Imperial Japan, the Bomb & the Pacific Powder Keg
On May 27th, 2016, Barack Obama visited Hiroshima, the
first time an American president had ever visited the city while still in
office. His speech there was a sermon that de-personified the attacks and
exculpated the president who authorized them. He spoke only abstractly about how “death
fell from the sky” seventy-one years ago. With his mind on domestic pressure
not to say anything that resembled an apology, President Obama strenuously
avoided mentioning the nation and the individuals who were responsible for the
decision to drop atomic weapons on civilian populations. Additionally, he made
no specific proposals about moving forward in nuclear disarmament.
In American public perceptions, there is still the common
belief that the bombs “ended the war” and saved a greater number of both
Japanese and American lives. A new National Parks museum called The Manhattan
Project National Historical Park, with three venues at Hanford, Los Alamos and
Oak Ridge, is hoping to tone down the triumphal, one-sided aspect of previous
texts and exhibits (like the Smithsonian exhibit in 1995). They are
now considering incorporating the views of Japanese victims and American
victims whose health was damaged by the production and testing of nuclear
bombs. [1]
Nonetheless, the triumphalist perspective persists as a
stubborn meme in American culture, even though the debate among historians is
essentially over. Historians such as Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, with his book Racing Against the Enemy, [2] have shown
that it was the Soviet entry into the war that provoked the Japanese to
surrender on August 15, 1945, one week after Stalin declared war on Japan. If
the surrender hadn’t come then, Japan’s circumstances were so dire that it
would have come soon without the need of an American invasion. This argument
was made by several high military officials in the weeks before the bombs were
used, but by this time a billion 1945 dollars had been spent on the Manhattan
Project, and everyone involved in making the bombs feared the political fallout
of not using them. Then there was the
motive to demonstrate to the Soviet Union that America possessed this new
weapon and was willing to use it.
Seventy-one years later, there are now nine countries
that possess nuclear weapons: USA, Russia, China, France, UK, Pakistan, India,
North Korea and Israel, the only one of the nine that maintains a stance of
ambiguity—refusing to declare whether it has nuclear weapons, even though it is
known beyond doubt that they do. In total the nine countries have about 15,000
weapons, with 93% of them held by the US and Russia, with about 7,000 each.
Each side has over one thousand on “hair-trigger alert” status in which they
are vulnerable to accidental launch or an overly hasty decision to launch with
incomplete or inaccurate information held by those who would have to make the
fatal decision.
In 1946, America took control of many of the Pacific
islands it had occupied during the war. Nuclear weapon tests began in July with
the tests in the Marshall Islands on the Bikini Atoll, which prompted a French
fashion designer to launch a swimsuit design we all know today. It was
described that summer as a “weapon of mass seduction” and “une bombe anatomique,” but
for Marshall Islanders there were no jokes to be made. They were relocated
within the island chain to small atolls that were already occupied and crowded.
In spite of the relocations, many of the still-inhabited islands were showered
with fallout. US military personnel were also exposed, and some of the
irradiated ships were hauled back to Guam and the US mainland for scuttling or
dismantling. Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay is one of the places where
this contamination remains a problem to this day. [3]
In 1949, the Soviets tested their first nuclear device in
Kazakhstan, and after that the arms race and the global paranoia of mutually
assured destruction accelerated into high gear. By the mid-fifties, both nations
were testing hydrogen weapons which were thousands of times more powerful than
the bombs used in 1945. The public knew little about what was going on, but the
Castle Bravo 15-megaton H-bomb test in the Bikini Atoll, on March 1, 1954, went
horribly wrong for military planners. The yield was larger than predicted, and
fallout landed on several Japanese fishing boats that were outside the zone of
exclusion. The ship called Lucky Dragon No. 5 arrived back in Japan with the
crew suffering from radiation sickness. The captain died shortly after his
return. The lid of secrecy surrounding nuclear testing was blown off because
Japanese media covered the story intensely, and from there the story went
global. Throughout the season tuna caught in the Pacific continued to test
positive for radiation. This incident triggered the anti-nuclear movement
throughout the world, leading eventually to a ban on atmospheric testing in
1963 signed by the US, UK and USSR.
Britain and France had their own arsenals, with their own
testing programs in Australia, Christmas (Kirimati) Island, French Polynesia
and Algeria. China and France did not sign the Limited Test Ban Treaty and
tested in the atmosphere until 1974 and 1980 respectively. India and Pakistan
conducted all their tests underground. In this century, only North Korea still
conducts tests, while the others make do with sub-critical tests and computer
simulations.
