A.Rahman
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It was 61 years ago today
61 Years Ago, To: August 9th 1945, America Became The, first country to use a nuclear weapon against civillians
Some things in life are just so horrific that the only successful defense mechanism is to laugh -- even when it's in enormously bad taste. And so it is, we guess, with America's dropping a plutonium bomb on the civilian population of Nagasaki, Japan, killing an estimated 74,000 people -- something that happened exactly 61 years ago today, Aug. 9, 1945. Our thoughts always go to the headline in The Onion's 2000 book, "Our dum.b Century: "Nagasaki Bombed 'Just for the Hell of It.'"
Like most jokes -- especially twisted ones -- it works because deep inside. you wonder how large a kernel of truth is buried there.
Shortly after 11 a.m. that 1945 morning, a U.S. B-29 Superfortress bomber, the Bockscar, appeared in the skies over Nagasaki, an industrial port city of 240,000 people. It was just three days after the dropping of the first atomic bomb over Hiroshima. This American bomber let loose a weapon called "Fat Man," which contained more than 14 pounds of highly radioactive plutonium, exploding some 1,540 feet over an industrial section of the city with the force of 21 kilotons of TNT.
Everything in a one-mile radius was flattened, and fires spread for a couple of miles further. It was estimated that the atomic explosion killed about 70,000 people, and that as many as 10,000 or so died in the short term from the radiation effects. (Contemporary estimates put the overall death toll at 74,000.)
One irony that rarely gets mentioned is that "Fat Man" was actually supposed to be dropped on a different city, Kokura, but a cloud cover caused the Bockscar to go to its secondary target -- saving thousands of unknowing lives in one place so that others would die elsewhere, in Nagasaki.
Those are the simple facts, and while they are quite awful, they can also be oddly sterile in the re-telling. In fact, we now know that the American government went to great lengths to cover up the human side of tragedy that took place in Nagasaki:
The reporter was George Weller, the distinguished correspondent for the now-defunct Chicago Daily News. His startling dispatches from Nagasaki, which could have affected public opinion on the future of the bomb, never emerged from General Douglas MacArthur's censorship office in Tokyo. Carbon copies were found just two years ago when his son, who talked to E&P from Italy today, discovered them after the reporter's death.
Greg Mitchell wrote about Weller's censored dispatch in Editor and Publisher last year, in an article that was republished this week. He writes:
An early article that George Weller filed, on Sept. 8, 1945 -- two days after he reached the city, before any other journalist -- hailed the "effectiveness of the bomb as a military device," as his son describes it, and makes no mention of the bomb's special, radiation-producing properties.
But later that day, after visiting two hospitals and shaken by what he saw, he described a mysterious "Disease X" that was killing people who had seemed to survive the bombing in relatively good shape. A month after the atomic inferno, they were passing away pitifully, some with legs and arms "speckled with tiny red spots in patches."
The following day he again described the atomic bomb's "peculiar disease" and reported that the leading local X-ray specialist was convinced that "these people are simply suffering" from the bomb's unknown radiation effects.
As a child of the Baby Boom and the Cold War, I certainly remember learning about Hiroshima and Nagasaki in school -- although nothing about "Disease X" or any of the other gut-wrenching maladies suffered in Japan by those who weren't instantly incinerated. We weren't exposed much to pictures like the one at left.
If you're from a younger generation than me, it's hard to explain what a good job the American public school system did during the 1960s and 1970s is inculcating the official U.S. spin: That the atomic bombings, while awful, saved many many more lives -- both Japanese and American, civilian and military -- than what would have been the toll had we been forced to invade the Japanese mainland.
The concept was so ingrained that for years I never questioned it, nor did many of my fellow Boomers. But over time, the doubt began to swell. Didn't the Hiroshima bombing, which killed an estimated 140,000 people, convince the Japanese government of the need to surrender, without the loss of 74,000 more in Nagasaki? Why were cities with large civilian populations selected as targets, and not military areas where casualties would have been lower and limited largely to combatants, while still demonstrating the crippling power of this new atomic weapon?
Was the Onion's sick, satirical headline perilously close to the truth?
