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Posts Tagged ‘Nagasaki’

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A Day Too Late

Friday, April 26th, 2013

Ever since I set up an e-mail alert for the phrase, “Manhattan Project,”¹ I’ve been getting an interesting cross-section of discussions on the Internet about the history of the atomic bomb.

One of the interesting ones to pop up again and again is the question of whether the United States warned Hiroshima and Nagasaki about their impending destruction. It’s a discussion in this case that has actually been confused by the abundance of context-less primary sources on the Internet. In particular, the Truman Library posted (some time back) copies of leaflets that it has labeled as being dropped on August 6, 1945 — the day of the Hiroshima bombing. These leaflets have proliferated across the web onto other reputable sites, like PBS’s Truman resources. The understandable result is that a lot of amateur historians out there have concluded that indeed, we did warn the Japanese.

But the truth, as with many things, is more complicated. I want to talk about three potential “warnings,” here, as both a means to help clarify this issue (to any other future Googlers about this topic), and also to use it as a case study for why history is more than just finding documents.

The first potential “warning” is the Potsdam Declaration. It was issued on July 26, 1945, by Truman, Churchill, and Chiang Kai-shek. It ends with this particular bit:

“We call upon the government of Japan to proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces, and to provide proper and adequate assurances of their good faith in such action. The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction.”

Was the “prompt and utter destruction” meant to imply atomic bombing? It’s not clear. An earlier draft of the statement, written by Secretary of War Stimson and his staff well before the results of the Trinity test were known, doesn’t include the “prompt and utter destruction” phrase. It does, however, emphasize that the point of the Potsdam Declaration is to try and shake Japan into surrendering, and that part of how it should do so is to outline “The varied and overwhelming character of the force we are about to bring to bear on the islands,” and “The inevitability and completeness of the destruction which the full application of this force will entail.” Varied and overwhelming sound like Stimson was thinking about more than just atomic bombs — he’s thinking about further firebombing, he’s thinking about invasion.

In any case, a veiled warning is not much of a warning. I’m not saying that the Potsdam Declaration should have warned specifically about atomic bombs — whether that would have done anything positive is unclear to me — but I think under any reasonable interpretation, it isn’t possible except in retrospect to even imply that it was some kind of warning about atomic bombs.

The second potential “warning”: the so-called LeMay leaflets. These were leaflets that were dropped on dozens of Japanese cities in July 1945. There were many versions of the leaflets dropped. Some listed specific cities, some did not. The most famous one, shown above, depicts a squadron of B-29s laying waste to a city with firebombs. The text apparently (I don’t read Japanese) said the following:

Read this carefully as it may save your life or the life of a relative or a friend. In the next few days, four or more of the cities named on the reverse side of this leaflet will be destroyed by American bombs. These cities contain military installations and workshops or factories, which produce military goods. We are determined to destroy all of the tools of the military clique that they are using to prolong this useless war. Unfortunately, bombs have no eyes. So, in accordance with America’s well-known humanitarian policies, the American Air Force, which does not wish to injure innocent people, now gives you warning to evacuate the cities named and save your lives.

America is not fighting the Japanese people but is fighting the military clique, which has enslaved the Japanese people. The peace, which America will bring, will free the people from the oppression of the Japanese military clique and mean the emergence of a new and better Japan.

You can restore peace by demanding new and better leaders who will end the War.

We cannot promise that only these cities will be among those attacked, but at least four will be, so heed this warning and evacuate these cities immediately.

Which cities were warned? I’ve seen sources that basically say, following an article in the CIA’s Studies in Intelligence, that they were “delivered to Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and 33 other Japanese cities on 1 August 1945.” Curiously, this phrase has been removed in their main web version of the document. I’d love to see the actual list of cities that they were delivered to, if someone has it, or can translate it. Specifically, I’m curious if all four of the final atomic bomb targets (Hiroshima, Kokura, Nagasaki, and Nigata) were on the list or not, since the US Army Air Forces had agreed to “preserve” those targets from firebombing. (I’d also be interested in knowing if Kyoto was named or not.)

These leaflets certainly warned of bombing and destruction. They were not warnings about atomic bombs, though, but firebombs. Does the distinction matter? I’ll come to that at the end. They are, if anything, the closest thing to any kind of “real warning” that was given to Japanese civilians.

Lastly, we have those mysterious warnings from the Truman website, the ones which were very specific about atomic bombs. There are reasons on the face of it to be suspicious that it is what the Truman Library claims it is.

The first one is dated by the library to August 6th, 1945. The fact that it references the past destruction of Hiroshima makes it, of course, pretty clear that it wasn’t dropped on Hiroshima ahead of time, and throws the dating into question — even if it was drawn up on August 6th, it’s too late to be used on Hiroshima. A second one, also labeled as August 6, 1945, references the Soviet invasion of Manchuria… which took place on August 9th. So, just a priori, we can’t really give the library’s own dating labels any credence — they’re clearly wrong about the dates, and the dates matter in this case, since we are talking about whether the warnings happened before the bombs were actually used. And that’s not even getting into the whole “the atomic bomb was a secret” bit.

What’s going on here? There’s only so much we can learn from these two isolated documents alone. For more… we head into the archives!

1946 - History Psychological Warfare Manhattan Project

Click image to view full document.

In late May 1946, Lt. Colonel J.F. Moynahan wrote a memo to General Groves with the subject heading “History Psychological Warfare, Manhattan Project.”² It appears Groves wanted it for his internal “Manhattan District History” he was compiling (more on that another time). I’ve included the entire memo above, so you can read it at your leisure, but here’s the main timeline that Moynahan lays out.

On August 7th, 1945 — the day after Hiroshima — General Henry “Hap” Arnold ordered that propaganda leaflets be prepared regarding the atomic bomb. General Thomas Farrell, Groves’ representative in the Pacific, was charged with carrying it out. This is interesting, no? It was the Army that made the call, not the Manhattan Project people.

