FP: America’s nuclear trules still allow another Hiroshima

Foreign Policy has published an article arguing that US leaders must take responsibility for past nuclear atrocities. Caliber.Az reprints this article. 

On May 18, U.S. President Joe Biden travelled to Hiroshima, Japan, planning to meet with G-7 leaders—as well as survivors of the nuclear bombs—to discuss, among other things, reducing the risk of nuclear war. He followed in the footsteps of former U.S. President Barack Obama, who visited Hiroshima in his final year as president. In a short speech, Obama mourned the dead—but he did not express regret and, his advisors insisted, he did not apologize. Instead, Obama looked forward to a future that would come to see Hiroshima and Nagasaki “as the start of our own moral awakening.”

Biden and his administration have proven to be uncommonly committed to atoning for past domestic acts of violence and racism that still weaken the moral foundations of the United States. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland has announced a major investigation into ethnic cleansing in federal boarding schools for Native Americans, and the president has reaffirmed the government’s apology for its racist internment of Japanese Americans during the second world war. “That’s what great nations do,” Biden said in a speech commemorating the Tulsa Race Massacre, “come to terms with their dark sides.”

The United States has never had a similar moral awakening on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Biden, then a candidate for president, wrote that “the scenes of death and destruction … still horrify us.” For too long, U.S. presidents have used passive language to refer to the bombings, evading responsibility for the act. White House spokesman John Kirby continued this tradition when he said that Biden would “pay his respects to the lives of the innocents who were killed in the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima.” The language helps Americans think of the bombings as something that happened to cities rather than as something their government did to people.

At Hiroshima, Biden said nothing about the bomb. He did not meet with bomb survivors as planned and did not deliver remarks when visiting the peace memorial. U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan stressed that Biden would be one of several leaders paying respects and it was not “a bilateral moment.”

After his trip, Biden—and the U.S. government—should begin to atone for the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in word and in deed. A moral awakening on nuclear weapons requires that we confront not only the facts of the bombings that killed uncountable thousands of Japanese civilians, but also the policies and principles that still echo in U.S. nuclear weapons policy today. 

When Hiroshima was destroyed on Aug. 6, 1945, the city contained more than eight civilians for each soldier. Though a group of senior advisors had recommended that the bomb be aimed at “a military target surrounded by workers’ houses,” they did not issue orders to strike a specific target. The crew of the Enola Gay aimed the atomic bomb at Aioi Bridge, a visible landmark at the centre of Hiroshima. The bomb detonated directly over nearby Shima Hospital. By November, the bomb had killed 90 per cent of people who had been within one kilometre of its detonation. By the next year, more than one-third of the civilians who had been in the city during the bombing were dead. Nearly as many had been injured and would have to wait hours or days for care. More than 90 percent of the city’s doctors and nurses were killed and only three of 45 civilian hospitals were usable.

Survivors describe burned figures stumbling away from the city centre, their skin hanging from their bodies, begging for water, some carrying blackened infants or their own body parts. Hospitals, churches, schools, firehouses, and public utilities all collapsed or succumbed to the flames. While two military headquarters near the centre of the city were destroyed, the airfield, ordinance depots, heavy industry, and navy units clustered around the port received less damage. The fire did not reach them. If the bomb were to have been aimed at the city’s military targets, it would have been dropped two miles to the south.

The intended target of the second atomic bomb was Kokura, a city to the north that contained a military arsenal. However, the bomber that carried it, Bockscar, was late due to bad weather, couldn’t see Kokura through a cover of fog or smoke, and was running low on fuel due to mechanical problems; and so it proceeded to its alternate target. When it arrived, Nagasaki was also not visible. The crew had orders to drop the bomb visually, so they circled. They claimed that a gap opened in the haze and so they released the weapon rather than ditching it in the ocean.

The bomb missed its intended target by three-quarters of a mile and detonated over the Urakami Valley, a residential area that included schools, a prison, a prisoner-of-war camp, a medical college, and a cathedral that served a large population of Catholics in the neighbourhood. A half mile to the north and south, at the edges of the damage, there were two arms factories. Some of Nagasaki’s pregnant women and elderly residents had been moved to the valley precisely because it did not contain military factories.

