Teaching the Cold War in the 21st Century

Teaching the Cold War in the 21st Century

by Dennis Riches

first published September 2015

(revised May 8, 2019)

A quarter century has passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the transformation of China into a commu-capitalist hybrid, and the end of apartheid in South Africa. A new generation has come of age with no direct knowledge of the very different world that existed before these sudden transformations of the late 1980s to early 1990s. Though many would agree that it is important for this generation to understand the history that shaped the contemporary world, most education systems fail to teach modern history because the interpretation of it is still too much in contention.

Perhaps this is so because education systems are designed to function as “systems of enforced ignorance.” [1] Education authorities pay lip service to creativity and the fostering of qualities that come wrapped in the latest jargon, such as “ambiguity tolerance,” but in reality education systems in recent decades have regressed. They have come to place greater emphasis on standardized testing and the memorization of a database of right and wrong answers, while educators avoid criticism from a polarized community that would be quick to accuse them of “politicizing the classroom.” Education systems themselves have been subjected to the victorious ideology of the Cold War that values efficiency and privatization. As a consequence, the young generation has little knowledge of or analytical tools for the events that shaped the world they have inherited.

One might be tempted to scoff at the ignorance of the younger generation, but they can’t be blamed for it. Educators who bear this fact in mind and make the effort to teach modern history can be rewarded with students who are very receptive to a teacher helping them understand the world they inhabit. In addition, there is an advantage in teaching young learners about this topic. They come to it with a blank slate, without the ideological investments of their elders, so they find it much easier to look at it objectively. Yet the topic is diverse, global and multi-faceted, so there are many challenges in covering its scope within the limitations of a single course. The paper that follows suggests a way of studying the component parts of the Cold War so that they can provide a basis for learning about the topic in more depth. This paper outlines this plan with examples of issues that can be covered in each of the sub-topics listed. The discussion makes no attempt to be a comprehensive treatment of the Cold War. Some of the bigger, more well-known chapters, such as Northeast Asia, the numerous conflicts in the Middle East, the fall of the Eastern Bloc, and the Vietnam War, have been deliberately overlooked in favor of some more obscure topics. What I have attempted is to describe a way to set up a few pillars of understanding that learners can use to build their own houses of knowledge.

The analysis pays more attention to American actions during the Cold War, and some educators might believe that the deeds of the Soviet Union should be covered more thoroughly. One reason I chose to pay more attention to American actions is because I used source materials written in English. Many criticisms of the Soviet system written in English have obvious biases against it. They attempt to paint it as a supreme evil that America was justified in fighting by whatever means necessary, even if regrettable methods were sometimes necessary.

It would interest me more to read criticisms of the Soviet system written in Russian and other Slavic languages, but this was not possible. This leads to the other reason for this emphasis. As a person who grew up in a country that was an American ally, I went with the dictum that one should look in the mirror. We should most closely examine the deeds of our own countries over which we have some degree of democratic control, especially in this case since the West supposedly “won the Cold War,” imposed its economic and political system on the globe, and has no one else to blame for the consequences. If anyone feels that such treatment is one-sided, I’ll just say that both systems were and are prone to collapse because so much of the surplus value of their economies was diverted to military spending. The timing of collapse may be the only difference.

(1) The historical roots of the Cold War

The first rule of Cold War studies is no one should talk just about the Cold War. This is because the period cannot be understood correctly if it seen only as a distinct period that was not a continuation existing historical trends. Furthermore, it didn’t really end definitively in 1991, and claims to victory are dubious. Nonetheless, the label persists as a term of convenience, something that even historians continue to use even though many believe that it is a distracting misnomer. We continue to use the term the way many still refer to Native Americans as “Indians.” It is difficult to discuss this period of history without using the name by which everyone knows it. Furthermore, the term is accurate as far as it conveys that nuclear arsenals created a new kind of conflict in which direct “hot” war was highly dis-preferred.

If we really want to understand the Cold War in depth, we need to consider its full context, and this leads to the understanding that it was really the outcome of a historical process that goes back to the voyages of Columbus and de Gama in the 1490s. It was entirely logical to predict in the 19th century that the competition between the “great powers” of the time (Great Britain, Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Russia, Austro-Hungary, Ottoman, Japan, the United States) would eventually, like a sports tournament, come down to a final between the two strongest left standing.  In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville predicted:

There are only two peoples now. Russia is still barbarous, but it is great. The other young nation is America. The future is there between these two great worlds. Someday they will collide, and then we will see struggles of which the past can give no idea.[2]

The early roots of the Cold War are visible in the actions of Czarist Russia and the United States in the 19th century. The Russian Empire expanded as far east as Alaska, into nations that had non-Russian religions, languages and cultures, and the Soviet Union inherited this empire and much of the mentality and bureaucratic structures that had made it.

In the 19th century, the US came to believe that it had to defend its interests beyond its borders. Without carrying out a colonizing mission outside of the continent, the US put the world on notice with the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, claiming that European efforts to colonize or interfere with North or South America would be seen as acts of aggression. Manifest Destiny referred to the United States’ right to expand westward within North America, leading to conflict with Mexico (1846-48) and the “Indian Wars” after the Civil War. The Monroe Doctrine was implemented fully in 1898 in the war with Spain over control of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. The Hawaiian Kingdom was occupied as a strategic necessity in fighting that war, and later under its status as a US territory then a state, unfinished business was never resolved. Under international law, the Hawaiian Kingdom is still a sovereign nation under a state of occupation.[3]

The Spanish-American war established the new norm for America: that isolationism was no longer an option, that it was now necessary to aggressively assert America’s sphere of influence throughout the world. (Yet we should keep in mind that the expansionism wasn’t really new. It started as soon as the first settlers landed on the East Coast and began annexing the established indigenous nations on the continent through genocidal war.) As late as 1963, American politicians cited the Monroe Doctrine as self-evident justification for demanding that communism should have no influence in Cuba or elsewhere in the Americas.

This early expansionist policy existed before there was a nuclear arms race and before there was a communist enemy that could be pointed to as the evil which necessitated American involvement in foreign lands. There is an additional reason why the term “Cold War” is inappropriate. The Soviet Union was devastated at the end of WWII, and had been a formidable military force during the war mainly because of American military aid. It was never close to being a threat to American dominance before or after WWII.

In an interview in which Noam Chomsky discussed Indonesia’s control of East Timor and West Papua, he was asked whether it was related to the Cold War. Looking somewhat weary of talk about the Cold War, he answered:

It didn’t have much to do with the Cold War… the Cold War is always a pretext for everything that happened, but it would have been pretty much the same if Russia didn’t exist. It [Russia] was devastated, demolished. Politics really has yet to recover in any serious way. I’m sure that in West Papua, and East Timor, the other case that falls right within that, there were no Russians.[4]

In the conclusion of his history of the Cold War, O.A. Westad also suggests that America’s actions on the global stage would have been much the same without the Soviet nemesis present:

It is unlikely that historians of the future will date the emergence of the United States as a hyperpower to the beginning of the 1990s; indeed, it is likely that many will see America as entering this phase at the beginning rather than the end of the last [20th] century… the Cold War never saw two equal superpowers—one was distinctly more ‘super’ than the other, even though its power was never limitless. America just had more of everything: power, growth, ideas, modernity.[5]

If Chomsky is right that it would have been the same if Russia didn’t exist, this implies that America’s enemy in the Cold War may not have been a country but an idea—simply the idea that there was an alternative to what America had to offer.

(2) The genesis of the Cold War

The Cold War may be a misnomer, but there were definitely some unique features of the post-WWII world that made people want to coin a new word for it. One common reference point for the start of the Cold War is in the late 1940s—in Winston Churchill’s coining of the term “iron curtain” in 1946, followed by the detonation of the first Soviet atomic weapon in 1949. However, one could look farther back and say that the era really began when the US entered WWII in late 1941. As soon as it became obvious that Japan and Germany were going to lose, planning began for the post-war world, and it was clear that America was going to emerge from the ruins as the predominant world power.

There were alternative views at the time of what the post-war world should be like because the Soviet-British-American alliance had been so successful. The Americans provided materiel to the Soviets through the lend-lease program while the Soviets sacrificed lives to fight Germany on the European eastern front. American and British soldiers of course made significant contributions, but the scale of Soviet losses is seen as the decisive factor that defeated Germany. The Soviet entry into the war against Japan in August 1945 was also a major factor in provoking Japan’s surrender shortly thereafter.

In light of so much co-operation between the US and the USSR, it seemed likely that there would be improved East-West relations, with more economic and cultural integration. There was even a school of thought called “convergence theory” that saw both of the superpowers as materialistic, bureaucratic and technocratic state capitalist economies which would eventually come to resemble each other and form closer relations.[6]

In 1945, it was reasonable to expect that the anti-communist animosities that had followed the Bolshevik Revolution might be forgotten and ideological differences wouldn’t be taken so seriously. After all, Roosevelt’s New Deal and the wartime economy had shown that the state had a positive role to play in the economy, one which greatly benefitted private corporations. One might say that this is exactly what happened with China a few decades later. After President Nixon visited in 1972, China eventually became an undemocratic (by the Western definition) hybrid of communism and capitalism, integrated with Western markets. It is also similar to the relationship between Russia and America that emerged in the 1990s. Communist ideology was no longer a factor. There remained just two oligarchies with their competing claims on spheres of influence.

In the early 1940s, the American War Department support for its Soviet ally was so enthusiastic that it produced a documentary called Why We Fight: The Battle of Russia”[7] which contains a level of pro-Soviet propaganda that is stunning to see in contrast with the reversal of support after the war. In the same Why We Fight series, Japan was utterly demonized and dehumanized, but here too the viewpoint reversed completely after the war.

By late 1945, the US had no interest in continuing the alliance to help the USSR recover. Western leaders were quick to blame Stalin for the Cold War because of his determination to draw an “iron curtain” across Eastern Europe in the immediate aftermath of WWII, but Stalin was dismayed that the West wouldn’t recognize this as a natural claim to a zone of influence that Soviet forces had fought and died for. He was equally dismayed that no Western aid was offered as a sign of appreciation for Soviet sacrifices on the eastern front, and shocked that the atom bombs had been used on civilian populations in Japan. He had known for a couple of years (ironically, long before President Truman knew) that the bombs were being built, but it came as a shock to see America use them on an enemy nation that was soon to be defeated by conventional means. The Soviets interpreted the atomic bombings as a message directed at them, and this fear drove Stalin to recklessly destroy lives and the Southern Urals ecology in order to carry out a crash program of plutonium production using prisoners of war, forced labor and gulag inmates.[8]

The physicist Leo Szilard, one of the lead scientists of the Manhattan Project, was consumed by guilt for his role in building the atomic bombs. He had the same opinion as many in the late days of WWII: the US and the USSR should continue to cooperate, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons should be put under international control. In June 1945, he tried to meet President Truman, but could only get as far as a meeting with a member of Truman’s inner circle, James Byrnes. Little did he know then that Byrnes was the person least likely to sympathize. He was one of the architects of Truman’s post-war policy, a member of the secretive interim committee that was laying plans to take full advantage of the Soviet Union in its moment of weakness. Szilard wrote afterwards, “How much better off the world might be had I been born in America and become influential in American politics, and had Byrnes been born in Hungary and studied physics.”[9]

(3) Ideology and Religion

The foundational ideas of the superpower conflict must be examined, though they are easy to ignore because policies, personalities and historical events can captivate most of the attention. The US and the USSR eventually evolved into two different versions of state capitalism with their own geographical spheres of domination, and the ideological differences could be easily dismissed as an excuse, or a mask for the real motivations for the conflict, but ideology was originally a sincere motivation and for many important actors, such as President Reagan who, in the 1980s, sincerely believed America was in a battle with an evil, atheistic empire determined to conquer the world.

The superpower conflict has always been debated in popular discourse by referring to the various “isms” and ideologies. One side demonized the atheistic ideology of its opponent, while the other called religion an “opiate of the masses.” American commentators often said the opposite of communism was democracy, not capitalism, and instead of taking Marxism seriously as a rigorous critique of capitalism, they confounded it with Stalinism and Maoism, the totalitarian distortions of Marxist and socialist theory. They also greatly exaggerated the extent to which the USSR wanted to, or was able to erase nationalism, ethnic identities, or religion, either Christianity in Russia or Islam in the republics.

The notion that communism was tossed in the dustbin of history has become well established. Even students born after 1990 have internalized the interpretation of Cold War ideology that is standard in the West. I have often heard them preface their criticisms of the contemporary world with comments such as, “I’m not a communist, but…” This indicates that they themselves have undergone some very subtle indoctrination, even though they may believe themselves to be living in free and open societies. They have internalized the notion that Marxism has been thoroughly discredited, so they now have some fear of saying something that lies outside the acceptable norms of thought.