In 1950, the US had about 1,000 nuclear weapons. By 1962,
at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the USSR and the US each had thirty
thousand. Fearing many of their weapons would be hit in pre-emptive strikes, or
that they would miss their targets, they planned for massive redundancy and
overkill with bombs that had yields big enough to render life impossible in areas
the size of the Boston to Washington corridor. One positive result of the Cuban
Missile Crisis was that it moved both sides to sober up. They installed a
“hotline” so that leaders could communicate directly during a crisis. The
process of détente, a general term for the relaxing of tensions between the two
powers, lasted from the late 1960s to the 1980s, and it helped somewhat to
inhibit enthusiasm on both sides for involvement in conflicts in the developing
world.
Newcomers to disarmament studies are confronted with a
bewildering list of acronyms for all the bilateral and international treaties
related to nuclear weapons. Since the early 1960s there has been the Limited
Test Ban Treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Outer Space Treaty, the
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and all the US-Soviet/Russia agreements: SALT I,
SALT II, START I, START II, START III Framework, SORT, New START, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and
others. [4]
The most significant may be the
1968 United Nations Non-Proliferation
Treaty, which most of, but not all of, the world’s nations have signed. [5] The
key stipulation of the treaty is that because non-nuclear states have agreed
not to pursue the possession of nuclear weapons, the states that do possess them
are obligated to work in good faith and a timely manner to eliminate their own
arsenals. The Marshall Islands (now an independent country), with the support
of other Pacific island nations affected by nuclear tests, brought a case to
the International Court of Justice in 2014, charging all nine nuclear armed
countries with failing to act on their obligations to disarm. Even the
non-signatories (India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel) were targeted because
the Marshall Islands case argues that they are still obliged to act under
customary international law.
Presently, only Britain, India and Pakistan have
addressed the charges. The other nuclear powers chose to not respond to the
suit at all. [6] Herein lies a fundamental contradiction of possessing nuclear weapons.
Nuclear armed nations participate in drafting international treaties on nuclear
proliferation and sign them, but possessing nuclear weapons means they can
choose when they do not wish to obey international law. There is no enforcement authority that can
make a nuclear-armed state do what it does not want to do, and this of course
is the reason the weapons are coveted. No one has used a nuclear bomb in
warfare since 1945, but the possessors know that the value of nuclear weapons
is in what is called their “non-explosive uses”–their ability to deter,
intimidate, and hold leverage over others.
Another clause in the Non-Proliferation Treaty guarantees
signatories the right to use nuclear energy if they agree to not pursue the
development of nuclear weapons. A large segment of the global civilian
population finds this unacceptable, believing that because every nuclear energy
program produces fissile material, nuclear energy can never be de-linked from
proliferation. Nuclear energy also produces nuclear accidents and nuclear
waste, so they involve the some of the same unacceptable hazards as weapons.
However, the UN agency that is tasked with guarding against nuclear weapons
proliferation, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is also the global
watchdog and promoter of nuclear energy. It even has veto power over the
research agenda and conclusions of the World Health Organization on matters
related to the health effects of radiation.
In the early 1980s, popular anti-nuclear movements
reached critical mass. In a very different sort of “Manhattan Project,”
1,000,000 anti-nuclear protesters gathered in Central Park, New York in June
1982 to demand a world free of nuclear weapons. Christian evangelical groups
were a reliable source of support for Republicans, but their support of the
anti-nuclear cause worried Ronald Reagan. In his 1983 “evil empire” speech to
evangelicals, he warned them about going soft on their godless adversary. He
had put the world on notice during his first administration that he would take
a hard line against the atheistic empire that he claimed was bent on global
domination. He broke off détente, calling it a “a one-way street that the
Soviet Union has used to pursue its own aims,” [7] and he announced the
space-based anti-ballistic missile initiative that would become known as “Star
Wars,” decisions which critics said went against the provisions of the Outer
Space Treaty and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Star Wars was never
completed, but it served the purpose of striking fear into the leadership of
the Soviet Union that strategic parity would be eliminated by an American
advantage in space-based weapons.
