Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Lest We Forget
The year 2005 marks the sixtieth anniversary of the horrific destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On August 6, 1945, at 8:15 a.m., the American bomber Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Its detonation caused an intense blast, killing some eighty thousand men, women, and children, many of them incinerated or carbonized instantly, others brutally injured: flesh seared, eyes burned out, limbs mangled beyond recognition. An additional sixty thousand people died in subsequent days and months due to radiation and fallout from the bomb. There had been no warning signs and no means of protection for those civilians who died or were injured. Thus, the nuclear age dawned suddenly upon the consciousness of humankind.
In due course, it became apparent that nuclear energy could generate electrical power for those countries that do not have oil, natural gas, coal, or other resources; it can be used for peaceful aims for human benefit—or it can be employed as a terrible weapon of mass destruction.
Was its use as a weapon of mass destruction in the war with Japan justified? This question has been debated ever since the bombs fell. On the very evening of the bombing, President Harry S Truman declared that the atomic bomb was used to force the Japanese to surrender unconditionally. He sought to justify its use by claiming that a Japanese surrender would save the lives of countless American boys, many of whom would have been on the huge list of casualties had we invaded Japan. Paul Tibbits, captain of the Enola Gay, who has been hailed by many as a patriot ever since, said in 1985, “I can assure you of one thing. Nobody in my airplane ever had the least emotional problem or lost a night’s sleep over the Hiroshima mission.” Following the shockwave of the Hiroshima attack, a second atom bomb was hastily dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, three days later. An estimated eighty thousand people were destroyed in that blast as well.
I vividly remember reports about the event. They are seared in my memory. I was a GI in the American army that had just defeated Germany. When news of the A-bombings was broadcast, my fellow GIs broke out in cheers: “The war will be over soon and we can go home!” But I did not share their glee. I felt shattered when I learned of the use of nuclear weapons by the United States against innocent civilians. My comrades-in-arms jeered. “Are you a Jap-lover?” they taunted me, and I responded, “We should not have done this. I can see no moral justification for the mass destruction of innocent civilians.”
Now, I’m not a pacifist; I enlisted in the American army as a volunteer at age seventeen, because I thought that the war against fascism was a just war.1 As a gunner on a half-track in the Second World War, I rolled through France and Germany and took part in the last battle for Czechoslovakia. I had witnessed the barbarian deeds of the Nazis against civilians and the infamous concentration camps in which they unleashed genocide. Nazi Stukas had bombed open cities such as Warsaw and Rotterdam. In London, where I was stationed for a brief period during the war, buzz bombs destroyed large parts of the city. In retaliation, English and American bombers exacted huge tolls upon civilian populations in Bremen, Hamburg, Munich, and Dresden. I had witnessed the aftermath of the destruction in several of these cities, which had been immolated in vast firestorms.
For their part, the Japanese had raped China and invaded Asian countries such as the Philippines and Korea. Japanese planes had attacked Pearl Harbor and sunk much of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. “A day that will live in infamy,” declared President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who immediately demanded from Congress a declaration of war. American planes retaliated at the height of the war by bombing Japan, destroying some sixty-two cities. This was “total war,” or so we were told.
But America’s resort to the atomic bomb ushered in a frightening new era that threatened the world with a yet larger nuclear holocaust; and that threat still hangs over us all like the sword of Damocles, as nuclear proliferation continues and rogue states strive to acquire nuclear capability. Some believe Truman decided to use the bomb so as to keep at bay Stalin and the Soviet army, which had entered the war against Japan as latecomers. Others maintain that the Japanese would have been willing to surrender if they knew that they could keep their emperor—and that, in any case, the bomb should have been demonstrated on an uninhabited island. Critics retort that this latter demonstration strategy would not have worked.
The atomic age had become a reality early in the war, when Albert Einstein and other physicists advised President Roosevelt that uranium could be used to build an atomic bomb and warned that the Nazis might develop the bomb first. A nuclear arms race thus began. The Manhattan Project culminated in the first test of a nuclear weapon in July 1945 at Los Alamos, New Mexico, under the direction of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and General Leslie Groves. Refugee nuclear scientists such as Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, Hans Bethe, and others also took part in this top-secret experiment. But many of them would be horrified by the destruction the atom bomb would wreak in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, believing that, with Germany defeated, the bomb should not have been used against Japan. Leo Szilard, in particular, thought that using atomic bombs against the Japanese was one of the greatest blunders of the war and a gross violation of American moral standards.
Nor were physicists the only opponents of using nuclear bombs in Japan. General Eisenhower had advised against it. Admiral Leahy, Truman’s chief of staff, urged against using the bomb, which he feared might cause humanity to revert to the Dark Ages.
