DUCKPOND

Sixty-two years ago, President Harry S Truman approved the dropping of the first nuclear bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. This single bomb devastated an area of 13 square kilometers and killed an estimated 140,000 people in a city of 350,0000. The second nuclear bomb was dropped over Nagasaki, three days later, killed 74,000 people.
Truman at the time of the bombing of Hiroshima was mid-Atlantic aboard the USS Augusta. The comments he made at the time, and recorded by the BBC are chilling in their bellicosity:

The President said the atomic bomb heralded the “harnessing of the basic power of the universe”. It also marked a victory over the Germans in the race to be first to develop a weapon using atomic energy.

President Truman went on to warn the Japanese the Allies would completely destroy their capacity to make war.

The Potsdam declaration issued 10 days ago, which called for the unconditional surrender of Japan, was a last chance for the country to avoid utter destruction, the President said.

“If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air the like of which has never been seen on Earth. Behind this air attack will follow by sea and land forces in such number and power as they have not yet seen, but with fighting skill of which they are already aware.”

The British Prime Minister Clement Attlee, who has replaced Winston Churchill at Number 10, read out a statement prepared by his predecessor to MPs in the Commons.

It said the atomic project had such great potential the government felt it was right to pursue the research and to pool information with atomic scientists in the US.

As Britain was considered within easy reach of Germany and its bombers, the decision was made to set up the bomb-making plants in the US.

The statement continued: “By God’s mercy, Britain and American science outpaced all German efforts. These were on a considerable scale, but far behind. The possession of these powers by the Germans at any time might have altered the result of the war.”

Mr Churchill’s statement said considerable efforts had been made to disrupt German progress – including attacks on plants making constituent parts of the bomb.

He ended: “We must indeed pray that these awful agencies will be made to conduce peace among the nations and that instead of wreaking measureless havoc upon the entire globe they become a perennial fountain of world prosperity.”

There you have it. The race to build the bomb was with the Germans, who may have developed it, and in doing so developed a war-winning weapon, but it was used on the Japanese. Since then, despite the years of the cold war, and the various trip wires along the way, the most noticeable perhaps being the Cuban Missile Crisis, nuclear bombs have not been used since.

Now there is the manufactured crisis with Iran, and the child-like wonder that if we (the US) have these nuclear bombs, a staple of the Military Industrial Complex, why should we not use them. Why indeed?

Postscript:

The following quote from Wikipedia suggests that Truman’s presidency was not without relevance to the current state of affairs. Notice that he was using Executive Orders, which I should distinguish from Signing Statements, and he was accused on being soft on Communism, resonant of the wedge politics that seems to have given the ALP the backbone of a jellyfish. Here is the quote:

After confounding all predictions to win re-election in 1948, he was able to pass almost none of his Fair Deal program. He used executive orders to begin desegregation of the U.S. armed forces and to launch a system of loyalty checks to remove thousands of Communist sympathizers from government office, eventhough he strongly opposed mandatory loyalty oaths for governmental employees, a stance that led to charges that his administration was soft on Communism. Truman’s presidency also was eventful in foreign affairs, starting with victory over Germany, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the surrender of Japan and the end of World War II, the founding of the United Nations, the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe, the Truman Doctrine to contain Communism, the beginning of the Cold War, the creation of NATO, and the Korean War.

Back in the present and the immediate future, even as the evidence of WMD was not to be found in Iraq, there is a concern about nuclear terrorism, which it might be supposed that talk of the use of tactical nuclear weapons and the destabilization of a swath of national states and peoples extending from the Middle East to Central Asia and South Asia will only intensify.

Update – 08/08/2007

Robert Scheer at Truthdig provides a contemporary historical commentary:

Of course, we had our justifications, as terrorists always do. Truman defended his decision to drop the atomic bombs on civilians over the objection of leading atomic scientists on the grounds that it was a necessary military action to save lives by forcing a quick Japanese surrender. He insisted on that imperative despite the objections of top military figures, including Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, who contended that the war would end quickly without dropping the bomb.

The subsequent release of formerly secret documents makes a hash of Truman’s rationalization. His White House was fully informed that the Japanese were on the verge of collapse, and their surrender was made all the more likely by the Soviets’ imminent entry into the fight.

At most, the Japanese were asking for the face-saving gesture of retaining their emperor, and even that modest demand would likely have been abandoned with the shift of massive numbers of Allied troops and firepower from the battlefront of a defeated Germany to a confrontation with its deeply wounded Asian ally. Instead, the U.S. played midwife to the birth of the nuclear monster, the ultimate terrorist weapon that presents a continuing and growing threat to the survival of human life on Earth.

This is a lesson to be pondered at a time when President Bush plays power games with a nuclear-equipped Russia while coddling Pakistan, the main proliferator of nuclear weapons to rogue regimes, and Congress authorizes an expansion of the U.S. nuclear program to better fight the war on terror by “improving” the ultimate weapon of terror, which the U.S. alone stands guilty of using.