: One last thing, when you hear people say, “Let’s nuke ’em,” “Let’s nuke these people,” what do you think?

PT: Oh, I wouldn’t hesitate if I had the choice. I’d wipe ’em out. You’re gonna kill innocent people at the same time, but we’ve never fought a damn war anywhere in the world where they didn’t kill innocent people. If the newspapers would just cut out the shit: “You’ve killed so many civilians.” That’s their tough luck for being there.

Not only has Dubya managed to get through one term plus of gluttonous Congressional Spending without managing to find his veto, but he’s also managed to avoid using his power of recission, which even Clinton (facing a split Congress) managed to slice away with over a hundred times at overfunded government programs. Congressman Jim Cooper explains.

, 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 .

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 , 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 , 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 , 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 , 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 . 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 , 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.

, 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 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. 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 , 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 , 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 .

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), ’s spending on nuclear activities is equal to what Ronald Reagan spent at . It exceeds by over 50 percent the average annual sum ($4.2 billion) that the United States spent — again, in real dollars — throughout .

U.S. policy & Osama’s creed

In the wake of the 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.”

and certainly , 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 , 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 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 ; 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?

Ten years ago, Americans got hit good and hard with the sort of death and destruction they so enjoy being on the other end of, and the United States became as noisy and menacing as a country-sized dropped beehive.

Some of the seeds of my future war tax resistance were planted then, in my disgust with the bloodthirsty, know-nothing jingoism and my intuitions about what it would lead to. A week or two after the attacks, my imaginary friend Ishmael Gradsdovic wrote a story, about what was going through my mind at the time as a guilty spectator to the coming bloodbath, in the form of an email to me:

Wrote this over on the other side — yes, I got there. Briefly. Got kicked out quick and escorted way out of my way at gunpoint. And now I’m even further off and in the allegedly civilized world. Here’s something I wrote for you while I was there. Write back at my regular address (not this one) and let me know what you think.

I developed horrible dysentery shortly after arriving in Afghanistan. Absolutely none of the well water here meets the minimum World Health Organization standards for either organic or inorganic contaminants. I didn’t stand a chance.

I held out hope that this would dislodge my tenacious and belligerent tapeworm, but no dice. It’s more in-your-face than ever. Like being stuck on a Greyhound bus next to a born-again.

I’m at this roadside nothing between nowhere and nowhere else, taking photos. I got in from Iran early yesterday and just kept walking — figure I’m at least fifteen miles in, but it’s been a lot of up-and-down so maybe less as the crow flies.

Right now I’m leaned up against a rock by a wide dirt road. Every once in a while, a small group of refugees comes by, headed for the border, which is already closed and heavily-guarded.

I don’t know the language or I’d tell them to turn back — not that it’d matter; I’m sure they’ve heard the news and are trying anyway.

On the other side of the rock from me and a little down the road is a woman sitting down with the body of a dead young boy lying across her lap.

Nobody else is with her, though I doubt she and the boy were on the road alone. The boy must have died right there, and recently, and the woman’s companions begged her to leave to body or bring the body but to continue on with them, and she refused and exasperated they continued on without her. But I’m speculating. If they get turned back at the border, maybe they’ll be back tomorrow or the next day.

She sits on the ground with her legs out in front of her, recklessly exposing one ankle, holding herself up by locking her arms around the weight of the dead boy still limp in her lap.

I think it would make a good picture. Callous, I know, but there aren’t a lot of us over here on the ground with cameras so I have to think like that. I can’t see her face, and I’m not so callous that I’m going to circle her for good angles. I haven’t taken any shots of her yet, actually, but the light will be good for a while still.

I can sure hear her voice, though. Wailing, crying out words and gasping at the same time so that even if I did know the language I probably wouldn’t know what she was saying, or what words she was saying it with anyway. Pulling in snot with lungs that break three or four times with each pull as the sobs override everything else.