It is a challenge to enter into a discussion of Marxism in order to distinguish it from the systems that claimed to be Marxist, or had to put Marxist goals aside in order to build a strong state and defend against external enemies. The educational effort requires students to learn, for example, that the nationalization of industry actually undertaken by socialist revolutions was something Marx would have dismissed as merely “state capitalism.” Unfortunately, the profound impact of Marxism in the late 19th and 20th centuries vanished in the post-Cold War years in educational programs dominated by neoliberal economics and Western triumphalism.  Yet the 21st century crises of capitalism (financialization, derivatives, the boom and bust cycle, central bank quantitative easing, the rentier economy, speculation on non-productive assets, unrepayable government and private debt, etc…[10]), which were predicted by Marx as the logical end game of capitalism, have led to a renewed interest in Marxism throughout the world. Arthur Knight explains how Marx, influenced by many ideas that existed during his time, predicted the present crises of capitalism:

I propose the End of Capitalism Theory to suggest that at this moment in history, no great new sources of wealth remain to be conquered… the planet is having increased difficulty sustaining the ecological damage produced by capitalist production and waste. These ecological limits are joined by the social limits to growth, manifest in people’s resistance to capitalism all over the world… It is natural to try to make sense of the extremely broad and deep crisis we are living through. As the crisis has dragged on over the last few years, sales of Marx’s Capital have skyrocketed. I suspect people are looking for an explanation for why capitalism has failed.[11]

(4) Eras of the Cold War

One obvious way to study the Cold War is to break it into specific incidents, decades or periods defined by the terms of Soviet or American presidents. A detailed discussion of every possible period is not possible here, but a few examples can be described generally.

The early period of 1945-49 can be seen as a preliminary phase when the iron curtain was drawn across Europe, but one in which America still enjoyed its material advantages and monopoly on nuclear weapons. The 1950s was the period of nuclear paranoia, and domestic witch hunts, when both nations created an overkill of hydrogen bomb arsenals and recklessly polluted the planet with nuclear fallout from bomb tests. This was also the time of de-colonization when the Cold War went global and the US and the USSR began to stake out claims on the de-colonizing nations of Africa and Asia.

After the Cuban Missile Crisis, the 1960s could be seen as a time when leaders on both sides staggered like a couple waking up on Sunday after hosting a drunken orgy the night before. It was time to tacitly admit that some pretty weird stuff had gone down. It was time to check up on the children and evict the unseemly guests sprawled on the floor. They now seemed ready to sober up and resolve some issues that would leave them both with a chance of survival.

After coming close to all-out nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis, atmospheric testing ended, both sides improved communications, and they were careful afterwards not to get into such a situation again. Disarmament talks began in a long process called détente, and the mutual interest in making it work also played a role in turning down the heat in regional conflicts. For example, when Cuba was eager to take its Soviet-made weapons to Africa to assist in anti-colonial wars of independence, the USSR was less enthusiastic because it worried about the American reaction and the effect on détente. When Cuba acted alone, the US could see it only as a Soviet betrayal of the détente process. US officials admitted later that they were slow to understand that it was the tail wagging the dog.[12] Cuba acted alone and only made the USSR reluctantly support the effort through the long Angolan war because Cuba knew it had too much strategic value as a communist nation just off American shores.

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan seemed to be reversing the progress of détente by declaring the Soviet Union an “evil empire” bent on global domination.[13] This was shocking news to the Soviet leadership because by that time global domination was the farthest thing from their minds. They were struggling to deal with economic crises, the war in Afghanistan, internal dissent and American military and economic superiority. The entire system was viewed as aging and discredited by its own people, a condition symbolized by the aging leadership which saw three leaders[14] die between 1982 and 1985: Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko.

Interestingly, during his evil empire speech, Reagan referred to an incident that was “during the time of the Cold War,” as if he was not still in the thick of it and provoking one of its most dangerous moments. When Gorbachev came to power, openly admitting to the need for openness and reform (glasnost and perestroika), Reagan unexpectedly became the only president who was able to negotiate significant reductions in nuclear stockpiles and achieve an enduring friendship with a Soviet leader. For Reagan it was a combination of good timing, Gorbachev’s willingness to work on the relationship over four summit meetings between 1985 and 1988, and the fact that Reagan had no opposition to the right of him. A Democratic president never could have risked the political backlash involved in warming up to a Soviet leader and making deep cuts to the nuclear arsenal. The Americans were also playing hardball behind the scenes—outspending the Soviets, frightening them with space-based weapons programs, supplying Muslim fighters in Afghanistan with stinger missiles, and undertaking a massive overt propaganda campaign promoting “democracy” through such organizations as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). It was also very convenient that OPEC kept world oil prices low because as a result the USSR’s export revenue dropped. The Chernobyl catastrophe came as a crippling blow that diminished Soviet citizens’ faith in the Soviet system. Gorbachev later pointed to it as the event that led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union:

The nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl …, even more than my launch of perestroika, was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union five years later. Indeed, the Chernobyl catastrophe was an historic turning point: there was the era before the disaster, and there is the very different era that has followed.[15]

  

(5) Colonialism, De-colonization and Independence:

Two American soldiers on a transport plane heading for Central America: 1st soldier: Any word on where we’re heading? 2nd soldier: I hear it’s San Marcos. 1st soldier: For or against the government? 2nd soldier: The CIA is not taking any chances. Some of us are for it, and some of us are going to be against it. from Woody Allen’s film Bananas, 1971

For the historian Odd Arne Westad, author of The Global Cold War, the global impact of the Cold War was its defining feature. Many analysts of the time tended to focus on the iron curtain in Europe and the fear of a hot war, and thus a nuclear war, erupting over Germany or other territory in Eastern Europe. However, it was precisely the dread of such a conflict that forced the superpowers to exert their influence in other parts of the world. Westad concludes his book by stating:

… the dual process of de-colonization and Third World radicalization were not in themselves products of the Cold War, [but] they were influenced by it in ways that became critically important and that formed a large part of the world as we know it today… they formed a pattern that has had disastrous consequences for today’s relationship between the pan-European states and other parts of the world.[16]

Westad’s book provides excellent coverage of the diverse regions of the world that were disrupted and often devastated by superpower rivalries, some of which were scarcely reported on at the time such as the civil wars in Yemen and Ethiopia. What stands out in his descriptions is the extent to which popular perceptions in the West, among the public and high-level officials, so badly misunderstood the complexities of these conflicts. They tended to exaggerate the ambitions and the strengths of their rival, not always for propaganda purposes but often out of sheer ignorance. The historian Greg Gandin wrote of Henry Kissinger’s foreign policy record:

Kissinger was absolutely blind to the fundamental feebleness and inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union… none of the lives Kissinger sacrificed in Cambodia, Laos, Angola, Mozambique, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, East Timor, and Bangladesh made one bit of difference in the outcome of the Cold War. Similarly, each of Kissinger’s Middle East initiatives has been disastrous in the long run.[17]

The thinking of Soviet planners was still shaped by Marxist theory that saw revolution as evolution, so they were hesitant to export revolution to parts of the world that were culturally unprepared for it. Cuba made a disastrous error in this regard when it sent Che Guevara to the Congo in the 1960s. When the Cuban soldiers tried to train rebel forces according to European military traditions, they realized that the African soldiers had no political education or awareness of what the struggle was about. They brought relatives with them on military campaigns, as well as phonograph players that they played within earshot of the enemy. They refused to crouch in trenches because the ground was a place only for the dead.[18] The Cubans had to withdraw and reassess their plans for fostering anti-imperialist resistance in Africa.

Although the de-colonizing nations may not have been ready for Marxist revolution, they were poor and emerging from long oppression by European capitalist states, so the American model looked like more of the same while Marxism and the Soviet model had obvious appeal as an alternative. Furthermore, with the CIA actively working to establish pro-American regimes, people who wanted an alternative had no choice but to seek Soviet support. It was often the case of the tail wagging the dog. Many of the leaders in newly independent nations had a very thin commitment to, or even an understanding of ideology, and they were happy to play both sides off each other to get the highest level of support possible. They also insisted on not being bossed around by Moscow or Washington, as they wanted to find the type of socialism or market economy that suited their needs best. The Soviets came into many Third World conflicts reluctantly, wary of the costs, the likelihood of failure, and the consequences of upsetting ongoing negotiations with the US over arms reduction or conflicts in other regions. In contrast, it was the Americans who often came with ideological zeal and blinders on, convinced that the entire world was ready for the American model of capitalism and democracy. Such enthusiasm didn’t end when the USSR collapsed.

One of the largest and most tragic failed interventions was Afghanistan in the 1980s, where competing communist factions abused Soviet aid to engage in petty power struggles while they bungled the struggle in the countryside where foreign-born Islamic radicals were gaining strength. Early in the Soviet involvement, some Soviet planners advised withdrawal because of the obvious lack of popular support and understanding of communism, and because of the tragi-comic incompetence of the Afghan communist factions that were vying for power. But bureaucratic inertia, as well as worries about religious fundamentalist revolution spilling from Iran north and east into Soviet republics, kept the project moving until it was too late to get out of it unscathed. All this time, Americans demonized the Soviets as eager aggressors, while the Soviets perceived their quagmire as something they had been dragged into reluctantly.

Another facet of the regional conflicts that is badly misunderstood is that they were usually very slow to escalate to a full level of commitment by either the US or the USSR. During the 1950s, the Cuban regime of Battista was decried as a puppet of Washington, but many in Washington, including Senator John F. Kennedy, were eager to see him replaced by a moderate reformer, and thus Cuba was under sanctions before Castro seized power. Many people who defected from Castro’s Cuba had fought in the struggle against the old regime.

It was a similar situation in Indonesia throughout the 1950s where Sukarno was seen as a moderate whom the US could work with, the only leader who could hold the diverse and fractious nation together. Sukarno hosted the first meeting of the moderate Non-Aligned Movement in 1955, which was a coalition of African and Asian nations that wanted to pursue independence without an exclusive reliance on the superpowers. Sukarno’s relationship with the US deteriorated slowly over many years as the US became worried about the “domino effect” of one nation after another falling to communism. As a reaction, Sukarno became frustrated with American intolerance of any policy that had a trace of socialism in it, so he began to look elsewhere for support. After he was deposed in a coup, and after the anti-communist genocide in Indonesia, he was erroneously remembered only as the anti-American foe he had been in the final years.

(6) The Domestic Impact of the Nuclear Arms Race and the Cold War

Noam Chomsky wrote in 2014, “If some extraterrestrial species were compiling a history of Homo sapiens, they might well break their calendar into two eras: BNW (before nuclear weapons) and NWE (the nuclear weapons era).”[19] This quote stresses what was profoundly unique about the historical period that began in 1945. One facet of the Cold War was regional conflicts, ideology, and the comings and goings of particular leaders—all the familiar aspects of politics as they had always been. Another facet was the emergence of this new era when humanity held in its hand the capacity to destroy itself in the span of a single day.

The impact of this change is often underestimated because its effects have become normalized and pervasive. Nuclear technology is the air we breathe, figuratively and literally in the sense that plutonium, a substance that didn’t exist before the 1940s, can now be detected in all animal tissue. A thorough study of the social effects of the nuclear era can be found in Joseph Masco’s 2006 book Nuclear Borderlands. A segment of the epilog appears below. While it refers to American society, one can assume the same description applies to every nation that built nuclear weapons:

… the Manhattan Project put in motion a revolution in American society, creating the concept of the nuclear superpower, making technoscience one of the key US national projects of the twentieth century, installing a new system of secrecy within American democracy, and beginning a new kind of nation-building built on nuclear fear. Consequently, the Manhattan Project is now best thought of as a multigenerational social mutation, one that has not only transformed the earth’s surface into a biosocial experiment, but that has also provided the core structures for organizing both American society and the international order. In the twentieth century, the United States did not just build the bomb; it built itself through the bomb. The sheer scale of the technoscientific infrastructure, the institutional collaborations, the economic investment, and the environmental effects of that ongoing project now link every citizen directly to the Manhattan Project, marking them as national subjects, as members of a military-industrial economy, as residents of the United States, and as biological beings.[20]

Specifically, what did it mean to be involved in “a new kind of nation-building built on nuclear fear”? For example, in the US it led to the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1950s in which education, government bureaucracies, the military, political parties, the mass media and the entertainment industry were purged of anyone who had the an association with leftist political beliefs. David Talbot noted in his study of the CIA that the purges ended only when the CIA refused to answer a subpoena to the House Unamerican Activities Committee. It was a notorious public slapdown of Senator Joseph McCarthy that turned out to be the beginning of the end for the infamous communist witch hunt. [21]

During the Cold War the population learned to censor itself and implicitly understand the new boundaries of permissible thought. New national security institutions were created. The population had to be treated with suspicion in order to keep it safe. These institutions were so well-rooted by the time the Soviet threat vanished that they simply could not cease to exist. They found a new raison d’être after 2001 when terrorism was substituted for communism, and later when rival “great powers” were enlisted as the new “adversaries.”