The Army Air Forces were instructed to lend their assistance. Farrell received the cable as he was boarding a C-54 plane (along with, among others, Enola Gay pilot Paul Tibbets) to visit Admiral Nimitz to report on the Hiroshima mission. Farrell set the ball in motion by getting in touch with the propaganda people already in the Pacific, and work began on planning the leaflet missions on Saipan. It was determined that they should use “half-sized” leaflets, and that they should try to distribute 6 million of them. They also made an inventory of the “leaflet bombs” that they were dropped out of the planes in (you don’t just drop them out of the hatch). They decided, in terms of targeting, to try and get a 60% saturation of all 47 enemy cities that had a population of over 100,000.

Then they had to figure out the text of it. Drafts were drawn up. Work was hurried. They worked straight through the night of August 7th. The Manhattan Project personnel on Tinian were intensely interested, as you’d expect, to the degree that they were “at times a positive obstruction” to finishing the drafts.

A copy of the final “atomic bomb” leaflet, I think? I don’t read Japanese, but this was attached to the above memo. If you do read Japanese, I’d love a translation. Please ignore my thumb in the corner — it’s hard to photograph documents that are bound like these ones were.

Finally, on the morning of August 8th, the plan was presented to Farrell at Tinian. Farrell edited the message a bit and approved it. The message was then flown to Guam, where the Army Air Forces and the Navy signed off on it. Radio Saipan was told to broadcast the message every 15 minutes, though Moynahan had no information as to when that actually began. The translation of the text was done, fascinatingly enough, by three Japanese officers held as prisoners on Guam. After talking with the officers, the Americans also decided to make the format look like that of a Japanese newspaper.

What they still lacked were the leaflet bombs — they had run low. A midnight flight from Sapian to Guam supplied those. And then Russia entered the war. So it was decided that they should incorporate that into the message. So that slowed things up again. Finally, they got it ready to go… but they weren’t in any way coordinated with the actual bombing plans. So Nagasaki did get warning leaflets… the day after it was atomic bombed.

Well, that’s a grim clarification. The short version: leaflets specifically warning about atomic bombs were created… but they weren’t dropped on either Hiroshima or Nagasaki before they were atomic bombed. The first Truman Library document was the first draft, that was never dropped. The second one was the second draft, and was dropped, but only after the bombs were used.

So what do we take away from all of this? The first is the historian’s point: isolated, context-free documents do not interpret themselves. Part the hard job of an historian is to provide the context for a given historical artifact. In this case, we’re talking about leaflet drafts, and the context is when they created, why they were created, and specifically when they were used. It doesn’t help, of course, that the library themselves have put incorrect dates on them, but even with a correct date, the context is still not completely straightforward. Context is everything — without it, nothing makes sense, and you can come away with exactly the opposite conclusion from the truth of things.

The second question is about the warnings themselves. I don’t think the Potsdam statement counts as a real warning — it’s an ultimatum, and it’s a vague one. I don’t think the atomic bombing leaflets count as real warnings, either — they were dropped after the fact.

A map created by the US Army Air Forces in the immediate postwar showing their strategic bombing handiwork. Includes percentages of cities destroyed, as well as similar-sized American analogs. Cleaned up by me from the original.

But the LeMay leaflets are the more complicated case. They are ostensibly warnings of immediate destruction — and the cities they “warned” were indeed destroyed, famously so. Whether they warned of destruction by firebombing or atomic bombing strikes me as somewhat of a distinction without a difference. Either way, it’s destruction of entire cities.

But do the leaflets in any way reduce culpability, for either the firebombs or the atomic bombs? This is the more difficult moral question. The leaflets were written as if they were dropped because the American Air Force actually cared about civilian lives:

Unfortunately, bombs have no eyes. So, in accordance with America’s well-known humanitarian policies, the American Air Force, which does not wish to injure innocent people, now gives you warning to evacuate the cities named and save your lives.

This strikes me as pure falsehood. The entire goal of the strategic bombing was to destroy civilian cities, with the idea of breaking the Japanese ability to make any kind of war, and with breaking the Japanese spirit. The firebombing raids had been optimized for the maximum destruction of entire cities, not just the parts involved with actual warmaking or even periphery industries. The “shock” effect of the atomic bombs was in part predicated on them taking high numbers of lives — they were meant to be so horrible as to be unendurable. The idea that firebombing was somehow, in any fashion, meant to be compatible with “humanitarian policies” is complete nonsense.

The leaflets were not part of any humanitarian mission. They were part of a campaign of “Psychological Warfare,” as was very explicit within their organization in the military. The goal was to convince the Japanese people to rebel, or to abandon their posts, or to hide, or to pressure their leaders into surrender. Now, whether that is ultimately, in a means-to-an-end way, “humanitarian” or not, one can debate. But you have to get pretty far along that twisty road to think that burning civilians alive is “humanitarian.”

Here’s a thought experiment: If a terrorist sent a warning before nuking an American city, would that get them off the hook for the bombing? (Much less if they named three possible cities, and then only bombed one of them.) If Hitler had issued an ultimatum to Great Britain that surrender was the only option, would he be let off the hook for the Blitz? Does it matter that the “warnings” in question were issued to a very non-free Japanese populace?

Ultimately what I’m asking is, do warnings really matter? I don’t think there’s an easy, pat answer here. There are a lot of interlocked ethical questions about ends-versus-means, the obligation of an attacking power, the obligation of a citizen in a country during war, and so on. Personally, though, I do think it’s somewhat of a red herring: the real issue still, for me, is under what circumstances one accepts the morality of total war. Because if you haven’t hashed that out, then quibbling about which warning was specific enough, whether that somehow reduced moral culpability, is all just an issue of counting angels on the head of a pin.

