says: “One can imagine the hurry with which the two bombs—the only two existing—were whisked across the Pacific to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki just in time, but only just, to insure that the Japanese Government surrendered to American forces alone.” Blackett points to an article by Norman Cousins and Thomas K. Finletter, in the Saturday Review of Literature, June 15, 1946, in which they ask why the United States did not first warn the Japanese by a demonstration of the atomic bomb. According to Cousins and Finletter, a demonstration would have taken some preparation, and there was no time for making such arrangements before the Russian invasion:
No; any test would have been impossible if the purpose was to knock Japan out before Russia came in. …
It may be argued that this decision was justified; that it was a legitimate exercise of power politics in a rough-and-tumble world, that we thereby avoided a struggle for authority in Japan similar to what we have experienced in Germany and Italy, that unless we came out of the war with a decisive balance of power over Russia, we would be in no position to checkmate Russian expansion.
Blackett adds:
The hurried dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a brilliant success, in that all the political objectives were fully achieved. American control of Japan is complete, and there is no struggle for authority there with Russia. … So we may conclude that the dropping of the atomic bombs was not so much the last military act of the second World War, as the first major operation of the cold diplomatic war with Russia now in progress.
Blackett’s conclusion is supported by Gar Alperovitz’s meticulous research of the Stimson papers and related documents. Alperovitz points out that at Potsdam Winston Churchill told his secretary of state for foreign affairs, Anthony Eden, that “it is quite clear that the United States do not at the present time desire Russian participation in the war.” Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, in his diary entry for July 28, 1945, said Secretary of State Byrnes “was most anxious to get the Japanese affair over with before the Russians got in.” Byrnes’s own memoir, Speaking Frankly, is full of frankness: “As for myself, I must frankly admit that in view of what we knew of Soviet actions in eastern Germany and the violations of the Yalta agreement in Poland, Rumania, and Bulgaria, I would have been satisfied had the Russians determined not to enter the war.” He then adds a much franker statement: that at the January, 1945, Yalta Conference the United States agreed on Russian entrance into the war because then “the military situation had been entirely different”; now with Japan near defeat and with the United States in possession of a brand-new deadly weapon, there was no reason to give Russia the added psychological and physical power in Asia that a major share in defeating Japan would afford.
What Hiroshima suggests is not that a liberal, humane society can make a mistake and commit mass murder for political ends, but that it is characteristic for modern societies to do so. The evidence for this harsh conclusion is in the explanations for the atomic bombings, advanced by the government and generally accepted by the American public, and it is reinforced by the behavior of the United States prior to and after Hiroshima. Granted that Hitlerism was a monstrous evil, were the attitudes toward human life demonstrated by the Allies during the war, and perpetuated after the war, such as to make the difference between theirs and Hitler’s worth fifty million corpses?
In World War II the two nations credited with being the most enlightened, liberal, democratic, and humane—the United States and England—agreed on the efficacy of saturation bombing of the German civilian population. As early as 1942 the British Bomber Command staff, according to the United States Strategic Bombing Survey’s official report, “had a strong faith in the morale effects of bombing and thought that Germany’s will to fight could be destroyed by the destruction of German cities. … The first thousand-bomber raids on Cologne and Essen marked the real beginning of this campaign.” At the Casablanca Conference in January, 1943, this faith was affirmed as Allied strategy; larger-scale air attacks would be carried out to achieve “the destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial and economic system and the undermining of the morale of the German people to the point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened.”
It was the same strategy Mussolini had used in dropping bombs on civilians in the Ethiopian campaign and the Spanish Civil War, and it was the same strategy used in bombing civilian populations from Kiev to Coventry—all to the horrified outcries of the liberal, democratic, capitalist nations of the West. The only difference in the two strategies was that the English and American attacks on German, French, Czechoslovakian, and other cities made the Fascist bombing of civilians seem puny.
World War II did not end, but rather sustained, the Fascist notions that war is a proper mode of solving international political problems, and that, once a nation is at war, any means whatsoever justify victory. The saturation bombing of Vietnamese villages by American bombers dropping napalm and cluster bombs, which are deliberately intended for people, not bridges or factories, and leave particularly cruel wounds, has been in accord with the thinking of the Allies in World War II—that “the morale” of the enemy could thereby be destroyed. In 1968 Daniel Ellsberg, at the time an official in the Department of Defense, publicly described this psychological objective in the strategic bombing of Vietnam. But Vietnam is only another example of the post-World War II acceptance of mass slaughter. When British historian A. J. P. Taylor was asked how he could place Hitler in the same broad context of evil shared by other nations, in view of the killing of six million Jews, he responded that those nations that had defeated Hitler were now stockpiling weapons capable of killing far more. American strategist and governmental adviser Herman Kahn suggested in his book On Thermonuclear War that atomic warfare did not necessarily mean the end of the human species; it might result in only thirty million American deaths.
Would thirty million American deaths be too high a price to pay for megadeaths among enemy civilians? By the end of the 1950s, the idea of nuclear war was becoming acceptable in the United States. All that people required was a reasonable provocation. In one nationwide poll conducted in 1961 among twelve hundred students, 72 per cent agreed that the United States “must be willing to run any risk of war which may be necessary to prevent the spread of Communism.” During the Berlin crisis in the summer of 1961, polls taken in various American cities, including Denver and Atlanta, indicated that most people were willing to risk atomic war with the Russians over the status of West Berlin.
All societies justify the most cruel acts of war by pointing to their superior culture. Thucydides, without making the accusation himself, shows Athens guilty of such arrogance. But whatever differences there are in the qualities of nations—and one can say there were differences between Sparta and Athens, as one can say there were differences between Nazi Germany and the United States—the act of total war reduces and sometimes obliterates these differences. Even if a society waging war possesses admirable features—the welfare system of the Soviet Union, the Bill of Rights in the United States—it is a fallacy to think that war is a valid means of spreading the good features to other nations in the process of “liberating” them from the enemy. Socialism did advance after World War II, but most effectively in those countries (China, Yugoslavia, Vietnam) where the local population fought its own guerrilla warfare and was not dependent on the massive strength of the Red Army. The Soviet Union supported socialist revolutions in certain places (Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria), but was reluctant to support them in others (Greece, Italy, France, China) because its main concern was its own national power, not changes in social systems. The historian Gabriel Kolko writes in The Politics of War: “The Russians had not created the left and they ultimately could not stop it, though they might try. … The two genuinely popular communist parties to take power—in Yugoslavia and in China—did so over Soviet objections and advice. …”
Similarly, the United States supported democratic institutions in Japan and undemocratic institutions elsewhere—Greece, Turkey, the Middle East, Latin America, and South Africa. Its main priority was not the social welfare or the human rights of the local populations, but whether
