It wasn’t the atom bomb’s designer who chose to drop it on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But questioning the moral and legal basis for that decision remains taboo in America. And that’s dangerous
By Tony Karon
JUL 24, 2023
I’ve not yet seen “Oppenheimer”, but I already know what’s wrong with the film (and, I swear I’ll update this with a massive slice of humble pie if I’m wrong).
Early reviews confirm my expectation that Christopher Nolan’s film focuses on the tribulations and anguish of the man who created the ultimate terror weapon, while ignoring the ghastly morality and criminality of the decision to use it, twice, against Japanese civilians. And that it turns away from the experiences, much less the voices, of the victims of the grotesque terror unleashed on two Japanese cities in August of 1945. That, of course, sets “Oppenheimer” squarely within the tradition of denial and evasion that pervades all mainstream U.S. conversation, such that there is, about Hiroshima and Nagasaki — a tradition that ought to terrify all of humanity, because it reminds us that the only country that has ever used nuclear weapons and which retains one of the world’s largest nuclear arsenals continues to avoid any discussion even with its own citizens on the question of what circumstances might prompt it to do so again, and against which targets.
The laws of war adopted in the 1949 Geneva Convention are quite unambiguous in deeming the deliberate targeting of civilian populations and infrastructure to be war crimes. That may be why even the likes of former U.S. Air Force commander Gen. Curtis LeMay, who relayed the order to drop the bomb, acknowledged later (according to former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara) that “If we’d lost the war, we’d have been prosecuted as war criminals.”
Or, as Leo Szilard, one of the scientist who worked on Oppenheimer’s program, put it, if Nazi Germany had developed nuclear weapons and dropped them on two U.S. cities, “Can anyone doubt that we would then have defined the dropping of atom bombs on cities as a war crime, and that we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them?”
President Truman’s radio address announcing the bombing seemed aware of the questionable morality of his decision to use nuclear weapons, and offered what reads today as a preemptive defense: “The world will note that the first atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base,” he claimed. “That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.”
This was untrue, of course, because Hiroshima was no more a military base than was any U.S. city that housed munitions factories and an army base. More revealing, perhaps, was his statement that the U.S. had used these weapons of mass terror “against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor, against those who have starved and beaten and executed American prisoners of war, against those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international laws of warfare. We have used it to shorten the agony of war, to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans.”
So, the mass slaughter of Japanese civilians was sold as vengeance for Japanese abuses. And — with what’s hard not to read as a tacit admission that doing so might put the U.S., also, beyond the bounds of “the international laws of warfare” — a step necessitated, he explained, to save the lives of American soldiers. The argument itself – that civilians can be deliberately targeted to protect soldiers – is the moral and legal equivalent of using human shields.
Truman later said that invading Japan would have killed half a million Americans and as many or more Japanese soldiers and civilians. Despite historians questioning those claims, not to mention wider questions about the laws of war, his argument has become America’s conventional wisdom on Hiroshima — notwithstanding the opposition at the time by a number of top US commanders who believed Japan was beaten and that a ground invasion wouldn’t be necessary, but also because it might violate the laws of war.
Suffice to say that in the decades since Hiroshima, there has been precious little public discussion in the US about the morality – and legality – of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear terror attacks (in the sense that they were acts of massive military force targeting an innocent civilian population in order to force their unelected leaders to make an unpalatable political decision).
I was gobsmacked in 1995, as a recent arrival in the United States, by the bipartisan congressional effort that blocked a planned Smithsonian Institution exhibit on the 50th anniversary, which was branded “anti-American propaganda” because it intended to include images of the damage wrought by the Hiroshima bomb. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who led that effort, later called it “a fight, in effect, over the reassertion by most Americans that they are sick and tired of being told by some cultural elite that they ought to be ashamed of their country.”
Sound familiar? Of course it does. The evasion of any moral or legal reckoning with Hiroshima and Nagasaki is very much of a part with more recent efforts to suppress a similar reckoning with slavery and American racism. But let’s be clear, the denial of U.S. war crimes abroad is very much a bipartisan business: The U.S. Senate unanimously passed a resolution condemning the Smithsonian plan, declaring that the bombing of Hiroshima had helped “bring the war to a merciful end”, thereby “saving the lives of Americans and Japanese”. (Needless to say, the U.S. Senate would not care to canvass Japanese public opinion on this claim.)
The morality and legality of consciously setting out to destroy civilian population centers via aerial bombing wasn’t seriously debated at the time; it was simply enacted as the inevitable next step once Oppenheimer’s bomb was ready. And the climate that made that possible had been created in the fire-bombings of Dresden, and Hamburg, and Tokyo — and before that in the Luftwaffe bombing of Basque town of Guernica in 1937 (and other cities early in WW2), and the aerial bombing by British war planes of rebellious villages in Iraq in the 1920s and by the Italians of the restive natives of their Libyan possession as early as 1911.
Western discourse recuses itself from even discussing Western violence against civilian populations elsewhere by falling back on its moral certitudes: Eggs are broken in the course of making omelettes, after all, and the assumption of virtue in Western military interventions abroad puts it beyond reproach, reducing the deaths of the uncounted people of color — whether in Japan or Viet Nam, Iraq or Afghanistan — to “collateral damage” inflicted in pursuit of a higher purpose.
And so, to Hollywood, and my expectations that the Oppenheimer film’s avoidance of the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki fits a long-established pattern.
As my friend Jyothi Thottam wrote in 2015, “Hollywood, too, has not moved far beyond the official narrative of the immediate postwar era. The administration of President Harry S. Truman censored a largely sympathetic 1946 Hollywood film about the men who made the bomb, ‘The Beginning or the End,’ adding a scene justifying Truman’s decision to drop it. The 1952 film ‘Above and Beyond,’ a dramatization of the life of Enola Gay pilot Col. Paul Tibbets, ends with the pilot’s feelings of remorse for the destruction he’s caused. But that film, made just a few years after the end of the war, not surprisingly focuses mostly on the pilot’s sacrifices and doesn’t dwell on the victims of Hiroshima. Even decades later, no major Hollywood film has ventured into that territory.”
From Paul Tibbets’ personal remorse, then, to Robert Oppenheimer’s…
We might take some comfort from a 2015 Pew study which found that one in three Americans now believe that using nuclear weapons against Japanese cities in 1945 was not justified — indeed, less than half of Americans aged 18-29 believed the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were legitimate. But that would matter only if the U.S. was genuinely democratic, with its leaders’ decisions reflecting the will of the citizens. Plainly, this is not the case on many critical issues. And when it comes to nuclear weapons, there isn’t even any serious discussion in the U.S. political conversation over under what circumstances, and against which targets, the U.S. might again mount nuclear attacks.
Until the U.S. reckons with the question of whether and how war crimes were perpetrated in its name at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we’re in a dangerous zone of denial. Given what we know about the logic that dictated Truman’s (not Oppenheimer’s) fateful decision to unleash nuclear terror in 1945, we should be aware of — and alarmed by — just how easy it is to imagine a repeat.