Notes

I used to do this with Google Alerts, but their service has been fickle as of late, so I’ve also signed up with Talkwalker. [↩]
Citation: Lt. Col. J.F. Moynahan to General Leslie R. Groves, “History Psychological Warfare, Manhattan Project,” (23 May 1946), National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD, RG 77, Box 49, “314.7 – History (MED).” [↩]

Tags: 1940s, Firebombing, Hiroshima, Japan, Manhattan Project, Nagasaki
Posted in Redactions | 7 Comments »

Visions

The 36-Hour War: Life Magazine, 1945

Friday, April 5th, 2013

When NUKEMAP first got very hot, the Washington Post’s blog declared its popularity a sign of our jittery times. Those were Iranian jittery times, if we remember back all the way to a year ago — today we are jittery again, this time regarding North Korea. And so people are flocking to the NUKEMAP again, trying to see what North Korea’s latest weapons would do to their cities if they were used. I’m almost tempted to push out the new one early, just to take advantage of the interest, but I have faith that we will be jittery again whenever the new one is done. Nuclear jitters aren’t a new thing.

Visualizing nuclear war is an old media pastime. How old? One of the most vivid early depictions of this sort of atomic apocalyptic thinking come from Life magazine’s issue of November 19, 1945 — only a few months after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

From the cover of the issue, you’d have little to suspect about its contents. “Ah, big belts! Fascinating! I love big belts!”

But once you get beyond that, the interior stories are much more interesting. For people interested in World War II and the Cold War, there are a lot of great stories in here: articles about what should be done with postwar China, what was going on in postwar Poland (with some impressive, awful photographs), plus an article on occupied Tokyo (with some amazing illustrations), and another on the OSS (spies!). There was even, at the very end, a reproduction of the Jack Aeby photo of the “Trinity” test, in full color (which was apparently just “orange,” after going through Life’s printing processes).

But the real stunner story of the issue was something much more grim. Once you get past a lot of fluffy stuff, you’re greeted with this horror:

“The 36-Hour War.” This long, feature story is a description of what nuclear war in the future will look like. It was based on a report by General “Hap” Arnold, the chief of the Army Air Forces during World War II and the later founder of Project RAND, which became the RAND Corporation, the epitome of a Cold War think tank. (He was also, incidentally, the guy who gave Curtis LeMay his job in the Pacific theatre.)

The report in question was the “Third Report of the Commanding General of the Army Air Forces to the Secretary of War.” Hunting around a bit, I eventually located a copy of the original online, if you’d like to look at it. It was published only a week before the Life story on it, which is pretty impressive given the illustrations involved in the article. The report is concerned both with summarizing what had happened in the air war during World War II on both the European and Pacific fronts, as well as a concluding section on “Air Power and the Future,” which is the subject of the “36-Hour War” article. Like many strategic bombing advocates, Arnold downplayed the importance of the bomb for World War II, emphasizing that the only reason the atomic bombs, or any bombs, could be delivered at will was because they had already won strategic superiority over the island. It’s the future where Arnold thought atomic weapons will really matter.

And it’s a grim future: rockets plus nuclear weapons equals “the ghastliest of all wars,” according to Life. The implications of ICBMs somewhat understood well over a decade before they were technologically realized.

The Life story starts with a large illustration of Washington, DC, getting nuked (hey, at least it’s not New York again, right? But why are they nuking RFK Stadium?), and then follows with a two-page spread showing 13 “key U.S. centers” getting wiped out by the Soviet Union. “Within a few seconds atomic bombs have exploded over New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boulder Dam, New Orleans, Denver, Washington, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Kansas City, and Knoxville.” (Sorry, Boston, but you didn’t rate! Austin, you are fine for now!) They guess that 10 million people would be killed in the initial attack. “The enemy’s purpose is not to destroy industry, which is an objective only in the long old-fashioned wars like the last one, but to paralyze the U.S. by destroying its people.”

Amusingly, the Life writer suggests that these Soviet missiles came from silos in equatorial Africa, “secretly built in the jungle to escape detection by the UNO Security Council.” Ah, the naiveté of 1945, believing that it would be a taboo of some sort to build ICBM sites! Believing that some kind of international order would be assembled that might affect the conduct of nuclear war! Sigh.

But on the whole the Life story is not bad (except for the ending, which I’ll get to). On the page above, it talks about radar as an early warning technique which they claim would give perhaps 30 minutes warning in the event of an ICBM attack. But they also point out that radar can be evaded by low-altitude missiles and smuggled atomic bobs. And they recognize that 30 minutes is really not that long of a period in time — “even 30 minutes is too little time for men to control the weapons of atomic war.” At best, they suggest, such warning could be used to fire defensive rockets at the incoming rockets, a topic they cover on the next page.

“Our Defensive Machines Stop Few Attackers.” Dang. In this hypothetical future, the US has a missile defense system that works pretty much like you’d expect one to work today — maybe it might destroy a few of them, “but inevitably it would miss some of the time.” The illustration above shows the enemy rocket “coasting through space” in its final descent, with the interceptor missile coming up from the ground. Some nice copy: “When the two collide, the atomic explosion will appear to observers on the earth as a brilliant new star.” It doesn’t actually work that way, but whatever, it’s a nice sentence.

In his report, Arnold outlines three approaches to “defense” against atomic attack. First, you basically try to make sure nobody is making nuclear weapons. Not a bad start, you have to admit. Second, you should try and develop defenses against launched attacks — e.g. missile and bomber defense. A bit more problematic. Third, you redesign the entire country to make it harder to attack with nukes. This is basically the “dispersal” theory of defense — if you don’t have all of your infrastructure and people living in a few, centralized locations, then the vulnerability to all but the most apocalyptic attacks is a lot lower.

But finally, he emphasizes — in the manner befitting a general, I suppose — that the best defense is a good offense. That is, deterrence. And to do that, you need a good second-strike capability, to use the lingo of a later time.

The Life writer and illustrator decided to combine both of these last two ideas, creating a rather amazing fantasy nuclear installation. Take a look at that spread — it’s a huge underground city devoted to producing ICBMs and launching them en masse. It has underground streets and underground cars and underground trains. I’m not sure that Arnold was suggesting anything like this, but it’s pretty amazing. It doesn’t seem very practical, for a lot of reasons (those firing tubes look pretty vulnerable to attack, which would moot the whole installation), but it’s wonderfully imaginative for 1945. Philip K. Dick wrote about crazy installations like this in some of his short stories, but those were written in the 1950s and 1960s.