During the Cold War, the nuclear arms race would only increase, especially with the development of the hydrogen bomb. So dismayed were leading physicists that many played prominent roles in campaigning for nuclear-test-ban treaties and nuclear disarmament.
In our own day, most people are rightly appalled by the lack of moral compunction displayed by Islamic suicide terrorists, who bomb innocent civilians in the name of jihad. But in retrospect, the bombing of the open cities during World War II by all sides—including the Allies—and America’s unleashing of nuclear weapons that killed so many innocent civilians should offend the moral conscience of humankind. We should not forget this terrible event.
We should beware the arrogance of hindsight, but it seems difficult to deny that in retrospect, the brutal bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were acts of terrorism on a mass scale. If wars must be fought, civilian casualties should be avoided to the greatest degree possible. Even in warfare, our actions should be governed by certain principles of moral decency.
The full scope of the destructive horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were covered up for many years. By now, almost everything about those two terrible days in August 1945 has been revealed. We need to learn the lessons of this awesome event. But can we? Will we?
The United Nations
Immediately after World War II, the victors resolved to develop new international institutions that would attempt to prevent preemptive strikes and wars of aggression. And so the United Nations was born. Given the lesson of the League of Nations, which had failed so tragically to prevent World War II, it was widely recognized that the destructive power of nation-states, ready to use all the violence and force at their command to achieve their political ends, had to be curbed. The idealism that inspired formation of the UN was encouraged in no small measure by the prominent humanists who convened at the world body’s inaugural session in San Francisco. Indeed, Sir Julian Huxley, first president of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and the first president of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (an honor that I later shared, serving for eight years as copresident); Lloyd Boyd Orr, head of the World Food Organization; and Brock Chisholm, head of the World Health Organization, all identified themselves as humanists. What they meant by humanism was the need to develop a humanitarian concern for the human condition on the planet Earth, beyond religion and ideology.
The hopes and dreams of those idealists included formulating a universal declaration of human rights; developing institutions such as the Security Council which would ensure collective security, and thus prevent future wars; perhaps developing an international police force able to respond to violations of world peace; and eventually developing the rule of law to a level at which it might be recognized by all nations and enforced by a World Court.
The United Nations has come a long way since that time, achieving some of those lofty goals and falling short of others. But it is also clear that fifty years after its creation, the United Nations needs to be strengthened and its institutions need to be reformed. Humanist Manifesto 2000, endorsed by the International Academy of Humanism and first published in Free Inquiry magazine, suggested many of the reforms that we believe will be necessary if we are to build a genuine global community. They include:
•A world parliament representing the people of the world, not simply nation-states;
•An expanded Security Council that would go beyond the original five victors of World War II (United States, England, France, China, and Russia) and could thus be more effective;
•A global Environmental Protection Agency with enforcement capabilities;
•A worldwide income tax that would reduce poverty and improve the health and education of all people of the planet;
•Some regulation of transnational corporations; and
•Open access to the media communications.
Underlying all of these is the basic ethical premise that we have constantly enunciated in these pages, namely, planetary ethics. This is the great battleground of today, to gain recognition for the principle that we ought to cherish and protect the planet Earth, our common habitat; and that we ought to consider every person on the planet equal in dignity and value, no matter in which country he or she resides.
Planetary ethics is transnational; it goes beyond the nationalistic, ethnic, racial, or religious biases, animosities, and hatreds that divide people; it seeks to find common ground in spite of multicultural diversity of beliefs and values; and it seeks to find some basis for negotiating differences and building cooperation.
There are powerful reactionary forces opposing the United Nations and seeking to put forward their own nationalist, ideological, religious, or ethnic agendas. While we surely recognize that the citizens of the various countries of the world have a loyalty to their own countries—whether the United States or China, France or India, England or Russia, Mexico or Bangladesh—nonetheless, I submit that we are all citizens of the planet Earth, and that as such, we should declare our allegiance to the planetary community. Thus, I recommend the following affirmation in addition to any other pledges or affirmations that people may now make:
“I affirm allegiance to the planetary community of which we are all a part: one planet, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. I recognize that all persons are equal in dignity and value. I defend human rights and cherish human freedom. I vow to honor and protect the global ecology for ourselves and future generations yet unborn.”
Free Inquiry at Twenty-five!
