Thomas McKelvey Cleaver : Nagasaki and Responding to Calamity

Shinto Shrine in Atomic Ruins, Nagasaki, Japan 1945. Public domain / National Archives / Flickr.
Responding to calamity and
what it says about our character

The people of Nagasaki dedicated their city to promoting international peace and brotherhood.

By Thomas McKelvey Cleaver / The Rag Blog / September 14, 2011

Watching the Tenth Anniversary celebration of national victimhood over the terrorist attacks of 9/11, I had some mixed thoughts. I thought using all this to celebrate and build support for the failed policies of the Bush-Cheney cabal (i.e., our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) in the aftermath of those attacks was an insult to the dead.

I thought about how societies remember calamities. It's said that how one deals with disaster is a better indicator of character than any other event. If that is true, then Americans beating their breasts about how singularly awful 9/11 was, how singularly different and vastly more important our victimhood is to any other anywhere else ever, clearly demonstrates the shallowness of character much of the rest of the world generally ascribes to us as a people.

I thought of another city that experienced a calamity so great it could only be termed a catastrophe, and what their response was to that event, and what it said about their character.

Sixty-six years ago last month, on August 9, 1945, the city of Nagasaki was hit by the last atomic bomb ever dropped in anger. 96,000 people died in the immediate aftermath, with thousands of others dying over the years that followed. It would be difficult to imagine a worse catastrophe that could happen to a city.

But wait, it gets worse.

The bomb was dropped in desperation by a crew that didn't want to return to base with "unexpended ordnance" aboard, who were desperately afraid that if they didn't drop the thing, they wouldn't be able to get back home. They'd tried bombing two other possible targets, but couldn't comply with the "visual drop only" orders they were operating under.

As it was, they had to make three passes over the city, with the bombardier finally telling the pilot he had "visual contact" at the last moment, which was later exposed as a lie; the bomb was dropped blind by radar fix, a violation of all the rules. "Bock's Car" had to divert from returning to Tinian and land at Okinawa, where the airplane had to be towed off the runway after running out of gas within moments of touchdown.

They really did have to get rid of the extra weight, and there was certainly no way this particular bomb would be abandoned over the open sea.

But wait, it gets worse.

Of all the cities in Japan to bomb, Nagasaki was the last place to consider. For over 300 years, since the first European explorers finally reached Japan, it had been Japan's door to the West, and the most traditionally pro-Western city in the country. It was the city that most opposed the military coup d'etat that took over the Japanese government in the late 1920s, and the city most opposed to the Pacific War.

As a result of the European influence beginning in the mid-sixteenth century, Nagasaki was overwhelmingly Christian. When the Shogunate was imposed in the seventeenth century, Nagasaki and the surrounding communities on Kyushu rebelled. Over 200,000 people where killed in the ensuing civil war, and Christianity was outlawed, with the death penalty for its practice. For the next 200 years, until Japan was forcibly opened to the West in 1854 by Commodore Perry's "black ships," the Christians of Nagasaki and Kyushu practiced an underground religion.

Following the Meiji Restoration in 1880, the official persecution of Christians was ended. Over the next 30 years, the Christians of Nagasaki built the Urakami Catholic Church, which was the largest Christian church in Asia, built entirely by the donations of the parishioners.

"Ground Zero" for the bomb was the bell tower of that church. The tower was the only structure remaining upright afterwards, and is today the site of the Museum of the Atomic Disaster.

How does all that strike you for terrible irony? Is that worse enough?

You'd pretty much figure the citizens of Nagasaki would never forget that one, wouldn't you? They'd probably hate the people responsible, too, right?

Wrong.

Unlike Hiroshima, where an American can still be made to feel guilty by the attitude of the citizens today, Nagasaki made a different choice.

The people of Nagasaki looked at what had happened, and concluded (as Americans did after 9/11): "Never again!" But they made a far different choice in how to achieve that. For the people of Nagasaki, the way to be sure such a terrible event never happened again was to work to promote international peace and brotherhood, and they dedicated their city to that principle.

