PAGE 4
MUSHROOMS OF AUGUST
BY MICHAEL McCUSKER
"Now the sun has come to earth,
shrouded in a mushroom cloud of death."
-KATE WOLFE
The Nuclear Age began 56 years ago
The Mushroom Cloud was first seen in the clear sky
over a desert Quickly it became the tombstone of two Japanese
cities Hiroshima was the first, on August 6, 1945 Nagasaki was
next, three days later on August 9. Less than a week afterward
humanity's most terrible war was over.
If there ever was a supreme pivotal moment in human
history, that was it All the discoveries of science and their
application to warfare culminated in the splitting of the atom and
its use as an apocalyptic weapon of annihilation Warfare might
have stopped at that point with the realization that its ultimate
potential would conceivably be the obliteration of civilization and
probably the extinction of humanity. Instead the war planners
devised greater weapons of destruction while simultaneously
continuing traditional warfare on a much smaller scale than the
tw World Wars — a new word in the military lexicon, Limited
War that presumably might be fought by "client states" without
reaching the irreversible point of oblivion.
The world's most accomplished experts on the effects
and consequences of nuclear weapons are the survivors of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki: as many as 140,000 died on the days
of attack or immediately afterward, and the death toll rose by
another 30,000 the next 5 years. Hundreds of thousands more
were severely injured, many to never recover — more than half
a century later people continue to die from wounds or illnesses
traced to the effects of both bombs A dozen years after the
atomic bombs were used against human beings, Max Bom
wrote in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (June 1957), "Since
the destruction of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the atom has
become a specter threatening us with annihilation."
The nuclear bombs that ended World War 2 were
carried by large human-piloted machines. Weapons of the
air developed in the 20th century — not the short-range arc
of an arrow or an artillery shell of past wars, but from powered
machines that soared higher than birds and flew immense
distances. World War 1 bombers were crude and clumsy,
unable to haul large bomb loads long distances, yet they killed
thousands of soldiers and civilians in the world's first true air
raids, and more significant to the human psyche, these primitive
wood and fabric airplanes made the very sky that envelops the
Earth the most dangerous threat to existence.
World War 2 fulfilled a vision by Francesco Lama de
Terzi who wrote in 1670 his visions of fleets of aerial machines
that could fly over cities and drop vast numbers of missiles down
upon defenseless citizens below. Powered flight developed in
many directions but it has been as an agent of warfare that has
made its first century the bloodiest battleground in history. The
bomber in particular has accounted for the slaughter of more
victims than a hundred-fold of previous wars.
Europe was bombed to rubble in World War 2. Japan
set on fire and nuked by American B-29s. The earlier bombing
of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War prompted Picasso's
masterpiece, which portrayed the outcry of ordinary citizens
against deliberate and indiscriminate death from the sky.
The two nuclear bombs that ended World War 2,
instead of putting an end to war, initiated a nuclear arms race
between two conflicting and aggressive ideologies, the United
States and Soviet Russia, allies and victors in the war against
Nazism. Each developed huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons
capable of obliterating the planet several times over. The result
was a bipolar world maintained by a balance of terror defended
by arguments that only nuclear parity could prevent a third world
war The USA and USSR spent hundreds of billions of dollars
developing their nuclear arsenals, each government posing the
threat of the other to continually escalate the race.
The two superpowers raced through generations of
nuclear weapons, blackmailing each other into increasing their
arsenals and making treaties that allowed for more and deadlier
weapons rather than their removal — and the contradictory
idea of "preventive wars," starting a war to prevent a war, was a
common rationale for threatening world obliteration. Every small
war anywhere in the world was a threat of nuclear confrontation;
simultaneously these wars skirted oblivion by acting as pressure
vents against the big bang
Within 40 years the U.S. and USSR built up arsenals
which together contained more than 60,000 nuclear warheads.