Towards the “war’s end,” enemy troops would show up. This is because, according to the Life writers, “in spite of the apocalyptic destruction caused by its atomic bombs, an enemy nation would have to invade the U.S. to win the war.” Win the war? Here you see a little bit of divergence from what would be a more common narrative: that nuclear war is really just about a “knock-out punch,” as opposed to conventional notions of taking over a country.

The illustration above is pretty interesting. OK, obvious cheesecake fantasy going on there, as gas-masked Soviet thugs step over the somehow-still-beautiful corpse of a telephone operator whose blouse has almost been knocked open by atomic bombs. The Soviet soldiers are attempting to repair the telephone infrastructure and get the country back up to (occupied) speed, and are walking around destroyed streets with bazookas (a less-sung wonder-weapon of WWII). The Life staff estimate that 40 million would be dead at this point “and all cities of more than 50,000 population have been leveled.” New York’s Fifth Avenue is merely a “lane through the debris.”

But, but! Have some hope! Improbably, “as it is destroyed, the U.S. is fighting back. The enemy airborne troops are wiped out. U.S. rockets lay waste the enemy’s cities. U.S. airborne troops successfully occupy his country. The U.S. wins the atomic war.“ Wait, what? We won the war? How? A little hand-waving was all that was needed. I know, they nuked all our major cities and landed troops with bazookas, but don’t worry, we managed to (within 36-hours, mind you!) launch a devastating counterattack that included occupying his country. Well. I am relieved and can move on to the article on big belts, no?

Well, hooray. Of course, the country has been reduced to radioactive rubble — “By the marble lions of the New York Public Library, U.S. technicians test the rubble of the shattered city for radioactivity.” But chin up — we won the war!

It’s an amazing place for the article to just… end. A preview of un-defendable, horrible destruction, and then a quick deus ex machina that resolves it. And what a resolution! 40 million dead, no more big cities, but don’t worry, we got ‘em back! It’s really not very satisfying. It has the whiff of a heavy, least-minute editorial hand: “we can’t end on such a grim note, and then expect them to just move on to other articles. We’ve gotta win, in the end! Give ‘em some hope!”

One wonders: what was the public supposed to take away from this? Support for international control of the bomb? Support for better defenses? Fear of the future? It’s really a wonderful mess, the sort of thing you’d expect only a few months after the bomb made its debut, to be sure. Not all of the clichés had codified, the genre was still new.

Speaking of which — remember that devastating sequence from Fog of War, where Robert McNamara describes the firebombing of Japan, telling you what percentage of each Japanese city was destroyed, and then telling you an American-sized equivalent? The Arnold report in question did it first, and may have been the source for the data (the percentages and cities seem to match exactly):

Which makes a wonderful full-circle, doesn’t it? Something originally used to brag about performance has now become a touchstone for explaining the barbarity of the Pacific campaign.

Tags: 1940s, Bad ideas, Civil Defense, Graphic design, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Soviet Union, Speculation, Trinity
Posted in Visions | 14 Comments »

Visions

Hiroshima and Nagasaki in color

Friday, March 22nd, 2013

I’ve been on the road all this week, so there’s not too much of a post today! (The one last week was double-sized, though.) But I thought I’d share some interesting images that have captivated me over the last week or so.

Most of the photos we are familiar with of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are black and white. The effect is one of a dusty, barren landscape — they look like abandoned cities on the moon. On top of that, almost all photos of the cities from the ground were taken after the bodies had been cleaned up and the streets cleared — most were taken no earlier than late September 1945, and many of the “classic” ones are actually from mid-to-late 1946, a year or so later. The net effect is that the cities were somehow neatly “vaporized.” This is a false impression.

Color photographs of the city, however, are far more striking. What was a city of dust now looks like a city of rubble. It becomes, in some unconscious way, more believable, more recent, less distant. It becomes more “real.”¹

The effects of the bomb also become a bit more clear, though there is still a lot missing. The atomic bombs used during World War II killed most of its victims by burning and crushing them — the classic medieval tortures, made wholesale by technology but not much more modern. (Only about 15-20% of the people at the cities died truly “modern” deaths, from the radiation effects.)

The above photograph is of Hiroshima, apparently taken in March 1946 — some eight months after the bombing. You can tell a lot has been cleaned up: the roads, for example, are very clear. There are no obvious corpses. A few reinforced buildings are standing, but not much else is. There are some telephone or electricity poles up; I don’t know whether those were added after the attack, or were somehow still standing despite it (blast effects can be complicated).

The photo above is labeled as being of Hiroshima in the autumn of 1945. Superficially, when compared to the one before it, one thinks that the damage looks a lot lighter. There are a lot of poles and trees and a few shack-like structures in the foreground, and some factory-looking buildings in the background. But there’s still a lot of rubble — a lot of places that just aren’t there anymore. (I’m a little suspicious about whether this photo is identified correctly, to be honest.)

The above photograph was taken by the photographer J.R. Eyerman sometime in the fall of 1945. It’s a rare color view from the ground, as opposed to being from aircraft or from a high vantage point. It’s a vivid look at the twisted jungle of pipes, bricks, concrete, wood, trees, and other unidentified objects. Imagine the struggle of trying to make your way through that.

Another of Hiroshima from March 1946. Compare it to the one above, and how different a perception one has. It’s not that one of these is wrong, per se; they’re both of Hiroshima, and they both give away a different sense of the damage. In trying to get a sense of scale for these things, I find mixing up the modes of perception to be pretty important. One needs to understand what this looks like at the ground level, but then one needs to realize the extent to which that damage applied.

The above two are both of Nagasaki from around October 1945. Again, notice the almost capricious nature of this kind of damage: some of those trees look not so badly off, next to structures that have collapsed to the point of non-identification. The presence of people also lets you get a sense of the scale from the human point of view. A big ruinous mess.

