Hiroshima: the beginning and the end of nuclear history

Witnessing the first ever nuclear explosion on July 16^th, 1945, in the New Mexico desert, Robert Oppenheimer claims to have thought to himself "Now I am become Death [sic], the destroyer of worlds”. He was not only misspeaking, but also misquoting from the Hindu scripture,Bhagavad Gita. Less than a month later on August 6^th, 70 years ago this week, the testing phase was over and Oppenheimer’s creation was being used to decimate the Japanese city of Hiroshima – nuclear history had begun, yet occasionally history lets us all down.

Hiroshima was followed three days later by a second nuclear attack on Nagasaki and, as the story goes, it was this demonstration of nuclear capability that forced Japan into surrender and thereby brought an end to the Second World War. This is, however, emblematic of nuclear history – the place it holds in our imagination is simply not matched by its material impact.

Aesthetically, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – a week before the Japanese surrender – seems in retrospect like a timely motivator. However, Japan had long since consigned themselves to both losing the war, and to suffering toward defeat. In a difficult, yet not hopeless situation, the Japanese government re-evaluated their definition of victory so that it meant avoiding the costs associated with ‘unconditional’ surrender – Japan was hoping that in defeat it could still keep its structure of government, retain some of its conquered territory, and evade a war crimes tribunal.

At this point, despite the poverty and suffering of the general population, Japan was still reasonably well equipped militarily with four million troops and heavily fortified coastlines. And it was these two opposing conditions that Japan was trying to leverage: by showing itself to be both willing to endure immense suffering, and able to prolong the fighting indefinitely – thereby creating a war of attrition that would hopefully drag the allied forces into an eventual compromise.

In a year of sustained bombing, after 500,000 civilians were killed (2 million soldiers were killed in the broader conflict), with a million people injured, 2 million people made homeless, and the majority of the population living in poverty, the Japanese government remained committed to this strategy. Yet we are made to believe that in the depths of all this suffering, the 70,000 killed in Hiroshima and the 50,000 in Nagasaki (the after-effects of radiation would more than double these numbers, yet this could not have been known at the time) changed everything.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were 2 of 68 cities targeted as part of the American-led air assault on the Japanese islands. And we now know that just as with the firebombing of Tokyo that levelled the heart of the then wooden city and killed 100,000 people, the Japanese leadership were unmoved. It was the shadow of Stalinism that made the difference.

In April 1941, Japan had signed a five year neutrality pact with the Soviet Union, and after it had become obvious that the war had been lost, Japanese Prime Minister Koiso Kuniaki (who had replaced Tojo Hideki in 1944) hoped that through this treaty Stalin might be convinced to negotiate on their behalf with the United States. On August 8^th, a day before the Nagasaki bombing, Stalin reneged on this agreement and invaded the Japanese-held territory of Manchuria with over a million Soviet troops.

With it increasingly apparent that Stalin would not be restrained by the spirit of the Yalta Conference, and that he would seek to retain control over any territory that the Red Army conquered, Japan were confronted by a new dynamic: not just of how they would surrender, but to whom they would surrender. The speed of the Russian invasion, quickly occupying Manchuria and pushing into Sakhalin Island, destroyed all hope of a negotiated surrender. Japan were out of options: the spectre of Soviet occupation forced their hand where nuclear warfare could not – unconditional surrender to the American forces was suddenly their best way out of the war.

The narrative that was left behind, however, was unacceptable:

The Empire of Japan brought to its knees by Russian forces who were so short on supplies that they were invading on horseback, and the United States winning the final battle of the Second World War only by default – this would not do. It was simply more prudent for both sides to champion the importance of the nuclear blasts, particularly so for the Truman administration who were only too aware that their decision to approve the bombings would sit better in history if it had a neat and matching justification.

That such a significant breakthrough in weaponry might have such an insignificant impact on the act of warfare itself, is an assault on the senses. The nuclear bomb uniquely captures our imagination, it seems to represent such an absolute break with all that came before, that it is hard not to impose our own meaning upon the material events at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and nuclear history in general.

