Truth or Consequences

Hiroshima is America’s raw nerve. Perhaps that explains why this year’s commemoration of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, passed without much notice. That often happens in anniversary years that do not end in zero. Three years ago, at the 50th anniversary, a great debate over the decision to drop the bomb raged briefly, but then public interest and impassioned oratory disappeared, perhaps to return in 2005--or maybe never. We will soon reach the point at which few of those who participated in creating or using the bomb, who served in the Pacific or who were among its Japanese victims will be able to testify about their experience, and soon after that, there will be none. Whither the great Hiroshima debate then?

One critical factor may keep it alive. Unlike the World War II generation, the bomb will not go away. But even a historical trend seems to be working against a reconsideration of Hiroshima. With the end of the Cold War, Americans rightly or wrongly feel much less threatened by nuclear weapons and nuclear war. Only one of the superpowers remains standing, and the United States and Russia are destroying, not assembling, nuclear warheads. Rogue states--new nuclear powers and various and sundry terrorist groups--seem capable of threatening us, sooner or later, with at least a limited nuclear assault (that is, a few million dead). Iran, for example, has just developed a mid-range missile. Still, the American public seems relatively unconcerned, despite the flurry of fear and warnings surrounding the recent nuclear tests by India and Pakistan.

Until this decade, Hiroshima always had a haunting topical resonance--with 50,000 nuclear weapons on earth, the power to use many of them in the hands of our president and thousands of enemy missiles pointed at us. Now, for most people, Hiroshima seems to be exclusively about history, and there are, to be sure, simpler and more pleasant episodes from our past to ponder. When the atomic bomb was dropped over Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, Americans felt both deep satisfaction and deep anxiety, and these responses have coexisted ever since. We wish to believe that the decision to use the bomb was reasonable and justified, but another part of us remains uncomfortable with what we did. It has never been easy to reconcile killing 200,000 people (mainly women, children and other noncombatants) with a sense of ourselves as a decent people.

Because this conflict remains unresolved, it continues to provoke profound uneasiness. It’s always there, but it goes on public display only in major anniversary years.

Clearly the editors of “Hiroshima’s Shadow” want to change all that--to provoke debate or at least set the terms of the discussion. For Hiroshima, contrary to popular sentiment, still matters. Thousands of nuclear weapons remain in the world, and we can hardly put permanent faith in the mixture of restraint and good fortune that has limited their use so far. Hiroshima matters because it set a precedent for using the weapon in wartime--and, just as significant, it’s an example that continues to be widely endorsed in America.

As long as we defend and justify the Hiroshima model, we--or even scarier, others--risk making that kind of decision again. One need merely cite public opinion polls at the time of the Gulf War, which suggested that a majority of Americans might have supported the use of nuclear weapons against Saddam Hussein and the city of Baghdad to defeat a ruthless aggressor and save American lives, the same rationale that was used in 1945.

In this and other ways, Hiroshima darkens many aspects of our personal and collective existence. Hence, “Hiroshima’s Shadow” is a title well-chosen. It is a hefty anthology of more than 60 essays and articles about President Truman’s decision to use the bomb, many stemming from the 50th anniversary debate, others dating back half a century or more. Perhaps even more useful, it reproduces about a dozen key primary documents, including diary entries written by those close to Truman, such as John J. McCloy, then-assistant to the secretary of war. One of the editors of this volume, Kai Bird, wrote a splendid biography of McCloy a few years ago. The other editor, Lawrence Lifschultz, has written extensively on the Far East for various European publications.

I should confess that, in a manner of speaking, I was present at the creation of this volume. The book emerged in response to what its editors call the “historical cleansing” of the Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution’s Air & Space Museum in Washington, D.C., in 1994. The Enola Gay, of course, was the B-29 that released the uranium, or “Fat Man,” bomb over Hiroshima. The Smithsonian planned to put a portion of the plane on display, surrounded by an extensive exhibit that explored the closing months of the Pacific War, plans for the plane’s mission, the range of opinion about Truman’s decision and the effects of the bomb at ground zero. After angry protests by some veterans, lobbyists for Air Force contractors and some members of Congress, the Smithsonian canceled the exhibit and simply put the plane on display to “speak for itself,” according to its director, and it remains on view there today, visited by thousands every week, making the original dispute all the more crucial and, for many, disheartening.

At that time, Bird co-founded the Historians Committee for Open Debate on Hiroshima, which sponsored press conferences and forums on this issue around the country and released to the media historical material (much of it reproduced here) that raises questions about Truman’s decision. As a critic of the censorship of the original exhibit, I was an active participant in the Enola Gay affair myself. The significance of the museum’s act of “patriotic correctness” (the editors’ term) is reflected in the fact that at least three books, and parts of several others, have been devoted to the controversy. Now the unfortunate episode is reprised as part of “Hiroshima’s Shadow” in five (somewhat repetitive) essays and 17 editorials and op-ed pieces.

