Column
America must confront its nuclear
guilt
By ROSEMARY RADFORD
RUETHER
Each August the anniversaries of the bombings of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki are times of renewed wonderment for me. How have
Americans avoided any real national guilt for these atrocities?
It has long been my assumption that the bombings were militarily
unnecessary. Their prime purposes were to test the effects of these new weapons
on dense populations and to scare the Russians. Once when I expressed these
views, a colleague retorted angrily that the bombings saved lives;
half a million Americans would have died or been injured invading Japan. That
the lives of a comparable number of Japanese were expendable was taken for
granted.
New studies, such as Kai Bird and Lawrence Lifschultzs
Hiroshimas Shadow, have thrown these well-worn justifications into
question. Bird and Lifschultzs exhaustive documentation of the
controversy around the bombings, from 1945 to the present, has shown that the
oft-cited half a million figure was deliberately inflated by
President Harry Truman and others. American military planners had actually
estimated 20,000 to 46,000 casualties.
More important, they had good reason to believe that Japan might
surrender without an invasion. Military and political leaders knew that Japan
would give up with only a few modifications of the demand for unconditional
surrender, such as assurances of a continued role for the emperor. This was the
advice of most of Trumans senior advisers.
Fleet Admiral William Leahy, Trumans chief of staff, said
after the bombing: It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon
at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war with Japan.
The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.
Gen. Dwight Eisenhower expressed a similar view, recalling his own
questioning of the bombing to Secretary of War Henry Stimson: I voiced to
him my grave misgivings: First, on the basis of my belief that Japan was
already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and
secondly because I thought our country should avoid shocking world opinion by
the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory to
save American lives.
Other justifications of the bombing have included the claim that
targeted cities were warned in advance and that they were key military targets.
In fact, part of the strategy of the bombing was to use atomic weapons without
warning. Leaflets were dropped, but only afterward. Neither Hiroshima nor
Nagasaki had large numbers of military personnel -- 94 percent of residents
were civilians.
Moreover, American prisoners of war were among the casualties as
well as a considerable number of conscripted Korean laborers.
The cover-up continues. The Smithsonian Institute planned an
exhibit on the 50th anniversary of the bombing that would include the fuselage
of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the bomb over Hiroshima, with a
multimedia display of the damage done to humans and environment. They also
planned a script that included statements criticizing the use of the bomb along
with others that justified it. News of the exhibit brought a storm of criticism
from right-wing Republicans, the American Legion and the Air Force Association,
echoed by the mainstream media.
The historians who did the research for the exhibit as well as its
general planners were decried as anti-Americans who hate their
country. The Smithsonian capitulated to this pressure. The Enola Gay was
exhibited but without explanation or discussion. An opportunity for American
soul-searching on our first use of atomic weapons 50 years ago, an act that
inaugurated the proliferation of nuclear weapons, was suppressed.
The Bird and Lifschultz book includes the documentation of the
Smithsonian episode and was created in part as a response to it. The authors
wished to redress something of this lost opportunity, but the readers of such a
tome (584 pages) will be far fewer than those who might have been instructed by
the exhibit.
The 1980s saw a crescendo of organizing against nuclear weapons,
fueled by fear that a major nuclear exchange between the United States and the
Soviet Union would endanger the whole planet. With the fall of the Soviet
Union, this movement faded from public consciousness. The assumption seems to
be that without the Soviet Union the danger of nuclear war has disappeared.
The recent testing of nuclear weapons by India and Pakistan should
give the lie to this assumption. Nuclear weapons continue to proliferate. The
refusal of the United States and others who count themselves the rightful
possessors of such weapons is the major cause. As long as we have them, others
want them and count their possession as evidence of status as world powers.
The only way to lessen this danger is renunciation of the weapons
by the old powers themselves. This must start with the United
States, the nation that created them in the first place and the only nation to
have used them.
For more than 50 years, Germans have agonized over their
culpability for the Nazi Holocaust (as they should), but Americans have
successfully avoided grappling with our guilt for the atrocities of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. Without such soul-searching by Americans, questioning both the
propriety of our use of these weapons and the immorality of the weapons
themselves, it is doubtful that the nuclear threat will be successfully
addressed.
Rosemary Radford Ruether is professor of theology at
Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, Evanston, Ill.
National Catholic Reporter, August 14,
1998
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