While he came in like a hawk, Ronald Reagan proved
himself to be a leader of puzzling contradictions. He turned out to be a
different kind of cold warrior than many conservatives expected, especially as
his re-election campaign approached. He remained hawkish on all other issues,
and despised for them by his opponents, but nuclear disarmament was one issue
where he charted a unique course. He rejected traditional hardliners who
planned for a winnable nuclear war and declared himself to be dead serious
about the elimination of nuclear weapons. He claimed to have been deeply
affected by the 1951 movie The Day the Earth
Stood Still, and was known to exasperate his staff by commenting repeatedly
that peace would be achieved if the human race faced an alien threat. Other
strong fictional influences were the 1983 films War Games and The Day
After, a television movie which graphically depicted nuclear holocaust in
the American heartland to an enormous prime-time audience of 100 million. [8]
These were instances in which Reagan’s confusion of Hollywood and reality may
have led to something good. By the mid-80s he became worried that his hawkish
policy had spooked the Soviet leadership and alienated the American public
which now wanted a return to détente and a reduction in the number of warheads.
In November 1983 (the same month when The
Day After was broadcast), the Soviets mistook the Able Archer NATO exercise
for the real thing and readied their forces for a nuclear attack. [9] As Reagan
faced re-election, he realized it was time to adopt a softer stance. A few
weeks earlier, Stanislav Petrov, an officer at a Soviet early warning station
was informed by a new computer system that five American missiles were
incoming. Under protocol, he was supposed to inform the higher command, but he
decided, correctly, that it was a false alarm. [10] It is a matter of
speculation as to whether the Soviets would have launched on warning instead of
waiting to confirm nuclear attacks. Some nuclear strategists, such as Robert
McNamara believed it was tacit policy on both sides that no one would be insane
enough to launch on warning. [11] These two near misses weren't revealed until years later, so American audiences watching The Day After were unaware of the ironic relationship between fact and fiction in November 1983.
In the ABC News discussion panel that followed the broadcast of The Day After, (November 20, 1983), Robert McNamara states at the 47:40 mark of the video that both sides clearly understood the madness of launch on warning, but they maintained a position of ambiguity on their policy. He believed they wouldn't launch on warning.
Reagan was able to resist hardliner opinion because,
unlike a Democrat president, there was no opposition to his right when he
decided to engage with Soviet leaders in arms reduction negotiations. Yet in
spite of his intentions, and the credit for ending the Cold War that Americans
would give him, nothing would have changed if his Soviet counterpart had been
anyone other than Mikhail Gorbachev.
In 1987, Reagan challenged Gorbachev in Berlin to “tear
down this wall,” and David Bowie’s concert at the wall the same year did
essentially the same thing. However, in spite of such Western political and
cultural pressures (and self-congratulation for the achievement), the momentum
for reform came from within the Soviet Union. Gorbachev was a sincere reformer
and humanitarian, brutally honest about the failings of the Soviet system and
the need for “new thinking” inside the USSR and in international relations. The
Berlin Wall came down and the Warsaw Bloc collapsed for complex reasons, but
mostly because Gorbachev made it clear he wouldn’t send in the tanks to prop up
the old system. Once it was clear that the East European regimes were on their
own, events followed their natural course. Gorbachev was preoccupied with internal
problems, more focused on economic and political reforms that would turn the
USSR into a multi-party, democratic socialist market system similar to Western
European countries. [12] By the end of the decade, Reagan was saying that his
“evil empire” comment of just a few years earlier was now irrelevant, as it
applied to a bygone era. In 1987, the two superpowers signed the
Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, the Cold War’s most significant
arms-reduction agreement. By the mid-90s, both nations managed to reduce their
arsenals to about 7,000 weapons each, the level at which they still remain.
