Perilous Times now, as we remember the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

BY Joseph Gerson, Truthout – August 6, 2018

The consensus among US historians is that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — in addition to being moral abominations against civilians — were also opposed by senior military leaders, including General (later President) Eisenhower, who did not see them as politically necessary.

While making no excuses for Japanese militarism and imperial aggressions, we should remember that in the months prior to the US’s atomic bombings, the Japanese government attempted to surrender on terms the US ultimately accepted after the atomic bombings: unconditional surrender with the exception of the emperor remaining on his throne. According to my own research for my book, most senior US military leaders thought that the bombings were unnecessary and wrong.

Craven domestic political calculations, racism and bureaucratic momentum contributed to former President Harry Truman’s decision to usher in the nuclear age with the annihilation of the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but as General Leslie Groves, who led the Manhattan Project, remarked in 1943, the atomic bomb project was no longer about Germany or Japan. It was about Russia. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were vaporized, incinerated, poisoned and traumatized to ensure that the US would not have to share influence with the Soviet Union in Northern China, Manchuria and Korea. Further, Truman thought that the atomic bomb gave him “a hammer” with which he could dominate the Kremlin with the threat of nuclear annihilation.

Despite the Hibakusha‘s fundamental truth that human beings and nuclear weapons cannot coexist, the illusion that nuclear weapons have worked and can serve as the ultimate enforcer of empire, compounded by lies and mistaken beliefs about nuclear deterrence, have repeatedly brought us to the brink of nuclear omnicide and have driven nuclear weapons proliferation. In Helsinki, Finland, Russian President Vladimir Putin again illuminated the madness and injustice of nuclear apartheid. “As major nuclear powers,” he said, “we bear special responsibility for maintaining international security.” He and Trump believe that their nuclear arsenals give them the right to intimidate and dictate how the world’s nations and peoples live and possibly die.

A Perilous Time

We live in a perilous time of rising great power tensions, the ascendency of right-wing autocracies, uncertainties, and renewed nuclear and high-tech arms races. This is compounded by the reality that there are no longer any givens in US foreign and military policies or to the future of liberal democracy in the US.

Following Trump’s secretive summit with Putin and the political and media circus that followed, Trump was confronted by his most senior staff who insisted that he deny or reverse a number of statements and commitments he had made in Helsinki…….

Independent of Trump, though, the gears of empire grind on. The Pentagon budget has been increased by an amount equal to Russia’s total military budget. Despite Trump’s embrace of Putin, the Pentagon’s new National Strategy prioritizes preparations for great power war against China or Russia — the two countries military leaders believe threaten“American power, influence and interests.”

This explains the $1.2 trillion spending plan for the new generation of US offensive nuclear weapons and their delivery systems and Trump’s new “Space Command” to dominate Earth from space.

………. Two Minutes to Midnight

All of this is deeply related to continuing US preparations for omnicidal nuclear war. This past winter, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists sent the world a warning by moving the hands of their Doomsday Clock to two minutes to midnight. This is the closest to apocalyptic nuclear war since 1953 and worse than during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

Why the warning? They cited the Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), decrying increased US reliance on nuclear weapons; its staggering investments in new nuclear weapons that are driving “modernization” of the world’s other nuclear arsenals; the return to Cold War rhetoric; and the total absence of US-Russian arms control negotiations. They warned about the dangerous lack of coherent US foreign and military policies that undermine global security, North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, South Asian rivalries, Trump’s threat to the nuclear deal with Iran, and climate change.

The NPR follows on the Pentagon’s new National Strategy that prioritizes preparations for a great power war and includes a more aggressive US first-strike nuclear war-fighting doctrine. …….

Perhaps the most dangerous element of Trump’s $1.2 trillion NPR is its blurring of the distinction between conventional and nuclear war and the increased role for nuclear weapons in US war-fighting strategies. ………https://truthout.org/articles/remembering-the-bombings-of-hiroshima-and-nagasaki-in-perilous-times/