All kinds of cities have all kinds of dedicated mottos, and most of their citizens never know what they are, or if they do, what they mean. That is certainly true here in America.

In Nagasaki, they know. They practice it every day. In 1964, less than 20 years after the event, wearing the uniform of the armed forces of the country that had committed that act, I was in Nagasaki, along with the rest of the ship's company of the old USS Rustbucket.

The young people of the city came down to the pier where we were docked and waited to meet us as we left the ship, and invited us to allow them to guide us through their city, to go to dinner with them, to even visit their homes (that is an amazing act, that gaijin would be brought into a Japanese home -- they're the most private people on the planet). And they told us why they were doing it.

I don't think I have ever experienced such a truly Christian act in my life

[Thomas McKelvey Cleaver is an accidental native Texan, a journalist, and a produced screenwriter. He has written successful horror movies and articles about Second World War aviation, was a major fundraiser for Obama in 2008, and has been an activist on anti-war, political reform, and environmental issues for almost 50 years. Read more articles by Thomas Cleaver on The Rag Blog.]

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BOOKS / Jonah Raskin : Schneir's 'Final Verdict' on Rosenbergs Offers No Such Thing

Walter Schneir's 'Final Verdict':
New book on Rosenbergs fails to deliver

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / November 6, 2010

[Final Verdict: What Really Happened in the Rosenberg Case by Walter Schneir; Preface and Afterword by Miriam Schneir (Melville House, 2010); Hardcover; 203 pages; $23.95.]

Final Verdict, the book Walter Schneir was writing when he died, and before he could finish it, came to me highly recommended and I can understand why. For students and scholars who have followed the case of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg -- the New York Jewish couple who were executed in 1953 as spies for the Russians -- this book offers tantalizing stories and anecdotes.

It certainly keeps the case alive, but in no way does it close the book on the Rosenbergs, and in that sense the title is misleading. So is the subtitle: “What really happened in the Rosenberg case.” Whatever did happen, this book never makes clear. Let me explain.

There is no “final verdict” in Final Verdict; there are only more questions, more doubts, and more disquieting revelations. Here are some of the words that Schneir uses that reflect his perspective on the Rosenberg case: “baffling,” “mystery,” “frustrating,” “incomplete,” “presumably,” and more.

All too often, he writes phrases such as “I cannot resist wondering,” “for reasons unknown,” and “I have often pondered the question.” While they might be taken as the author’s own authentic disclosures about his troubled journey, they hardly inspire confidence about his methods and his conclusion. Final Verdict is a jumble and a mumble.

Reading Walter’s Schneir’s last book -- it comes with a preface and an afterword by his widow, Miriam Schneir -- led me to the conclusion that there will never be a complete and satisfactory explanation of who the Rosenbergs really were and what they might or might not have done.

As Walter Schneir himself points out, the U.S. Government lied about the Rosenbergs from the time they were arrested in the summer of 1950 until the time they were executed in 1953. The U.S. government refused to release their files for decades. Lies were piled on top of lies on top of lies until truths were buried probably forever. The Russians kept files too, but they’re hardly more credible or reliable than those of the FBI.

The Rosenbergs, Schneir says, lied too. They affirmed their innocence, and denied their guilt, though all of the evidence today makes it clear that Julius Rosenberg was a spy for the Soviet Union in the 1940s.

Julius Rosenberg lied, and so did Ethel. That they didn’t steal the secret of the atomic bomb -- the crime they were accused of committing -- is clear (as well as the fact that there was no single “secret” of the bomb) and has been for a long time.

That they were framed, and then wrongly and unjustly executed has also been apparent for a long time and is hardly new, or news, though Schneir tries hard to frame his story as a final revelation, the key that finally unlocks the Rosenberg riddle

Sadly, Final Verdict is a book by a scholar so caught up in his own scholarship that he becomes obsessed with it and buried under the weight of it. He is a cliché of the man who searches frantically for a needle in the proverbial haystack. In his case, the haystack or haystacks, are KGB and FBI files.