The possession of nuclear weapons made nations anti-democratic, less free, and obsessed with security. This trend was observed in any nation that wanted nuclear weapons. In the USSR, Stalin’s repressive regime and gulag already existed before WWII, so the necessary system already existed when the nuclear project began.

In France, the nuclear weapons program, and later the nuclear energy program, was enacted without public debate or votes in the National Assembly. French territories outside the hexagone (France proper) were subjected to the ecological damage of nuclear weapons tests. In 1985, the French secret service sank the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior, killing one crew member. It was a state-sponsored act of terrorism on the territory of New Zealand, a Western ally, conducted in order to stop the group from protesting nuclear weapons testing. Margaret Pope, the wife of David Lange (New Zealand prime minister at the time) said about the incident, “I think it settled him [Lange] in his view of what nuclear politics did to people, especially countries like France. It made them utterly unprincipled.”[22]

The international community has always expressed great satisfaction that since August 9, 1945, nuclear weapons have never been used during wartime against an enemy, but this pride has overshadowed the disastrous effects, and the eternal toxic legacy of nuclear weapons manufacture and testing. The US and USSR, and other nuclear powers, subjected minority and marginal groups to nuclear tests in remote locations that put the tests beyond the awareness of voters.[23] If international law could be applied to the nuclear powers (all of them members of the UN Security Council), these testing programs would be deemed as war crimes, or “Cold War crimes,” but instead they hardly register in the popular consciousness of the nations that conducted them.

Nuclear powers also subjected their nuclear workforces to contamination and risks that resulted in a largely unquantified, but undoubtedly huge toll of disease and shortened lives. In this regard, it is likely that the Manhattan Project took more American lives in slow motion than it took in the two explosions in Japan. Stalin’s crash program to build a bomb in the late 1940s was a callous, reckless project that created, through both routine operations and accidents, a public health and environmental catastrophe in the Southern Urals that was arguably equal to, or worse than, the Chernobyl catastrophe, depending on how one decides to qualify the damage.[24]

The historian Kate Brown has described in detail the human cost of the atomic bomb programs of the US and USSR by comparing the two towns in each country—the two “plutopias”—where plutonium was made. She noted that life in the American town where plutonium was made from the 1940s to 1960s, (Richland, Washington), “epitomizes a lot of shifts we find in American society in the post-war years… making these kinds of exchange of body rights, rights over one’s body [submitting to the risk of workplace contamination with plutonium], and civil rights and freedoms for consumer rights and financial security, and national security made sense to a lot of Americans, not just people in Richland.”[25]

Kate Brown’s book on this topic[26] pointed out the many uncanny similarities that evolved between the social structures of the US and the USSR in the towns where plutonium was made, similarities that contradicted ideology and popular national self-conceptions. The similarities are outlined in Tables 1 and 2 below. In essence, American workers gave up rights and freedoms, while Soviet managers adopted a policy of inequality and elite privilege in order to foster a loyal workforce that would keep secrets and accept the risks of working with nuclear materials. These effects spread to some degree outside of these plutopias to all aspects of society, a phenomenon which supports the convergence theory mentioned above. Both nations were transforming themselves into versions of state capitalism. America’s bombs and weapons were built by private corporations, but the flow of profits depended on the state directing resources to them. Soviet state-owned industries just lacked a stock market where private investors could access the profits of military production.

Nonetheless, the USSR developed an interest in competing with America to provide “the good life” to its workers, if not to stockholders. On a visit to Moscow in 1959, Vice President Richard Nixon challenged Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to provide more and better consumer goods for the masses, and he took the bait. From then on, both countries implicitly acknowledged the importance of providing citizens with material comforts, while politics, sacrifice and the struggle to build a just society took a back seat.

Table 1

Ideals of American Capitalism and Soviet Communism

		American Capitalism	Soviet Communism
1	Property	private	state-owned
2	Individual Outcomes	unequal	equal
3	Economy	free market	directed by the state
4	Speech	free	state-controlled
5	Individual Motivation	enlightened self-interest	enlightened self-sacrifice
6	Value of the Individual	primary	secondary to the collective

Table 2

The actual values adopted in both of the superpowers’ plutonium cities:

Richland, USA and Ozersk, USSR

		Ozersk-Richland Hybrid Economic and Social Order
1	Property	state-owned
2	Individual Outcomes	unequal
3	Economy	directed by the state, licensed monopolies
4	Speech	state-controlled
5	Individual Motivation	enlightened self-interest
6	Value of the Individual	secondary to the collective

(7) Aid and Trade

The study of history is often dominated by the drama of war, so it is easy to overlook the fact that non-military attempts to control markets and resources were the motivations that sometimes required the use of force. After the USSR established a buffer zone called the Eastern Bloc between itself and Western Europe, staking out its right to have this sphere of influence, it preferred to get involved in regional conflicts only when regions sought an alternative to Western economic hegemony or seemed ripe for socialist transformation. The USSR had all the natural resources it needed, and had no corporations demanding profit from overseas mines and plantations. The USSR did its colonizing and exploitation in the republics within the union. Kazakhstan, for example, was inflicted with the Aral Sea ecological catastrophe and the fallout from 340 underground and 116 atmospheric nuclear tests.

In Latin America, Africa and Asia, 19th century Western colonialism had been, and 20th century capitalism was, the aggressive force that was imposed on the Third World, while communism was something new—an alternative that could be turned to as a way to fight against imperialist aggression. American officials and some historians might have often described Soviet actions as “naked aggression” and other such terms, but such double-speak should not be surprising. The sight of the natives defending themselves has often been labelled “aggression.”

Western economists have always argued that capitalism lifted more people out of poverty than communism, with Taiwan, South Korea and Japan held up as the model pupils. Yet from these successes it doesn’t follow logically that they could have been duplicated everywhere. Nor does it follow that the USSR had ever promised that it could lift the world out of poverty while being opposed on every front, especially in the timeframe implied by the people making these comparisons. Furthermore, a few decades of prosperity proves little about the ability of the “Asian Tigers” to create long-lasting prosperity.

Anyone who sees the USSR as having been the supreme threat forgets that it was Marx himself who predicted correctly that the United States would become the main revolutionary power of the 20th century. The US defeated Germany, Japan and the USSR and established a global US dollar-based economic system. This victory does not mean it was benign or morally good in the places it touched. While it is common to accuse communists of being naïve about how much human nature could bend to its ideals, the American mission has been blind to its own naiveté regarding how much the Third World would welcome or adapt to the American model of capitalism and democracy. Hindsight on the 21st century American interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria are cases in point. For many nations, the economic medicine prescribed by America failed, guaranteeing that they would turn to fundamentalist religion, nationalism or socialism as alternatives. The disaster didn’t end when the USSR collapsed in 1991.

Perhaps the most drastic period of American economic intervention was in the 1980s. In a chapter called Aid, Trade and Ideology, Westad describes the role of Reagan’s economic policy in fighting the last decade of the Cold War:  

From the outset the Reagan administration was much more intent than any previous government had been in using economic warfare against its enemies through hitting at their trade, currency and credit… As a key survey of the international economy since 1945 notes, Reagan’s policies were not only “predetermined and ideological,” but “aggressively selfish.” The model of development that the Washington Consensus prescribed to Third World countries—and which its emissaries forced the implementation of with near religious zeal—was considerably less flexible than the policies the United States allowed itself. In addition to budget austerity and devaluation, it consisted of price and trade liberalization, privatization, and—in some cases—the wholesale abolishment of public services… These countries saw a massive increase in poverty which had or are now having disastrous effects on their political stability or even national cohesion.[27]

Descriptions such as this underscore the importance of looking beyond military conflicts in order to understand the Cold War.

(8) Specific Incidents

Cold War history can be approached through the study of specific incidents in which several of the sub-topics covered above all come together. However, it can be difficult to discuss these with students if they are not aware of the context and background. A few examples of incidents that could be studied are the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Reagan-Gorbachev summit meetings, the launch of Sputnik and the space race, the Berlin Blockade, the fall of the Berlin Wall, to mention only a few. The Cuban Missile Crisis is discussed below in order to outline how one incident highlighted some fundamental aspects of the Cold War.

The Cuban Revolution portrayed how the failure of American economic and political models led an impoverished nation to communist revolution. The unlikely victory of Fidel Castro’s outgunned and inexperienced forces showed that both East and West were not in control and were unprepared for such unexpected turns. The Soviets, following Marxist theory, were looking elsewhere for nations that might be on a Marxist “natural path” toward revolution. It was supposed to happen in a society with an industrial proletariat, not in an economy based on sugar cane and casinos ninety miles from American shores. For the Soviet leadership, it was a complete surprise, but one which they took full advantage of to get a strategic foothold in the Americas.

The American reaction revealed a policy, in fact an implicit popular belief, that international law need not be a concern when America felt its strategic interests were threatened.[28] It invaded Cuba in the failed Bay of Pigs attack, and it made numerous covert attempts on Castro’s life. Most American interventions elsewhere consisted of a faltering pro-American regime allowing or asking for American assistance, or America giving assistance to one side in a civil war. But Cuba was a sovereign nation that posed no threat to America. No stretched interpretation of international law could have provided an excuse for military aggression against it, but within America the “right” to invade or topple the Castro regime was an uncontroversial notion.

During the missile crisis, when America had clearly announced to the world that it was preparing an aerial invasion, Cuba shot down an American reconnaissance plane flying over Cuban territory. In an American documentary about the crisis, made over forty years later, an advisor to President Kennedy interviewed in the film still described this defensive action as an “act of war, by the Russians” and a dangerous escalation of the crisis.[29]

The most striking feature of the crisis was the speed with which it arrived at the brink of total nuclear war, which everyone at the time understood to mean there would be no winner. Civilization would be gone, the environment would be destroyed, and survivors would be living in the Stone Age. People within Kennedy’s cabinet during the thirteen days of the crisis told each other one evening to enjoy the sunset because they were aware it might be the last one they would see. Yet even though everyone understood this situation, Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro let it get to this point before offering each other ways out or suggesting points they would compromise on.

While the technology enabling long-distance phone calls had been around for a while, there wasn’t even any means for the leaders of the two most powerful nations on earth to speak directly with each other. Each side was left to wonder if the head of state was really in charge or whether military leaders might be in charge and planning to do something reckless. This was three years after Nixon and Khrushchev had had their friendly “kitchen debate” in Moscow. They were able to talk then about the quality of kitchen appliances in their respective countries, but now in the midst of an existential crisis, lines of communication didn’t exist. Communiques had to move with costly delays through telegraph messages passed via the respective embassies in Washington and Moscow. A hotline was established only after the crisis.

During the crisis, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff were recommending that Kennedy launch a massive air assault on the Soviet missiles that had been installed in Cuba, assuming hopefully that none of the missiles were ready to launch and loaded with nuclear warheads. It was revealed many years later that Khrushchev had ordered the warheads to be stored securely away from the missiles, and the Americans assumed this would be done, but they had no way to be certain that some warheads had not been loaded during this tense time when Cuba was about to be bombed and invaded.[30] In this we see an utter disregard for the environmental contamination that would have been caused by destroying nuclear warheads, even if nuclear detonations could have been avoided. The plan was to destroy the missiles without causing nuclear detonations (and before a single one could be launched in retaliation), but even if it had succeeded, there would have been a vast contamination of Cuba, the Southeast US, and the Caribbean if warheads, not just the missiles, had been destroyed. The conventional bombing and subsequent fires would have released plutonium and uranium into the wind. There were also 100 tactical nuclear weapons in Cuba at the time which the Americans didn’t know about.

In 1966, a B-52 bomber crashed over Spain and deposited just one shattered hydrogen bomb near the town of Palomares. The cleanup cost millions of dollars yet a sacrifice zone still remains. Everyone involved in the Cuban Missile Crisis had had their thinking shaped by fighting WWII, so they were not even aware of these extreme hazards of nuclear materials. In 1962, environmental consciousness was fairly limited. Curtis Le May, the general planning the attack, was still thinking in terms of the WWII air raids he had led twenty years earlier.