Many anti-nuclear activists decry the fact that arms
reduction halted at this still-unacceptable level. Seldom discussed is the
questionable theory that the US and Russia both halted progress at this level because they agreed that their massive
arsenals would deter other nations from ever trying to gain equality and thus
nuclear proliferation is actually discouraged by the existence of this absurdly
large number of nuclear warheads (see the comments by General Brent Scowcroft in the video above, 39:00~). [13]
In the 1990s, as the secrecy of the Cold War era faded,
the full impact of the nuclear project started to become apparent. Uranium
miners, military veterans, nuclear workers, downwinders and aboriginal and
minority groups near test sites—in all nations that built weapons—started to
be more aware of the health impacts. Most ominously, it became clear that
genetic damage had been passed onto the children and grandchildren of nuclear
test veterans. [14]
Official recognition and compensation came to some groups
during the Clinton administration when Hazel O’Leary, an outsider to the
organization, took charge of reforming the Department of Energy. Americans
might have been more aware of Clinton’s apology to victims unknowingly
submitted to radiation experiments, but the news was pushed to the back pages
on October 4th, 1995 by the announcement of the OJ Simpson verdict. [15]
In recent years, Gorbachev has spoken often about the
West’s broken promises to not expand NATO eastward, as well as other disastrous
reversals of the trust that was built long ago. This month, 30 years after the
historic 1986 Reykjavik summit with Reagan, Gorbachev noted the betrayal and
disappointment that came after that hopeful time. [16] He said all attempts to
resolve the numerous conflicts of the previous two decades militarily (Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and
Syria) through a “cult of force” have solved no real problems, and only
led to the erosion of international law and the glorification of force. He added, “There has been a collapse of
trust in relations between the world’s leading powers that, according to the UN
Charter, bear primary responsibility for maintaining international peace and
security.” He stated that the international community cannot make
progress toward the goal of a nuclear weapons-free world until the world gets back
to normal politics and international relations are demilitarized.
It is important to mention here that, in contrast to his image in the West as an inspired world leader, Gorbachev has always been despised by millions of people within the former Soviet Union who see him as a betrayer of the revolution. His opponents always said that his latter-day regrets were entirely predictable at the time he was making concessions to the United States. They criticized him at the time for not doing more to hold the union together and not preventing opportunists like Boris Yeltsin from destroying it. Considering the massive suffering that occurred in the former Soviet Union during the 1990s, and damage caused throughout the world by unchecked neoliberalism and American military interventions, there is a strong argument to be made that the disappearance of the Soviet Union was not something to be celebrated. Since many of its reforms had already been successful by the late 1980s, there is no reason to say the union had to disintegrate and socialism had to fail and succumb to the gangster capitalism of the Yeltsin years.
It is important to mention here that, in contrast to his image in the West as an inspired world leader, Gorbachev has always been despised by millions of people within the former Soviet Union who see him as a betrayer of the revolution. His opponents always said that his latter-day regrets were entirely predictable at the time he was making concessions to the United States. They criticized him at the time for not doing more to hold the union together and not preventing opportunists like Boris Yeltsin from destroying it. Considering the massive suffering that occurred in the former Soviet Union during the 1990s, and damage caused throughout the world by unchecked neoliberalism and American military interventions, there is a strong argument to be made that the disappearance of the Soviet Union was not something to be celebrated. Since many of its reforms had already been successful by the late 1980s, there is no reason to say the union had to disintegrate and socialism had to fail and succumb to the gangster capitalism of the Yeltsin years.
In contrast to the days when the West found Gorbachev to
be an international figure of great stature, his recent comments were reported
only in a medium that the Obama administration considers to be a “Russian
propaganda tool.” As a response, Obama counters with $100 million spent on
nurturing Russian dissidents who are, supposedly, going to encourage a
non-existent pro-American constituency within Russia to bring the country into
line. [17] They fail to take note that the only significant opposition to Putin
is in the nationalistic and belligerent parties that think he is too soft on
America.
Amid this stalled progress caused by the deliberate
antagonizing of Russia, President Obama's pledge to work toward a world free of
nuclear weapons (for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009) is a dead
letter. With so many congressional districts addicted to defense spending,
Obama had to exchange the elimination of some aging weapons for the nuclear
weapons modernization plan that will cost $1 trillion over thirty years.
Meanwhile the world sits on a toxic legacy of nuclear
waste that will plague the planet long into the “deep future.” Seventy-four
years after the Manhattan Project began, there are still no proven successful
nuclear waste repositories, and that goes for both military and civilian waste.
After all, how could anyone guarantee perfect containment for 100,000 years,
with no fires, explosions, leaks or intrusions down in the hole?
In addition, sites throughout the country, like West Lake
near St. Louis, and Niagara Falls, New York, are contaminated with wastes from
weapons production. The large former weapons factories in places like Hanford,
Washington, Rocky Flats, Colorado and Paducah, Kentucky (a partial list)
present challenges that will stretch so far into the future that they might as
well be called eternal. The promised cleanups that began decades ago are not
going well. And the same goes for all nuclearized states.
Staff in America’s weapons labs were actually assigned
science fiction creative writing tasks to get them to consider all that could
go wrong with the WIPP nuclear waste storage site in Southeast New Mexico.