This is listed as the damage outside a school in Nagasaki, taken just a few weeks after the bombs were dropped. Without knowing what this looked like before the attack, it’s hard to get a sense for what we’re looking at, but it appears the windows of the school are probably all blown in (there isn’t any glare or reflection), and those are some pretty big trees to see snapped about.

Hiroshima’s financial district, date unknown. Again, note the apparent capriciousness of the damage. The truth is, the construction of the buildings in question matters quite a bit. But don’t be too fooled — being inside a burning concrete building whose windows are blown in isn’t that great. You can tell the one in the middle has no remaining glass and some ominous-looking charring around the windows.

And here is one of the Hiroshima Gas Company and the Honkawa Elementary School. I think the latter really emphasizes the horror of “strategic” bombing, where burning elementary schools become acceptable as “collateral damage.” The famous dome at the upper right hand corner of the photo was directly underneath the explosion; the school was about 800 feet from there.

There are two ways you can go wrong in making sense of the scale of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The first is to see the bombs as instant vaporizers, to see the bombs as Everything Killers that just zap cities out of existence. This isn’t the case. They kill by crushing and burning and irradiating. They don’t turn you to dust. They don’t freeze you and turn you into a stop-motion skeleton, like in The Day After. For some, death was instantaneous, but for a lot of others, it was a much more protracted affair.

The other way to misunderstand it is to downplay it. Ah, a number of large buildings survived! It’s not so bad, then, right? Maybe the whole nuke thing has been exaggerated! Well, unless you are, you know, not in one of those buildings, and even if you are, it’s a pretty awful thing. Yes, you can approximate the city-wide effects of early atomic bombs with a fleet of conventional bombers dropping napalm — which personally I consider just as much a weapon of mass destruction as anything else, and yes, napalming cities is “conventional” in the sense that it is not a nuclear, biological, or chemical weapon, but let’s not forget that it’s not exactly an everyday occurrence. But being napalmed is not exactly a walk in the park for those being bombed, either.

So what’s the right view? An ugly, troublesome, disturbing one; right between those extremes. The atomic bomb was a weapon used to inflict tremendous human suffering. (This is true whether you think its use was justified or not.) If an atomic bomb were to go off over your city, the damage would be horrifying, the death toll staggering. But it’s a level of destruction that people should try to appreciate for what it is — a realistic possibility, not a clean science-fiction ending or a blow to be shrugged off.

That’s the perception I’m always searching for. The color photographs add a little bit to that, to keep one from the misconceptions, to keep one from seeing these wrecked cities as sanitary piles of dust.

Notes

These come from here and there on the Internet, but two very nice galleries I got a number of them from are here, here, and here. I’ve done some color correction on the photos, which understandably have faded a bit over time. [↩]

Tags: 1940s, Hiroshima, Manhattan Project, Nagasaki
Posted in Visions | 8 Comments »

Meditations | Redactions

The Decision to Use the Bomb: A Consensus View?

Friday, March 8th, 2013

One of the great historical arguments of the late-20th century was whether the decision to use the atomic bomb was justified or not, and what the real goals of its use were. I’ve sometimes seen this dismissed by partisans (usually in favor of the use of the bomb) as being a recent sort of argument, only made by people who were well distanced from World War II, but this isn’t the case. People were arguing loudly about this almost immediately. The ambivalence about the use of the bomb was nearly immediate, and even the Japanese were aware of such discussions taking place in the United States a month later.

This was why, in 1947, Secretary of War Henry Stimson put his name on an article in Harpers that February 1947 titled “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb” — it was meant to be the “official” response to the on-going debates and speculation. General Groves, of course, had a heavy role in the composition of the article, not only because he was the guy who had all of the documents at hand, but because it was his legacy on the line, too. In fact, Groves seems to have been fairly responsible for pushing Stimson to publishing something on the subject, even offering up multiple pre-fab drafts drafts for Stimson in November 1946:¹

Click the image for the full set of drafts.

Personally, I don’t wade into these questions much, professionally, or even here on the blog. They honestly don’t interest me very much. Maybe it’s a sign of how post-post-Cold War I am? I don’t know. To me it has always seemed like splitting very fine hairs, trying to make distinctions without much difference. In my mind, the atomic bombings were plainly not ethically very different than the previous firebombings of Japan or Germany. To argue about whether they were justified or not seems to me to be the wrong question — a question that misleads us into mistaking what the core issue was.

For me, the better question is, under what circumstances do we believe the use of weapons of mass destruction on civilians is justified? That gets one into much more interesting ethical territory, in my opinion, than asking why the bombs were used, a question that seems to presume that the motivations are somehow the most important thing to ask about. It also keeps us from having the same old discussion that people have been having for nearly 70 years. Maybe it’s my post-postness talking, here, but whether people in the past had better or worse intentions before setting a hundred thousand people on fire seems like the least interesting historical question to pose in the face of such actions.

1945: Tokyo at left, Hiroshima at right. Is there a significant moral difference?

Ruins of 1945: Tokyo at left, Hiroshima at right.

Nevertheless, I do pay some attention to these arguments, mostly because I get asked about this sort of thing from time to time (one of the hazards of being an historian of such matters) and it helps to have a snappy answer or two. So I was really interested to hear, at a workshop in DC a few weeks ago convened by the Atomic Heritage Foundation (more on the workshop and its purpose in a later post), the retired NRC historian J. Samuel Walker give a brief talk on the current state of the historiography over the “decision to use the bomb.” Walker wrote an article on this subject in 1990, a book in 1997, and another historiographical review in 2005.

I hadn’t met Walker before this, but I’ve reviewed two of his books (one on Three Mile Island, another on US nuclear waste policy), and had appreciated and drawn upon his work as an historian. Walker is, as he put it, “a flaming moderate,” and it comes out in his work. Both of those books are great — for TMI, he has a nice balance of technical detail with political/bureaucratic considerations (and a great chapter on the long-term effects on the nuclear industry); for nuclear waste, he does a great job of being strictly factual while pointing out exactly where he saw the US government underestimating the problem and failing to appreciate how much they were losing public faith. As with all moderates, he runs the risk of disappointing partisans of all sides, but that’s the nature of it.