Free Inquiry was founded twenty-five years ago. We came into being in October 1980, in response to surging attacks by fundamentalist Christians and the pressing need to defend secularism, the separation of church and state, and the ideals and values of humanism. We wished to demonstrate that a person did not have to be religious in order to be virtuous, that anyone can lead a good life and exercise moral responsibility without religion. Secular humanism emphasizes individual freedom and autonomy, human rights and responsibilities, the common moral decencies, and the cultivation of human excellence and a good will. The Council for Secular Humanism, and the Center for Inquiry movement that arose from it, have grown rapidly during this period in the United States and throughout the world.
No doubt, religious fundamentalists have made serious inroads in various parts of the world in the past twenty-five years, but at the same time secularism, democracy, scientific research, and technology have expanded. The standards of living and health of human beings around the globe have made significant gains.
We have said that the modern world still needs to fulfill the agenda of the Enlightenment, which was introduced in Europe and America in the late eighteenth century and has spread everywhere since then. Indeed, the world has witnessed two and a half centuries of economic progress and the growth of democracy, fueled largely by this Enlightenment vision. Today, we need to define a new agenda for humankind. High among the priorities of this New Enlightenment must be the end of extreme poverty and the application of science, technology, free markets, democratic governments, and the principles of fairness to the underdeveloped world. The global community needs to find the means to satisfy the basic needs of all people, on the planetary scale. In his book, The End of Poverty: Economic Possibility in Our Time, the well-known Columbia University economist Jeffrey D. Sachs argues that it is now possible for the world community to bring an effective end to poverty..2 Many political leaders—including, to his credit, British Prime Minister Tony Blair—have spoken out strongly in favor of the war against poverty. We believe that the affluent nations have an obligation to help achieve sustainable development in the undeveloped world. This goal has always been high on the moral agenda of secular humanism.
A New Enlightenment
If we are to usher in a New Enlightenment, we need to spell out new goals to be achieved in the future. I can only briefly suggest what these might entail:
•The New Enlightenment needs to defend secularism, that is, the separation of church and state and the secularization of values.
•It must be planetary in scope, applying to all members of the human family—thus it would develop a new planetary ethics.
•It would seek to develop the public appreciation of scientific methods of inquiry and the scientific outlook.
•It would emphasize the need to use reason to resolve social differences and to lessen the resort to violence on the national and international level.
•It would defend the protection and cultivation of democracy and human rights everywhere.
•It would seek to banish poverty and disease from all parts of the globe and to reduce the disparities in income and wealth by expanding the amount of wealth and income available.
•It would focus on education and persuasion as the best methods for achieving social change, and it would make education and cultural enrichment truly universal.
•It would seek to elevate taste and appreciation, to cultivate the best of which we are capable as human beings, to achieve excellence, and improve the quality of life.
•It would seek for all people to work together to deal with global problems such as the unmeasured growth of population, environmental hazards, and global warming.
•It would seek to cultivate individual freedom consonant with the rights of others.
•While it would respect diversity and multiculturalism, it would seek always to find common ground that we may share.
•It would encourage cultivation of open societies, equal access to the media, and freedom of inquiry and research.
•It would seek to go beyond the ancient religious, ethnic, and national moral prohibitions of the past and move on to new alternatives appropriate to the contemporary world, new ethical values and principles.
•It would seek to generate and expand equality before the law and equality of opportunity for all individuals.
•It would seek to develop cooperative efforts among all segments of the world to deal with common problems.
•Finally, it would exude some optimism about the human prospect, some belief that the human condition can be progressively improved, and above all, express the resolve to do so.
If we are to achieve a New Enlightenment, we need to go beyond the European and American Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. We need an Enlightenment capable of encompassing the entire global community. We need to build new institutions appropriate to a newly emerging world civilization, one that allows the free market to operate, yet develops laws and regulations on the global scale based on the principles of fairness. It would emphasize the realization of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all individuals on the planet; it would seek to replace greed and avarice with cooperation and negotiation, violent force with peaceful methods of social change, and the brutal competition for power and resources with a common concern for the needs of everyone in the planetary community.
Notes
1. Incidentally, my grandson Jonathan enlisted in the Marines and has fought since in Iraq.
2. Jeffrey D. Sachs, The End of Poverty: Economic Possibility in Our Time (New York: Penguin Press, 2005).
BOX:
Hiroshima at Ground Zero
The impact was at once immediate and catastrophic. In the first billionth of a second, the temperature at the burst point reached 60 million degrees centigrade, 10,000 times hotter than the sun’s surface, the heat almost instantaneously expanding outward across the city in a visible, searing, alien, unimaginably brilliant flash of light. . . . thousands of . . . human beings were . . . burned beyond recognition by the extreme primal heat, instantly carbonized into little charred smoking bundles where they stood or sat or slept or walked, littering what was left of Hiroshima’s streets.
