Hiroshima 

Dehumanization Perusing the yellowed pages of wartime magazines, images of the Japanese gradually change from pictures of Americans of Japanese descent to be interned in concentration camps to the images of insects and rats. The depictions of enemy were different in each theatre of war. The faces of enemy in Europe provoked derision and disgust. The images of the enemy in the Pacific theatre of the war provoked hatred and fear, paving the road at which end loomed the mushroom clouds above Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

Bomb them Japs back to the Stone Age  In March of 1945, General Curtis LeMay, 38, took charge of the Bomber Command on the Marianas Islands and initiated the firebombing of Japan. LeMay was the running mate of George Wallace in his 1968 presidential campaign. Wallace, well known for his opposition to the school desegregation ('segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever'), ran on a ticket stressing increased defense spending, patriotism, and support for law enforcement agencies. During the war in the Pacific, Curtis LeMay was best known for the exhortations to 'bomb them Japs back to the Stone Age.'

President Harry S. Truman (1884-1972) Member of the Ku Klux Klan

President Harry Truman  Photographs of the President Truman in the Oval Room of the White House around the time he made decisions to drop the atomic bombs at the Hiroshima and Nagasaki show a small plate on his desk. It reads The Buck Stops Here. Harry Truman was a military commander in the World War I and joined Ku Klux Klan in 1924. The final decision to deploy the atomic bombs was made by Truman who, in his words,

 'had given the matter long and prayerful study before reaching the decision.' (The New York Times, August 15, 1947).

Harry Truman also consulted his advisors. However, the moral code associated with the Judeo-Christian religion and indigent to the group of people who advised the President was not strong enough to prevent the deployment of nuclear weapons. The United States is the only nation that ever used atomic weapons against civilian population. The majority of the people who were involved in the decision to initiate a nuclear warfare subscribed to the biblical moral codes. These moral codes were, however, not sufficient to prevent a nuclear war, as the Bible does not contain moral codes adequate for the atomic age.

Looking into the abyss ... Hiroshima, August 6, 1945, 8:14 A.M.

…and shortly afterwards.

Straight Flush, Great Artiste, and Enola Gay Visiting the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, one can see a metal cylinder, dropped from the plane on August 6, 1945. The cylinder contains instruments for measuring and transmission of the blast data. This cylinder was suspended below a cluster of parachutes people on the ground were watching when the atomic bomb, detonated high above the ground, burst into their eyes. The sequence of the atomic raid on Hiroshima was as follows. At 7:07 a.m. the weather scout plane, piloted by Major Claude Eatherly, Straight Flush, reported that weather over Hiroshima is clear. After the leading plane of the air raid on Hiroshima named the Great Artiste and piloted by Major Charles Sweeney released the metal cylinder carrying the measurement instruments, the Enola Gay, piloted by Colonel Paul Warfield Tibbets, dropped the atomic bomb. The bomb exploded at 8:15 a.m.

Eyes made from white porcelain Akira Kohchi, in his 1989 book Why I Survived the A-Bomb describes these events as follows.

'A cluster of three parachutes opened in the easterly sky like a fantastic, white, huge flower. Quite untimely and unexpected, it was a grand spectacle that people on the ground had to watch out of curiosity. Behind the parachutes, the second plane dropped the atomic bomb. The bomb fell like a stone. It exploded to the face of people, turning the eyes of my friend Egawa into glass blobs and those of the Ohtake people I saw on the coastal highway into a white porcelain.'

Blood and soot At the time of the explosion, Akira Kohchi was about 15 miles from the epicenter. His parent's house was in the downtown of Hiroshima. Searching for his parents, he experienced the following.

'Hatless and barefoot, these figures were ashen all over. They looked like dirt-covered figurines. Their hair was disheveled up and often singed to the scalp. There was no way to tell where their torn clothes ended and their flesh began. An old man stooped deeper due to the burn on his back. By him a small boy limped. The boy looked like a porcupine - black slivers of some sort stuck out from the countless bleeding slit cuts over his head and shoulders. A wilting baby carried under the arm of a woman was so battered that it was indistinguishable from the disarrayed shreds of her scorched cotton dress. A young girl was rubbing her bared torso, spasmodically nauseating dark yellow jelly. Each time she passed her hands over, the mixture of blood, and soot was smeared on her flesh. And at the lacerated openings on her torso, it all congealed to brownish black ridges of complex pattern.'

Skulls from one of the excavated Hiroshima mass graves.