Portraits from Time magazine covers, 1945: Stalin, Truman, Hirohito. Each kind of tacky in their own way, each kind of brilliant in their own way.

Walker mapped out two major poles on the “decision to use the bomb” question. (I should say up front that this is my synthesis of Walker’s synthesis, re-written from memory. So it’s possible I may be inadvertently mangling this a bit, though I don’t think I am. There are other sub-arguments to this debate, of course, but to me this boils it down to the really crucial bits nicely.) The first is the “traditional” argument, which roughly follows the position put forward by Stimson in 1947. At its core, it argues, in brief:

that Truman made a decision to use the bomb on the basis of ending the war quickly;
the as far as the US was concerned, Japan would not surrender on acceptable terms without either the bomb or invasion;
and that of those two options, the bomb was the option that would cost the least number of American and Japanese lives;
and, as the Japanese Emperor acknowledged in his surrender statement, the bomb did in fact end the war promptly.

This is, of course, the argument that most people are familiar with. The other pole, according to Walker, is what is often called the “revisionist” take, a term acknowledged as potentially disparaging, and is expressed most forcefully in the work of Gar Alperovitz. At its core, it argues, in brief:

that Japan was already defeated at the time the decision to use the bomb was made, and that US intelligence already knew this;
that Japan had been suing for peace and was ready to surrender without an invasion;
that the real reason the bomb was used was so to demonstrate its power to the Soviet Union, in an attempt to exert more influence on them in the postwar;
and that Japanese Emperor’s surrender statement invoked the bomb only as a politically-acceptable “excuse” for his people, when actually he surrendered primarily because of the Soviet invasion of Manchuria.

There are, of course, more details that people have hashed out over the years, including the infamous “how many casualties in an invasion” question. In the 1990s in particular, these were fiercely debated. It was, of course, the immediate post-Cold War, and everybody was still in a mood of assessment of trying to make out what the Cold War’s legacy actually was.

So where are we now, firmly in the 2010s? Walker reported that in his assessment, the scholarly debate had cooled down quite a bit, and that a new consensus was emerging, something that could be visualized firmly in between the two poles. There were problems, he argued, with both the “traditional” and the “revisionist” views. Specifically:

It’s not really clear that Truman ever made much of a “decision,” or regarded the bomb/invasion issue as being mutually exclusive. Truman didn’t know if the bomb would end the war; he hoped, but he didn’t know, couldn’t know. The US was still planning to invade in November 1945. They were planning to drop as many atomic bombs as necessary. There is no contemporary evidence that suggests Truman was ever told that the causalities would be X if the bomb was dropped, and Y if it was not. There is no evidence that, prior to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that Truman was particularly concerned with Japanese causalities, radiation effects, or whether the bombs were ethical or not. The entire framing of the issue is ahistorical, after-the-fact, here. It was war; Truman had atomic bombs; it was taken for granted, at that point, that they were going to be used.
Defeat is not surrender. Japan was certainly defeated by August 1945, in the sense that there was no way for them to win; the US knew that. But they hadn’t surrendered, and the peace balloons they had put out would have assumed not that the Emperor would have stayed on as some sort of benign constitutional monarch (much less a symbolic monarch), but would still be the god-head of the entire Japanese country, and still preserve the overall Japanese state. This was unacceptable to the US, and arguably not for bad reasons. Japanese sources show that the Japanese military was willing to bleed out the country to exact this sort of concession from the US.
American sources show that the primary reason for using the bomb was to aid in the war against Japan. However, the fact that such weapons would be important in the postwar period, in particular vis-à-vis the USSR, was not lost on American policymakers. It is fair to say that there were multiple motivations for dropping the bomb, and specifically that it looks like there was a primary motivation (end the war) and many other “derivative” benefits that came from that (postwar power).
Japanese sources, especially those unearthed and written about by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, make it clear that prior to the use of the atomic bombs, the Japanese cabinet was still planning on fighting a long battle against invasion, that they were hoping to exact the aforementioned concessions from the United States, and that they were aware (and did not care) that such an approach would cost the lives of huge numbers of Japanese civilians. It is also clear that the two atomic bombs did shock them immensely, and did help break the stalemate in the cabinet — but that the Soviet invasion of Manchuria also shocked them immensely, perhaps equally, maybe even more (if you have a choice between being occupied by Truman or occupied by Stalin, the decision is an easy one). But there is no easy way to disentangle the effects of the bombs or the Soviet invasion, in this sense — they were both immensely influential on the final decision. That being said, using the bomb as an “excuse” (as opposed to “we are afraid of Russians”) did play well with the Japanese public and made surrender appear to be a sensible, viable option in a culture where surrender was seen as a complete loss of honor.

So what we’re left with is something that, in my view, looks a lot more plausible than either the “traditional” or “revisionist” options, both of which assume way more prescience than actual historical actors usually have. (Much less Truman, of all people. In my view, even wondering what Truman thought about this is the wrong question to ask — Truman was many things, but he was not a thoughtful guy. He makes Eisenhower look like a French philosopher by comparison.)

One of the more post-modern Time magazine covers — where the atomic bomb unseats Truman as Man of the Year. Or something.

The are genres of historical explanation that people find compelling. This is something that goes a bit beyond the historical facts themselves: it is the superstructure in which we interpret the facts, or, to put it another way, it is how we think about everything that’s going on that doesn’t end up in the archival record.