Their writing of a scenario known as Free
State of Chihuahua amounted to federal employees envisioning a future when
the federal government no longer exists, a scenario in which New Mexico has
reverted to its previous Mexican and Native American cultures, and impoverished
inhabitants find the WIPP site and start salvaging the “valuable” scraps
within. [18]
This example shows the extent to which the defense
industry is the nation’s make-work program, engaged in elaborate plans to deal
with a waste legacy of monstrous proportions while at the same time adding to
it. The industry may not hire many science fiction writers, but it is often
touted as the last sector of the American economy that manufactures something, that provides high-paying
jobs to engineers and keeps the economy of states like New Mexico viable.
So is it the demand for jobs and economic spin-offs that
leave our world bristling with thousands of nuclear missiles? Is it corporate
lobbying and greed and the need to expand weapons markets that has led to Cold
War II with the extension of NATO to Russia’s border? Can a popular “don’t bank on the bomb” campaign succeed? Would a
boycott of weapons financers work, or does the deadlock need to be broken by
political leadership that has higher aspirations than jobs and profits? Are
there any political leaders on the horizon who can repair the broken trust and
militarized politics that Gorbachev speaks of? President Obama finished his
speech in Hiroshima by saying “we can choose a future in which Hiroshima and
Nagasaki are known not as the dawn of atomic warfare but as the start of our
own moral awakening.” Yes we can, or how about yes he can, for only he has the power to awaken morally to the
implications of his administration’s reckless attempt to provoke and
destabilize Russia, the indispensable nation in his stated ambition to lead the
world toward the elimination of nuclear weapons.
Notes
[1] Joe Copeland, “At Hanford, a chance
for a fuller telling of atomic history,” Crosscut, June 9, 2016.
[2]
Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy:
Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Harvard University Press,
2006).
[3] Marisa
Lagos, “Radiation levels at
Treasure Island sites called no health threat,” SF
Gate, August 28, 2014,
[4] U.S.-Russian Nuclear Arms Control Agreements at a Glance,
Armscontrol.org.
[5] The
Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) at a Glance, Armscontrol.org.
[6] Merritt Kennedy, “Tiny Marshall
Islands Taking On 3 World Nuclear Powers In Court,” National
Public Radio, March 3, 2016,
[7] “Ronald
Reagan’s News Conference—January 29, 1981,” The American Presidency Project.
[8]
Matthew Gault, “This TV Movie About Nuclear War Depressed Ronald Reagan:
‘The Day After’ made the president rethink nuclear proliferation,” War
is Boring, February 19, 2015.
[9] Peter
Beinart, “Think Again: Ronald Reagan,” Foreign Policy, June 2010.
[10] Colin
Freeman, “How
did one grumpy Russian halt Armageddon?” The Telegraph, May 11, 2015.
[11] ABC News Viewpoint: Discussion
panel held immediately after the broadcast of The Day After, November
20, 1983. Robert McNamara states this point from the 47:40 mark of the video.
[12]
Mikhail Gorbachev, Gorbachev: On My
Country and the World (Columbia University Press, 1999) p. 34.
[13] ABC News Viewpoint: Discussion panel held immediately after the broadcast of The Day After, November 20, 1983. General Brent Scowcroft states this point from the 39:00 mark of the video.
[14] Chris
Busby, “Chernobyl, genetic
damage, and the UK nuclear bomb tests - justice at last?” The
Ecologist, May 6, 2016,
[15]
Marlene Cimons, “Clinton Apologizes
for Radiation Tests,”
Los Angeles Times, October 4, 1995.
[16] “Gorbachev warns
world of ‘cult of force,’ says all recent conflicts could have had peaceful
solution,” Russia Today, June 3, 2016.
[17] Ricky
Twisdale, “Nuland to Congress:
We Spend $100 Mil a Year Trying to Destabilize Russia,” Russia
Insider, June 9, 2016.
[18]
Joseph Masco, The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project
in Post-Cold War New Mexico, Princeton University Press, 2006, p. 197-202.
Masco describes the original research document containing the Free State of
Chihuahua scenario: 10,000 Years of
Solitude? published by Los Alamos National Laboratories. The
title chosen by the government scientists is an interesting tip of the hat
toward the Latino heritage of New Mexico and to the magic realism of both
novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez (author of One
Hundred Years of Solitude) and the American nuclear weapons project.
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