Good questions, all. One of our favorite books of all-time is Howard Zinn's "The People's History of the United States," which asks them as well, and provides some unsettling answers. Over at Daily Kos, Zinn's words were posted in this diary earlier today:
The justification for these atrocities was that this would end the war quickly, making unnecessary an invasion of Japan. Such an invasion would cost a huge number of lives, the government said -- a million, according to Secretary of State Byrnes; half a million, Truman claimed was the figure given him by General George Marshall. (When the papers of the Manhattan Project -- the project to build the atom bomb -- were released years later, they showed that Marshall urged a warning to the Japanese about the bomb, so people could be removed and only military targets hit.) These estimates of invasion losses were not realistic, and seem to have been pulled out of the air to justify bombings which, as their effects became known, horrified more and more people. Japan, by August 1945, was in desperate shape and ready to surrender.
Zinn said that the U.S. government, because of its code-breaking superiority, was well aware how close Japan was to a total collapse just before the two A-bombs were dropped. He also notes that Truman in essence lied to the American people with an outlandish initial claim that Hiroshima was a military target. Regarding Nagasaki, he adds:
The dropping of the second bomb on Nagasaki seems to have been scheduled in advance, and no one has ever been able to explain why it was dropped. Was it because this was a plutonium bomb whereas the Hiroshima bomb was a uranium bomb? Were the dead and irradiated of Nagasaki victims a scientific experiment?
In hindsight, Nagasaki was a turning point in a century of a world history in which the killing of civilians has now become far too commonplace. It's stunning to realize that less than 100 years ago in World War I -- while clearly an unnecessary tragedy of epic proportions -- almost all of the death took place on the military frontlines.
Today's headlines -- that's not a metaphor, I mean today, Aug. 9, 2006 -- concern the ever-growing use of civilians, including children and women, in the global great games of power, fundamentalism, and war. A movie opened today called "World Trade Center," the story of the attack by hate-filled zealots who thought nothing of killing innocent secretaries and stockbrokers in the name of seeking power a world away. In Lebanon and Israel this very day, the boundaries between warfare and killing random civilians have grown weak, if non-existent.
Even in Connecticut, a politician who wants to end the war in Iraq is under siege from some quarters, because he dares to question the necessity of a conflict that is killing 100 civilians every day as well as 2,595 American soldiers, for a "cause" that began with a lie and still manages to defy any good explanation some three years and so many bodies later.
That's why we should never forget what happened in Nagasaki, and never stop asking the hard questions about it. Nothing can bring back those 74,000 people, but the lives of millions of civilians today from Tyre to Manhattan and beyond depends on an open and honest debate about war, about why we fight, and how.
As Zinn wrote:
But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress....that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth.
61 Years Ago, To: August 9th 1945, America Became The, first country to use a nuclear weapon against civillians
Some things in life are just so horrific that the only successful defense mechanism is to laugh -- even when it's in enormously bad taste. And so it is, we guess, with America's dropping a plutonium bomb on the civilian population of Nagasaki, Japan, killing an estimated 74,000 people -- something that happened exactly 61 years ago today, Aug. 9, 1945. Our thoughts always go to the headline in The Onion's 2000 book, "Our dum.b Century: "Nagasaki Bombed 'Just for the Hell of It.'"
Like most jokes -- especially twisted ones -- it works because deep inside. you wonder how large a kernel of truth is buried there.
Shortly after 11 a.m. that 1945 morning, a U.S. B-29 Superfortress bomber, the Bockscar, appeared in the skies over Nagasaki, an industrial port city of 240,000 people. It was just three days after the dropping of the first atomic bomb over Hiroshima. This American bomber let loose a weapon called "Fat Man," which contained more than 14 pounds of highly radioactive plutonium, exploding some 1,540 feet over an industrial section of the city with the force of 21 kilotons of TNT.
Everything in a one-mile radius was flattened, and fires spread for a couple of miles further. It was estimated that the atomic explosion killed about 70,000 people, and that as many as 10,000 or so died in the short term from the radiation effects. (Contemporary estimates put the overall death toll at 74,000.)
One irony that rarely gets mentioned is that "Fat Man" was actually supposed to be dropped on a different city, Kokura, but a cloud cover caused the Bockscar to go to its secondary target -- saving thousands of unknowing lives in one place so that others would die elsewhere, in Nagasaki.
Those are the simple facts, and while they are quite awful, they can also be oddly sterile in the re-telling. In fact, we now know that the American government went to great lengths to cover up the human side of tragedy that took place in Nagasaki:
The reporter was George Weller, the distinguished correspondent for the now-defunct Chicago Daily News. His startling dispatches from Nagasaki, which could have affected public opinion on the future of the bomb, never emerged from General Douglas MacArthur's censorship office in Tokyo. Carbon copies were found just two years ago when his son, who talked to E&P from Italy today, discovered them after the reporter's death.
