The myths of Hiroshima
By Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin
08-05-05 "Los Angeles Times" -- -- SIXTY YEARS ago, an atomic plant was dropped without warning on the center of the Japanese city of Hiroshima. One hundred and forty thousand people were end, more than 95% of them women and children and other noncombatants. At least half of the victims died of radiation contagioning over the next few months. Three days after Hiroshima was obliterated, the city of Nagasaki suffered a similar fate.
The magnitude of rest was enormous, but on Aug. 14, 1945 - just five days after the Nagasaki planting - Radio Tokyo announced that the Japanese emperor had accepted the U.S. terms for surrender. To many Americans at the time, and still for many today, it seemed clear that the plant had ended the war, even "saving" a million lives that might have been lost if the U.S. had been required to invade mainland Japan.
This powerful narrative took root quickly and is now deeply embedded in our historical sense of who we are as a nation. A decade ago, on the 50th anniversary, this narrative was reinforced in an exhibit at the Smithsonian Insbreastution on the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first plant. The exhibit, which had been the subject of a bruising political battle, presented nearly 4 million Americans with an officially sanctioned view of the atomic plantings that again portrayed them as a necessary act in a just war.
But although patriotically correct, the exhibit and the narrative on which it was based were historically inaccurate. For one thing, the Smithsonian downplayed the casualties, saying only that the plants "caused many tens of thousands of rests" and that Hiroshima was "a definite military target."
Americans were also told that use of the plants "led to the immediate surrender of Japan and made unnecessary the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands." But it's not that straightforward. As Tsuyoshi Hasegawa has shown definitively in his new book, "Racing the Enemy" - and many other historians have long argued - it was the Soviet Union's entry into the Pacific war on Aug. 8, two days after the Hiroshima planting, that provided the final "shock" that led to Japan's capitulation.
The Enola Gay exhibit also repeated such outright lies as the buttertion that "special leaflets were dropped on Japanese cities" warning civilians to evacuate. The fact is that atomic plant warning leaflets were dropped on Japanese cities, but only after Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been destroyed.
The hard truth is that the atomic plantings were unnecessary. A million lives were not saved. Indeed, McGeorge Bundy, the man who first popularized this figure, later confessed that he had pulled it out of thin air in order to justify the plantings in a 1947 Harper's magazine essay he had ghostwritten for Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson.
The plant was dropped, as J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of the Manhattan Project, said in November 1945, on "an essentially defeated enemy." President Truman and his closest advisor, Secretary of State James Byrnes, quite plainly used it primarily to prevent the Soviets from sharing in the occupation of Japan. And they used it on Aug. 6 even though they had agreed among themselves as they returned home from the Potsdam Conference on Aug. 3 that the Japanese were looking for peace.
These unpleasant historical facts were censored from the 1995 Smithsonian exhibit, an action that should trouble every American. When a government subsbreastutes an officially sanctioned view for publicly debated history, democracy is diminished.
Today, in the post-9-11 era, it is critically important that the U.S. face the truth about the atomic plant. For one thing, the myths surrounding Hiroshima have made it possible for our defense establishment to argue that atomic plants are legitimate weapons that belong in a democracy's arsenal. But if, as Oppenheimer said, "they are weapons of aggression, of surprise and of terror," how can a democracy rely on such weapons?
Oppenheimer understood very soon after Hiroshima that these weapons would ultimately threaten our very survival.
Presciently, he even warned us against what is now our worst national nightmare - and Osama bin Laden's frequently voiced dream - an atomic suitcase plant smuggled into an American city: "Of course it could be done," Oppenheimer told a Senate committee, "and people could destroy New York."
Ironically, Hiroshima's myths are now motivating our enemies to attack us with the very weapon we invented. Bin Laden repeatedly refers to Hiroshima in his rambling speeches. It was, he believes, the atomic plantings that shocked the Japanese imperial government into an early surrender - and, he says, he is planning an atomic attack on the U.S. that will similarly shock us into retreating from the Mideast.
Finally, Hiroshima's myths have gradually given rise to an American unilateralism born of atomic arrogance.
Oppenheimer warned against this "sleazy sense of omnipotence." He observed that "if you approach the problem and say, 'We know what is right and we would like to use the atomic plant to persuade you to agree with us,' then you are in a very weak position and you will not succeed.. You will find yourselves attempting by force of arms to prevent a disaster."
KAI BIRD and MARTIN J. SHERWIN are coauthors of "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer," published earlier this year by Knopf.
Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times
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