The Soviets were equally reckless merely by the decision to let a good part of their nuclear arsenal go to the opposite side of the world to be left with a government they had very little experience with. They sent nuclear-armed submarines, designed for Arctic waters, to distant tropical waters where they lost contact with Moscow. Once the missiles and bombs were in Cuba, any independent action by Castro could have upset the fragile agreements that the superpowers were trying to come to. After the crisis, Castro was furious that the Soviets had backed down and agreed to remove the missiles. As compensation, he wanted to keep the 100 tactical nuclear weapons which the Americans didn’t know about. The Soviets considered it for a time, but soon realized they could not risk having any of their arsenal outside of their direct control. They insisted on taking them all back.[31]

What Castro may not have understood about his ally was that the missiles sent to Cuba were primarily to be a bargaining chip to get American missiles out of Turkey. Castro saw possession of nuclear weapons as the only way to deter further American aggression, and he had thought the Soviets were committed to providing this shield. The Americans could have avoided the crisis before it ever happened by recognizing that the missiles in Turkey were too close to Moscow for the Soviets to tolerate. They were, by American admission before the crisis, outdated and in need of removal, but they were kept to make Turkey and other NATO allies feel secure. In a review of The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory, Benjamin Schwarz summarized how the book’s author, Sheldon M. Stern, overturned the long-held view that Kennedy heroically led America away from the nuclear brink. In fact, Stern shows that Kennedy took the world recklessly to the brink, then, once there, endangered the world further by prioritizing political survival and saving face. Kennedy could not let Republicans portray him to domestic voters as weak, and America had to show the world that it would not back down in the face of a challenge or easily give up its goal of overthrowing Castro.

In spite of what was said at the time, and repeated in histories that came later, the record shows that at the time American officials knew that the missiles in Cuba didn’t alter the strategic balance. They also knew that American missiles in Turkey had upset the balance because they required hours to prepare for launch. This meant that they had no deterrent effect and were only destabilizing because they were useful only for a first strike, or they were a target to be taken out by a Soviet first strike. Everyone knew this and knew that this was the primary motivation for the Soviets to put missiles in Cuba. Everyone also knew that Americans had overall superiority in nuclear weapons and a sufficient deterrent capacity, regardless of any missiles that might be deployed in Cuba for Cuba’s own deterrent purposes.

It should have also been obvious to world opinion, if not American perceptions, that if one country could have nuclear weapons, any country could have nuclear weapons. Cuba had as much right as Japan to ask to be put under the nuclear umbrella of an ally. It was the blockade of Cuba during the crisis, euphemistically called a “quarantine,” which was illegal. Khrushchev is often described as “crazy” for having sent the missiles to Cuba, but it is possible that he reasonably expected that the right to do so would be accepted just as the Soviets had accepted missiles in Turkey without threatening to invade Turkey and start WWIII. He was reckless only because he believed Americans would accept the situation. At the core of the crisis was the basic hypocrisy that still exists: only a few privileged nations are allowed to have nuclear weapons and decide where and how they can be deployed.[32]

By the time the Americans offered to remove the missiles in Turkey, the Soviets were just as terrified as anyone and eager to back out of the crisis. They even agreed to make the withdrawal of the Turkish missiles a secret that wouldn’t be revealed to the public in either country. Kennedy also promised to stop aggression against Cuba, another gesture that could have been made long before the crisis developed, seeing as how it went against international law and the UN Charter to interfere in the internal affairs of sovereign nations, or to threaten war or make war on them. Nonetheless, even on the eve of the planned massive air raid on Cuba that had a 50-50 chance of resulting in global nuclear war, Kennedy was worried about losing face domestically and internationally—worried more about the political fallout than the radioactive fallout. It is to his credit that, as the audio recordings he made during the thirteen days reveal, in the end he didn’t listen to the hawkish advice of the men around him. Almost all of them, including Robert Kennedy, had pushed for invasion and bombing of Cuba, and Sheldon Stern’s book on these recordings (see note 30) suggests that if anyone else had been president, nuclear war would not have been avoided.

At the approximate mid-point of the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis may be the best single episode of it for highlighting many of its important characteristics. The willingness of the superpowers to risk nuclear holocaust revealed their ugly priorities and the sorts of lesser damage that they would tolerate to pursue their goals. As humanity faced up to the real possibility of nuclear war for the first time, it was a stark revelation of the new frontier in human awareness that the nuclear age ushered in. By 1968, an entire generation of youth in Chicago, Paris and Prague would be on the streets protesting this world that their elders had created for them.

Throughout the crisis, and after facing the threat of total destruction, the two superpowers never recognized their own fundamental hypocrisy. By claiming the right to have thousands of nuclear weapons for their own security, they could not recognize that smaller nations like Cuba would want them too for the same deterrent purposes. In fact, with a disadvantage in conventional weapons, smaller nations had more reason to want a nuclear deterrent. The crisis could have been avoided if America had simply accepted Cuba’s nuclear arsenal for the time being and then begun leading the world out of the arms race—through the example of unilateral reductions if necessary. That was always an option, if one was truly interested in avoiding the risk of accidentally stumbling into a nuclear conflict. The crisis could be traced back precisely to America’s refusal to follow Leo Szilard’s advice to put nuclear weapons under a system of international control. It is always worth bearing in mind that this option was inconceivable while Kennedy, who is often called the wise statesman who guided America to safety, preferred wading deeper into a crisis with a non-negligible risk of turning into full nuclear war.

The Cuban Missile Crisis demonstrates this recklessness, and it also shows how the superpowers used small nations as strategic pawns. On the other hand, it showed how the weaker nations, like Cuba in this case, could take their masters on a wild ride that they were utterly unprepared for. The superpowers were often undermined and redirected by allies who had divergent agendas, or by others who aspired to achieve or retrieve their own great nation status. Ultimately, some of them ended up only wanting to break free. The 1979 revolution in Iran led to the rise of Third World rejection of both the “evil empires” that both had, after all, common roots in European Christian culture.

(9) Beyond the Two Superpowers

This influence of smaller nations on the Cold War illustrates that late 20th century world history wasn’t only the story of the superpower rivalry. China was an obvious power to contend with during the Cold War, and when it went communist in 1949, Americans feared that all of Southeast Asia would fall like dominoes. But a rift formed between the USSR and China, and China was beset internally by famine and the Cultural Revolution through the 1950s and 1960s. Furthermore, its nuclear arsenal numbered in the hundreds, not in the tens of thousands, as was the case in both the US and USSR. After Nixon visited in 1972, China faded in American perceptions as a threat.

Israel and France present the most peculiar examples of American allies which might be best understood as “frenemies.” They often acted like high ranking members of a criminal gang. They usually made outward displays of loyalty to the boss, but they often pursued side-agendas which conflicted with the boss’s interests. Both France and Israel were motivated by the memory of being disempowered during WWII, so much of their behavior after the war can be understood as a desire to never again be dependent on others for security.

France could have lived under America’s nuclear umbrella, but it chose to develop its own nuclear arsenal, and later an extensive nuclear energy infrastructure. While doing so, it secretly helped Israel build its own nuclear weapons in the 1950s and it accepted Iran (during the regime of the Shah) as a major creditor for a one billion-dollar loan for the Eurodif uranium enrichment plant. Iran was hoping to develop its own nuclear power plants and was looking forward to using the enriched uranium. It was promised 10% of production in exchange for providing the loan. However, after the Iranian revolution, it became unthinkable for any Western nation to supply enriched uranium to Iran. Iran insisted on repayment of its investment in the enrichment facility, but France refused to recognize the commitment that was made to the previous regime. A wave of terror attacks in France followed throughout the 1980s. Though they could never be definitively linked to Iran, the French security services may have known something they didn’t want to share. The attacks were simply explained to the public as “Islamic terror,” but they ended in 1991 as soon as a deal was negotiated and France paid back the loan.[33]  

Israel behaved in a similar way toward its American protector and benefactor: don’t ask permission; act first, then apologize later when what’s done cannot be undone. America didn’t want any nation in the Middle East to have nuclear weapons, but by the time Israel had obtained its weapons (the existence of which it still won’t confirm or deny), they had to be accepted as a fait accompli. During the writing of this paper (September 2015), the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) General Conference rejected a resolution (61 to 43) that would have required IAEA inspection of Israel’s nuclear facilities. The resolution was rejected thanks to Israel’s traditional allies such as the US, various EU members, Australia, Japan, South Korea and Canada.[34] The rejection of the resolution went unreported in the New York Times during a month when it published several stories on actions taken to end Iran’s nuclear program—one which never produced a single bomb.

In order to build a nuclear arsenal and reclaim its standing as a pre-eminent nation, France had to secure supplies of uranium and oil, and to do this it needed to re-establish its control of its former colonies. In this it succeeded quite well, during a time when the popular conception of the world was that only two superpowers were contending for every region of the Third World. Roger Lokongo notes the importance and the scale of the French arrangement in Africa:

West and Central Africa are the constituents of the so-called “Françafrique,” meaning that since independence they have kept close ties with France, the former colonial power, with which they are bound not only by defense agreements but also by a common currency, the CFA franc, which was pegged to the French franc, and therefore to the French Treasury, but is now pegged to the euro… former President Jacques Chirac acknowledged in 2008 that “without Africa, France will slide down into the rank of a third [world] power.” Chirac’s predecessor François Mitterand already prophesied in 1957 that “Without Africa, France will have no history in the 21st century.”[35]

A further striking reminder of France’s impact on Africa was the Rwandan genocide of 1994. The “superpower” conflict preceding the genocide was between France and the US, as France feared that African nations were showing an interest in adopting English as an official language and joining the American sphere of influence on the continent. France had been backing the Hutu-led government (who became the perpetrators of the genocide) for a long time in the Hutu-Tutsi conflict, which had also spilled over into countries surrounding Rwanda, while America had been assisting the Tutsi rebels based in Uganda—encouraging their invasion of Rwanda at the same time President Bush “drew a line in the sand” over Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. France maintained its support for the Hutus throughout the genocide and arranged for safe passage out of Rwanda when the tide turned against the Hutus. In all of this, the Soviet empire was long gone, and there were no Russians anywhere to be seen.[36] This roles played by two NATO allies was a major underlying cause of the genocide and the wider pan-African war that followed, yet Western discourse on the subject has shown a tendency to dwell more on the notion that President Clinton was merely too distracted in April 1994 to organize a timely American-led intervention.

 (10) Cold War II

In 2012, John Wiener published his book How We Forgot the Cold War[37] in which he followed up on the efforts of conservative American politicians in the 1990s to commemorate “American victory” in the Cold War. Across the country numerous museums and memorials were set up to patriotically commemorate events of the era. He found to his surprise that these sites were ignored by both local people and visitors. America no longer had any interest in the Cold War, nor was it interested in the patriotic narrative that these initiatives had wanted to convey.

The end of the Cold War also created complacency about the risk of nuclear war, while American interventions continued and terrorism became an easy substitute for communism in the national security apparatus.

The combined nuclear arsenals of the two superpowers have decreased from a 1985 peak of about 60,000 warheads to about 16,000 in 2013. The total of the arsenals of the other eight nations that possess nuclear weapons remained unchanged and now amounts to a little over 1,000.[38] Russia’s economic weakness in the 1990s and its lack of hostility toward the US caused people to feel that the threat of nuclear Armageddon was a danger that had passed. Yet 60,000 warheads and 16,000 warheads are both figures that represent redundant overkill—both are enough to create a game-over situation for humanity. Hundreds of the weapons in each country have always remained on ready-to-launch status, which means that the world is still vulnerable to sabotage, command and control failures, theft of nuclear weapons and their use by rogue actors, and misunderstandings about whether the enemy has launched a first strike.

Additionally, the public seemed to not notice that all the nuclear powers stopped talking about further reductions after the 1990s, and in fact they have committed themselves to the tremendous expense of renewing nuclear weapons, claiming they are essential for national security. The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (1996) includes a loophole that renders it effectively meaningless. It would allow America to resume tests if US scientists ever “lost confidence” that bombs would function.[39] In retrospect, one might wonder if the arms reductions of the early 1990s were a cynical deal worked out by the technoscientific managers in both countries to create the illusion of safety and progress. In addition to the strategic issues, the financial incentives are enormous. In effect, the apparent progress functioned to keep the global nuclear enterprise alive while “disarming” the disarmament movement.