Greg Mitchell wrote about Weller's censored dispatch in Editor and Publisher last year, in an article that was republished this week. He writes:
An early article that George Weller filed, on Sept. 8, 1945 -- two days after he reached the city, before any other journalist -- hailed the "effectiveness of the bomb as a military device," as his son describes it, and makes no mention of the bomb's special, radiation-producing properties.
But later that day, after visiting two hospitals and shaken by what he saw, he described a mysterious "Disease X" that was killing people who had seemed to survive the bombing in relatively good shape. A month after the atomic inferno, they were passing away pitifully, some with legs and arms "speckled with tiny red spots in patches."
The following day he again described the atomic bomb's "peculiar disease" and reported that the leading local X-ray specialist was convinced that "these people are simply suffering" from the bomb's unknown radiation effects.
As a child of the Baby Boom and the Cold War, I certainly remember learning about Hiroshima and Nagasaki in school -- although nothing about "Disease X" or any of the other gut-wrenching maladies suffered in Japan by those who weren't instantly incinerated. We weren't exposed much to pictures like the one at left.
If you're from a younger generation than me, it's hard to explain what a good job the American public school system did during the 1960s and 1970s is inculcating the official U.S. spin: That the atomic bombings, while awful, saved many many more lives -- both Japanese and American, civilian and military -- than what would have been the toll had we been forced to invade the Japanese mainland.
The concept was so ingrained that for years I never questioned it, nor did many of my fellow Boomers. But over time, the doubt began to swell. Didn't the Hiroshima bombing, which killed an estimated 140,000 people, convince the Japanese government of the need to surrender, without the loss of 74,000 more in Nagasaki? Why were cities with large civilian populations selected as targets, and not military areas where casualties would have been lower and limited largely to combatants, while still demonstrating the crippling power of this new atomic weapon?
Was the Onion's sick, satirical headline perilously close to the truth?
Good questions, all. One of our favorite books of all-time is Howard Zinn's "The People's History of the United States," which asks them as well, and provides some unsettling answers. Over at Daily Kos, Zinn's words were posted in this diary earlier today:
The justification for these atrocities was that this would end the war quickly, making unnecessary an invasion of Japan. Such an invasion would cost a huge number of lives, the government said -- a million, according to Secretary of State Byrnes; half a million, Truman claimed was the figure given him by General George Marshall. (When the papers of the Manhattan Project -- the project to build the atom bomb -- were released years later, they showed that Marshall urged a warning to the Japanese about the bomb, so people could be removed and only military targets hit.) These estimates of invasion losses were not realistic, and seem to have been pulled out of the air to justify bombings which, as their effects became known, horrified more and more people. Japan, by August 1945, was in desperate shape and ready to surrender.
Zinn said that the U.S. government, because of its code-breaking superiority, was well aware how close Japan was to a total collapse just before the two A-bombs were dropped. He also notes that Truman in essence lied to the American people with an outlandish initial claim that Hiroshima was a military target. Regarding Nagasaki, he adds:
The dropping of the second bomb on Nagasaki seems to have been scheduled in advance, and no one has ever been able to explain why it was dropped. Was it because this was a plutonium bomb whereas the Hiroshima bomb was a uranium bomb? Were the dead and irradiated of Nagasaki victims a scientific experiment?
In hindsight, Nagasaki was a turning point in a century of a world history in which the killing of civilians has now become far too commonplace. It's stunning to realize that less than 100 years ago in World War I -- while clearly an unnecessary tragedy of epic proportions -- almost all of the death took place on the military frontlines.
Today's headlines -- that's not a metaphor, I mean today, Aug. 9, 2006 -- concern the ever-growing use of civilians, including children and women, in the global great games of power, fundamentalism, and war. A movie opened today called "World Trade Center," the story of the attack by hate-filled zealots who thought nothing of killing innocent secretaries and stockbrokers in the name of seeking power a world away. In Lebanon and Israel this very day, the boundaries between warfare and killing random civilians have grown weak, if non-existent.
Even in Connecticut, a politician who wants to end the war in Iraq is under siege from some quarters, because he dares to question the necessity of a conflict that is killing 100 civilians every day as well as 2,595 American soldiers, for a "cause" that began with a lie and still manages to defy any good explanation some three years and so many bodies later.
That's why we should never forget what happened in Nagasaki, and never stop asking the hard questions about it. Nothing can bring back those 74,000 people, but the lives of millions of civilians today from Tyre to Manhattan and beyond depends on an open and honest debate about war, about why we fight, and how.
As Zinn wrote:
But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress....that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth.