Then-U.S. President Harry Truman had not specifically ordered the bombing of Nagasaki and seems to have been surprised by how rapidly it occurred. The initial plan was to leave about a week between the bombs to allow Japan time to surrender. Truman had been told only that the second uranium weapon of the type that destroyed Hiroshima would be ready more than two weeks later. But when the first plutonium bomb was ready in only three days, military personnel managing the operation on Tinian Island followed their orders to drop the bomb as soon as it was available. When he learned of Nagasaki, Truman ordered a halt to further use of nuclear weapons, saying, according to accounts of a cabinet meeting, he didn’t like the idea of killing “all those kids.”

In Tokyo that morning, the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War was debating surrender terms when it was informed of the destruction of Nagasaki. Historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa records that the Nagasaki bomb “had little impact on the substance of the discussion.” Bockscar returned to Tinian late in the evening. Historian Alex Wellerstein writes: “No one was waiting for them. There were no photo ops.”

The bomb missed its intended target by three-quarters of a mile and detonated over the Urakami Valley, a residential area that included schools, a prison, a prisoner-of-war camp, a medical college, and a cathedral that served a large population of Catholics in the neighborhood. A half mile to the north and south, at the edges of the damage, there were two arms factories. Some of Nagasaki’s pregnant women and elderly residents had been moved to the valley precisely because it did not contain military factories.

Then-U.S. President Harry Truman had not specifically ordered the bombing of Nagasaki and seems to have been surprised by how rapidly it occurred. The initial plan was to leave about a week between the bombs to allow Japan time to surrender. Truman had been told only that the second uranium weapon of the type that destroyed Hiroshima would be ready more than two weeks later. But when the first plutonium bomb was ready in only three days, military personnel managing the operation on Tinian Island followed their orders to drop the bomb as soon as it was available. When he learned of Nagasaki, Truman ordered a halt to further use of nuclear weapons, saying, according to accounts of a cabinet meeting, he didn’t like the idea of killing “all those kids.”

In Tokyo that morning, the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War was debating surrender terms when it was informed of the destruction of Nagasaki. Historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa records that the Nagasaki bomb “had little impact on the substance of the discussion.” Bockscar returned to Tinian late in the evening. Historian Alex Wellerstein writes: “No one was waiting for them. There were no photo ops.”

Many Americans are taught a common narrative about why the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki: U.S. officials were forced to drop the bombs to end the war, avoid a devastating invasion, and save the lives of both U.S. soldiers and Japanese civilians.

In the years after the end of the war, officials who had overseen the bombings promoted this narrative, which was backed by lies, censorship, and racism. Announcing the bomb to the public, Truman called Hiroshima a “Japanese army base” and, after the war, claimed that an invasion of Japan would have cost 500,000 American lives, a figure at least an order of magnitude higher than estimates his generals had presented to him in 1945. Truman and other officials argued that the bombings were a just retaliation for Japan’s war crimes: he declared that the Japanese had “been repaid many fold” for their attack on Pearl Harbor, as though the atrocities of soldiers justified the killing of civilians living under an authoritarian government. “When you have to deal with a beast,” he wrote to an ecumenical leader two days after the Nagasaki bombing, “you have to treat him as a beast.”

In the days and weeks after the bombs, when the American people were learning about nuclear weapons for the first time, U.S. officials also systematically concealed and misrepresented information about the radioactivity that was continuing to kill Japanese civilians. In 1945, Gen. Leslie Groves told U.S. reporters if the “Japanese claim” that people had died from radiation were true, “the number was very small.” He later told the Senate radiation was “a very pleasant way to die.”

U.S. occupation units in Japan suppressed and edited Japanese books, suspended newspapers, and classified scientific research that contained firsthand accounts from survivors or information about radioactivity on the pretext that they would disturb “public tranquility.” Few photographs of civilian victims of the bombings were released to the public. Film shot by a Japanese crew was confiscated and classified for more than 20 years. The United States also misinformed U.S. journalists and restricted their movement, and officials probably destroyed stories and photographs that they considered harmful to America’s reputation.

