CrossCurrents

CrossCurrents A Catholic Reflects on Faith in Our Times

Bernard F. Swain, Ph.D.

Still Under a Cloud

That day the kids poured out of the school and raced to climb the monkey bars that stood in the corner of the schoolyard. Today those charred and mangled bars remain to mark the spot where the children died when The Bomb fell on them that day, 60 years ago this week.

After one A-Bomb landed on Hiroshima and another fell, three days later, on Nagasaki, the Japanese took to calling the A-bomb “the original child bomb,” since there had never been anything like it before. Indeed, in a split second those two bombs unleashed evil forces that eventually killed 250,000 human beings, mostly civilians.

The events marking the 60^th anniversary of history’s only nuclear attacks are to be found everywhere this week. In Japan, a “global pilgrimage honoring civilian casualties of war” called “Stonewalk” will end when participants finish dragging a one ton memorial stone from Nagasaki to Hiroshima. And in Hiroshima, local officials will screen internet-delivered photos taken worldwide to commemorate the exact moment the first A-bomb dropped.

In Europe, an international walk will finish the 250km distance from Ypres, Belgium (where chemical weapons were first used) past NATO headquarters in Brussels to the NATO nuclear base at Kleine Brogel.

In Canada, Toronto will mark the occasion with a daylong “Day for Peace” observance calling for the elimination of all nuclear weapons.

In America, Time Magazine has already devoted its cover story to the anniversary, including extensive interviews with some of the 85,000 “hibakusha” (witnesses to the bombs themselves) who remain alive today. In New York City, a 4000km “Bike for Peace” journey will finish after first passing through Vienna, Prague, Dresden, Berlin, Leipzig, Bonn, Paris, and then (after crossing the Atlantic by air) Montreal, Ottawa, and Washington, DC.

And a vigil sponsored by 1300 citizens’ organizations, including the Catholic Worker, Maryknoll of New York and DC and Pax Christi USA from five different states will be held at the Oak Ridge (Tennessee) nuclear weapons plant. The vigil will include a three-hour long reading of the names of the dead from Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In hindsight the A-Bomb was a classic case of a new and dangerous technology where no one asked the basic ethical question: “just because we can do this now, does that mean we should do it?” In fact the historical evidence is that the intention to use the bomb, at any cost, led to a parade of pretexts (much like Iraq half a century later).

Originally, of course, the Manhattan project began as a nuclear arms race to beat the Germans to the bomb. The Germans foiled that plan by surrendering first, so the U.S. turned its bombsites on Japan. When it became clear the Japanese surrender was near, the U.S. postponed the decisive Potsdam conference until the bomb was ready –and insisted that the Potsdam declaration include the demand for Japan’s “unconditional surrender.” This demand deadlocked the Japanese high command, postponing surrender until the bomb could be dropped. It was still a race however, since the Soviets were themselves about to declare war and invade Japan.

Once the bombs were dropped, Truman and others claimed they had prevented invasion and saved the lives of a million American soldiers. But the force preparing for invasion numbered only 800,000 men– and, in any case, supreme commander Dwight Eisenhower declared, both before and after, that the bombs were not necessary to prevent invasion. The Allied demand for “unconditional surrender” delayed the war’s end because the Japanese were reluctant to surrender the emperor himself. But at the war’s end, Japan was allowed to keep the emperor anyway. In other words, the U.S. could have achieved the same result without demanding “unconditional surrender” –and without either A-bombs or invasion.

In this sense, “unconditional surrender” turned out to be the symbolic “WMD” of WWII: a pretext for attack that turned out not to matter at all. Had the US dropped that demand, the pretext for the bomb would be gone. The REAL WMDs, of course, were the bombs themselves (just as nuclear weapons remain the true WMDs today).

But President Truman was determined to intimidate the Soviets with American might, which meant the A-Bomb became the first shot in the cold war. And besides, Truman and many of his advisers shared the widespread popular desire to get revenge against Japan for the attack on Pearl Harbor.

President Roosevelt had called that attack a “day that would live in infamy.” In recent years, Japan has apologized for that attack, and Japanese public opinion generally believes that Japan was wrong to go to war. The U.S. by contrast, has never apologized for taking revenge –and most Americans still feel the bombs were justified.

The history is debatable, but here’s the bottom line today: those days began a new age of terror we have not yet escaped. Sixty years later, people are still dying from those two bombs, and new children are still being born with defects caused by those bombs. The suffering goes on, sixty years after war’s end.

The Cold War has come and gone, but we do not have peace. Yet the US has kept most of its nuclear arsenal, and US policy still clings to threatening our ”first use” of nuclear weapons on our enemies. The Nukes remain—and they remain (as both John Kerry and George Bush agreed) the number one threat today. By maintaining its threat to use them, the US taunts adversaries and extremists to build their own nukes. So we have entered a “second nuclear arms race” where “second tier” nations and terrorists vie to join the US in the exclusive, one-member “Nuclear Attackers” club.

And perhaps worst of all, a dangerous moral genie escaped the bottle at the end of World War II, when civilian populations became fair game for WMDs. It didn’t start with the A-bombs of course—US firebombs had already killed 900,000, mostly civilians, in Japanese cities—including 85,000 in Tokyo in a single night. But 250,000 killed by two split-second blasts brought violence against civilians to another level.

Today, every day, somewhere in the world, an average of 2174 people die from war. Nine out of ten are civilians—and half of them are children. It is a fine and patriotic thing to support our troops—but it is also a smokescreen obscuring the moral problem of modern war, because troops are no longer the main victims of war. Women and children are. It is governments, not armies, that make war policies—and now it is ordinary people, not troops, who suffer the most from them. Civilian deaths in Iraq, for example, outnumber US troop deaths nearly 100 to 1.

Many US Catholics remain unconcerned about our moral liability here, despite the clear teaching of the Church, which singled out war on civilians for the only condemnation issued by Vatican Council II:

“Every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and humanity, which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation.”

World War II ended the war of battlefields and trenches, and the A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki linked war and terror forever. Now the military is merely a cog in the war machine—and civilians are its fuel. Today, it’s convenient to define “terrorism” as attacks on civilians—but it did not start on 9/11. It sprouted as Blitzkrieg, it grew into firebombing, and it finally blossomed as the mushroom cloud that still hangs over the world and infects the planet with terror.

Send Your Comments and Questions to bfswain@juno.com