Schneir’s flawed reasoning leads him to believe that the truth is to be found somewhere in the hundreds of thousands of documents about the case. In fact, the documents are false; they are compounded of lies, untruths, half-truths, suppositions, fabrications and fictions.

Having lied in public before, during, and after the trial of the Rosenbergs, there was no legitimate reason to believe, as Schneir did, that the U.S. government would tell the truth in its own files. A romantic, and an idealist, Schneir believed that the dogged reporter would inevitably find the truth, ferret it out, and publish it for all humanity to see, read, and understand. If only it were so.

There is no clear narrative in Final Verdict; no straight story we can follow; only a mish-mash of dates and names and Schneir’s reflections and observations about his own work. Moreover, he becomes the main character in the story and the Rosenberg’s become the minor characters. I don’t believe that was his intent; but, unfortunately, in these pages, Ethel and Julius recede into the background while he emerges into the foreground.

No doubt about it, Walter Schneir was a kindly, humane man. But in these pages, he is guilty of a kind of intellectual arrogance. Moreover, he tends to belittle the very individuals he set out to defend. That too is an all-too frequent problem with scholars who spend so much time with and feel so intimately connected to their subjects that they come to loathe them, or feel superior to them.

At the start of a long paragraph about Julius Rosenberg’s politics, Schneir writes, “I can well imagine that the next two years were the most exciting and fulfilling of Julius Rosenberg’s life.” Schneir goes on to say, without providing the source of his information and without a single footnote, that “Julius was a man with a head full of the fantasies about the Soviet Union then current among the far left, a blind faith in the goodness of a land he had never seen.”

How Schneir knew what was in Julius’s “head” he never says. How he knew that Julius had “blind faith” he never says either. The fact that some members of the U.S. Communist Party had blind faith in the Soviet Union does not mean that Julius Rosenberg did, and it is unfair to link Julius to those trends and patterns without evidence.

Schneir goes on to say that “Rosenberg was no great shakes as an engineer,” as though that was further proof he could not have been guilty of the crime for which he was executed.

About three-quarters of the way though the book, Schneir writes that, “it would be interesting to have a clearer picture of what Julius was up to in the postwar years, but, unfortunately, a scarcity of hard evidence makes it impossible.” The lack of hard evidence does not prevent him, however, from writing that Julius Rosenberg’s “devotion to the Soviet Union and the cause of communism never wavered.” Perhaps Julius communicated with him secretly, or perhaps Schneir was channeling Julius.

If you want to read about the Rosenberg case, read Walter and Miriam Schneir’s earlier book, Invitation to An Inquest, or We are Your Sons, by Michael and Robby Meeropol -- the sons of Ethel and Julius. Or read Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar that begins, "It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York."

Or ponder the telegram that Allen Ginsberg sent to President Eisenhower in the White House in the summer of 1953: “Rosenbergs are pathetic! Government Will Sordid! Execution Obscene. America caught in crucifixion machine. Only barbarians want them burned. I say stop it before we fill our souls with death-house horrors.”

There is one very good reason to buy Final Verdict and that is the superlative black-and-white photos of the principal figures in the case. The documents in the case lie; the memories of those who lived then are no longer to be trusted. The photos are the closest things to the truth that exist.

The photos provide as real a story as we will ever know. Look at them and judge for yourself: Ethel and Julius; Ethel’s sister-in-law Ruth and her brother David; Judge Irving Kaufman who presided over the trial; Irving Saypol, the U.S. Attorney, who prosecuted, and his assistant Roy Cohen; Emmanuel Block, the Rosenberg’s lawyer. So many Jews! Indeed, the trial of the Rosenberg was all about Jews, Judaism, and anti-Semitism.

Finally, in Final Verdict, there is the amazing photo of the crowd of courageous New Yorkers who gathered on West 17th Street in Manhattan on June 19, 1953, the day of the execution, to bear witness to the deaths of Ethel and Julius and to this immense psychic and political wound to the body of America itself that has never healed, that won’t go away, that haunts this country to this day.

