A Personal & Professional Response: HIROSHIMA, LEST WE FORGET!

HIROSHIMA, LEST WE FORGET!

Reference:

Dr. Fisher's essay was written to acknowledge the 63rd anniversary of the American B-29 bomber named Enola Gay, which took off from Tinian Island in the Marianas to drop a single atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan at 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945.

More than 80,000 mainly civilians died in less than a minute, and led to 140,000 deaths in later years. In that instant, most of Hiroshima ceased to exist.

Two days after Hiroshima, on August 8, 1945, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan (as agreed to at Yalta in February 1945 by president Franklin D. Roosevelt, prime minister Winston Churchill and commissar Joseph Stalin).

An atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki on August 10, 1945, with 40,000 mainly civilian deaths, which eventually led to over 100,000 deaths.

On August 14, 1945, Japan surrendered.

Japan's formal unconditional surrender to the Allied Forces was presented in a document to General Douglas MacAruthur aboard the U. S. battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945.

Humanity had acquired the power to destroy the world and mankind. Sixty-three years later the world trembles in the shadow of the atomic bomb's mushroom cloud.

WRITER WRITES:

Jim,

Apologies for the delayed response.

Minus hospital time in Pearl Harbor, my father spent the time from late 1942 to mid-1946 in the South Pacific, almost all of it on an escort carrier CVE-84, USS Shamrock Bay. He missed Midway, but caught most of the action thereafter. In July 1945, his carrier was part of a task force headed toward Tokyo Bay to join other American forces building there for the final assault on the Japanese home island. Although he’d survived a lot of stuff he shouldn't have, including the kamikazes at Leyte, he was 100% convinced that this was it. The reason being, the ordnance hold of their ship, and those of the others, was loaded with poison gas. One bomb or torpedo and they were all goners.

Based on what they'd seen on Iwo, Guadalcanal, and Okinawa, they were convinced that the Japanese would dig in even more fiercely on their home island. It would take forever to root them out of the mountains and caves of Japan. So, the primary battle plan was the widespread use of gas through aerial bombing. The ground invasion would then focus on ‘mopping up’ operations. Casualty projections were 500,000 – 750,000 Americans, 1.5M Japanese military, and over 4M Japanese civilians.

Roosevelt didn't believe in the bomb, and undertook the project only after considerable nagging by Einstein and others who knew the Germans were working on it. We built four bombs, and used one at Alamogordo, leaving three. The Japanese didn't know that. For all they knew, we were building them hand over fist. Shifting to Dresden, some believe that the firebombing was revenge. More likely, it was an attempt to break the will to fight. Our strategic bombing of military and industrial targets made war fighting difficult, but the fire bombing of Dresden brought despair to the German people, and coupled with their disaster on the Russian front, broke their will.

When Truman took over, he took a more pragmatic stance. He was willing to try the bombs, and if they didn't work, he could still follow the primary plan. They worked in that they convinced the Emperor that we could / would annihilate the Japanese race. He stepped in, ended the war, and was almost assassinated for his trouble.

In the end, about 175,000 people died. That's a lot of folks. However, if you had to make the decision, would it be more moral to incur the casualties of the primary plan rather than use a nuclear device? I’d have to recheck my data, but I believe more Japanese were actually killed in the incendiary attacks on Tokyo leading up to August 1945 than in the atomic bombs themselves. The bombs accomplished a second objective as well. They sent a message to the world that said, “We have it, we’ll use it. Don’t mess with us again.”

It’s easy for artists and poets to wring their hands, but as usual, it’s with less than total context. The Japanese bemoan the events and build memorials, but I see them building no memorials to Nanking.

Atomic weapons are horrible things, but it is their very horror that gave them value – they forced even politicians to constrain their military adventurism. They kept the cold war an economic contest. The good news is their time has passed. Both candidates for President have said they will downsize and DE-alert nuclear weapons, and frankly, the time has come. The Russians welcome that too, as they want to do the same. Nuclear weapons are expensive to maintain and dangerous to have around. The only limit to how fast we can downsize is how fast we can destroy the material in civilian reactors. (It’s not good to have plutonium around in any format.) We can however, DE-alert immediately. It only requires Presidential order.

Unfortunately, we cannot un-invent technology. Neither can we keep the technology to ourselves forever. We’re going to have to face nuclear terror, it is inevitable. However, the time of major powers hoarding thousands of weapons is gone. I see the world’s major powers downsizing to dozens of weapons, not thousands; just enough to be a deterrent. As I write this, USSTRATCOM is doing their homework to determine what to downsize and when to downsize it in anticipation of a new President. I know this because I am personally involved in these exercises. My career today focuses on modernizing the technologies to permit us to go to the minimum number necessary for deterrent. (Every target we can hit conventionally is one more nuke we don’t need.) Good riddance I say.

What of the future? It’s my observation that people who have something worthwhile to lose, don’t much like war. It’s my hope, my dream, that as economic modernization and uplifted lifestyle spreads around the globe, the people themselves will back away from war, leaving the politicians to waggle their tongues and weenies at each other. That’s what they’re best at anyway.

v/r

e

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

e

Thank you for a sage and thoughtful personal and professional response. Man has a future if there are more with a mindset such as yours. I am humbled to have my reflections of this tragedy placed in such meaningful perspective. We are on the same page. May temperance prevail.

Be always well,

Jim

WRITER WRITES AGAIN:
I know this has been beat to death, and I apologize for responding yesterday after you cried uncle; I was working through emails up from the bottom.

I’ve been thinking though, about the civilian target thing. It seems to me that reticence about hitting civilian targets is a product of modern media – bringing into people’s homes the true brutality of war on civilians. Civilians have always gotten the dirty end of war. I could think of no war in history where civilian targets were not attacked, and as you go farther back, the sacking of civilian targets for plunder actually becomes the objective. In modern times, I think attacking of civilian targets reflects a frustration that sticking to military targets is not bringing the conflict to the desired ends. Civilian targets are soft and indefensible.

When the cold war began, both the US and Soviets targeted each other’s cities. As American missiles grew more accurate, the warheads grew smaller, and the targets switched to 100% military. The Soviets today are 50 – 50, targeting both our weapons and our cities. Perhaps, the reticence of attacking civilian targets actually reflects progress in the maturity of our species? Wouldn’t that be Grande? As demonstrated by Gen Giap in Vietnam, all you have to do to win is break the opponent’s will to fight. It doesn’t necessarily mean you have to annihilate him. Maybe we’re gradually evolving to where Sun Tzu was in 400 BC – to win without fighting is the highest glory.