What I find compelling about Walker’s “consensus” view is that it is much more of a muddle than either the “traditional” view or the “revisionist” view. The “traditional” view makes it look like Truman et al. were making carefully reasoned decisions based on an ethics of the bomb that had not developed, based on questions that were not yet being asked. I don’t really believe for a minute that Truman worried much about the first use of the atomic bomb. But the “revisionist” view makes him still look too clever by half — too scheming, too anticipatory, too prescient about both the Japanese war and the Cold War. That’s not the Truman I know. The “consensus” view is much more human looking: the people in it are half-way acting consciously, half-way caught up in things that had been going on for a long time and were by then out of their active control. Of course, in retrospect, everyone wants to re-write history to make them look better, especially when they’re being criticized for past actions. That’s part of being human, too.

Walker also posited that along with this emerging consensus, there was also a cooling in the tone of the debate. This was immediately proved to be somewhat premature, as Peter Kuznik, another attendee to the workshop (who I consider a friend), vigorously defended the “revisionist” point of view. Well, so it goes — there’s no better way to prove an argument among scholars than to propose that there really isn’t much of an argument anymore. Still, I found Walker’s synthesis a useful way of framing the field of historical argumentation, summing up a number of disparate positions (each with books and books of documents and footnotes debating each tiny point) in a fairly convenient format. And what can I say — I’m a sucker for moderate, synthetic arguments.

Notes

Citation: Leslie R. Groves to Harvey H. Bundy, drafts of “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb” (6 November 1945), Correspondence (“Top Secret”) of the Manhattan Engineer District, 1942-1946, microfilm publication M1109 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1980), Roll 3, Target 5, Folder 20, “Miscellaneous.” [↩]

Tags: 1940s, 2010s, Harry S. Truman, Hiroshima, Historiography, Leslie Groves, Manhattan Project, Nagasaki, Soviet Union
Posted in Meditations, Redactions | 17 Comments »

Meditations

Who knew about radiation sickness, and when?

Thursday, October 18th, 2012

Historians of science love “who knew what, and when?” question in science. We like to do so, in part, because the results are often so counterintuitive when compared with the “traditional” narratives: Mendel wasn’t really a Mendelian, Darwin’s novelty is often quite overstated, and even superficially straightforward questions like, “when was the electron discovered?” yield a considerable amount of debate about how one knows when the existence and identity of a fundamental particle is “discovered.”¹ They rarely have answers that come in the form of names and exact dates. In fact, they usually show you something deeper about the way knowledge is produced, circulated, and agreed-upon at any given time in history.

Of all the many questions and sub-questions about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, one of the ones that occasionally comes up is, “How much was known about the radiation effects of the first atomic bombs before the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?” Did Harry Truman know, for example, that the bombs would produce both prompt and residual radiation? Would it have changed his decision to use the bomb?

21-year-old soldier at Nagasaki, suffering from what was known as “Disease X” to the Japanese doctors before its identification as radiation poisoning. It took him a little under a month to die from the effects; click the image for the unpleasant details.

The reason it might matter is because arguably the radiation effects of the first atomic bombs are what distinguish them from “traditional” incendiary raids — i.e., the firebombing that had already been going on for quite some time before the Second World War went nuclear. (I personally don’t think they do, from an ethical standpoint, but I’ll be writing an entire post on this very soon, so let’s put that question to the side for now.)

Truman didn’t feel it was appropriate to use chemical or “poison” warfare — so perhaps, the argument goes, if he had thought about the atomic bombs not just as “big fire bombs” but instead as “big fire bombs with poison” he would have considered them an inappropriate weapon to actually use on cities inhabited primarily by non-combatants.

This is an interesting question, and one that would take a lot of careful work to answer. So I was really glad that Sean Malloy, an historian at UC Merced and the author of a great biography of Henry L. Stimson, decided to sit down and seriously hash it over. He wrote what I expect is going to be the definitive article on the subject, published this summer in Diplomatic History with the title: “‘A Very Pleasant Way to Die’: Radiation Effects and the Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb Against Japan.” For the very literal out there, Malloy isn’t himself saying that radiation sickness is a pleasant way to die; it’s from a quote by General Groves. (If you would like a copy of the article and don’t have access to the journal, I am sure that Sean would be happy to send you one if you sent him an e-mail.)

I have written a lengthy review of Sean’s article for the online-list H-Diplo. I wrote it a little while back — closer to when Sean’s article actually came out — but due to the way H-Diplo schedules things, it’s only just come out this week. You can read it online here, if you’re interested in getting my extended take on Malloy’s article.

What follows here is a summary of my main points from my review of Malloy, which summarizes his main points. So if you’re curious about anything said below, read my full review, and if you’re still curious, read Malloy’s article.

There were certainly physicists at Los Alamos who understood that the first atomic bombs would produce significant amounts of radiation, and were likely to cause both radiation sickness and nuclear fallout effects.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, 1946. Oppenheimer was curiously incurious about the effects of radiation on the Japanese. Photo via the DOE Digital Archive.

But J. Robert Oppenheimer never seemed to be very interested in that. Why not? It remains something of a mystery — how do you find out why someone wasn’t interested in something? Anyway, for whatever reason, he never really paid too much attention to the reports about radiation effects, and spoke almost exclusively of the bomb in terms of heat and blast effects.

Despite much lore to the contrary, the targeting height of the bomb was not chosen in order to minimize radiation effects. It was chosen to maximize blast and thermal effects. The argument that its height was chosen to minimize radiation effects is an after-the-fact argument, though it is not an entirely inaccurate side-effect.²

Because Oppenheimer didn’t know/care about radiation effects, General Leslie Groves didn’t really, either. Groves actually thought he could march American troops through an area that was recently atomic bombed — had he been given the opportunity to do so, his ignorance would have actually cost American lives. Malloy thinks — and I agree — that such is a good indication that he was pretty confused on the issue.

And yet, Groves and Oppenheimer did consider radiation in other contexts — such as the health of those involved with witnessing the Trinity test. But they never seemed to have talked about it in the context of the Japanese, the intended victims of the bomb. Why not? Malloy suggests that Groves was subjected to a “self-compartmentalization” — that a side-effect of his compartmentalized project was a compartmentalized self. Health safety and weapons effects were totally different departments as far as he was concerned; he never made the linkage. This is, of course, speculative, but I like it as an explanation, because it jibes with other commonly-observed side-effects of working in highly-compartmentalized environments.