[Jonah Raskin is a professor of communication studies at Sonoma State University and has been writing about the Rosenbergs since 1962.]

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Marc Estrin : Awesome Days of Awe

The space between the pillars:
Awesome days of awe

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / August 7, 2010

August 6th: Hiroshima. August 9th: Nagasaki. Three days in between.

The days between close-set giant pillars take on special significance. Whatever the current behavior of the state of Israel, most Jews know such spaces well.

The 10 days between Rosh Hashanah, the beginning of the year, and Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, are not actually holidays, but mark a special period of time -- what are called the Days of Awe. They are a kind of spring cleaning in fall, a purification of one's world and soul so that on Yom Kippur the Jew can faced the Eternal with all worldly issues in place. And what is the main strategy for this cleaning? It may surprise you. Asking and giving forgiveness.

The tradition of the shtetels -- those small eastern European Jewish communities depicted in Fiddler on the Roof -- was that in the 10 days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur people would ask forgiveness of everyone they had wronged that year. All the little, and sometimes the big, wrongs that had been done in the community were brought out into the open, confessed, made good if possible, and forgiven. The entire community felt cleansed and pure.

Perhaps not everyone was that honest. Like folks everywhere, not all Jews had the courage to beg someone's pardon or, when they themselves were asked, to give pardon with a full heart. But they found it a lot easier to do than we would today. While we have much more information now than they did, we don't know as well how to say "I'm sorry."

But in those simple villages, to avoid a world full of hate, people often took the 10 days and went knocking on the doors of any estranged friends, and cleared their personal paths, and those of the community. The world was cleansed for Yom Kippur -- the "Day of Atonement."

And on that day the naked human being was scheduled to go mano a mano, godwrestling with the Eternal. Tradition has it that on Rosh Hashanah, God inscribed your name in either the Book of Life or the Book of Death. That's why the concern for measuring up. But the verdict on Rosh Hashanah was not final. You had the 10 days in between, and especially Yom Kippur, to change the Judgment. But at the end of Yom Kippur, the Books were closed.

And so it is understandable that Yom Kippur be a full day of prayer without food. Five separate services take place during 25 hours -- like Muslim practice -- but with little or no pause between them. The idea of the fast is this: when the human body has paused from its natural acts of life, and history has suspended its normal ups and downs, the spirit can be utterly reborn. We don't really do fasts in America. We're better at pig-outs.

And sin -- or evil, for that matter -- is not a very popular concept in the contemporary American heartmind. Yet some concept of estrangement from the Truth has been common to most religious world views. The acknowledgment of sin is a crucial part of the Yom Kippur service.

"The Cloud Over The Culture" is the punning title of an extraordinary article by Paul Boyer (1985) which appeared on the fortieth anniversary of dropping the bombs. In it, he asserts, as do I, that although "Hiroshima" and "Nagasaki" are such familiar words -- banal even -- the United States "has yet to assimilate fully what those words represent in its political, cultural or moral history."

He quotes the American Catholic Bishops' 1983 Statement on Nuclear War:

After the passage of nearly four decades and a concomitant growth in our understanding of the ever-growing horror of nuclear war, we must shape the climate of opinion which will make it possible for our country to express profound sorrow over the atomic bombing in 1945. Without that sorrow, there is no possibility of finding a way to repudiate future use of nuclear weapons. [My emphasis.]

Sorrow. Remorse. It sounds Days of Awe-like. How very, very strange it is that we -- as a nation -- have never done that. Not once, in now 65 years. Not even the teensiest bit. Un-Amerkin.

We have consistently refused -- and still, even now, refuse -- an absolute and explicit "no first use" nuclear weapons policy. One of the physicists who worked on the Manhattan Project observed that

If the memory of things is to deter, where is that memory? Hiroshima has been taken out of the American conscience, eviscerated, extirpated.

