The Mushrooming Cloud

BY H. JACK GEIGER

Edited by Kai Bird and Lawrence Lifschultz.

Pamphleteer's Press. 584 pp. Paper $25.

FALLOUT: A Historian Reflects on
America's Half-Century Encounter With
Nuclear Weapons.

By Paul Boyer.

Ohio State. 268 pp. Paper $17.95.

INDIA AND PAKISTAN HAVE THE BOMB NOW, and the cheering crowds in New Delhi and Islamabad have turned out to affirm that it is a good thing, a necessity, a rite of passage into national military adulthood. The Old Bombers Network of existing nuclear powers, fiercely resistant to any suggestion that they eliminate their own huge arsenals, have reacted with dismay. Nuclear weapons, after all, are to have and to hold (by us), not to be possessed by newcomers. With no acknowledgment of irony, they have even suggested that India and Pakistan have done something immoral. So, fifty-three years after Hiroshima, a billion or so more human beings live directly under its shadow--not counting the hundreds of millions of Southeast Asians who live downwind.

   What has been curiously missing from the resulting international outbreak of finger-wagging is any detailed new discussion of what nuclear weapons--all nuclear weapons, not just those of India and Pakistan--actually do when they are used. One virtue of Hiroshima's Shadow--the book, edited by Kai Bird and Lawrence Lifschultz--is that it does more than recall the agony of the victims. It is focused, instead, on something subtler: the long-lasting moral damage to those who choose deliberately to obliterate hundreds of thousands of civilian lives at a single stroke, and then try to justify that choice. Only one nation has made that choice, and struggled to defend it, and so Hiroshima's Shadow, while giving due attention to what happened to the Japanese, is mostly about a uniquely American experience. What happened to the Japanese is well-known. What happened to us deserves the scrutiny that this book provides.

   It is important, nevertheless, to begin by recalling the physical reality. Among the thousands of photographs, paintings and other artifacts of what happened on August 6, 1945--those images, now familiar everywhere in the world, of bleeding children, twisted buildings, grotesque figures walking across miles of rubble--there is one that is unique. It is the picture of a shadow burned into concrete, the only remnant of a person vaporized in the 5,000-degree heat of the first seconds after Little Boy exploded. It is all that is left of what might be named Hiroshima's Unknown Civilian, a ghostly doorman at the entrance to the nuclear age.

   That shadow speaks to the reality of Hiroshima. But the bomb, and the one that followed three days later over Nagasaki, instantly cast another shadow that has darkened the succeeding half-century, even as Little Boy proliferated into what one scientist has called "a monster with 70,000 heads," the global nuclear arsenal at its peak. It is the wrenching, persistent concern that Hiroshima (and, by extension, all nuclear weapons) represented the crossing of an invisible moral line. It has engendered innumerable debates and created myths, legends and rationalizations that have been intensified, in America, by the knowledge that the United States is the only nation that has actually used nuclear weapons to destroy human populations. The "official" story of Hiroshima became an American legend, wrapped in our historical consciousness--but threatened by historical scholarship that has increasingly eroded claims that the United States acted correctly, even morally. Hiroshima's Shadow is a response to the latest battle over that legend.

   The facts of that battle are straightforward. As the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II approached, the curators of the Smithsonian Institution--America's principal national museum--decided to commemorate the occasion with an exhibit that would have chronicled the origins of the war and its final act, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The planned exhibition in the National Air and Space Museum was to include the fuselage of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the bomb over Hiroshima. An elaborate multi-gallery display, including but not limited to portrayals of the human and material damage, was to be accompanied by an elaborate script that, among many other things, examined the complexity surrounding President Truman's decision to proceed with the attack on Hiroshima and included some statements critical of the use of the bomb.

   The attack on this plan came from the Air Force Association and the American Legion, rapidly joined by right-wing Republicans (newly ascendant in Congress) and fueled by a swelling and eerily McCarthyite chorus of editorials from all corners of the political spectrum (the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, for example) and Op-Ed articles, columns and letters to editors. The distinguished historians who had advised the Smithsonian were now described as people who "hated their country," "revisionists," a "ragtag collection of academics and left-wing ideologues," and "zealots of academe who prowl the liberal arts departments muttering against 'American imperialists.'" An official of the American Legion accused the Smithsonian of the "prostitution of history" and demanded adherence to "a history all of us can be proud of...a joyful mosaic celebrating the end [of World War II]." Newt Gingrich, that self-styled historian, apparently unaware that leading Republicans in 1945 had pressed for clarifications of "unconditional surrender" that might convince Japan to quit, spoke darkly of the Smithsonian as "a plaything for left-wing ideologies." (He also overlooked the fact that Herbert Hoover, that old radical, had written that "the use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul.")

