A Distorted Legacy: Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Many of you by now have been watching news accounts of the 60th anniversary of the United States dropping two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima (Aug. 6) and Nagasaki (Aug. 9) in 1945. What you probably haven’t heard is some perspective on the event. That is, the events that transpired on the Japanese mainland in early August of 1945 did not occur within a vacuum.
Writing in today’s The Dallas Morning News, Duke English professor Marianna Torgovnick states “It’s not that Americans don’t know that the United States remains the only nation ever to have used atomic weapons against civilian populations.” Notice the careful qualification: “ATOMIC weapons against a civilian population.”
In reality weapons had been used routinely on civilian populations in Britain, Germany and even Japan. In months prior to dropping the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing some 140,000 people outright, the United States had firebombed Tokyo, killing 150,000 civilians. Of course, such devastation took two nights rather than one morning, but the end result was the much the same. Similarly, European cities (e.g. Dresden, London) were bombed killing tens of thousands of civilians.
One can surely argue that these instances were morally wrong and inhumane, but why single out Hiroshima or Nagasaki just because the bombs released on those cities did in 10 minutes what conventional bombs would need perhaps a couple of nights to do? When the end result of civilian deaths is the same, why does the instrument of those deaths matter?
I think the guilt that Americans are told to feel about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the illogical attacks from moralists and ethicist who conveniently neglect the civilians deaths under other, less atomic, circumstances, is a product not of the act but of the bombs themselves. The nuclear bomb changed the way America and world does politics. It is the ultimate trump card. Today these bombs can yield so much energy that they can eradicate whole societies—not just cities.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki are ghosts that continue to haunt us not because they happened, but because they could happen again.