Oppenheimer, Groves, and others take reporters to the Trinity test site in September 1945, as part of their publicity effort to show that the atomic bombs were not too toxic. Many of the visitors picked up Trinitite — radioactive glass — as souvenirs. Some of this was made into jewelry, prompting a later press release saying that radioactive glass shouldn’t be worn close to the body. Whoops.

If Groves didn’t know/care, then the Targeting Committee and Interim Committee, Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s turf, didn’t know at all. If Stimson didn’t know, Truman didn’t know. Question answered, in a sense: some people knew, but they were very low on the hierarchy, and the Manhattan Project was highly hierarchical. The reasons it didn’t percolate up the chain aren’t because anyone was deliberately holding it down — it’s because knowing something and caring about it (that is, thinking it is important) are linked. (This is my formulation of the reason, anyway, and why I like to use know/care as a linked term here.)

They didn’t really care, they didn’t really know, and it never got passed up. Oppenheimer was a scientific filter to Groves, and Groves was a filter to the politicians — and a good deal of filtering had to take place for something done at Los Alamos to ever make it to Truman’s ear. (As an aside, Groves struggled with this even in explaining the basics of the project to Truman in terms the latter could understand and care about, much less technical details.)

Would Truman have stopped the bombing if he had known that 15%-20% of those affected by it would die of radiation sickness?

Would it have mattered? Malloy thinks it might very well have mattered for Truman — he was markedly averse to the idea of poison warfare. Personally I doubt it would have made a difference; you don’t call off a massacre because you think it might kill a few more people than you originally intended, and the scientists would have had no way to give a plausible number for the number affected. Later estimates put the number of acute dead from radiation exposure at about 15%-20% of the total casualties from the bombings — a not insignificant number (many thousands of people), but probably not enough to change the direction of the bomb program, and probably a number that would have been dismissed as too high if it had been presented as an estimate before actual use.

Lastly, what about the allegations of an “atomic cover up” that periodically go around, which say that Groves et al. tried to hide the fact of radiation illnesses? Malloy gets into this here fairly well, too. Not long after the bombing, reports started coming in that doctors in Japan were seeing the effects of radiation sickness amongst the (apparent) survivors of the attacks. Groves thought they were just propaganda, trying to make the American people feel sympathetic to the Japanese. He asked his medical experts about it, they told him it was unlikely, and so he enlisted Oppenheimer to help deny that this could have been the case.

A few things here warrant attention:

Oppenheimer was happy to help, even though really he was kind of out of his league. Such was the way of Oppenheimer, but I also suspect he genuinely thought the reports were propaganda, as well.
Prior to this instance, there actually had been fairly uninformed stories circulating about how Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be totally uninhabited for generations and things like that which legitimately were total nonsense. So Groves was already in “defensive mode” when it came to radiation effects, and already primed to see them as nonsense.
The Japanese did release significant propaganda about the bomb during this period. A lot of total nonsense, like the fact that they too had atomic bombs and were just saving them up for a rainy day and now were going to use them. (The Germans did stuff like this too, of course.) It’s easy to forget, in the absence of a sense of the day-to-day from that period, how hard it would have been to separate out fact from fiction. If you look through newspapers of the day though you will be amazed at how much weird news — stuff that was clearly propaganda and false — was coming in from abroad.

To his credit, even though he dismissed the Japanese doctors’ claims, Groves also sent his own teams to Japan as soon as he could to evaluate the results themselves. They found that indeed, radiation had been a significant factor in mortality at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Groves’ testimony to the Special Senate Committee on Atomic Energy, late November 1945: “…they say it is a very pleasant way to die.”

By November 1945, Groves had stopped denying that radiation sickness had occurred, even if he did, in his awful way, suggest that they were not all so bad (the aforementioned “very pleasant way to die”). But spinning, however misleading or offensive, is not the same thing as knowingly perpetuating a cover-up.

I find Malloy’s account very convincing, not just because it is well-documented and well-argued, but because it generally agrees with my reading of the primary sources. These guys were not really in the “cover-up” business. They certainly were in the “spin” business. They were willing to give in to their internal biases and believe what they wanted to believe in the absence of indisputable information. They weren’t shining heros, and they weren’t despicable villains. They muddled it out the way most people do when it came to anything other than the business of producing atomic bombs, which they turned out to be fairly good at — though even there, their superhuman prowess is usually exaggerated.

But what I really love about Malloy’s work, here, is that instead of saying, “they did know” or “they didn’t know,” he asks about how knowledge worked in the context of the Manhattan Project, which is a question of how knowledge is created, how it circulates within institutions, and how it is or isn’t acted upon. This is a very deep endeavor and one that takes you well beyond the standard ways of thinking not only about the bomb, but in thinking about any other comparable projects and institutions. This is how these sorts of questions should be worked on.

Notes

Does it matter, for example, that J.J. Thomson, the so-called discoverer of the electron, thought his results said something quite different than did his contemporaries? Does it matter that the modern understanding of what it means to be an electron is quite different from that of the late 19th century? Does it matter that a low-mass, negatively-charged particle called an “electron” had been proposed well before Thomson claimed the existence of his “corpuscle”? If this sort of question interests you — there must be one of you out there! — you might enjoy Helge Kragh’s Quantum Generations, which is full of interesting stuff like this. [↩]
The height of the detonation points did mean that the neutron effects of the bomb were relatively minimal, even if the gamma rays were not; the difference matters because neutrons, and not gamma rays, can induce radioactivity in other substances, and thus produce more contamination. The height also meant less material was sucked up into the fireball than otherwise would have been were it detonated lower. But the fact remains that the height wasn’t chosen to minimize radiation effects. [↩]

Tags: 1940s, Hiroshima, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Leslie R. Groves, Manhattan Project, Nagasaki, Radiation
Posted in Meditations | 10 Comments »

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