It was understandable that Americans would become complacent while Russia was weak, but this situation didn’t last. Ironically, the year when How We Forgot the Cold War was published was about the same time that Americans started to remember it all too well. Russia and America supported opposite sides of the Syrian conflict, then in 2014 America backed a coup in Ukraine in a continuing effort to expand NATO eastward. Suddenly the Western media was full of anti-Russia and anti-Putin messages. It was just like the old days. Russia acted to hold onto its bases in Crimea, which it claimed a right to under existing treaties. There was also raging debate about whether Russia had acted in a responsible way to protect ethnically Russian populations in Eastern Ukraine, or whether it had launched an aggression there and “annexed” Crimea. America enacted economic sanctions on Russia for being upset with the encroachment of NATO on its traditional sphere of influence. All of this has happened at a time when America and Russia need to cooperate in order to resolve crises in other parts of the world. It seems the prediction made by de Tocqueville in 1835, which had no definitive end date, still holds true. I finish this section with the following quote by American historian Stephen F. Cohen because it illustrates why it is essential for the new generation to appreciate the Cold War roots of the present conflict:

The new Cold War has been deepened and institutionalized by transforming what began, in February last year [2014], as essentially a Ukrainian civil war into a US/NATO-Russian proxy war; by a torrent of inflammatory misinformation out of Washington, Moscow, Kiev and Brussels; and by Western economic sanctions that are compelling Russia to retreat politically, as it did in the late 1940s, from the West. Still worse, both sides are again aggressively deploying their conventional and nuclear weapons and probing the other’s defenses in the air and at sea. Diplomacy between Washington and Moscow is being displaced by resurgent militarized thinking, while cooperative relationships nurtured over many decades, from trade, education, and science to arms control, are being shredded.[40]

(11) Conclusion: A Final Say for Arts and Literature

One of the best ways to approach teaching Cold War history is through arts and literature. Once one looks for a Cold War setting in works of fiction, it is easy to find. Sometimes the setting is explicit, sometime implicit because the environment made by the Cold War is essentially the air we breathe. Comic books and science fiction B-movies offer many examples of how nuclear danger couldn’t be confronted consciously—it appeared subconsciously as mutant monsters, blobs and aliens. In other cases, it was an explicit element of the story. Whereas traditionally children’s stories resorted to magic and spells to give characters special powers, the progress of rational science now provided the transformational power, and, ironically, the superstitious nonsense. A rich comic book and movie franchise was established by the bite of a radioactive spider. Spy novels and popular music are other genres that offer thousands of works with Cold War and nuclear-age themes.

There is no space here to list all the possibilities. With a page left for just one example to finish with, I choose the American writers of the 1940s who grasped how the world had changed and were the first to raise the rebel yell. William S. Burroughs, who by odd coincidence attended a high school that was later converted to the Los Alamos Laboratory, wrote post-apocalyptic stories in his famous cut-up technique—a fitting style for the social fragmentation of the nuclear age. He was a friend of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. These artists lived on both sides of 1945, so they were well positioned to witness how the atom bomb had transformed society. In the Ginsberg biography American Scream, Jonah Raskin wrote:

“Nineteen forty-eight was the crucial postwar year,” Ginsberg explained. “It was the turning point. Of course the atom bomb had already gone off in 1945, and Kerouac and Burroughs and I had talked about it, but the psychological fallout from the bomb—the consciousness—didn’t really hit until 1948. There was the splitting of the atom and the splitting of the old structures of society and also a sense of the inner world splitting up and coming apart.” Like many other writers around the world, Ginsberg turned the atom bomb into an all-inclusive metaphor. Everywhere he looked he saw apocalypse and atomization.[41]

Ginsberg believed the bomb had caused a “psychic disturbance” among his friends, fueling their despair and subsequent drug use. In his journals, Kerouac labelled the spiritual crisis the “atomic disease.”[42] In his writing and his actions, Kerouac showed no interest in politics, or protests and petitions of any kind. Some said his intent was never to save America but to praise its joys and eulogize it, as if the existence of the atom bomb had doomed it. However, William Burroughs said about his influence, “By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their disclaimers.” He believed that Kerouac had inspired a worldwide movement that took his work to the next logical step, which was an activism which aimed to better the world, not merely fatalistically eulogize it.[43]

Kerouac described his writing as a holy calling, a command from God to “go moan for man” and be “as minute as a seed in the pod” in doing so.[44] Indeed, he may have been one of many humble seeds, for the more powerful forces in the disarmament movement arose later, some secular, some religious such as Plowshares (still spilling blood on nuclear installations in the 21st century) and evangelical Christian groups. It is impossible to know what the alternate history would have been, but it is plausible that nuclear annihilation was averted only because of the resistance of millions of citizens who forced political leaders to step back from the brink. As I write this (September 2015), the beat goes on. Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, Pope Francis declared:

An ethics and a law based on the threat of mutual destruction—and possibly the destruction of all mankind—are self-contradictory and an affront to the entire framework of the United Nations, which would end up as “nations united by fear and distrust.” There is urgent need to work for a world free of nuclear weapons, in full application of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, in letter and spirit, with the goal of a complete prohibition of these weapons.[45]

Even in Kerouac’s final year, when his talent and his relevance were said to have been drowned in terminal stage alcoholism, he could show flashes of wit and a flair for bringing attention to the existential problem that the chattering classes preferred to ignore. In an appearance on William F. Buckley’s show Firing Line in 1968,[46] he joined a panel discussion seeking a definition of “the hippy movement.” Kerouac was said to be pathetic in this appearance, offending everyone and at times incapable of speech. But even drunk and diminished as he was, he could still play the holy fool. He may have been aware of what was going on but just couldn’t stomach political discourse and the inanity of the questions about hippies and beatniks.

Buckley asked him if the hippy movement was “Adamite” (aspiring to a state of purity like Adam in the Garden,) but Kerouac was confused by this flaunting of obscure vocabulary. He asked with puzzlement, “Adamite? You mean Adam and Eve, or atom? What? Adam and Eve? What’s Adamite? They wear their hair long, in layers? Live in caves?”

“Yeah, sort of, and back to nature and...”

“Well, that’s alright. We might have to in due time—after the atomite bomb! Haha!”

Buckley smiled and nodded, “That was good. Give that man a drink.”

So here, even at the end of his road, Kerouac was harkening back to what he had felt in the 1940s on a journey to Mexico City. His evocation of the atom bomb in the final pages of On the Road reveals the reason the characters have refused to chase the post-war prosperity on offer in mid-century America. All the preceding delinquency and mad wanderings of these “best minds of a generation” now seem to be explained by a painful consciousness of the destiny of the world. This is also the moment of the story when the narrator becomes conscious of the failure within. They are both rebels and products of the society they had rejected. The search for freedom and God went hand in hand with utter irresponsibility. Behind them lies a trail of abandoned wives and children, not to mention a few stolen cars. To the natives coming down from the hills, and the pimps and the women in the whorehouses, they are just like all the other yanquis with dollars in their pockets. I finish with this excerpt because it brings this discussion of the Cold War back to its proper perspective. Kerouac shifts our attention back to where it needs to be, to the aboriginal peoples of the world who have endured and paid the costs of Western civilization’s suicidal rivalries:

Strange crossroad towns on top of the world rolled by, with shawled Indians watching us from under hatbrims and rebozos. All had their hands outstretched. They had come down from the backmountains and higher places to hold forth their hands for something they thought civilization could offer and they never dreamed the sadness and poor broken delusion of it. They didn’t know that a bomb had come that could crack all our bridges and banks and reduce them to jumbles like the avalanche heap, and we would be as poor as them someday and stretching out our hands in the samesame way.[47]

NOTES

[1] Edward S Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (Pantheon, 1988).

[2] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835).

[3] David Keanu Sai, “A Slippery Path Toward Hawaiian Indigineity: An Analysis and Comparison Between Hawaiian State Sovereignty and Hawaiian Indigineity and its Use and Practice in Hawaii Today,” Journal of Law and Social Challenges 10, (Fall 2008): 68-133.

[4] Noam Chomsky for West Papua, 2013 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWlYorZWvWw.

[5] Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 403.

[6] Wilfried Loth and George Soutou, The Making of Détente: Eastern Europe and Western Europe in the Cold War, 1965-75 (Routledge, 2010), 25.

[7] Frank Capra (director), Why We Fight: The Battle of Russia, (1943, United States War Department), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONxRYd28u7s&index=5&list=PLue4rhsHxp6-h5AO9Az-gdo7sq_m5roBm.

[8] For a full description of the early Soviet bomb program, see Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford University Press, 2013), 83-123.

[9] Roger Goodman (director), Hiroshima: Why the Bomb was Dropped (1995; ABC News), 26:45~, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-WnLNLe3sk.

[10] See “The Keiser Report,” Episode 723, Russia Today, February 24, 2015.

http://rt.com/shows/keiser-report/235067-episode-723-max-keiser/ . Anthropologist David Graeber commented that such aspects of Western economies can be considered the “Sovietization” of capitalism because they have arisen from a system that consists of a stifling hybrid of private and public bureaucracies functioning with common goals and interchangeable management, to the detriment of the general population.

[11] Arthur Knight, “Zombie-Marxism Part 2: What Marx Got Right,” The End of Capitalism, November, 2010, http://endofcapitalism.com/2010/11/04/zombie-marxism-part-2-what-marx-got-right/.

[12] Jihan El Tahri (director), Cuba: An African Odyssey (2007; Arte France, Temps Noir, Big Sister, ITVS, BBC).

[13] “Ronald Reagan, Address to National Association of Evangelicals,” Voices of Democracy US Oratory Project, March 8, 1983, http://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/reagan-evil-empire-speech-text/.

[14] There is no single term that can refer to all the heads of state of the USSR. At various times, the role of head of state was determined variously as “Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars,” “General Secretary,” “First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party” or finally “President” at the time the union dissolved.

[15] Mikhail Gorbachev, “Turning Point at Chernobyl,” Project Syndicate, April 14, 2006, http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/turning-point-at-chernobyl.

[16] Westad, 396.

[17] Greg Gandin, “Henry of Arabia,” TomDispatch.com, September 27, 2015, http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176049/tomgram%3A_greg_grandin%2C_henry_of_arabia.

[18] Jihan El Tahri.

[19] Noam Chomsky, “How Many Minutes to Midnight?” TomDispatch.com, August 6, 2014, http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175877/tomgram%3A_noam_chomsky,_why_national_security_has_nothing_to_do_with_security/.

[20] Joseph Masco, Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico (Princeton University Press, 2006), 336-337.

[21] David Talbot, The Devils Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government (William Collins, 2015), 220-226.

[22] Phil Taylor, “Rainbow Warrior: 30 Years On,” New Zealand Herald, July 2015, http://features.nzherald.co.nz/rainbow-warrior/.

[23] Robert Jacobs, “Nuclear Conquistadors: Military Colonialism in Nuclear Test Site Selection during the Cold War,” Asian Journal of Peacebuilding 1, No. 2 (November 2013): 157—177, http://tongil.snu.ac.kr/ajp_pdf/201311/02_Robert%20Jacobs.pdf. 

[24] Dmitriy Burmistrov, Mira Kossenko, and Richard Wilson, “Radioactive Contamination of the Techa River and its Effects,” Department of Physics, Harvard University, http://users.physics.harvard.edu/~wilson/publications/pp747/techa_cor.htm.

[25] Kate Brown, “The Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters,” TalkingStick TV, January 18, 2014, 35:00~, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6Ys8ii6r_M.

[26] Kate Brown, 133-149.

[27] Westad, 360.

[28] See the widely cited declaration by American statesman Dean Acheson: “No legal issue arises when the United States responds to a challenge to its power, position, and prestige,” speaking to the American Society of International Law, 1962. http://www.alternet.org/world/chomsky-who-wants-be-us.

[29] Nick Green (director), The Man who Saved the World (2012; PBS), 36:20~. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/the-man-who-saved-the-world-watch-the-full-episode/905/.

[30] Sheldon M. Stern, The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myths versus Reality (Stanford University Press, 2012), 85.

[31] Joe Matthews, “The Cuban Missile Crisis, the Other, Secret One,” BBC Magazine, October 13, 2012, http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-19930260.

[32] Benjamin Schwarz, “The Real Cuban Missile Crisis,” The Atlantic, January/February 2013. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/01/the-real-cuban-missile-crisis/309190/.

[33] Nicolas Lambert, A Radiant Future: A French Fission (Avenir Radieux: Une Fission Française) (Éditions L’Échappée, 2012), 98-102.

[34]  “‘Great victory’? Israeli nuclear program resolution voted down by IAEA,” Russia Today, September 18, 2015, http://www.rt.com/news/315787-israel-iaea-nuclear-inspection/.

[35] Antoine Roger Lokongo, “Central African Republic: The French Complicity in the Crisis,” Norwegian Council for Africa, January 20, 2014, http://www.afrika.no/Detailed/24741.html.

[36] Chris McGreal, “France’s Shame?” The Guardian, January 11, 2007, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/jan/11/rwanda.insideafrica.

[37] John Wiener, How We Forgot the Cold War (University of California Press, 2012).

[38] Robert Norris and Hans M. Kristensen, “Global Nuclear Weapons Inventories, 1945−2010,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July 1, 2010. doi:10.2968/066004008.

[39] Joseph Masco, 342.

[40] Stephen F. Cohen, “Why We Must Return to the US-Russian Parity Principle,” Foreign Policy, April 14, 2015, http://www.thenation.com/article/why-we-must-return-us-russian-parity-principle/.

[41] John Raskin, American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation (University of California Press, 2004). Ginsberg’s concern with the nuclear threat continued throughout his life as he participated in protests in the 1970s at the Rocky Flats, Colorado plutonium pit factory where he wrote his poem Plutonian Ode.

[42] Mark Sayers, The Road Trip that Changed the World (Moody Publishers, 2012), 57.

