The Nuclear Age Began 81 Years Ago—With Lies; It Could End
the Same Way
Mitchell
Zimmerman for Common Dreams
The atomic age began with a lie.
Eighty-one years ago this week, a single American airplane,
flying almost unnoticed over a Japanese city, dropped a single bomb that
destroyed the entire city. Three days later another American plane destroyed a
second city.
The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima on August
6, 1945 and Nagasaki on
August 9, 1945 killed 100,000 people outright. By the end of the year another
100,000 succumbed to radiation sickness, burns, and other injuries from the
blasts. Over 90% were civilians.
The stated reason for killing all these people was a lie.
The claim that we had to drop atomic bombs to avoid the horrific losses US
troops would have been suffered in an invasion of the Japanese home islands was
false—and American decision-makers knew it when they decided to drop the bombs.
Because the United States had
broken Japanese military codes, American intelligence learned in July 1945 that
the Japanese government had already contacted the Soviet Union, America’s World
War II ally, to discuss surrender. The Japanese hoped, above all, to ensure
that the Allies’ demand for unconditional surrender did not require the
Japanese Emperor to abdicate—a condition that US readily agreed to in the end.
As Gar Alperovitz convincingly
explains in his book, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam, the
destruction of the two Japanese cities had to do with emerging Cold War politics,
not with avoiding an invasion of the Japanese islands.
Those who made the decision knew that Japan was seeking to
end the war and believed that the entry of the Soviet Union into the war, after
the Allies’ victory in Europe, would likely be enough to precipitate Japan’s
capitulation.
A long-hidden, top-secret US intelligence study in 1946 confirmed
that the atomic blasts were not what ended the war—it was Russia’s August 8,
1945 declaration of war against Japan and Soviet troop movements.
Because Russia was preoccupied with the life-and-death
struggle against Nazi Germany, they had not participated in the war against
Japan until then. But in July 1945, at a conference in occupied Potsdam,
Germany, President Harry Truman secured Joseph Stalin’s promise to join the war
against Imperial Japan.
“Fini Japs when that occurs,” Truman observed in his
war-time, hand-written journal in July 1945. “We’ll end the war a year sooner
now,” Truman wrote in a letter around the same time. “Think of all the kids who
won’t be killed.”
US war leaders confirmed the atomic bombing was not needed.
The Supreme Commander of Allied Forces General Dwight D. Eisenhower (later
President Eisenhower) concluded that “Japan was already defeated and that
dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary... no longer mandatory as a
measure to save American lives.”
Fleet Admiral William Leahy, then Truman’s chief of staff,
agreed: “The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender... The use
of this this barbarous weapon... was of no material assistance in our war
against Japan.”
Truman did not hesitate to drop the bombs anyway. “The atom
bomb was no ‘great decision,’” he said 15 years later.
The World War II era was an age of atrocity. The Second
Sino-Japanese War—Japan’s war of conquest against China from 1937 to
1945—caused an estimated 10-20 million deaths. Nazi Germany murdered 6 million
European Jews. The Germans also murdered 2 million captured Russian soldiers
through starvation.
And there was the rape of Nanking, the destruction of Dresden, the 1943 famine of Bengal, and
the firebombing of Tokyo and 60 other Japanese cities.
In the face of these unspeakable horrors, the atomic death
of 200,000 Japanese civilians stands out because they were the world’s first
victims of nuclear warfare—and their unnecessary deaths, excused by a set of
lies, ushered in an era of peril for all humanity.
The lies and the dangers did not stop with the end of World
War II. As we should have learned, nuclear weapons have
a way of spawning lies.
In the wake of the 9-11 attacks, in 2003 the Bush regime
constructed the fiction that Iraq had nuclear weapons, as an excuse for
invading and occupying the oil-rich nation. But Iraq had neither nukes nor
other weapons of mass destruction. The neoconservatives who promoted the
invasion of Iraq (and urged President George W. Bush to
proceed to invade Iran as well) had manipulated dubious intelligence to promote
fears of an imaginary threat.
The price of those lies was high. In the end, the US
occupation of Iraq cost the United States trillions of dollars and thousands of
US service members’ lives—and caused hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian
deaths.
This year Donald Trump returned
to the right-wing dream
of overthrowing the Iranian government, again lying about nuclear weapons to
support a completely unnecessary war. Trump and his aides claimed that Iran was
on the verge of building a nuclear bomb and was developing long-range missiles
that could soon strike the United States. US intelligence agencies confirmed that these claims
were both lies.
The persistence of presidential lies about fictional nuclear
threats should not obscure the all-too-real dangers of nuclear proliferation.
Citizens who are concerned about threats to our existence on
this planet have rightly focused on climate change. But
a world increasingly subjected to the stresses of climate change and its
impacts—extreme temperatures, sea-level rise, mega storms, uncontrollable
fires, crop destruction, drought,
famine, refugee flows, and xenophobic politics—is a world in which desperate
and megalomaniacal rulers may feel tempted to use thermonuclear weapons. And
the nuclear age could end, as it began, with lies.
Mitchell
Zimmerman is an attorney, longtime social activist, and author of the
anti-racism thriller "Mississippi Reckoning" (2019).