Soviet warheads alone numbered some 45,000 at their peak in
1986 By the end of the Cold War in 1991 with the collapse of
the USSR, the awesome arsenal of nuclear devastation had
been transferred out of human management to primarily techno
logical control, primarily through computers and electronically
controlled intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs); a slippery
robotic hold on the nuclear trigger.
The use of nuclear energy was from the very beginning
surrounded in secrecy. "Only a handful, of course, knewvtfiat
they were creating," Dwight MacDonald said after Hiroshima and
Nagasaki "It hardly needs to be stressed that there is something
askew wth a society in which vast numbers of citizens can be
organized to create a horror like The Bomb without ever knowing
they are doing it."
The so-called national security state started with
Hiroshima, Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell (authors of
Hiroshima in America: 50 Years of Denial) wrote in The Nation
— a small group of relatively isolated leaders making drastic
decisions and then concealing from the public the nature and
consequences of their decisions. 'The American coverup has
been apocalyptic in at least tw> ways," they wrote: "in the
grotesque human dimension of what has been suppressed and
in the relationship of that coverup to our continuous embrace
of still more destructive nuclear devices." Hiroshima, Lifton and
Mitchell said, was "the mother of all coverups, creating distort
ions, manipulative procedures and patterns of concealment that
have affected all of American life Secrecy has been linked with
national security — and vice versa — ever since."
Nuclear alienation was the result of secrecy: starting
with Hiroshima, officials advised Americans to leave concerns
about the bomb to political, scientific and military "experts" —
the nuclear priesthood Americans were requested to opt out
of the most critical issues of the age Surrendering their right
to know more about nuclear policies contributed to the gradual
alienation from the political process Despite mass collusion in
official secrecy, and resentment at vtfiat had been concealed
and falsified, Lifton and Mitchell asked, 'To what extent do we
KEIJINAKAZAWA
feel ourselves a people who have been unforgivably deceived in
the most fundamental of human areas — having to do with how,
when and by whose hand, or lethal technology, are we to die?"
The obsessive secrecy of the nuclear powers did not
prevent the international proliferation of nuclear technology. The
effect instead was to remove the public from the issue and make
it a process of a very few who profited immeasurably from
nuclear armaments. Patriotism and claims of national defense
and security obscured the fact that immense fortunes were
made from a war economy fueled and made self-perpetuating
with public money. Only nowand then was an expensive
corruption revealed (and quickly hushed up), but the process
itself was never examined nor its devastating impoverishment of
the social fabric seriously discussed. The mutual distrust and
political paralysis that characterized the growth of the arms race
spoiled chances for disarmament. Despite the insistent desire
of the world's population to de-escalate nuclear terror the arms
race never slowed down until the internal collapse of the Soviet
Union, much of it the result of exhausting its resources in the
arms race
exchanging information to improve America's moral standards;
the problem was leaders sitting down and negotiating a way
beyond the mutual danger the new weapons would otherwise
install The opening up (of knowledge about the atomic bomb)
would emerge out of those negotiations, necessarily to guaran
tee safety; it could not in the real world of secrecy and suspicion
realistically precede them."
Though Rhodes writes that no one "should presume
to judge these men as they struggled with a future” that no
one could "barely imagine," the future they created started off
in the wrong direction. Instead of opening up to the world the
U.S. denied information about the bomb to the Russians thereby
guaranteeing a nuclear arms race. The arms race began when
the U.S. attempted to impress Russia with its military might so
that it might be more manageable at the Potsdam conference
in May 1945, directly after the Nazi surrender, and withdraw its
troops from Eastern Europe Instead the USSR began a crash
program to develop nuclear capability wtiich it did four years
later in 1949, at the same time dropping an 'Iron Curtain'
(Winston Churchill's metaphor) over Eastern Europe.