In many ways, the common narrative about the U.S. decision to drop the bomb conflicts with what we now know from documentary evidence. Though the literature is vast and contentious, J. Samuel Walker identifies several tenets of “a broad, though hardly unanimous consensus” among historians. The primary motivation for the destruction of Hiroshima was to hasten an end to the war and it did in fact advance the Soviet invasion by a week. U.S. leaders understood they had an alternative to dropping the bombs in August 1945. They knew Japan’s military position had collapsed. Many believed that the incipient Soviet entry into the war, or clarifying that Truman’s demand for “unconditional surrender” would not require removing or executing the emperor, would end the war before the U.S. Army had planned to invade Kyushu in November 1945 or Honshu in early 1946. The U.S. invasion of Japan was not regarded as inevitable, especially in the Navy or the Army Air Forces, and even then it was being reconsidered.

Documentary records show that U.S. officials hoped that the destruction of civilians would shock the Japanese leadership into surrender.

Truman did ensure that there would not be a concerted diplomatic effort to end the war before the bomb could be dropped. He delayed the Potsdam Conference that would deliver an ultimatum to Tokyo until mid-July, when the bomb was tested, and he refused to offer an assurance on the emperor’s fate until after Nagasaki. At the same time, then-Secretary of State James Byrnes and other U.S. officials worried that if the war ended with a diplomatic agreement rather than a mushroom cloud, it could lead to questions about the cost of the Manhattan Project, political costs for the Truman administration, and a more aggressive Soviet Union.

Though the Japanese Supreme Council had not decided to surrender before Hiroshima, U.S. officials also knew that the Japanese foreign minister had cabled his ambassador in Moscow in July that the emperor “desires from his heart that [the war] may be quickly terminated.” Until the emperor personally intervened after Nagasaki, the Supreme Council still had not agreed on surrender

In many ways, the administration’s planning for use of the atomic bombs was cursory and careless. American officials did not discuss in detail whether to drop the atomic bombs or the moral and humanitarian implications of doing so. President Truman did not issue a clear order about where and when to release the weapons. It is doubtful that Truman or his close advisors were informed about the effects of residual radiation that would continue to kill and injure for decades. Hiroshima was selected as a target not out of military necessity but because, as the largest city that had not yet been devastated by firebombing, the bomb’s full potential for destruction would be on display. Nagasaki was not even on the original list of targets.

Rather than acting to minimize civilian casualties, Katherine McKinney and her coauthors have demonstrated that, “killing large numbers of civilians was the primary purpose of the attack.” Documentary records show that U.S. officials hoped that the destruction of civilians would shock the Japanese leadership into surrender. A planning committee recommended that the bomb should be dropped not on isolated industrial targets but “in center of selected city.”

Over the years, many true statements have been used to justify the bombings. Truman believed that dropping the bomb was necessary to end the war. Most U.S. officials said that this was their primary motive for dropping the bomb. The Japanese Supreme Council was not ready to surrender before Nagasaki. An invasion would have been devastating—for American soldiers, Japanese soldiers, and Japanese civilians. Many Japanese civilians were directly or indirectly producing materiel for the military and were trained to resist invading forces. There were soldiers and valid military targets in and around both cities. The Japanese military committed appalling atrocities against Chinese, Americans, and other peoples.

It is also true that major combatants had conducted indiscriminate bombing of cities throughout the war, beginning with the German assaults on the Netherlands and Belgium. On the U.S. side alone, Allied surveys estimate that bombing campaigns in Europe caused a million civilian casualties, a third of them deaths. Incendiaries created firestorms that devastated Dresden and Hamburg in Germany, and Tokyo. The night of March 9, 1945, U.S. aircraft dropped 1,667 tons of incendiaries on Tokyo and burned fifteen of the most densely populated square miles on earth to the ground, causing deaths comparable to the Hiroshima bombing. By August 1945, every major Japanese city was wholly or substantially in ruins. When “precision bombing” of industrial targets proved insufficient, civilians became the target. Gen. Curtis LeMay, who perfected the firebombing of Japanese cities and commanded the atomic bombing missions put the goal succinctly: “Bomb them and burn them until they quit.“

We should regret that our government did not try to find another way.