1945 seems so long ago. We were a nation in genuine and legitimate relief from a dreadful war. But what tenacity there is in the myth of American innocence, the belief that we are somehow set apart from the world, our motives higher, our methods purer.

It is this constant myth that prevents us from having any national Days of Awe, that keeps us from expressing sorrow over the event. And, as the Catholic Bishops so insightfully express, without that sorrow, we cannot go on, we cannot build a world safe -- from ourselves.


New national holydays

Let me therefore beat the drum for some pre-Labor Day labor. Down with innocence! Up with memory, confession, sorrow, apology, healing!

I hereby propose a new national holiday, modeled on the Days of Awe, but occurring in August, between Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Like the Days of Awe, they would be bounded by two momentous events, would celebrate those events with appropriate ritual, and would feature redemptive tasks to be done in between.

"It could never happen," you say, "too serious. It runs against the American grain to do that kind of self-criticism."

Maybe, maybe not. We have our solemn holidays, in places still solemnly kept. And besides, we may be growing up as a nation. Engaged in five current wars, with Iran coming up, the peach fuzz is off our cheeks. Obama's fairytales notwithstanding, we know we're not in Kansas anymore.

The vast majority of people realize we can't go on as we are -- exporting jobs, exploiting foreign workers, making wars, eviscerating and polluting the planet. "Change" has become the buzzword to win elections.

The Christians have taught the world to acknowledge a December season of Peace. Is it too much to imagine that churches and synagogues, national organizations and neighborhood groups, schools and universities, could slowly grow a late summer holiday to express the profound sorrow the Catholic Bishops recommend -- a mindful holiday to witness and grieve, to assimilate a painful part of the past, to dissipate the cloud over the culture, to ask and give forgiveness, to sing in chorus "Hiroshima, Nakasaki. Never Again," and to be able to go on, safer from ourselves?

The religious historian Mircea Eliade has made a distinction between sacred and profane time. In sacred time, historical events gradually come to partake of the permanence of myth, while in profane time they gradually lose their grip on people and become merely material for historians and the technicians at Disney World.

I am calling for a holiday that would change Hiroshima and Nagasaki into universal myths, deeply grounded in sacred time, permanent stop signs on the road to destruction. Four new holydays, making things whole, healing.

Here's how it might go. On August 5th, supper is a Japanese meal, which Americans would learn to make as beautifully as we do a turkey dinner. The event would have a ritual component like a Seder, in which symbolic foods are eaten, and history is thoughtfully reviewed. Each family, each congregation, each school would develop its own texts until some key themes and treatments became solidified.

The morning and afternoon of the 6th -- Hiroshima Day -- would be a time for fasting, or some special breakfast, with a ritual observance at 8:15 AM. During the 6th, 7th and 8th -- our three days of awe and repentance -- individuals would consciously perform expiatory tasks, personal and interpersonal, as in the Jewish Days of Awe, but also social, holding teach-ins, attending peace events. If a weekend fell between Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there would be special services at churches, synagogues, mosques. Morning and afternoon of the 9th is again a special time of fasting. 11:02 is observed, and everyone gears up for a big celebration in the evening, at which international foods of all kinds would be prepared -- a huge community festival.

What I'm describing is a full-blown, big holiday. Things don't begin that way, of course. We might just start by thinking about it for a few years, by recognizing that in fact something important did occur on these days. Then, who knows what would grow -- in individual hearts, in individual families, in individual congregations and institutions. Were something like this to get underway, in 10 years we'd have Good Housekeeping printing August peace recipes.

We postmoderns like to play with history. Now we can play in its real mudbath, and actually get dirty -- a death-defying vital alternative to psychic numbing.

Would the New Days of Awe change anything? I can't imagine otherwise. The power of confession has been known to the Catholic Church for centuries. If anything has sustained the even older Jewish community, it has been the inspiration of the High Holy Days. The Muslims make pilgrimage to Mecca.

This stuff has both a track record and the power of newness-at-large. Like an exotic virus spreading in a vulnerable population, the power of guilt could quite transform postmodern American culture. Revelation through genuine memory, then Teshuvah, turning and Tikkun, healing.

