The Terror America Wrought [Hiroshima,
1945]
by Robert Scheer
www.truthdig.com, August 7, 2007
During a week of mayhem in Iraq, in which
terrorists have rightly been condemned for targeting schoolchildren,
it is sobering to recall that this week is also the 62nd anniversary
of a U.S. attack that deliberately took the lives of thousands
of children on their way to school in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. As noted in the Strategic Bombing Survey conducted
at President Harry Truman's request, when the bomb hit Hiroshima
on April 6, 1945, "nearly all the school children ... were
at work in the open," to be exploded, irradiated or incinerated
in the perfect firestorm that the planners back at the University
of California-run Los Alamos lab had envisioned for the bomb's
maximum psychological impact.
The terror plot worked all too well, as
Hiroshima's Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba recalled this week: "That
fateful summer, 8:15 a.m. The roar of a B-29 breaks the morning
calm. A parachute opens in the blue sky. Then suddenly, a flash,
an enormous blast-silence-hell on Earth. The eyes of young girls
watching the parachute were melted. Their faces became giant
charred blisters. The skin of people seeking help dangled from
their fingernails. ... Others died when their eyeballs and internal
organs burst from their bodies-Hiroshima was a hell where those
who somehow survived envied the dead."
Like most of the others killed by the
two American bombs, neither the children nor the adults had any
role in Japan's decision to go to war, but they were picked as
the target instead of an isolated but fortified military base
whose antiaircraft fire posed a higher risk. The target preferred
by U.S. atomic scientists-a patch in the ocean or unpopulated
terrain-was rejected, because the effect of hundreds of thousands
of civilians dying would be all the more dramatic.
The victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki
were available soft targets, much like the children playing in
Iraq, suddenly caught in the crossfire of battles waged beyond
their control. In "White Light/Black Rain," a devastating
HBO documentary released this week, there is an interview with
the sole survivor of a Japanese elementary school of 620 students.
The murder of the other 619, and the 370,000 overall deaths attributed
to the bombings, 85 percent of which were civilian deaths, has
never compelled a widespread examination of the "end justifies
the means" morality of our own state-sanctioned acts of terror.
Indeed, the horrifying footage taken by Japanese and American
cameramen soon after the devastation, and shown in the HBO film,
was long kept secret by the U.S. government for fear that an informed
American public might question this nation's incipient nuclear
arms race.
Just exactly what distinguishes the United
States' use of the ever-so-cutely-named "Fat Man" and
"Little Boy" atomic bombs on cities in Japan from the
car bombs of Baghdad or the planes that smashed into the World
Trade Center? To even raise the question, as was found in one
recent university case, can be a career-ending move.
Of course, we had our justifications,
as terrorists always do. Truman defended his decision to drop
the atomic bombs on civilians over the objection of leading atomic
scientists on the grounds that it was a necessary military action
to save lives by forcing a quick Japanese surrender. He insisted
on that imperative despite the objections of top military figures,
including Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, who contended that the war would
end quickly without dropping the bomb.
The subsequent release of formerly secret
documents makes a hash of Truman's rationalization. His White
House was fully informed that the Japanese were on the verge of
collapse, and their surrender was made all the more likely by
the Soviets' imminent entry into the fight.
At most, the Japanese were asking for
the face-saving gesture of retaining their emperor, and even that
modest demand would likely have been abandoned with the shift
of massive numbers of Allied troops and firepower from the battlefront
of a defeated Germany to a confrontation with its deeply wounded
Asian ally. Instead, the U.S. played midwife to the birth of
the nuclear monster, the ultimate terrorist weapon that presents
a continuing and growing threat to the survival of human life
on Earth.
This is a lesson to be pondered at a time
when President Bush plays power games with a nuclear-equipped
Russia while coddling Pakistan, the main proliferator of nuclear
weapons to rogue regimes, and Congress authorizes an expansion
of the U.S. nuclear program to better fight the war on terror
by "improving" the ultimate weapon of terror, which
the U.S. alone stands guilty of using.
Terrorism watch
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