Within a one-kilometer radius of the hypocenter, the thermal energy contained in that single moment’s flash was intense enough to evaporate internal organs, literally boiling off intestines in less than a fraction of a second. . . . One man was sitting on the steps outside a bank 260 meters from the hypocenter when the fireball struck. All that was ever left of him was the imprint of his pose, scorched into the stone like a photograph. The heat was visceral and horrifyingly destructive, as if the sun had suddenly descended to earth. And it all happened in the first three seconds.
Within those first seconds, too, came something new in the history of warfare: the invisible flood of gamma rays and neutrons released in the bomb’s chain reaction, penetrating exposed skin, damaging and destroying cells, altering the very structure of living tissues.
After the flash came the shockwave. It ripped out from the hypocenter at 7,200 miles per hour—10,000 feet a second—rapidly dropping to the speed of sound, a wall of high pressure that smashed through doors, windows, houses, offices, temples, hospitals, shops, stalls, restaurants, factories, buses, schools, animals, and people. . . .
Flash and blast, fire and destruction: these are the keynotes of the bomb’s impact. Perhaps 80,000 people died in those very first seconds; the exact figure will never be known.
* * *
In that first half hour after the bomb fell, Hiroshima’s identity as a city effectively ceased to exist. The bomb overwhelmed everything and everyone in a single devastating, unparalleled blow . . . it was as if a meteor had struck the earth. The members of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey—the teams that went into Hiroshima immediately after the war—dutifully compiled the figures: 109,000 buildings entirely destroyed; 70,000 to 80,000 people killed, an equal number injured (almost certainly an underestimate; a number of historians later revised the figure to 140,000 killed, some dying immediately, others within the next few months from radiation poisoning and other injuries).
From the eyes of an observer:
"He could not tell what it was. It did not look like a human being. It looked monstrous. Every part of its body was black, its arms, its head, its legs, its grotesquely swollen face. Its eyes protruded horribly like golf balls. Its black lips were half the size of its face. It was naked but Hida did not know if it was a man or a woman. Its hands were stretched out with the palms turned down. Black rags hung from its arms and torso. For a moment Hida thought these were pieces of burned clothing. Then he realized they were burned flesh."
Excerpted from Stephen Walker,
Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima (HarperCollins Publishers, New York, 2005; pp. 255–58, 271, 266–67).
BOX:
Center for Inquiry Awarded Special Consultative NGO Status by the United Nations
The Center for Inquiry–Transnational (CFI) is a federation of many organizations including the Council for Secular Humanism (CSH), the International Academy of Humanism (IAH), the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), the Commission for Scientific Medicine and Mental Health (CSMMH), African Americans for Humanism (AAH), and others. It now includes four Centers and fourteen Communities in North America, and fifteen international Centers worldwide. In addition, CFI maintains bilateral relationships with numerous other organizations, with which it is in constant contact, including local and regional skeptical and secular-humanist groups, Secular Organizations for Sobriety, and student groups that now number well over 800 growing worldwide.
The Center for Inquiry–Transnational is committed to the use of reason, science, and free inquiry in all areas of human endeavor. It is committed to defending secularism, critical thinking, humanist ethical values, and planetary ethics.
The UN vote to grant special consultative status as a nongovernmental organization (NGO) to CFI–Transnational was unanimous (including, let us note, the votes of the U.S. delegation). This consultative status will enable CFI to attend meetings at UN facilities in New York City, Geneva, and Vienna. The representatives of CFI can take part in UN-sponsored conferences and workshops and can submit position papers. Equally important, CFI can provide aid to the developing world. Indeed, CFI (in cooperation with Prometheus Books) already contributes thousands of free books and publications to libraries throughout Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe. It assists in providing funds and translations to these organizations and other forms of aid.
CFI thus represents a much-needed, thoroughly naturalistic, rationalistic, secular, and humanistic viewpoint in world forums. Nonprofit NGOs such as CFI can thus play a vital role on the world scene. Many NGOs represent religious bodies.
We are pleased to participate in this endeavor. We will do what we can to contribute to the development of the planetary community and the strengthening and expansion of the United Nations and other transnational organizations.
Paul Kurtz is the editor in chief of Free Inquiry, a professor emeritus of philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and chair of the Center for Inquiry.
CFI SUMMIT
OCTOBER 24-27 2013
TACOMA, WASHINGTON
Joint Conference of the Council for Secular Humanism, Center for Inquiry, and Committee for Skeptical Inquiry
The transnational secular humanist magazine
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