[43] Richard Lerner and Lewis MacAdams (directors), What Happened to Kerouac (1986; New Yorker Films).

[44] Jack Kerouac, Visions of Cody, (McGraw-Hill, 1972).

[45] “Full text of Pope Francis’ speech to United Nations,” PBS Newshour, September 25, 2015, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/full-text-pope-francis-speech-united-nations/.

[46] William F. Buckley (host), Firing Line, The Hippies, Season 3, Episode 32 (September 4, 1968; National Educational Television), http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0830733/.

[47] Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll (Penguin Books, 1951, 2007).

Executive Privilege Invoked for Approving French Nuclear Waste Site

For many years, the French nuclear establishment has been struggling to overcome public opposition and legislative obstacles to its plans to bury high-level, long-lived nuclear waste in the rural village of Bure. During the summer of 2015, the socialist government of Francois Hollande took the desperate measure of tacking the issue onto an omnibus bill called the loi Macron, which is supposed to be concerned only with growth, equality and economic opportunity. Just about anything could be subjectively judged to  promote economic growth, so the government took an expansive view and included whatever it wanted under a very flexible definition of matters which favor “growth, equality and economic opportunity.” Once the nuclear waste project was in the Macron Bill, the government then took advantage of an executive privilege called Article 49.3. 

About Article 49.3 (compiled from the two sources listed in this section) Sources: Resorting to Article 49.3 of the Constitution, (Le recours à l’article 49.3 de la constitution). Vie Publique, June 16, 2015. http://www.vie-publique.fr/focus/cdp/recours-article-49.3-constitution.html Article 49.3 Executive Weapon, (L'article 49.3, coup de force de l'exécutif), Le Figaro, February 17, 2015. http://www.lefigaro.fr/politique/2015/02/17/01002-20150217ARTFIG00293-l-article-49.3-le-coup-de-force-de-l-executif.php Article 49.3 gives the prime minister the possibility, after consultation with the Council of Ministers, to claim the right of the government to pass a bill that is up for a vote in the National Assembly, any bill concerning national finances, the financing of social security, or any other project or proposed law being debated there. It is a “weapon with only one bullet,” as it can only be used once in each legislative session. The decision of the prime minister to use Article 49.3 leads to the immediate suspension of parliamentary discussion of the laws. The project is considered adopted, without being put to a vote, unless a motion of censure [by the Constitutional Council] is made within twenty-four hours under very precise conditions: the motion to censure has to be approved by a majority vote in the National Assembly. Resort to Article 49.3 makes parliamentarians uneasy because they see it as an abuse of executive power. In 2006, Francois Hollande, the leader who invoked Article 49.3 in the summer of 2015, declared, “49.3 is an assault on and a denial of democracy. 49.3 is a way of stopping and impeding parliamentary debate.”

Translation of:

Pierre Le Hir, Outcry after the Appearance of Radioactive Waste in the Macron Bill, Le Monde, July 10, 2015

http://www.lemonde.fr/energies/article/2015/07/10/tolle-apres-l-irruption-des-dechets-radioactifs-dans-la-loi-macron_4678426_1653054.html?xtmc=cigeo&xtcr=1

It is decidedly difficult to get rid of nuclear waste. It has managed to surreptitiously embed itself in the Macron Bill concerning growth, equality and economic opportunity. At the last minute, an amendment concerning the Centre industriel de stockage géologique (CIGEO) was introduced into the text, which will be adopted on Friday July 10, without a vote because the government has resorted once again to the use of Article 49.3 [see explanation above]. Ecologists are “furious” and they have denounced this “unacceptable abuse of power.”

The CIGEO project, managed by l’Agence nationale pour la gestion des déchets radioactifs (ANDRA), aims to bury nuclear waste 500 meters under the village of Bure. The wastes consist of 80,000 cubic meters of high-level, long-lived waste produced by French nuclear facilities. The project was estimated to cost 16.5 billion euros in 2005, but an estimate done in 2009 set the figure at 36 billion euros. The final cost is unknowable. For several years, anti-nuclear activists and residents have opposed what they call a “nuclear garbage dump.”

So how did nuclear waste find its way into a bill with 400 articles related to economic growth? In fact, pro-nuclear parliamentarians have been trying to clear this path into legislation for CIGEO for two years. First it was written into the law on energy transition, but the Minister of Ecology, Ségolène Royal, withdrew it under pressure from environmentalists. Then it appeared in the Macron Bill while it was being reviewed in the Senate. Until recently, members of parliament had barred its path.

On the morning of July 9, in a special commission of the National Assembly, a special amendment by the senator for the Meuse region, Gérard Longuet (Republican Party), brought up the CIGEO project. The matter was taken up by the head of the commission, Francois Brottes (Socialist Party) and it was put into the Macron Bill, thus evading the possibility of debate during the present session thanks to the invocation of Article 49.3.

This does not yet mean that CIGEO has a green light to bury the most radioactive wastes at Bure. In 2017, ANDRA has to submit an application for authorization of the creation of the facility. Furthermore, an “industrial pilot phase” of 100 years is planned before authorization of the full-scale project.

CIGEO is nonetheless still engraved in the bill. Article 201 of the Macron Bill is committed to defining the notion of “irreversibility” of nuclear waste storage while this reversibility must be the object of a specific law before the creation of the facility will be authorized.

The EELV party (Europe Ecologie-Les Verts) protested, “At the last moment, without debate or vote, CIGEO made its surprise appearance in the Macron Bill. This imposed decision will have a disastrous impact on health and the environment in our country. This assault makes a definitive end to the trust environmentalists once had in this government.”

For the ecologist members, Denis Baupin, vice president of the National Assembly, Francois de Rugy and Barbara Pompili, vice presidents of the EELV party, a “red line” has been crossed. They plan to seek recourse in a motion of censure which the Republicans are planning to submit to the Constitutional Council. They hope to have the article related to CIGEO withdrawn as it has nothing to do with growth… [the Macron Bill is ostensibly concerned with growth, equality and economic opportunity.]

Among the groups and residents opposed to CIGEO, anger is also growing. The Collectif contre l’enfouissement des déchets radioactifs (CEDRA) denounced the “audacious assault” while Bure-Stop condemned the process as “beholden to the power of industrial lobbies and horribly disdainful of the opinions of citizens.”

_____________

August 6, 2015: Result of the Motion of Censure

“What the Macron Bill will Contains (from now on),” [Ce que contient (désormais) la loi Macron,] Le Monde, August 6, 2015.

http://www.lemonde.fr/les-decodeurs/article/2015/08/06/ce-que-contient-desormais-la-loi-macron_4714255_4355770.html

At the last moment, the government added an amendment to the bill concerning the management of radioactive waste at Bure, in the Meuse region. This was censured by the Constitutional Council which found it was a legislative rider* that should be presented in a separate bill.

*A rider is an additional provision added to a bill or other measure under the consideration by a legislature, having little connection with the subject matter of the bill. Riders are usually created as a tactic to pass a controversial provision that would not pass as its own bill.

The Dawn of the Age of Nuclear Waste

On July 25, 2015, Green Majority of Canada (www.greenmajority.ca) published an interview with Dr. Gordon Edwards, the president of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility. The link to the interview posted here goes to a version with accurate English subtitles for the benefit of the hearing impaired, people who know English as a foreign language, and anyone who might want to translate this interview into other languages.

Click play, then click on the settings icon 
(beside the YouTube icon) to view the accurate (not automated!)
subtitles, or read the transcript below

Dr. Edwards describes how he became a nuclear skeptic—that is, how he left high school in the 1950s thinking nuclear power was wonderful, but then completely changed his mind by the time he graduated from university. Since then he has been Canada’s most vocal advocate for greater transparency and full public debate about the merits and demerits of nuclear power.

This interview can serve as an essential introductory lesson for those who are new to the discussion of nuclear power. For novices, there is an intimidating learning curve involved, and this challenge causes many people to stay disengaged, or it leads them to just follow an optimism bias and trust the reassuring messages of the pro-nuclear lobby. Most people have no idea how bad the problem is and find it hard to know what to believe. It must be a law of physics that the badness of news is inversely proportional to the likelihood of it being believed. It might even be an inverse square law (non-linear). It is truly hard to admit the grim reality created by the nuclear age.

Dr. Edwards is an expert in explaining nuclear science and nuclear history in simple terms, so this interview has the potential to capture the attention of segments of the population that are still skeptical or yet to be initiated in nuclear matters. In fact, I believe that what it really needs is a global audience. As Dr. Edwards makes clear in the interview, the nuclear industry really is in decline in North America and Europe, and this has caused the nuclear industry to look for unsuspecting buyers in developing countries (an issue which he didn’t discuss, unfortunately, as his talk is focused on those countries that adopted nuclear power decades ago).

China already has a lot of nuclear construction underway, while Saudi Arabia, South Africa, India, Vietnam, and Indonesia, as well as others, are all being courted by nuclear corporations from Japan, the USA, Russia and France. Citizens in these nations may wish to oppose these nuclear dreams, but to varying degrees they have little or no rights to have a say in decisions. Even in the “advanced democracies,” nuclear schemes were always implemented under secrecy and national security laws. One ray of hope may lie in the fact that the messages of people like Dr. Edwards can reach people in these countries that are being conned by nuclear power development schemers for the first time.

English is the most widely spoken foreign language, but still not many people in non-English speaking countries can follow spoken English on specialized topics such as this. If they have a good knowledge of the English language, it is likely that they still appreciate having subtitles or a transcript in order to comprehend interviews like this one with Gordon Edwards. Having a transcript also makes it possible for translators to create versions in other languages.

Youtube has its automated subtitling feature, but it works with varying levels of accuracy, depending on the speaker. It gave this interview subtitles that were about 80% accurate, but still that 20% inaccuracy led to some ridiculous misinterpretation that rendered the whole thing unreliable. The best solution was to use software called Google2SRT to download the automated subtitles, then revise this file to turn it into an accurate subtitle script (an .srt file that can be put on a Youtube video). Human input is still good for something.

     For this week’s blog entry I painstakingly created the accurate subtitles for the half of my readers who seem to have English as a foreign language. They will be able to learn something useful about the Canadian experience with nuclear energy, and understand why nuclear energy is a technology of the past. Most importantly, they will see that not only is the nuclear energy era over, but what we are facing now is the fact that, in the words of Dr. Edwards, “the age of nuclear waste is really just beginning.” Nations which have been fortunate enough to avoid nuclearization until now would be wise to heed the lessons of those which have been down this sorry road already.

TRANSCRIPT:

     Hi, I’m Gordon Edwards, president of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility. I grew up here in Toronto. My dad was a pharmacist and I went to the University of Toronto and graduated in mathematics, physics and chemistry with a gold medal in mathematics and physics.

At that time, I thought nuclear power was great because the only thing I knew about it was it was safe, clean, cheap and abundant, and as a result I thought, “Hey, this is great. It’s going to save the world.” And in fact that was how it was presented in high school at that time. That was back in the 1950s. But when I graduated from university, I discovered that none of these adjectives were in fact true. It is actually one of the dirtiest technologies that we know.

It creates the most dangerous waste of any industry ever on the face of the planet and this waste is indestructible and remains dangerous for literally millions of years and we don’t know what to do with it except to bury it somewhere and hope that it won’t get out, and that’s not a very good recommendation for a technology. Secondly, it can undergo, as we’ve seen at Chernobyl and Fukushima, it can undergo catastrophic failures and the reason this happens is fundamental. It is because you cannot generate electricity with uranium without simultaneously generating huge quantities of radioactive poisons, and these radioactive poisons are all, you might say, transmutations of the uranium atom.

For example, people have heard about Fukushima. They’ve heard about the poisons that have come out of that: the cesium 137, the iodine 131, the strontium 90, the krypton 85, the plutonium 239. What people don’t always realize is that every one of these elements started off as a uranium atom and most of that uranium came from Canada. In fact, it came from Saskatchewan, went over to Japan, was used as fuel, and was transformed into literally hundreds of different highly radioactive poisonous materials which are then spewed out in event of the accident and are still leaking today from the reactor. They’re still pumping—this is four and a half years after the accident. They’re still pumping almost 400 tons of water a day down into the cores of those melted reactors, the three melted reactors, and then back up to the surface again. By the time they get to the surface they are saturated with these radioactive materials and the water is so radioactive it can’t be released so they’ve stored it in 1,500 tanks, huge tanks, each one containing about 300 tons, and they are building more every week because they need them.

And so this is the legacy of the nuclear industry. Now here in Ontario, and here in Canada we got started into this project through the World War II atomic bomb project. Canada was one of the three countries involved in the project to develop the world’s first atomic weapons. And in fact there was an agreement signed in Quebec in 1943 between President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill at the invitation our prime minister, Mackenzie King at the time, for these three countries to cooperate in building the world’s first atomic bombs. And the reason why Canada was involved is because we had the uranium. The uranium is the key material for all nuclear weapons. There wouldn’t be any nuclear weapons of any description if we didn’t have uranium to start with. So Canada got involved very early and in great secrecy.