Although Bird and Lifschultz present columns by several supporters of the censorship at the Air & Space Museum, no one should consider this book balanced. Contrary opinions do appear from time to time, but only a handful of its major pieces take issue with the editors’ opinion that the use of the bomb could, and should, have been avoided. While it’s undeniably true that the number of prominent critics of the atomic bombing has grown over the years and that on many particular points most respected historians take their side, the overall debate among experts remains more evenly divided than the one found in “Hiroshima’s Shadow.” But, oddly, that seems fair, because discussion of this issue has long been skewed in the other direction: first by government suppression of the full story of Hiroshima and later by one-sided media coverage (still in evidence as recently as 1995) that have left a legacy of myths and omissions. A recent Gallup Poll suggested that one in four Americans does not even know that an atomic bomb was dropped on Japan, let alone what happened after it exploded.

That makes “Hiroshima’s Shadow” an enormously valuable and long overdue collection that it is hoped will remain on researchers’ and reporters’ shelves for years to come.

In his preface to this volume, Joseph Rotblat, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, observes that more than half a century after the atomic bombings “the question is still before us: Was the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki necessary?” Among critics, it has long been an article of faith that the American public would change its generally positive view of Truman’s decision if the people knew even some of the key facts about it (for example, the significance of Russia’s declaration of war against Japan) or learned that important military figures of that era voiced opposition or regret. I confess that I have, in public discussions, quoted Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s comment--”It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing”--more than once.

Now Bird and Lifschultz have assembled nearly all of the potentially persuasive material in one place. “Hiroshima’s Shadow” suffers from anthologitis, essays on the same subject, reprinted in their entirety, producing mind-numbing redundancy. But those willing to winnow through it will find much to contemplate.

One lengthy section of the book presents some of the early responses to the use of the bomb, attempting to show that, contrary to popular legend, not everyone reacted with approval. True, some of these critics were iconoclastic and, therefore, I suppose, suspect, however eloquently they argued: Dwight MacDonald, Mary McCarthy, Norman Thomas, Wilfred Burchett, A.J. Muste and others. More surprising, and instructive, are the many conservative critics reprinted or cited: Herbert Hoover, Henry Luce, David Lawrence (founder of U.S. News & World Report), John Foster Dulles, Felix Morley (founder of Human Events) and various writers for William F. Buckley’s National Review.

One of the most effective sentences in the entire volume, in fact, belongs to Morley: “It was pure accident if a single person slain at Hiroshima had personal responsibility for the Pearl Harbor outrage.” Barely a week after the bombing, Lawrence, later a Vietnam-era super-hawk, declared that Americans should be “ashamed” for employing “the most destructive weapon of all times indiscriminately against men, women and children.” This passionate moral rejection of the bombing was later paved over by conventional wisdom.

Similarly, it wasn’t Gar Alperovitz who invented the notion that the atomic bomb was used in 1945 not only to subdue Japan but to intimidate the Soviet Union. Years earlier, Harry Elmer Barnes endorsed this notion in the National Review.

Another major section profiles historical scholarship, beginning with the first major critique (by physicist P.M.S. Blackett) and concluding with the latest work of Alperovitz and other so-called revisionists, such as Barton Bernstein and Martin J. Sherwin. The only important defenders of the bombing given much of a say in this collection are Paul Fussell and former Secretary of War Henry Stimson (whose crucial 1947 essay in Harper’s is reprinted and then exposed, elsewhere in the book, as a brilliant piece of propaganda). The editors then present the reflections by several Japanese, including survivors of the bombing, Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe and the current mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The book concludes with nearly 80 pages of excerpts from historical documents. These long-cited touchstones of the critics’ case against the bombing are rarely reproduced at length and are largely unknown to the general public: memos by Stimson, Joseph Grew and Gen. George Marshall; entries from the diaries of Truman, Stimson, McCloy, Adm. William Leahy, Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal and others, and a portion of the report of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey. It is fascinating to see familiar quotes in context; none of them “prove” anything or serve as a trump card in any debate on this subject. All raise tantalizing questions about whether Truman could have ended the Pacific war in short order without using the atomic bomb and without invading Japan (with an enormous loss of American lives).

In a characteristically graceful essay, historian Paul Boyer observes, “To contemplate Hiroshima and Nagasaki unblinkingly is to confront our recent moral history in the most radical way imaginable. Few were ready to do that in 1945. Few have been prepared to do it since.” “Hiroshima’s Shadow” offers us another opportunity, perhaps one of the last, before the atomic bombings retreat even further into the dustbin of history.