Or shall we just go on making wars?

[Marc Estrin is a writer and activist, living in Burlington, Vermont. His novels, Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, The Education of Arnold Hitler, Golem Song, and The Lamentations of Julius Marantz have won critical acclaim. His memoir, Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (with Ron Simon, photographer) won a 2004 theater book of the year award. He is currently working on a novel about the dead Tchaikovsky.]

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Marc Estrin : Hingepoint of History

65 years and counting:
Hingepoint of history

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / July 24, 2010

As I write, we are one week past the 65th anniversary of what may be the most important date in the history of the planet. The Planet of the Human Apes.

On July 16th, 1945, Fat Man, aka "the Gadget," did its early morning, Trinity Test thing, lighting up the sky over Alamogordo, New Mexico.

The U.S. military put out this statement to calm any worried neighbors:

Several inquiries have been received concerning a heavy explosion which occurred on the Alamogordo Air Base reservation this morning. A remotely located ammunition magazine containing a considerable amount of high explosives and pyrotechnics exploded. There was no loss of life or injury to anyone, and the property damage outside of the explosives magazine itself was negligible. Weather conditions affecting the content of gas shells exploded by the blast may make it desirable for the army to evacuate temporarily a few civilians from their homes.

But the sky was not lit up by any considerable amount of high explosives and pyrotechnics. What made the light and blast was the first explosion of a nuclear weapon in planetary history.

And more important than that: what had come to pass was a human call-up of forces beyond control, forces greater than could be imagined, even by the glyph of E = mc2.

They were not only unparalleled physical forces previously sequestered in the infinitesimal. They were forces of human chutzpah, of political and philosophical confusion, of a rape relationship to nature that has never been, can never be, repaired. We have lived since then, and will ever live, in the miasma of that ravishing.

There was one incident at Trinity that seems particularly revealing of the pathology of the perpetrator:

Chief Meteorologist Jack Hubbard, in consultation with every group leader, had early on drawn up a list of the best and worst conditions for the test:

Best conditions for the operation.

A. Visibility greater than 45 miles.
B. Humidity below 85% at all altitudes.
C. Clear skies.
D. Temperature lapse rate aloft slightly stable to prevent dropping of the cloud.
E. Little or no inversion between 5,000 and 25,000 feet to allow cloud to reach maximum altitude.
F. A thick surface inversion or none at all to prevent internal reflections and mirage effects.
G. Winds aloft fairly light, preferred direction from between 6 degrees south of west and 25 degrees south of west. Steady movement desirable to anticipate track of cloud. Horizontal and vertical wind shears desirable for maximum dissipation of the cloud, although such a condition increased the tracking problem.
H. Low-level winds light and preferred drift away from Base Camp and shelters.
I. No precipitation in the area within twelve hours of the operation.
J. Predawn operation desired by the photographic group, although 0930 operation considered best for thermals dissipating the lower levels of the cloud.

Conditions least favorable to the operation.

A. Haze, dust, mirage effects, precipitation, restrictions of visibility below 45 miles.
B. Humidity greater than 85% at the surface or aloft, which might result in condensation by the shock wave.
C. Thunderstorms within 35 miles at the time of operation or for 12 hours following.
D. Rain at the location within 12 hours of the operation.
E. Surface winds greater than 15 mph during and after the operation.
F. Winds aloft blowing toward Base Camp or any population center within 90 miles of the site.Human rationality -- even if in service of the irrational.

But instead of tailoring the operation around desired weather, Hubbard was faced with a fait accompli -- Truman was in Potsdam, and weather be damned. July 16th was it. “Right in the middle of a period of thunderstorms,” he wrote, “What son-of-a-bitch could have done this?”

Everything unwanted was present: rain, high humidity, inversion layer, and unstable wind. None of the optimum requirements had been met. Rain could scrub the clouds and bring down high levels of radioactivity in a small area. Unstable conditions and high humidity increased the chances that the blast could induce a thunderstorm.