CD Howe, who was the power behind the throne in Canada at that time, told parliament that there was a secret project underway and he would appreciate it if nobody asked questions, and so nobody did, and so parliament from that day to this has never really questioned our commitment to nuclear power or to uranium mining in this country.

That’s one of the reasons why in my organization, which was founded in 1970, one of the first things we asked for was for there to be a national debate on the benefits and hazards of nuclear power. We were quite willing to have everything out on the table, both the pluses and the minuses so that people can judge for themselves. That’s never happened in Canada, so what happened is when they started building nuclear reactors in Ontario with the Pickering reactors, in Quebec with the Gentilly reactors, and in New Brunswick with Point Lepreau reactor, nobody knew at that time that the radioactive waste problem was a serious difficulty. Everybody thought that it was just like any industry that has garbage. The garbage men take it away and it’s gone. Nobody thought of it as being a particularly great problem, so my organization was one of the first ones to blow the whistle on this question.

I remember being on television here in Toronto and Morton Shulman, who used to be the coroner of Toronto, and who then had a radio talk show and television talk show, had me on the show along with an executive from Ontario Hydro, and I said, “Well, we have this problem with nuclear waste,” and he asked, “So what’s the problem?” and the Ontario Hydro guy said, “Well, I mean, every industry has waste so I don’t see the problem. We look after our waste better than any other industry I know of.” And Morton Shulman turned back to me and he said, “So what is the problem?” I said, “Well, ask him where we’re going to put it and he turned back and said, “Where are you going to put it?” and the guy went beet red, and he said, “Oh! You don’t know!” And that that’s when really, literally, you might say the shit hit the fan because they had a Royal Commission of Inquiry into nuclear power.

It was actually into electricity planning. It was called the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Electric Power Planning in Ontario and it was called the Porter Commission. It lasted for three years and they devoted a lot of that time into looking at the nuclear question, and they were very impressed by the dangers of this nuclear waste, and I’ll explain a little bit more about the danger in a second, but what they concluded, one of their major conclusions was that unless they can solve this problem by 1985, there shouldn’t be any more nuclear reactors built. This was in 1978 when that report was written. Unless they can solve this nuclear waste problem, there shouldn’t be any more nuclear reactors, and in fact there have not been any new nuclear reactors ordered anywhere in Canada since 1978. So, in fact, we have brought the industry to a standstill simply by asking the question: where are you going to put it? They don’t have a place to put it.

Now why is it so important? Well, the reason why is because they had a chart in this Royal Commission report which showed the toxicity, the danger to humans and to other living organisms of these nuclear wastes, and what they did was they took one year of waste from one CANDU reactor, just one year, one CANDU reactor, and they looked at how dangerous that waste would be after one year, and they said well, since we don’t have a very easy way to measure, let’s ask the following question: how much water would you need to dilute that waste to the maximum level of contamination allowed by law? So how much water would you need? It turns out to be almost exactly equal to Lake Superior. That’s one reactor, one year, and multiply that now by the number of reactors, which is twenty, multiply it by the number years, which is thirty, and you’re talking about 600 Lake Superiors. That’s a lot of Lake Superiors. We don’t have that much water in the whole world, so what they were basically saying is that this material is so dangerous that if 1 percent or 0.1 percent or 0.01 percent of this material leaks into the environment, it’s a disaster. Whereas in most human affairs you’d think that 99.9 percent containment would be wonderful. In this case, it would be a disaster, so that’s what’s fundamentally wrong with nuclear power. It creates poisons that we don’t know how to destroy. Nobody knows how to turn off radioactivity. Nobody knows how to shut it off.

And what is radioactivity? Basically, these atoms that are broken pieces of uranium atoms or else transmuted, heavier-than-uranium atoms like plutonium, these atoms are unstable, which means that they are like little miniature time bombs. They explode and when they explode, they give off damaging subatomic shrapnel which is called atomic radiation, and this exists in three major kinds: alpha, beta and gamma. Alpha and beta are not very penetrating but they’re extremely dangerous inside the body. In fact, they’re much more dangerous than the more penetrating gamma radiation.

Gamma radiation is very dangerous, too. In fact, one fuel bundle, which is about this big. It’s about the size of a log for a fireplace. One of those fuel bundles, before it goes into the reactor, you could look at it and handle it with gloves and it wouldn’t harm you. When that same fuel bundle comes out of the reactor, it would kill any human being standing within one meter’s distance without protection in twenty seconds. So that’s how... and that’s just because of the blast of gamma radiation coming off that spent fuel rod. In fact, those spent fuel rods, those spent fuel bundles when they come out of the reactor, they’ll never be handled by human hands again. They will only be handled robotically, by robots or by remote equipment.

So how did we get into this? How do we build so many nuclear reactors? The fact is people were lied to. They were told that this was a clean, safe, cheap, abundant energy source and that’s what I thought when I was in high school. If that’s all you know about nuclear power, who could possibly be against it? So these were built on false premises, these reactors. And I think now the time has come when people are more and more realizing that this is all a big lie, and that we made a big mistake in swallowing that lie, and going along with it because we trusted the scientists, thinking scientists were sort of like gods. Because they are scientists they are devoted to truth, they are devoted to honesty, and that a scientist would not say anything that was untrue, but they’re forgetting that scientists are human beings, and all human beings are fallible and all human beings have vested interests. If your whole career, and in fact the dream of your career, is really this technology, you can’t afford to tell the whole truth about it.

This is the way the nuclear industry has always behaved. It’s paternalism written with a capital P because they believe that “we scientists, we nuclear scientist, we can, in fact, look after these wastes. We can prevent reactors from exploding. We can prevent all the bad effects. For example, we can prevent these materials from being used in atomic weapons.” In fact, they cannot do this. This is beyond human power.

Because they thought that they were able to control this, they thought that it’s no harm to tell people reassuring lies, to tell people it’s perfectly safe because “we’re going to make it perfectly safe, the waste is not a problem because we’re going to solve it,” but what they were doing was putting on their shoulders a kind of an arrogance that is beyond their powers to actually realize, so we’re now at the showdown stage, and we have countries like Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Sweden and a few other countries who are totally phasing out nuclear power.

Germany had seventeen nuclear reactors. The moment the Fukushima reactor accident happened and after that triple meltdown, they shut down seven of those reactors permanently and they’re in the process of shutting down the remaining ten. By the year 2022 they should have them all shut down.

Here in Canada, although we haven’t said that we’re phasing out nuclear power, in fact, we seem to be because at Pickering, where we had eight nuclear reactors, two of them are now permanently shut down and the other six are going to be shut down by the year 2020, so eight of those reactors are going to be gone permanently by 2020, and even though the government of Ontario has said they’re going to build new reactors, they have not, and they have postponed and postponed it because the cost is absolutely exorbitant.

It turns out that they spent billions of dollars in refurbishing some of the old reactors, and these refurbished reactors are operating at about a percent capacity factor. That means they’re only operating a little more than two-thirds of the time compared with what they’re designed to operate at, so more and more the planners and the government authorities are beginning to catch on to the idea that this is a bad deal, and at the moment we’re trying to convince the government of Ontario, and there already have been talks between the premier of Quebec and the premier of Ontario, one-to-one talks, [suggesting] rather than taking a further risk on refurbishing the Darlington reactors, the four big reactors outside of Toronto at Darlington, rather than refurbishing these at a cost of billions of dollars, why not buy surplus hydro power from Quebec? We’ve got huge surpluses of water-generated hydro power.

Now that was not environmentally innocuous at all—there was a lot of damage done to the environment building those dams, but now that they’re built we do have surplus hydro power. There’s no harm in using that surplus hydro power, as long as it isn’t used to justify more damage of the same kind. In the meantime, Ontario can actually do itself a favor. It would cost far less to buy the surplus hydro power than it would to refurbish those reactors. They can also do Quebec a favor because they are now selling that surplus hydro power to the United States at a loss, and you could also do the people of the country a favor by getting rid of this liability.

Many people still believe that the CANDU reactor is really a good reactor, and it is. It’s really one of the best, but it’s the best of a bad lot. Just because you’re the best of a bad lot doesn’t mean you’re good. The fact of the matter is that a CANDU reactor can melt down just like any other reactor can. It can have catastrophic failures just like any other reactor because the fundamental problem is not the mechanism of the machinery. That’s not the problem. The problem is that while it’s producing electricity it is also creating this enormous inventory of poisons. Anything that disrupts that, whether it’s an earthquake, whether it’s sabotage, whether it’s terrorism, whether it’s an industrial accident, whether it’s an unanticipated explosion, whatever it might be that allows that stuff to leak into the environment is going to create catastrophic results, so it’s fundamental to the technology. It is not based upon the machinery. It’s based on the poisons which are created. So a nuclear reactor is not just a machine for generating electricity. It’s also a warehouse of a fantastically large quantity of radioactive poisons. That’s the fundamental problem.

Would you want to have in your backyard a warehouse full of the most dangerous radioactive poisons you can imagine? And I think the answer is no, we don’t want it. And as a matter of fact even nuclear scientists, for example, I heard Alvin Weinberg, one of the deans of nuclear energy—he was the head of the Oak Ridge nuclear division down in the United States which developed the first enriched uranium atomic bomb—and he said we nuclear scientists—this was back in 1977 even before Three Mile Island—he said that we nuclear scientists have made a big mistake in thinking that nuclear power is just another form of generating electricity. We should not be building these near large cities at all. Now he was pro-nuclear. He said we should build them but we should build them behind a wall which society is shut off from, and this wall should be a very large and it should include a lot of waterfront so that we can have enough water to run the reactors, and that’s where the reactors will melt down into the ground, and he didn’t think about the fact that this stuff will come over the wall and contaminate the food supply, but he thought that it was definitely a mistake to build these reactors.

Look at what we have done here in Ontario. We’ve built reactors right along the shores of the Great Lakes. Can you imagine anything more stupid? Because if you look at what’s happening at Fukushima right now all the water that’s pouring into the Pacific Ocean from the Fukushima reactors. Imagine if that wasn’t the Pacific Ocean but only the Great Lakes. We would be contaminating the water supply for forty million people, and not just for one generation but for several generations to come. So it seems that people are beginning to wake up and realize that this is not the way to go.

Although Canada was the world’s largest supplier of uranium in the early years, up until 1965, all of our uranium production… from 1942 to 1965 there was a tremendous amount of uranium mined in Canada, and it was all for bombs. It all went into nuclear weapons. There were military contracts. In fact, that was the only market there was for it. We also, by the way, sold all of our plutonium for bombs to the United States from the Chalk River reactors that we built. Then in 1965 Prime Minister Pearson said from now on we’re only going to be selling uranium for peaceful purposes.

Well, it sounds good but the problem is when you sell uranium for peaceful purposes, what happens to it? You put it into a nuclear reactor, the uranium atoms get chopped up and create all these poisons we talked about, but some of the uranium atoms actually absorb a neutron to become a little heavier, and they turn into a substance called plutonium which has a 24,000-year half-life and which is the nuclear explosive that is most useful in all nuclear weapons. There isn’t any nuclear weapon that doesn’t use uranium or plutonium, and every atom of plutonium starts off as an atom of uranium.

So here in Canada, even though we are thought of worldwide as being like the Saudi Arabia of uranium, in terms of how much uranium we have in, for example, the province of Saskatchewan, we already have two provinces that have banned uranium mining altogether: British Columbia has declared a permanent ban. There will never be uranium mining in the province of British Columbia. By the way, way back in around 1980, it was the British Columbia Medical Association who led the charge on that particular score, although there were many other people who played a role in it—the fruit Growers Association, the Landowners Association, the Small Business Association—an amazing agglomeration of different segments of society which brought about that moratorium which was originally a temporary moratorium but now it’s become a permanent one.

In Nova Scotia we had a ban on uranium mining declared in 1985 which again was a temporary ban which extended right up until a couple of years ago and when it was made into a permanent law. And so now it’s illegal in Nova Scotia to even explore for uranium, and by the way, if you’re exploring for something else and you happen to come across uranium, you’ve got to stop. That’s according to the law.

Right now in Quebec we have a temporary moratorium on uranium mining and we’re hoping—in fact we’re just at the end of a process of a public hearing, a year of public hearings on uranium mining in Quebec. We’re hoping that the Quebec government—the first government to phase out nuclear power completely in North America—will ban uranium mining also from Quebec.

So we’re waiting to hear from that, but in April of this year we had an international symposium on uranium with people coming from Australia, from China, from Mongolia, from Europe and from Africa, and from all over the United States and Canada to meet together and have three days of intense discussions about uranium. Out of that symposium came an international declaration calling... and again led by the physicians... the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW)—they won the Nobel Prize Peace Prize in 1985—and they have the led the way on this, calling for a worldwide ban on uranium mining.