And then, after a while, the anguish builds to an opiate strength and she’ll be quiet — the sorrow pervasive but smooth and diffuse. Then a few moments will pass and a sharp image — maybe a face looking up or a laughing voice or the memory of a hope for a young boy’s future — will come out of this awful, blessed, narcotic fog and it starts all over again.

If I knew her language, or if I thought I could hold her or hold her hand without being killed by a misunderstanding refugee, I’d try to comfort her. And fail. She is vividly, universally, utterly inconsolable.

So instead I make stories. Speculate, like I did about her companions. Make a murder mystery out of it. Who killed Mohammad Doe?

Maybe it was another refugee, and the boy died during a fight over food or water or some squabble born of frustration and too many sleepless nights in flight. Or maybe he died as the family ran from bandits who prey on refugees near the border.

Could have been Taliban officials trying to turn back the refugees, or to punish them. Could have been the Iranian border guards.

Could have been U.S. jets or troops — I’ve heard rumors of English-speaking paratroopers. But there have been a lot of rumors.

Could have been a landmine. Lots of those around, even down here.

Or maybe the child died of more-or-less natural causes. Malnutrition, infection, fever. Maybe even the woman went mad and killed the boy herself.

Which is to say I don’t know and I’m just trying to occupy my mind and fill out captions to the photos I haven’t taken yet because every time she starts wailing my eyes water up and I feel a pressure in my sinuses and I have to choke it down.

Another thing I think of is how much taxes I paid last year, and, now that I’ve done some research, I can translate that into a certain number of landmines, or a certain percentage of a cruise missile, or the bulk of the salary of someone on an aircraft carrier doing a very important job who’ll never see anything like what I saw today.

But a bad fall or a bad well or a bad case of scarlet fever will kill a young woman’s pride and joy just as dead as my taxes, so I don’t really know who to lodge a complaint with.

I’m getting tedious now. I don’t want to pay for this war, and I’m sorry for what I’ve paid already. I think I’m going to sell these photos to some wire service photographer under-the-table and let him pay the taxes and get the pulitzer. And then I’m coming back home and maybe growing dope again or something else that I can do with clean hands.

Of course, that’s assuming I get out of here, which is what I do a lot of assuming despite the evidence. An indulgence I allow myself because I think it keeps me sane. Despite the evidence.

So I’ll sign this off by saying I’ll see you when I get back to California. Take care of yourself.

 — Ishmael

I also tried to imagine how a saner, wiser, more courageous world might have responded:

POPE ANNOUNCES HE WILL TRAVEL TO KABUL

Astana, Kazakstan (AP) — Pope John Paul Ⅱ announced Sunday that he will be traveling from Kazakstan to Afghanistan, “on foot if necessary,” in order to work for religious tolerance and brotherhood and to protect the lives of innocent people there.

“I beg God to keep the world in peace,” he declared. “I wish to make an earnest call to everyone, Christians and the followers of other religions, that we work together to build a world without violence, a world that loves life and grows in justice and solidarity. We must not let what has happened lead to a deepening of divisions,” he said. “Religion must never be used as a reason for conflict.”

CONGRESS PASSES RESOLUTION CONDEMNING BOMBINGS OF HIROSHIMA, NAGASAKI

Washington (AP) — Congress today passed a resolution apologizing for the atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War Ⅱ.

“It is the understanding of this Congress,” the resolution read, “that there is no justification for the wholesale murder of civilians — not to discourage an imperialist enemy, no matter how aggressive or irrational — not to prevent the loss of life of soldiers on the battlefield — not even to win a war that might be otherwise lost.

“To slaughter thousands of innocents in order to horrify a nation into surrender can never be a victory for Good. We recognize this now as we have not recognized this before.

“As we prepare for battle against the evil of terrorism, we must as part of this preparation purify our hearts, atone for our injustices, and be able to go forward with confidence that we are in the right. As our chaplain said, ‘we ask not that God be with us, but that we be always with God.’

“We do solemnly and gravely apologize for the great evil this country committed when we murdered and maimed hundreds of thousands of people in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We condemn the bombing of civilian areas to terrorize a populace or a nation.”