Leo Szilard, described as "the man who has thought
longer and harder than anyone else about the consequences
of chain reaction" and without whom the U.S. might not have
so readily developed an atomic bomb in time for its use against
Japan, argued even before the world's first human created
nuclear explosion in July 1945 ('Trinity') that the nation was
"moving along a road leading to destruction of the strong
position (it) hitherto occupied in the world." He was not referring
to a moral advantage but that American military strength was
due to the fact that the USA could outproduce every other
country in the world in heavy armaments. By preparing to test
and use atomic bombs, Szilard said the U.S. would lose that
advantage "in just a few years" when other countries acquired
nuclear weapons. He was amply prophetic: "Perhaps the great
est immediate danger which faces us is the probability that our
'demonstration' of atomic bombs will precipitate a race in the
production of these devices between the United States and
Russia."
Szilard echoed Niels Bohr's wish for an open internation
al covenant with nuclear weapons when he said "these decisions
ought to be based not on the present evidence relating to atomic
bombs but rather on the situation which can be expected to con
front us in this respect a few years from now."
Niels Bohr understood that the bomb was a source of
terror but also a source of hope, "a means of welding together
the nations by their common dread of a menacing nuclear stand
off," wrote Richard Rhodes in his Pulitzer Prize winning book
The Making of the Atomic Bomb. "The problem was not
J. Robert Oppenheimer, who ran Los Alamos when it
built the first atomic bomb, thought about "the implications for
mankind for the thing we had created and the wall into the future
we had breached." Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson might
have had it right when he lamented, in Oppenheimer's recollect
ion, "the appalling lack of conscience and compassion that the
war had brought about, the complacency, the indifference, and
the silence with which we greeted the mass bombings in Europe
and above all, Japan." Oppenheimer said that Stimson felt, "as
far as degradation went, we had had it; that it would take a new
life and a new breath to heal the harm."
Or as General Curtis LeMay, commander of the B-29s
firebombing Japanese cities, put it, 'We knew we were going
to kill a lot of women and kids when we roasted a town."
Those firebombings were even used as a basemark for use
of the atomic bomb; in the words of one government official,
the "number of people that would be killed by the bomb would
not be greater than the number already killed in fire raids."
Total death in total war, as Rhodes called it.
Once the United States began to rely on nuclear
weapons to counter the perceived Soviet threat, the issues that
kept the arms race going with the USSR were, as Carl Kaysen
wrote, the "profound ideological antipathy and demonization of
the other side, the lag between the decision to build new weap
ons and their deployment, worst-case analyses, Soviet secrecy
and successful Soviet bluffs about the size and capability of
their forces, and American belief in the possibility of sustaining
technological superiority."
"Spurred on by the mass media, the pressure exerted
by the military, scientific and industrial complex played an
enormous part in fashioning the nuclear ethos of the U.S., wth
the USSR inevitably following suit." Lord Zuckerman, who once
headed the British nuclear establishment, wrote just before his
death in 1993 The rational views of scientists, dissenting politi
cians and millions of common people who organized against
U.S. nuclear policies "were powerless to prevent the waste of
billions of dollars on unusable or unneeded systems," Zucker
man wrote The attempt to squelch public dissent during the
Cold War dramatized the inseparable weave of business and
military in peace and war It also illuminated the charge that
patriotism is a form of opportunity
Beginning wth Harry Truman, every Cold War President
spoke of the necessity to achieve what Jimmy Carter and his
successor Ronald Reagan called "zero nuclear weapons." Yet
under each administration the arms race with the Soviet Union
intensified until it seemed self-perpetuating and irreversible.
Ironically, it was the United States that initially offered a blue
print for the abolition of nuclear weapons, suggesting "the
elimination from national armaments of atomic weapons and
of all major weapons adaptable to mass destruction..."
The U.S. plan was named after its representative to the
United Nations Atomic Energy Council, Bernard Baruch, v/io
said in 1946, 'The search for the absolute weapon has reached
fruition in this country But she stands ready to proscribe and
COLUMBIA RIVER
MARITIME MUSEUM
1792 MARINE DR.. ASTORIA. ORE.
(503) 325-2323