Thus the sole legacy of nuclear warfare was anxiety. American journalist Edward R. Murrow said at the time, "Seldom, if ever, has a war ended leaving the victors with such a sense of uncertainty and fear -- with such a realization that the future is obscure and that survival is not assured". Fulfilling this forethought, generations grew up on a knife edge of constant panic, waiting for the seemingly inevitable moment when a nuclear winter would bring an end to humanity.

Yet, despite the hysteria, nuclear history never quite managed to step out of the shadows. Britain and France came to join the nuclear club, if, for nothing else, than to ensure that they would retain elite status in the shifting geo-political world. Similarly, China’s nuclear breakout precipitated greater international integration and an easing of military tensions; the South Africa nuclear program gradually became too heavy a burden, after which they voluntarily dismantled it in the 1990’s; and Israel’s acquisition only increased regional antipathy, and did nothing to stop its neighbours from posturing for conflict nor from publicly calling for its destruction.

Kashmir remains the most likely spark-point for direct nuclear conflict, yet the Indian and Pakistani tests in the closing years of the last century were followed by only a brief three-year period of sanctions, after which the international community lost its resolve – Kashmiri tensions have since simmered along, materially un-impacted by the new nuclear dimension.

As North Korea began nearing nuclear capability, a leaked internal report was made public by defectors to South Korea: recognising that a nuclear bomb would offer no tangible defensive improvement, offensive options were war-gamed. The only feasible option involved a nuclear strike on the southern half of the Korean peninsula, in order to neutralise South Korea’s ability to re-group following a hypothetical invasion of Seoul. Understanding that this would almost certainly provoke a regime-changing international response, the ordinarily bellicose leadership dismissed this possibility out of hand – the Kim dynasty had gone to considerable effort to arm themselves with a weapon, only to find out that they could not use it.

However, it was the Soviet Union and the spectre of the Cold War that crystallised our nuclear imaginations. The stage was poignantly set: two global superpowers, in an intractable ideological divide, competing for international influence, and viewing nuclear build-up as the means to this end. And as the accepted logic goes, it was only the prospect of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) that prevented this conflict from turning hot.

MAD involves a recognition from both sides in any given standoff, that a nuclear strike on the other, even if it were to render their entire territory lifeless and uninhabitable, would however, not be able to destroy all their nuclear launch-pads. As such, a retaliatory strike could be expected, so it holds that the destruction of your enemy also represents the destruction of yourself.

This logic, itself, speaks volumes about our larger-than-life attachment that to nuclear weapons. Any discussion of nuclear deterrence begins with the preface of ‘rational actors’. If the leaders in question lack a rational concern for their own survival and that of their nation, then all bets are, colloquially, off!

Yet if this point is granted – which it must be – then it is also inconceivable that such a rational actor would also launch the retaliatory strike. The leader of either country, suddenly aware that the enemy’s entire nuclear arsenal had been launched at their homeland, would have only one choice: that is, with their own death, and the deaths of all their citizens then imminent, would they also like to kill the population of another country out of sheer spite. The logic of mutual deterrence disappears the moment the first strike is undertaken.

This is the real impact of the nuclear era: where it might once have been possible to marginalise, or even to ignore, the messianic and the irrational individuals amongst us, the prospect of acquiring a nuclear bomb embodies them with a whole new menace. The current panic over Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon has less to do with the geo-political implications, and everything to do with previous statements from the Supreme Leader Khamenei and from former-President Ahmadinejad championing the destruction of Israel.

With the presence of such an apocalyptic mind so far having been absent in nuclear history, the near-misses that we have witnessed, such as with the Cuban Missile Crisis, have been the fault of misunderstandings and/or accidents.

This mundane reality stands in contrast to the place nuclear weapons continue to hold in the public mind. This has been apparent from the very beginning: Oppenheimer’s powerful reflection on the first successful nuclear test, ruminating on ‘death’ and the ‘destruction of worlds’ was a revision upon what he first claimed had crossed his mind: “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendour of the mighty one” – once again quoting from the Bhagavad Gita. But even this seems an unlikely and over-aggrandized first thought. What we do know for sure, is what Oppenheimer actually said at the time: “It worked!” – It is only in our minds that nuclear history has ever risen above this banal statement. But just as well, because the moment it becomes exciting is the moment it becomes horrible.