   The Smithsonian caved in. Offending statements were censored. The director of the Air and Space Museum resigned. The Enola Gay was displayed without critical commentary or explanation, and with no references to Hiroshima's devastation. "Historical cleansing" had been accomplished.

   Hiroshima's Shadow is the historians' answer to what its editors call "one of the great intellectual scandals of American history." It is a massive compendium that reprints virtually every major scholarly analysis of the decision to use the bomb. It quotes the first criticisms that began to appear within days of the Hiroshima bombing and continued for years thereafter--many of them, ironically, from political conservatives, including Henry Luce, David Lawrence of what was to become US News & World Report and contributors to William Buckley's National Review. In an effort at scrupulous academic fairness, the book reprints in full two scholarly articles and five journalistic articles defending the bombing and attacking the Smithsonian, and quotes other defenders of the official canon with frequency. Sixty pages are devoted to detailed accounts of the Smithsonian struggle itself. It then offers a series of new and gruesome on-the-ground accounts of the carnage in Hiroshima by survivors. Finally, almost a hundred pages are devoted to reprinting documents--diaries of President Truman and his Cabinet officers, official memos and reports.

   The most useful section lists the four "articles of faith" that "have sustained the Hiroshima legend for more than fifty years." Bird and Lifschultz write:

First, Americans have been repeatedly told that the bomb saved a half-million, even a million, American lives or casualties. Second, the legend has led most Americans to believe that the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were given specific and ample warning of the impending attack on their cities. Third, the official legend has persuaded defenders of the atomic bombings that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were legitimate military targets. Fourth, the legend frames Truman's decision as a stark choice between the use of atomic weapons to force Japan's early surrender and the grisly prospect of a costly military invasion of Japan.

   Take these pillars of the official rationale away, the authors say, and the Hiroshima legend collapses.

   And taking them away is the very substance of the book's meticulously documented argument. American military planners officially estimated that an invasion of the Japanese mainland would cost 20,000 to 46,000 casualties. Those figures were then systematically and continually increased into the millions in postwar justifications by Truman, Churchill and many others. (This was unaccompanied by any discussion of the morality of taking civilian lives to reduce military casualties, but that moral line had long since been crossed in Nanjing, Guernica, Hamburg, Dresden, London, Coventry and the conventional firebombing of Tokyo and sixty-five other Japanese cities. Deliberate destruction of civilian populations was characteristic of World War II; the innovation at Hiroshima was the nature of the weapon, not the nature of the target.)

   Warning leaflets? The macabre fact is that leaflets were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombings; there had been an official decision to use the bomb without warning.

   Military targets? In Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, roughly 4 percent of the deaths were soldiers; 96 percent were civilians. In Nagasaki alone, military casualties totaled less than two one-thousandths of 1 percent of the deaths. Years later, McGeorge Bundy, who had ghostwritten a classic defense of the bombing in a 1947 Harper's article, said, "It's not a myth that [Hiroshima was] a military target...it's a military target like New York."

   As to the fourth myth--the key article of faith that the United States had no alternative to using the bombs, other than a costly invasion of the Japanese mainland--Hiroshima's Shadow notes that "the historical record is replete with details that an alternative strategy to securing Japan's surrender without an invasion was being recommended" [emphasis in original] by virtually every senior adviser to President Truman (with the crucial exception of his buddy Secretary of State James Byrnes). All it would take, they reasoned on the basis of repeated Japanese peace feelers and intercepted cables, was a modification of the demand for "unconditional surrender" to include assurances that the role of Emperor would survive.

   There is more--much more--but I think few readers will succeed in wading through it all. Hiroshima's Shadow is maddeningly repetitious, because the editors quote the contributors, the contributors quote each other and they all quote the same basic sources. It is at once enormous in range and obsessive in detail. But there is a real reward in winnowing from these accounts the revealing--and often shocking--comments both of major contributors to the official legend and of their critics.

   Here are some of my favorites:

   First, the two quotations that so goaded the American Legion and its right-wing allies into comments against the anti-American, unpatriotic revisionists. The first reads:

"During [Secretary of War Henry Stimson's] recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings: first, on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly, because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face.'"

   And the second:

"It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.... My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages...wars cannot be won by destroying women and children."