All of these are facts. None of them justify the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear weapons. Even if all these things are true, and even if it were necessary to drop the bombs to prevent an invasion, it does not affect the central moral facts of the atomic bombs.

Even if they believe the common narrative about why their government destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Americans should still regret that the United States killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians. We should regret that the bombs killed children, doctors, teachers, religious leaders, Allied prisoners of war, and forced laborers. We should regret that their government did not recognize or provide medical care for the Americans it killed and injured. We should regret that neither weapon was aimed at a military target and that both detonated over civilian areas. We should regret that the government lied about the effects of the bomb. We should regret that the policy process was cursory and disorganized and that the president’s authorization was unclear. We should regret that our government did not try to find another way.

As the philosopher Margaret Anscombe wrote years later about Truman, this is not a conclusion that depends on context or details: “For men to choose to kill the innocent as a means to their ends is always murder.” Whatever other effects they had, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a deliberate act of government policy to kill civilians. This is close to the definition of a crime against humanity.

President Biden did not apologize in Hiroshima. But there are three ways that he, or a future president, could begin to atone—in word and in deed.

First, a president could state that, given how the United States understands its obligations under the laws of armed conflict, it would now consider the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki illegal and would not carry out such an attack today. This statement should be indisputable. The U.S. Department of Defense Law of War manual, which covers nuclear weapons, imposes several constraints on military operations that the atomic bombings evidently violated: that a nuclear attack must be “directed against military objectives,” that the advantage of an operation must be “definite” rather than “hypothetical or speculative,” that the collateral damage must be proportionate to the expected military advantage, that civilians working in a munitions factory are not valid targets, and that the military must “take feasible precautions to protect civilians,” and many others. None of these conditions were met in destroying Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

It is not clear that current U.S. nuclear targeting policy would consider Hiroshima and Nagasaki to be illegal today.

Despite this, it is not clear that current U.S. nuclear targeting policy would consider Hiroshima and Nagasaki to be illegal today. Legal advisors at U.S. Strategic Command continually review and update nuclear warfare plans to ensure they are in compliance with how the United States understands its obligations under the rules of law. In fact, the sole constraint on the president’s ability to order a nuclear attack is that a combatant commander may object that the order is illegal, in which case they would work to develop a lawful order. Much about this procedure is subjective, including how the attorneys interpret terms such as “proportionate” and “feasible” and whether participants in the “decision conference” choose to object.

There is a long tradition in U.S. nuclear weapons policy that justifies the destruction of cities. After the war, LeMay served as commander of the Strategic Armed Forces, which initially concentrated its planning against infrastructure in urban areas. If the bombs missed and struck population, it was “bonus damage.” In 1959, U.S. nuclear war plans targeting Moscow cities contained targets for 179 “designated ground zeroes,” which included targets not only for leadership, industry, and infrastructure but also “population” targets. Beginning in the 1960s, priority gradually shifted from “urban-industrial” targets to an enemy’s own nuclear forces, but there were sufficient military sites in and around cities that urban centers would inevitably be destroyed.

Though the Obama administration stated that “the United States will not intentionally target civilian populations or civilian objects,” the logic that was used to justify Hiroshima and Nagasaki is still in place today. Ltc. Theodore Richard, while serving as an attorney at U.S. Strategic Command in 2017, wrote that Truman was correct in thinking of both cities as military targets because they contained military facilities and because “civilian objects can easily be converted to military objectives.” Furthermore, the United States has maintained that it can legally target civilians with nuclear weapons as long as an enemy did so first. For Richard, this kind of ambiguity about our interpretation of the law of war “can serve to improve deterrence.”

The United States should not interpret the laws of war in ways that allow another Hiroshima or Nagasaki. For the president to state that Hiroshima and Nagasaki would violate our legal obligations would create a presumption against legal theories that would justify similar operations and should mark the start of a process to review nuclear plans. The best way to atone for the bombings is to ensure that they never happen again.