Procession of dead  'My first impression was,' Kohchi continues,
'that they had crawled up from a burning pit. Some of them would crumble down to the heated road surface, push themselves up with a great effort and revert to wandering, only to fall again several steps later. As I passed the procession of the dead, one of them, a dehydrated woman, fell out, crouched by the roadside and folding herself in two in agony, coughed up blood in lumps. I went back and grabbed her by the arm to help her stand up. From the nape down to waist, her back was a sheet of numerous blisters. At the next instant, however, my heart stopped as she became dismembered, or something slipped out of her. What I had in my hands was almost a square foot of her skin.'
The recanting judge A judge representing the Netherlands at the Tokyo Trials, B.V.A. Rolling, in his book The Tokyo Trial and Beyond (1989, published posthumously, translated to several languages but not to English) maintains that during the Tokyo Trials no evidence was presented that the Japanese high command issued orders which sanctioned or instigated atrocities against civilians. The Japanese military leaders were bound by the Bushido (from Chinese 'way of the warrior') code of ethics. The Bushido ethic was build around the teaching of Japanese philosopher Yamaga Soko (1622-1685) who formulated the honor code for the samurai. Rolling, after examining pertinent evidence such as Japanese military Orders of the Day, concluded that they frequently contained reminders that soldiers should be friendly toward civilians and show compassion to the defeated enemy. This contrasts with stories of Japanese wartime atrocities.

The torching of Nanjing The best known of these is the ‘Rape of Nanjing’ atrocity attribution. There are several versions of this story, one claiming 300,000 victims of the Japanese atrocities (the pre-war population of Nanjing was 200,000), some containing exaggerations such as that that the number of massacred women and children was so great that the bodies dammed up the Yangtze River (at Nanjing, the bridge, spanning the Yangtze River, is 4 miles long). Within this context one may add that Western apologists often fail to mention what happened to Nanjing ten years earlier. On the morning of July 24, 1927 the American battleships USS Pittsburgh, USS Tennessee, and USS California, together with the British warships HMS Renown, HMS Hood, and HMS Malaya opened fire from their heavy guns on Nanjing and set the city on fire. The incinerated bodies of women and children were blown away by the wind so that they did not dam up the river.

Fort Lauderdale, Florida, 1935 - Lynching of Rubin Stacy

Pal, Willoughby, and Stimson Another interesting point Rolling makes is the description of the dissenting opinion of Tokyo Trial Judge Pal, representing India, who maintained that Japan waged a legitimate war to liberate Asia from Western domination. Rolling also quotes General Willoughby’s personal remark that the Tokyo Trials are the worst travesty known to history. However, one of his most telling observations is the account of the personal intervention of U.S. Secretary of War Stimson regarding the formulation of the accusations of crimes against humanity. Stimson insisted that these accusations must be formulated in a way that 'could not be interpreted as also applying to the U.S. treatment of African-Americans.'

Friendship dolls Preceding the war, the relationship between the United States and Japan was friendly. In 1926 and 1927, several million Americans and Japanese participated in exchange of friendship dolls, intended for children of both countries. This amicable atmosphere prevailed up to 1940s with about 80% of Americans opposing the U.S. involvement in foreign wars and Franklin Delano Roosevelt's pre-election pledges including his opposition to such military adventures. However, as the recent wars amply demonstrate, the decision to go to war is seldom made by the populace. President Bush confided to his friend on a fishing trip that he decided to attack Iraq long before that war became a public issue and his son entered the Oval Office with an ardent wish to continue his father's legacy. With the general public opposing the war, the idea emerged in the FDR's cabinet that the U.S. could enter the war on the England's side through the 'back door' of the Far East. There are many indicators that the FDR knew beforehand about the impending Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, one of them the testimonial of the daughter of the president of the American Red Cross who was in the weeks preceding the Pearl Harbor sworn to secrecy and instructed by President Roosevelt to transfer nurses and large quantity of medical supplies to Hawaii. Another unattested but likely piece of evidence in this respect is that in the hours preceding the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt was sitting in his study, passing time inspecting his collection of stamps. At one point he turned to his close friend Harry Hopkins and said. 'You know, Harry, the trick is to force the other side to fire the first shot.'
Protagonists of the A-Bomb Some of the protagonists of this drama played over the vast expanse of the Pacific maintain that true heroes of this conflict rest on the bottom of that ocean and recall, above all, the profound human tragedy of this conflict. Other recall experiences of supreme ecstasy they felt when their enemies lied prostrate at the end of this war. The profiles of some of the dramatis personae of this tragedy can be drawn best with the help of perspective provided by the passage of time. Steve Heims, in his 1982 book John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, characterizes John von Neumann, one of the principal architects of the atomic bomb, as emotionally cold. Von Neumann asserted that 'no weapon can be too large,' and, in 1950s, advocated a nuclear war to achieve nuclear dominance. (Quoted by C. Blair: 'If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at 5 o'clock, I say why not one o'clock?''). Von Neumann also diminished the cancer-producing effects of nuclear weapons. Ironically, in 1955 he was diagnosed with bone cancer he likely contracted while in proximity of radioactive materials. He died three years later, 53 years old.
Von Neumann was considered so important that Air Force personnel with top clearances kept vigil at his hospital bed up to the last moments of his life that, amidst the death throws, he would not divulge atomic secrets to the attending medical staff. Heims describes his last days as follows: 'then came complete psychological breakdown; panic, screams of uncontrollable terror every night.' Apparently, at his end, von Neumann was not being able to come to terms with the horrors he helped to inflict upon others.

Number of people in each age - gender category (males on the left, females of the right) killed during the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima by the United States warplane.