"It would be a mistake to suppose that the fate of Japan was settled by the atomic bomb. Her defeat was certain before the first bomb fell." (Winston Churchill)

   But there are many others, including two from Gen. Leslie Groves, chief of the Manhattan Project:

"The real purpose of building the bomb was to subdue the Soviets."

"It is a very pleasant way to die."

"The critics [of Truman's decision] have an agenda...that goes well beyond instructing us to face up to our true history. It is to repudiate the moral basis of nuclear weapons. If their use in the one situation where they were actually employed can be shown to be unnecessary, illegitimate, and even depraved, then a powerful change will have been wrought in the political culture in which strategic decisions and historical judgments are made." [Emphasis in original.]

   After the heavy weight of Hiroshima's Shadow it is--despite the subject matter--a joy to read Paul Boyer's Fallout. Boyer, Merle Curti Professor of History and director of the Institute of Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin, has for years been studying the impact on American life and culture of Hiroshima, the nuclear arms race, Star Wars, the antinuclear protests of the sixties and the freeze campaign of the eighties. He explains at the outset that

"the 'fallout' from nuclear weapons was cultural as well as chemical...not limited to strontium 90 and other deadly substances; it also worked its way into the mental and imaginative world of an entire generation, adults and children alike, producing not only nightmares, worried conversations, and activist campaigns, but also a diverse array of cultural artifacts, ranging from poems, novels, and paintings to popular songs, slang, movies, advertisements, radio shows, and television specials."

   To read it, for activists (Boyer is one) and passive observers alike, is to relive a huge slice of American life over the past half-century--to remember Dr. Strangelove, Edward Teller, the Cuban missile crisis, Three Mile Island, Reagan-era confrontations with the Soviet Union, the antinuclear campaigns of scientists and physicians, the Armageddon preachers and the zany promises of civil defense. They are all here, described with wonderful lucidity and, what is even more important, an unfailingly perceptive instinct for their significance in the lives and thoughts of ordinary Americans. On the controversy that really underlies Hiroshima's Shadow, for example, Boyer observes:

To contemplate Hiroshima and Nagasaki unblinkingly is to confront our recent moral history in the most radical way imaginable. Few were ready to do that in 1945. Few have been prepared to do it since.

   Thus the American cultural and intellectual engagement with Hiroshima has remained episodic and inconclusive.... Hiroshima challenges...some of our most deep-seated beliefs about the meaning of our national experience. For years, cultural historians have noted the power and the tenacity of the myth of American innocence: the belief that we are somehow set apart from the other nations of the world, our motives higher, our methods purer.... It is very difficult, to say the least, to fit Hiroshima into a moral schema rooted in a national mythology of innocence and exceptionalism.

   Everyone, most particularly younger generations for whom the nuclear events of the past half-century are remote abstractions, should read this book. To discover the real history of nuclear folly, they might also turn to Fred Kaplan's The Wizards of Armageddon, about the creation of American war plans to use the bombs; Robert Scheer's With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush & Nuclear War, on the demented promises of survival through civil defense; and Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth, on the very real risks of human extinction.

   There is particular poignance, for me, in Boyer's account of the efforts of New York Times science reporter William Laurence (described by Boyer as "the Manhattan Project's official reporter--and unofficial public relations mouthpiece") to deny the stories of radiation sickness in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, already reported firsthand by the Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett, as nothing but "Jap propaganda." Boyer notes that

"the official effort to discredit Burchett's Hiroshima report in fact prefigured a pattern that would continue through the Bikini tests of 1946, the Eniwetok tests of 1954, a whole series of tests in the American Southwest, and decades of blandly optimistic civil-defense pronouncements."

   Not long ago I took part in a committee meeting of the US Institute of Medicine that grappled with the problem of how to respond to a National Cancer Institute estimate that 10,000 to 75,000 cases of thyroid cancer among Americans would result from the fallout of radioactive iodine from those pre-1963 atmospheric tests in Nevada. A year or so earlier I was one of a team sent by the Energy Department to review the work of the Radiation Effects Research Foundation, successor to the old Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission. Hundreds more of Hiroshima's bomb-induced cancer cases were likely still to come, the foundation's Japanese and American researchers told us, because the exposed population was only now reaching the age of maximum cancer incidence. Hiroshima's shadow stretches on.

H. Jack Geiger, a founding member of Physicians for Social Responsibility, which shared the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize with International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, is Arthur C. Logan Professor Emeritus at the City University of New York Medical School.

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