Second, the U.S. government could state that bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki was wrong. This would add an important moral statement over and above legality or policy. A change in policy can be circumvented or reverted by a future president. A moral determination can not only shift one specific question of policy, but help guide other changes.

There is an important and complex debate to be had about the law of war in 1945, and the brutalization caused by years of conflict, but it is not necessary to conclude the debate for us to judge the bombings. We can listen to LeMay when he said, “If we lose the war, we’ll be tried as war criminals,” and to then-U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson saying he “did not want to have the United States get the reputation for outdoing Hitler in atrocities,” and to Truman’s worry about killing “all those kids.” It is why Truman called Hiroshima a military base and why U.S. officials had recommended dropping the bomb on a factory (though it wasn’t, and they didn’t). U.S. officials failed to live up not only to the moral standards of today, but also to their own at the time. Destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki was wrong not only because we know it was wrong, but because they knew it was wrong.

An apology is how a country proves that this is not who it wants to be.
To this day, the United States often fails to hold its own war criminals accountable for violating the law of armed conflict. For example, former U.S. President Donald Trump, who talked casually of killing 10 million Afghans and improvised nuclear threats toward North Korea, pardoned convicted war criminals and obstructed military leaders who were trying to hold them accountable. Unfortunately, that is only the most recent episode in a long history of shameless impunity for U.S. soldiers who have raped, tortured, and murdered when deployed in foreign countries. It is a pattern that makes it virtually impossible for Biden to “make America, once again, the leading force for good in the world.”

Third, the U.S. government could apologize for the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Some survivors demand an apology, while others do not. Though the Japanese government discouraged Obama from issuing an apology while he was in Hiroshima, we should not make the mistake of assuming that many Japanese would not appreciate an apology in less disruptive circumstances.

Apologizing to those you have harmed is not the only virtue of an apology. When we act contrary to our principles, an apology is how we repair our identity. Imagine the reticent, half-hearted apologies you’ve received: “I hurt you. I was wrong. I won’t do it again.” The apology is important in and of itself. It is the most complete and demanding form of contrition. When we’ve done something wrong, we owe it to ourselves to apologize and until we do, we are holding something back. For a country still struggling to transcend the racist instinct to dehumanize and harm minority populations, it is not enough to recognize that it has done wrong. An apology is how a country proves that this is not who it wants to be.

As a country, the United States is not ready to apologize for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It will probably never be ready. Though it is easy to think of this as a reason not to apologize, we should instead think of it as a reason to do so.

Along with a statement of contrition, there are pragmatic steps that could shift the United States away from repeating its mistake. As a candidate, Biden promised to state that the sole purpose of nuclear weapons is to prevent other countries from using them. As president, he has not done so. As a first step, he should state that the United States will not use a nuclear weapon to destroy a target if there is a viable conventional option.

The Biden administration should also reform the procedures that afford the president sole authority for nuclear use and establish a more rigorous and inclusive system for certifying the legality of an order to employ nuclear weapons. It can also review the standards that would be used to make that assessment—to clarify what, if any, military advantage is proportionate to the destruction of a hundred thousand innocent civilians; when nuclear use would be necessary when weighed against non-nuclear options; what constitute a “feasible precaution” to avoid civilian casualties; in what cases a nuclear weapon would be indiscriminate; and so on. When the United States makes these assessments, it should be writing them not to ensure they are compatible with its destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but to ensure that we never do it again.

Many Americans probably assume that the laws and morals that guide nuclear targeting have already evolved, but in too many ways, our nuclear arsenal today is still the one that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But today’s B-2 bombers are operated by the 509th Bomb Wing, which, of the dozens of bomber squadrons from World War II, was created to deliver the bombs. The new $1.3 billion building at U.S. Strategic Command outside of Omaha, Nebraska, is named the Gen. Curtis E. LeMay Building after the commander of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki missions—who, in his own words, believed that “there are no innocent civilians.” As the Pentagon was beginning a long-overdue effort to remove the names of Confederate traitors from military bases, Strategic Command was settling into a building named after a war criminal.

The United States is still the country that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Until we admit the facts of what we did, until we atone for our actions, and until we act to ensure that we would never do such a thing again, that is who we are choosing to be.