60 years on the shadow of the first cloud remains

The flash of light. The flash of light was like nothing I had ever seen before. Or since.

– Hiroshima Survivor

Today marks the 60th anniversary of one of the great war crimes of human history. At 8:15am on a beautiful Summer day, the Enola Gay dropped 'Little Boy', an atom bomb, on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later, another atom bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. American war planners chose these two cities because they had remained relatively undamaged by the intense aerial bombardment meted on most of Japan's major cities.

Mainstream history tells us that dropping those two bombs was a military necessity, that it ended the war. Were it not for the two atom bombs, Japan would have refused the Allies' unconditional surrender and the Americans would have had to mount a bloody land invasion of Japan. This interpretation has sat uncomfortably with many for a long time.

Peter Kuznick, director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University Washington DC, argues that Truman authorized the use of the bomb not to bring a quicker end to the Pacific War, but to limit Soviet expansion into Asia.

Others argue that the intention behind the use of the bomb is too complex to distill into either an essentially aggressive or passive motivation.

Two certainties seem clear. The two atom bombs killed 100,000s of Japanese civilians at a time when Japan was incapable of resisting its antagonists.

The second is that the Pacific War was a conventional war between belligerent states, not a war of liberation. There is no doubt that Imperial Japan was a fascist, militarist enterprise to its core. But it was also the product of centuries of Western colonialism in the greater Pacific region. Prior to the attack on Pearl Harbour, Japan found itself in a desperate geopolitical situation, surrounded in all corners by openly antagonistic rival great powers and with an uncertain supply of resources. Whereas the Western powers had sought to control the Pacific over centuries of colonialism, Japan’s colonial ambitions were relatively new. Most of Japan’s political and military elite, although not all, were eager to close the gap between Japan and the other great powers sooner rather than later.*

Japanese war planners knew they could not defeat the United States decisively. Their best chance, so they believed, was to knock out the Western navies in the Pacific long enough to establish a stable Japanese presence throughout the Pacific which would compel the Western Powers to agree to a truce. Unfortunately, for Japan’s war planners, the attack on Pearl Harbour, Manila, Singapore and throughout the initial phase of the Pacific War did not achieve this end. Eventually, the US counterattacked spectacularly. Before long, what had begun as an attempt by the Japanese to expand its influence over the Pacific ended as an American exercise in geo-strategic expedience. The Pearl Harbour attack gave the United States the perfect pretext to defang a serious regional rival and assert its dominance over the region.

In this light, how anyone can consider the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki merely as tactical manuevers is perplexing.

Two months after the bombing of Hiroshima, one of only two Western journalists who visited the devastated city commented:

Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller has passed over it and squashed it out of existence. I write these facts as dispassionately as I can in the hope that they will act as a warning to the world.

After the war, the Tokyo Tribunal was established to prosecute Japan's leaders for war crimes. One of the Tribunal’s Judges, Justice Radhabinod Pal of India, refused to acknowledge the Tribunal’s jurisdiction. Justice Pal noted:

The so-called trial held according to the definition of crime now given by the victors obliterates the centuries of civilization which stretch between us and the summary slaying of the defeated in war. A trial with law thus prescribed will only be a sham employment of legal process for the satisfaction of a thirst for revenge. It does not correspond to any idea of justice. Such a trial may justly create the feeling that the setting up of a tribunal like the present is much more a political than a legal affair, an essentially political objective having thus been cloaked by a juridical appearance.

There is a clear allusion in that statement to the use of the two atom bombs.

The machine that murdered so many on this day still exists. Today reminds us how little progress has been made towards dismantling it.

Those who died this day, may you rest in peace.

*For further information on the origins of the Pacific War, see this excellent piece from Noam Chomsky, written in 1967.