Tree of Death Von Neumann had been one of General Leslie R. Grove's closest advisers in selecting particular locations in Japan to bomb. General Leslie Groves was the eminence grise of the Manhattan Project and was largely responsible for shifting the target area away from the eligible military targets to the residential areas of the cities. Shortly before his death in 1970 Groves summarized the argument on the 'pro' side of the atomic bombing as follows: 'The atomic bomb is not an inhuman weapon. I think our best answer to anyone who doubts this is that we did not start war, and if they don't like the way we ended it, to remember who started it.' The central point we try to make in this chapter is that the immorality of aerial bombing of civilian cities, both atomic and conventional, somehow escapes our sensibilities. A frequent diagram of demography is the tree of life, showing frequencies of age categories of a population. The above diagram is the tree of death, showing frequencies of age categories of those killed during the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. In Hiroshima, by far most people killed were children.

How Many Japs Did We Kill Today? Aside of publicity they received while receiving Distinguished Service Medals from General LeMay and short-lived interest of media after the end of WW II, the crew of Enola Gay lived in relative obscurity. Colonel Tibbets ran a business in Columbus, Ohio, and his co-pilot, Captain Robert Lewis was a manager of New Jersey candy factory. In 1971, Lewis auctioned the flight log of Enola Gay. One of its entries, made on August 6, 1945 reads: 'How many Japs did we kill today?' The flight log fetched him $37,000, about 15 cents for each of the 260,000 Japanese killed on that day.

Shipwreck However, the story of pilots diving their planes on the enemy would not be complete if it did not include the account of the wartime exploits of President George Bush. Bush, a lifetime member of the NRA, onetime director of the Central Intelligence Agency, was vice-president during the Reagan administration, and later president of the United States. During his years as vice-president, as presiding officer of the U.S. Senate, Bush cast the deciding vote in favor of producing deadly nerve gas. As President, George Bush vetoed the bill that would have provided for ten weeks of unpaid maternity leaves, while spending over $500,000,000 a day during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

During World War II, Bush was a pilot for the American Expeditionary Forces in the Pacific Theater of the war, decorated with the Distinguished Flying Cross and three Air Medals. As told fifty years later by one of President Bush's surviving comrades-in-arms, after their squadron sank a Japanese ship, the planes turned around to return to their on an aircraft carrier. Suddenly, one of the planes got separated from the rest of the squadron, dove on the lifeboats, and machine-gunned the survivors. The pilot of that plane was George Herbert Walker Bush.

He had no other choice?  With the opening of the war archives it is now clear that the President Truman was well aware that Japan was trying to surrender before he ordered to drop the atomic bombs. The Japanese government contacted Sweden's King Gustav and the Premier of the Soviet Union Marshal Stalin to convey their offer of the unconditional surrender if the Emperor will be spared. At the Potsdam conference Marshal Stalin informed President Truman that 'It is the personal desire of the Emperor to avoid further bloodshed' with President Truman replying 'I appreciate very much what you said.' President Truman received the most serious peace offer from Japanese Emperor Hirohito three weeks before bombs were dropped. The wording of the peace offer on July 12, 1945 was:

'His Majesty the Emperor, mindful of the fact that the present war daily brings greater evil and sacrifice upon the peoples of all the belligerent powers, desires from his heart that it may be quickly terminated. His Majesty is deeply reluctant to have blood lost among the peoples on both sides and it is his desire, for the welfare of humanity, to restore peace with all possible speed.'

This message is missing in the Truman archives. Instead there are pages from Truman's diary where he says that he was praying before making the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and another on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. He justifies his decision to drop the bombs by saying that he had no other choice but to drop the bombs or to sacrifice lives of estimated one million of American soldiers who would lose their lives during the invasion of Japan.

Hiroshima, mon amour  Among the screenplays of the Vietnamese writer Gia Dinh, the best one she made was for the French movie Hiroshima, Mon Amour. Directed by Alain Resnais, the movie opens with documentary scenes made following the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. After viewing children’s eyes falling out of their sockets it is hard to get enthusiastic about achievements of Western science and technology in general and nuclear physics in particular. One may wish that the whole generation of nuclear scientists, who gave us on that fateful July 16, 1945 at Trinity Site in New Mexico that most gruesome of Pandora’s gifts, would have never been born. This may seem a rather unusual thought which is used here only to illustrate a more general problem recently approached by Manfred Eigen, the chemistry Nobel Prize winner, in his 1989 book Jenseits von Ideologien und Wunschdenken - Perspektiven der Wissenschaft. The desire to erase the knowledge of nuclear weapons can be likened to wish of a child to return to mother’s womb. We need more knowledge, not less. Where we need the knowledge is in the social sciences. However, this is easier said than done. Illustrations of methods for gaining knowledge about ourselves and the societies we live in are scattered throughout this book, but most of these methods are limited by our inability to carry out experiments the way other sciences do. This limitation can be compensated for to a degree by introducing a new paradigm to social sciences, a paradigm which opening paragraph should read: Be courageous. Open to scrutiny issues that really matter.