Still, Truman was in Potsdam, and the order was given to proceed with the test. The president needed an ace up his sleeve in his card game with Stalin. Such is the pecking order of politics, war and science.

Hamlet:

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me...

July 16th, 1945 at Alamogordo was the moment when the human species blew it forever, and our world will never be the same.

After the blast, the "successful" test, Oppenheimer summed it up: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." He was speaking for all of us.

I tell the story of the Manhattan Project and its Trinity Test in great detail in my novel, Insect Dreams: the Half Life of Gregor Samsa. Without blushing, I highly recommend it.

[Marc Estrin is a writer and activist, living in Burlington, Vermont. His novels, Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, The Education of Arnold Hitler, Golem Song, and The Lamentations of Julius Marantz have won critical acclaim. His memoir, Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (with Ron Simon, photographer) won a 2004 theater book of the year award. He is currently working on a novel about the dead Tchaikovsky.]

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MEDIA : The Press and the Atomic Bomb

Mushroom cloud from the nuclear explosion over Nagasaki rising 60,000 feet into the air on the morning of Aug. 9, 2008.
63 Years Ago: Media Distortions Set Tone for Nuclear Age
By Greg Mitchell / August 6, 2008

At this time of year it is always important to look back at how the original "first-strike" was explained to the press, distorted, and then became part of the decades-long narrative of how, in this view, nuclear weapons can be used -- and used again.

Sixty-three years after the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, The Bomb is still very much with us. The U.S. retains over 5000 nuclear weapons -- does this surprise you? -- with better than 4000 said to be "operational." There are plans to reduce this number, but only by 15%. The Russians still have many of their nukes but these remnants of the "superpower" era -- and the lack of airtight security surrounding them -- get little play today. All we seem to hear about are alleged or possible Iranian or North Korean or freelance terrorist nuclear devices.

The fact is, our "first use" policy -- dating back to 1945 -- remains in effect and past Gallup polls have shown that large numbers of Americans would endorse using The Bomb against our enemies if need be. So at this time of year it is always important to look back at how the original "first-strike" was explained to the press, distorted, and then became part of the decades-long narrative of how, in this view, nuclear weapons can be used -- and used again.

The Truman announcement of the atomic bombing on Aug. 6, 1945, and the flood of material from the War Department, written by The New York Times' William L. Laurence the following day, firmly established the nuclear narrative. It would not take long, however, for breaks in the official story to appear.

At first, journalists had to follow where the Pentagon led. Wartime censorship remained in effect, and there was no way any reporter could reach Hiroshima for a look around. One of the few early stories that did not come directly from the military was a wire service report filed by a journalist traveling with the president on the Atlantic, returning from Europe. Approved by military censors, it went beyond, but not far beyond, the measured tone of the president's official statement. It depicted Truman, his voice "tense with excitement," personally informing his shipmates about the atomic attack. "The experiment," he announced, "has been an overwhelming success."

The sailors were said to be "uproarious" over the news. "I guess I'll get home sooner now," was a typical response. Nowhere in the story, however, was there a strong sense of Truman's reaction. Missing from this account was his exultant remark when the news of the bombing first reached the ship: "This is the greatest thing in history!"

On Aug. 7, military officials confirmed that Hiroshima had been devastated: at least 60% of the city wiped off the map. They offered no casualty estimates, emphasizing instead that the obliterated area housed major industrial targets. The Air Force provided the newspapers with an aerial photograph of Hiroshima. Significant targets were identified by name. For anyone paying close attention there was something troubling about this picture. Of the thirty targets, only four were specifically military in nature. "Industrial" sites consisted of three textile mills. (Indeed, a U.S. survey of the damage, not released to the press, found that residential areas bore the brunt of the bomb, with less than 10% of the city's manufacturing, transportation, and storage facilities damaged.)

On Guam, weaponeer William S. Parsons and Enola Gay pilot Paul Tibbets calmly answered reporters' questions, limiting their remarks to what they had observed after the bomb exploded. Asked how he felt about the people down below at the time of detonation, Parsons said that he experienced only relief that the bomb had worked and might be "worth so much in terms of shortening the war."