They’re saying that like asbestos, which we have found to be such a dangerous mineral that it should really be left in the ground altogether, there’s no way you should mine asbestos. Yes, it’s natural. So is arsenic, but arsenic is actually safer to mine than asbestos is. So asbestos should just be left in the ground, and uranium is of the same character, even more so. Asbestos threatens the health of anybody who comes in contact with it. Uranium threatens the entire planet. It threatens the entire survival of the planet, in terms of its ultimate use in nuclear weapons, and even when you use it for peaceful purposes, it breeds the material which can be used for the next ten thousand years, twenty thousand years, 100,000 years for nuclear weapons, so we’re calling for a ban on uranium mining worldwide, and we don’t think this is pie-in-the-sky. We think this is just plain common sense.

Of course that doesn’t mean that it solves the problems that are already there, but it means that you have put a cap on them. We talk about putting a cap on carbon emissions, so let’s put a cap on a weapons of mass destruction. And of course the main weapon of mass destruction really is not chemical weapons, bacteriological weapons—horrible as they are—but nuclear weapons which include all the worst characteristics of those two together with further dangers.

It’s been calculated by the same scientists who work on climate change, using the same models that are used in climate change, that if you were to have an exchange of nuclear weapons. (They like to use the word “exchange” ... “Would you like to have my nuclear weapon?” “Oh, good thank you. I’ll take one of yours...”) If you had a war involving only a few dozen nuclear weapons on each side, this would affect the entire northern hemisphere and cause a nuclear winter which would mean that it would be impossible to grow food, and it would have devastating consequences for the entire northern hemisphere. That’s a small nuclear war. If you had a big nuclear war, it’s totally game over much faster, and not only human civilization is gone but most higher forms of life as well. So why would you want to bring that material to the surface?

Let’s just think about it for a moment. What is uranium needed for? What is uranium used for. Well, basically, you can count them on the fingers on one hand, and have extra fingers left over. Nuclear weapons is the only use for uranium which absolutely requires uranium. With no uranium there’s no nuclear weapons. OK, so that’s number one. Number two is electricity generation, but we have many ways to produce electricity. We’ve got wind power, we’ve got solar energy, we’ve got hydro power, we’ve got...even peddling your bicycle generates electricity. Turning a wheel will generate electricity... and geothermal power. So uranium is not really needed for electricity. It is just one of many ways, and we don’t really need it.

As matter fact, the contribution of nuclear to electricity production worldwide has declined steadily since 1995. In 1995, it was about seventeen percent of world electricity that was produced by nuclear. Now it’s down to eleven percent and still falling.

In fact, even the most optimistic pro-nuclear people are admitting that nuclear will continue to decline in importance for the next twenty to thirty years at least because no matter how many new reactors you build, they’re going to be shutting down the old ones faster than they can build the new ones. Most of them are old and most of them are falling apart, and they’re being shutdown much faster. So there’s no way that nuclear power can make a dent in global warming in the time frame were talking about.

On the other hand, if you take a look at the specific examples such as Germany...Germany decided basically that while...especially since 2011... they’ve decided to phase out nuclear power. In only eight years, they built 30,000 megawatts of wind power. Now that’s twice the entire installed capacity of nuclear power in Canada:15,000 megawatts. If all the reactors were running and producing at top capacity, we’d have 15,000 megawatts of nuclear electricity. Germany built 30,000 megawatts of wind power in eight years. There’s no way you could build that amount of nuclear power in eight years. It’s impossible.

When you think about it, you realize... let’s imagine that you could build, 30,000 megawatts of nuclear in eight years, and during that entire eight years you would have no benefit. In fact, you would be adding to global warming because building the concrete structures, mining the uranium, refining the uranium, enriching uranium—greenhouse gases would be emitted big-time in building these reactors. You would get no electricity until after the eight years was done. Then you would start producing electricity. With wind power you build some windmills now and you get immediate benefits. Next year you get more, next year you get more, next year more, more, more, and after eight years you build your way up to 30,000 megawatts, but you’re getting benefits all the way along the line, so you can see the difference here is that these renewables are much more flexible, they’re light on their feet. They are like boxers that can, you know, float like a butterfly sting like a bee. And they can sort of solve the problem whereas nuclear is lumbering along and is really unable to respond quickly enough to make a difference.

There’s another thing, too. If after a while you decide you don’t like those windmills, what do you do? Take them down. No problem. You can’t do that with nuclear power. By the time a nuclear reactor is finished or you decide you don’t want it, you’re stuck with it because it’s a radioactive hulk, even after you take the nuclear waste out of it, the structure itself is so radioactive you have to let it cool off for about forty years and then you have to dismantle it, and all the rubble becomes radioactive waste. So you end up with a huge cost in the future even after all the benefits have been squandered. So you don’t have that with any other energy technology that I’m aware of, so that’s where I think that that simple economics combined with simple common sense combined with a real sense of responsibility to the future is combining to really put an end to the nuclear age.

I have to warn people, though, that while the nuclear age in terms of nuclear energy may be winding down, the age of nuclear waste is really just beginning, and people are going to have to get more involved, not less involved, more involved to make sure that these wastes are handled properly and that doesn’t mean abandoning them. What the industry wants to do is to abandon these wastes. They want to dig a hole, put them down a hole and then tiptoe away and say, “There, that’s done,” and of course it’s not done. Those wastes are there and they’re going to remain dangerous for millions of years, or certainly hundreds of thousands of years and they want to put these right beside the Great Lakes right now. They’re talking about building a deep geological repository less than a mile from Lake Huron. That’s about 1.5 kilometers, and so people are fighting this not out of a sense of fear, but a sense of responsibility. We don’t feel that it’s ethical or scientifically justified to abandon these wastes because nobody knows, if you put them down there, whether they’re going to stay there.

They could very well leak out over the hundred thousand years of danger that they admit to, but when they say a hundred thousand years they’re talking about plutonium which has a 24,000-year half-life and when you multiply that by ten you get 240,000, so there’s your hundred thousand years. The reason you multiply by ten is because it takes ten half-lives to get it reduced by a factor of a thousand. But what they don’t think about, even the people the nuclear industry, who should know better, or at least they don’t want to admit it, is that when plutonium disintegrates because it’s unstable, it turns into another element which is radioactive for seven hundred million years, and so in fact it doesn’t disappear. It transforms into something else which is even longer-lived than plutonium itself.

What’s happening here is that when you start totaling up the benefits you find out that nuclear power can’t do the job. When you total up the costs you figure out that they’re never-ending, and by the way that’s why they want to bury them and abandon them. It’s so that they can cut their liability, so the corporation can draw a line and say we’re no longer liable because we have quote-unquote “disposed of this.”

They thought they had disposed of poison gas in the Black Sea until it started bubbling up to the surface again after a while. Dow Chemical in Sarnia [Ontario, Canada] thought that they had disposed of chemicals that they’d injected deep into underground holes until they came up in the St. Clair River as toxic blobs in the sediment, and we’ve heard about various other incidents where, you know, the Love Canal [Niagara Falls, New York State] where there were toxic waste dumps which have come back to haunt people and really endanger the lives of people.
     So this is where we’re at, and I think that we’re at a very good juncture because people are awakening, and people are realizing that they have been misled. They were taught that nuclear power was essential. They find out that not only is it not essential to have nuclear power but rather it is essential to get rid of it.

Dr. Gordon Edwards

Toronto, Canada

July 25, 2015

A Lesser Evil or a War Crime?

A Lesser Evil or a War Crime?

by Yves Boisvert

La Presse, Montreal, August 6, 2015

Translation of

Moindre mal ou crime de guerre?

par Yves Boisvert

La Presse, Montréal, le 06 août 2015

HIROSHIMA -- Mitaki might be the most beautiful place in Hiroshima. The 19th century Buddhist temple is surrounded by a small wood and moistened by nearby waterfalls. The urn buried there contains the ashes of unknown Jewish victims from the Nazi prison camp at Auschwitz.

The strange journey that brought this urn here sums up the misunderstandings and ambiguities related to the victims of the atomic bomb.

The journey took place in 1962. Four young Japanese pacifists undertook a “walk for peace from Hiroshima to Auschwitz.” Their goal was to “unite the victims” of the tragedy of the Second World War.

To the crowds that turned out to follow them they declared, “We Japanese, with our double status as aggressors and victims, have, more than others, a duty to call for peace in the world.”

They arrived at Singapore, but it was at the time when mass graves of the victims of Japanese soldiers had been found. Their welcome was not particularly warm.

They came to Israel at the invitation of the ambassador, but they got a cold reception. Their pacifist and anti-nuclear speeches didn’t have much appeal in a nation that felt threatened on all sides, a nation that had drawn different lessons from the war: a people without military power is at the mercy of assassins. Israel was developing its nuclear program, and they weren’t going to listen to the former allies of the Germans telling them to halt it.

Then they arrived in Poland. This time, their arrival was triumphal. The communist nation found these “victims of Anglo-American nuclear imperialism” to be formidable political symbols. They went to the Nazi prison camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and this is where they were given the urn.

They thought about having it placed in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial in order to symbolize the unity of all victims of the war, but they met with opposition from all directions. What right did they have to use these ashes of unknown Jewish victims? The affair became politically untenable and the mayor had to renounce the idea. With nowhere else to go, the urn ended up at Mitaki.

If the victims of the atomic bomb had an ambiguous status after the war, it was because the memories of the aggression by the fanatical Japanese army were more salient. Among the dead at Hiroshima were thousands of “forced laborers”—Koreans conscripted into slavery in factories.

The American version of history is that the atomic bomb was the lesser evil—the only way to end the war in the Pacific. Tokyo and almost seventy other cities had been bombed, but still the Japanese refused to surrender. A report claimed that a land invasion would lead to the deaths of one million American soldiers and 250,000 British soldiers. The destruction of Japan in an invasion would have been worse than the effects of the atomic bombs.

WAR CRIME

For Robert Jacobs, this version doesn’t hold up. The 55-year-old American historian, born in suburban Chicago, has been at the University of Hiroshima since 2005. We met in an ordinary-looking café, but the walls were the cut-stone façade of a bank, a rare vestige of Hiroshima before August 6, 1945.

Jacobs describes himself as a self-confessed “nuclear obsessive” and concentrates on the effects of nuclear tests that took place throughout the world, and on the fate of nuclear workers like those who work in Fukushima.

“When a woman falls to the bottom of the social ladder, sex work is the last resort. For men it is nuclear work.”

Jacobs added, “I remember the day when I was eight, when they taught us to hide under our desks in case of a Russian nuclear attack. At that instant I became aware of my mortality and the possibility that my entire city could disappear. I went home in a state of terror. Since the age of fourteen I have considered the atomic bombings as war crimes. It is very easy to blame the imperial Japanese government. They launched a ridiculous war and refused to surrender. It is true that the bomb put an end to the war. But the Americans were pursuing other objectives at the time. Stalin’s army was advancing rapidly. They had to show the Russians that the bomb was strategically important.”

General Douglas MacArthur, like many military leaders, was opposed to the use of the bomb, which was a decision made by President Truman. After the war, it was discovered that negotiations for surrender were taking place. The estimates of casualties of a land invasion were contested, and some historians state that an invasion probably wouldn’t have been necessary.

FROM ENEMIES TO ALLIES

How is it to be living in Hiroshima as an American specializing in nuclear history?

“A small minority expresses its anger against the United States, but in this country with many faces, you cannot always trust appearances. Sometimes forgiving is a way of affirming moral superiority… They say they are happy to have us here.”

The Americans quickly went from being enemies to being occupiers until 1952. During this period, mention of the bomb was banned from the media and works of fiction. Accounts of the hibakusha, or survivors of the bomb, appeared only later, a fact which added to the strangeness of their status.

The United States then became the ally and protector of the country from the communist threat posed by China and the USSR. All of this occurred in a very short time.

“It is interesting to see the reaction of Americans who visit the memorial. Some feel guilty when faced with the destruction of civilian life. Many are disoriented. They are confronted with a new version of history.”

A visit to this sobering memorial does not cover the creation of the bomb. All of a sudden not only the horrifying power of the bomb appears, but also the human disaster that ensued from the only two occasions when it was used.

Sources: 

Ran Zwigenberg, "The Hiroshima-Auschwitz Peace March and the Globalization of the 'Moral Witness'" Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust, Volume 27, Issue 3, 195-211, 2013. DOI:10.1080/23256249.2013.852767

Kenzaburo Oe, Hiroshima Notes (Grove Press, 1965).

Translation of:

Moindre mal ou crime de guerre?

by Yves Boisvert

La Presse, Montréal, le 06 août 2015