FALLING SHORT: BARACK OBAMA’S VISIT TO JAPAN’S GROUND ZERO

In a tweet I posted earlier this year when Washington was still on the fence as to whether or not Barack Obama should be the first sitting president to visit the site of the first of two US nuclear bombings of Japan at the end of World War II, I suggested he should not only go, but that he should also carry a heartfelt American apology with him. In the end, Mr. Obama indeed went, but he did not—and this, unfortunately, comes as no surprise, considering standing US policy on the subject—make any apology for what many, including myself, consider one of the worst war crimes in human history.

US President Obama with Japan's Prime Minister Abe at the 

Hiroshima Memorial.

Last Friday, Obama became the first US president in the seven decades since to end of World War II to pay an official visit to the Hiroshima Memorial, a 30-acre park at the ground-zero epicenter of the nuclear blast that instantaneously laid waste to the Japanese city killing tens of thousands in the blink of an eye and continuing to kill many thousands of others for weeks, months and years afterward. August 6^th of the current year will mark the 71^st anniversary of what President Obama this past week described as “a bright cloudless morning, (when) death fell from the sky and the world was changed.”

In a speech that he gave at the Hiroshima ground zero memorial site, Obama said that “technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us.” He added that such technological advancement “requires a moral revolution as well.” The US president proposed, “a future in which Hiroshima and Nagasaki (where the US dropped a second nuclear device three days after leveling Hiroshima) are known not as the dawn of atomic warfare but as the start of our own moral awakening.”

The mushroom cloud from the Hiroshima blast 

rose more than 60,000 feet in 10 minutes.

But for all of his flirting with “moral awakenings” and despite, after much contemplation, his deciding to meet with actual survivors of the nuclear holocaust that the US rained down on Japan, the president still fell short of saying what many people in that country and, indeed, around the world have long been waiting to hear: a straightforward admission that nothing could possibly have justified such a monstrously inhuman act, that it never should have happened, that the United States was clearly and horribly wrong and that it would be forever repentant of such a heinous crime against humanity.

The “moral awakening” that the US president mentioned has not, to my mind, come to pass, if, a lifetime down the road from that unconscionable act, the United States can still not face up to its wrongdoing and at least formally apologize to the people against which it perpetrated a virtual act of genocide. The fact is that many in the United States—perhaps even a majority—continue to justify the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a “necessary means” for forcing the Japanese to surrender and end World War II. But according to the research that my team and I gathered for my most recent book, War: A Crime Against Humanity, this argument simply does not hold water.
The research tends to show that these horrific war crimes were perpetrated as a result of a precipitous decision by President Harry S. Truman, who ignored the conscientious and morally sound judgment and advice of some of the country’s top generals and scientists in a show of callous (some have said racist) disregard for innocent civilians, for extended consequences and, indeed, for the world at large, since there was not yet sufficient evidence to know what the short, medium and long-term effects of the atomic blasts would be  not only on Japan but on the entire planet as well.

The letter authorizing the nuclear bombings

In my book, I recall a 1960 interview that the American weekly U.S. News & World Report did with Leó Szilárd, a key scientist in the country’s nuclear program, who said that the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki “…made it very difficult for us [the United States] to take the position after the war that we wanted to get rid of atomic bombs because it would be immoral to use them against the civilian population. We lost the moral argument with which, right after the war, we might have perhaps gotten rid of the bomb.” Szilárd tangentially accused the Truman administration of war crimes, saying, “Suppose Germany had developed two bombs before we had any bombs. And suppose Germany had dropped one bomb, say, on Rochester and the other on Buffalo, and then, having run out of bombs, she would have lost the war. Can anyone doubt that we would then have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and that we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them?”

My book also quotes James Franck, a Nobel physics laureate who headed an advisory committee formed months before the bombings, and who warned President Truman that, "If the United States were to be the first to release this new means of indiscriminate destruction upon Mankind, she would sacrifice public support throughout the world, precipitate the race for armaments, and prejudice the possibility of reaching an international agreement on the future control of such weapons."

But, as I point out in War: A Crime Against Humanity, it wasn’t just scientists and other intellectuals who objected to the employment of weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction as a means of forcing the Japanese military to surrender. High-ranking US military officers also considered Truman’s decision not only morally questionable but also militarily excessive.

In his memoir entitled The White House Years, former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II, states that, “In 1945 Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act...I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.”

An official World War II Army poster

published following the surrender of Germany

and Italy, when Japan was still fighting.

This was clearly not the opinion of a peace activist but of the highest ranking officer in the United States Army and in the joint Allied Forces. And Eisenhower was not alone in his misgivings. Among numerous other distinguished officers, Admiral Chester Nimitz, who commanded the US Pacific Fleet during the war said, "The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan." And the legendary General Douglas MacArthur is quoted by writer Norman Cousins as saying that he saw no military reason for the bombings. Cousins writes: “When I asked General MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb, I was surprised to learn he had not even been consulted. What, I asked, would his advice have been? He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb.” Admiral William Leahy, President Truman’s own Chief of Staff, took a staunch moral stance on the issue of the bombings saying: "The use of [the atomic bombs] at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons...My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children."

And yet, the United States persists, even today, in its resistance to fully and honestly admitting its grave and unjustifiable crime against the Japanese people and, by extension, against humanity. As such, the US is perpetuating, as Szilárd so eloquently pointed out, a double standard by which the extermination by the Nazis of six million Jews and other minorities over a period of several years is justly considered a holocaust, while the elimination of between 150,000 and 246,000 lives, and the killing of tens of thousands of others as a result of nuclear after-effects within the following five years in Japan are considered the mere, unintentional, collateral damage of an expedient tactic to end a war.

The even bigger Nagasaki blast seen from 9 km away...

"gratuitous at best and genocidal at worst."

By not admitting its guilt in perpetrating this inhuman act of genocide on two major civilian populations, the US implicitly maintains the notion that the employment of nuclear warfare, no matter how many protocols to the contrary it might sign, is not entirely unthinkable. As the only power ever to have made use of nuclear devices—and worse still, against general populations—if it fails to admit wrongdoing, then it is tacitly condoning doing so again should a similar situation arise.    Despite all of the evidence to the contrary, Truman is still seen today by many as a veritable hero for dropping atomic bombs on the civilian populations of two Japanese cities, allegedly as a means ending World War II quickly and “at a lower cost in human life”. He is often hailed in the United States as a “strong leader” and his decision is seen as “difficult yet compelling” rather than as rash, inhuman and criminal.

But even if a case could be made for the Hiroshima bombing—which, morally, it simply cannot be—as an evil at the service of a greater good, the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki three days later (before Japan and, indeed, the world had even had a chance to react to the horror of the first blast) was criminally indefensible. Or as Pulitzer Prize-winning American historian Martin J. Sherwin puts it: “The Nagasaki bomb was gratuitous at best and genocidal at worst.”

It is not merely disappointing that, after making a highly significant decision to go to Hiroshima and to meet with survivors and their families, President Obama should have opted out of an official apology and thus out of ushering in a new era of a stricter than ever policy of nuclear non-aggression and non-proliferation: It is a sign that the US remains unrepentant and feels a sense of nuclear entitlement that disregards the human rights and safety of humanity as a whole.

My question today is, then, with this precedent still jealously defended by every US presidency since World War II, what could we expect the attitude of a Donald Trump presidency to be toward the use of nuclear weapons in any situation that his paranoid, intolerant and patently aggressive mind might construe to justify it?