Almost without exception newspaper editorials endorsed the use of the bomb against Japan. Many of them sounded the theme of revenge first raised in the Truman announcement. Most of them emphasized that using the bomb was merely the logical culmination of war. "However much we deplore the necessity," The Washington Post observed, "a struggle to the death commits all combatants to inflicting a maximum amount of destruction on the enemy within the shortest span of time." The Post added that it was "unreservedly glad that science put this new weapon at our disposal before the end of the war."

Referring to American leaders, the Chicago Tribune commented: "Being merciless, they were merciful." A drawing in the same newspaper pictured a dove of peace flying over Japan, an atomic bomb in its beak.

At the same time, however, the first non-official news reports began to break into print, including graphic accounts of casualties, a subject ignored in the War Department's briefings.

Tokyo radio, according to a United Press report, called Hiroshima a city of the dead with corpses "too numerous to be counted ... literally seared to death." It was impossible to "distinguish between men and women." Medical aid was hampered by the fact that all the hospitals in the city were in ashes. The Associated Press carried the first eyewitness account, attributed to a Japanese soldier who had crudely described the victims (over Tokyo radio) as "bloated and scorched -- such an awesome sight -- their legs and bodies stripped of clothes and burned with a huge blister. ..."

Americans who came across these reports were thrust briefly into the reality of atomic warfare -- if this information could be believed; The New York Times observed that the Japanese were "trying to establish a propaganda point that the bombings should be stopped." The Hearst newspapers published a cartoon showing a hideous, apelike "Jap" rising out of the ruins of Hiroshima screaming at Americans, "They're Not Human!", with the caption, "Look who's talking."

But in quoting from Tokyo radio, newspapers did introduce their readers to a disturbing point of view: that the atomic bombing might not be an act of deliverance blessed by the Almighty but a "crime against God and man"; not a legitimate part of war but something "inhuman," a cruel "atrocity," and a violation of international law, specifically Article 22 of the Hague Convention which outlawed attacks on defenseless civilians. The Japanese also compared the bomb to the use of poison gas, a weapon generally considered taboo. It was this very analogy many American policy makers and scientists had feared as they contemplated using the bomb, which they knew would spread radiation.

Other condemnations appeared as the War Department's grip on the story weakened slightly. The New York Herald-Tribune found "no satisfaction in the thought that an American air crew had produced what must without doubt be the greatest simultaneous slaughter in the whole history of mankind," likening it to the "mass butcheries of the Nazis or of the ancients."

A leading religious body in America, the Federal Council of Churches, urged that the U.S. drop no more atomic bombs on Japan, in a statement issued by two of its leaders, G. Bromley Oxnam and John Foster Dulles, later President Eisenhower's chief adviser. America had won the race for the bomb but it "may yet reap the whirlwind," Hanson Baldwin, military analyst for the New York Times, declared.

Interest in Hiroshima, however, receded as other events in the Pacific war, as well as speculation about a Japanese surrender, took center stage. On Aug. 9, the top two headlines on the front page of The New York Times announced the Soviets' declaration of war against Japan (indeed, some historians would later write that it was this, not the atomic bombs, that primarily forced the Japanese surrender). Not until line three did this message appear: "ATOM BOMB LOOSED ON NAGASAKI." The target of the second attack, a city of 270,000 people, was described, variously, as a naval base, an industrial center, or a vital port for military shipments and troop embarkation, anything but a largely residential city. The bomb, in fact, exploded over the largest Catholic community in the Far East.

That night, President Truman told a national radio audience that the Hiroshima bomb had been dropped on a "military base,"not a large city, although he knew this was not true. "That was because we wished in the first attack to avoid, in so far as possible, the killing of civilians," he said. Yet 150,000 civilians had died or would soon perish from radiation disease.

[Greg Mitchell is co-author, with Robert Jay Lifton, of the book, "Hiroshima in America."]

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