Thanks to reporter Max Marcus for his article about the recent commemoration in Turners Falls of the the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended the Second World War. And thanks to the Traprock Center For Peace and Justice for organizing the event. The atomic bombings were crucial moments in our history and need to be remembered and debated.
However, as a professional historian and a member of the Baby Boom generation, I must say that this debate has in fact been going on for over 50 years. This is, to a large extent, the product of a widely read and much debated book published in 1965 called “Atomic Diplomacy” by the historian Gar Alperovitz.
“Atomic Diplomacy” was a detailed analysis of the impact of the bomb on Harry Truman’s negotiations with the Soviet Union leading up to and immediately following the Potsdam conference in July of 1945. It argued not only that possession and use of the bomb influenced those negotiations but that this was, in fact, the reason why the bombs were dropped. Alperovitz also seemed to presented strong evidence that Japan was on the verge of surrender in late June of 1945 and neither an invasion of the islands nor the bombings were necessary.
The argument that the bomb was dropped to scare the Russians became extremely popular among an influential segment of my generation, most of whom had probably never read “Atomic Diplomacy,” and has been debated by academic historians ever since.
I was skeptical of Alperovitz’s core argument when I read “Atomic Diplomacy” in 1976 as a history graduate student, mainly because I did not believe it was necessary to make the shaky argument that the bombings were unnecessary to question their morality.
Rereading the book last week I am even more skeptical. Alperovitz shows that possession of the bomb influenced Truman’s attitude toward the Soviets in the spring and summer of 1945. But showing that possession of the bomb influenced negotiations does not prove that is why he dropped the bombs.
I think the evidence in the book shows that, from the moment he was told about the potential atomic weapon in April of 1945, Truman and his advisors never really considered not using it. They were essentially on automatic pilot, a point Alperovitz makes a number of times.
None of this, of course was known to my parents’ generation at the time, particularly the veterans like George Bush of Turners Falls, who was waiting in Hawaii to invade Japan when the bombs ended the war. One can hardly blame Mr. Bush for feeling the atomic bombings may have saved his life.
What we have, here, are very different generational experiences. My parents’ generation actually lived through the war, experienced Pearl Harbor, the brutal behavior of the Japanese military in the Philippine Islands, and the deadly “island hopping” campaigns at the end of the Pacific war. There was intense anti-Japanese sentiment in this country, as shown by the terrible decision to place Japanese-American citizens in internment camps.
My generation did not experience any of this. We grew up in the shadow of the bomb with air raid drills, movies about accidental nuclear war and nuclear tests that produced giant tarantulas that attacked Los Angeles, books like John Hersey’s graphic “Hiroshima,” the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 and of course the Vietnam war, which made many of us question every rationale for every foreign policy decision.
We were primed for “Atomic Diplomacy.”
How will future generations view the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? I hesitate to predict but at the end of Max Marcus’ article, he quotes one of those at the commemoration event bringing in the treatment of Native Americans under European colonization as a source of the racism that produced the bombings. This idea is linked in the article to the current Black Lives Matter movement, a movement that partly reflects the experiences of more recent generations.
I respect those experiences too but also feel there is a huge downside to the moralistic ideology they have produced. Pasting the long history of American racism on top of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is theoretically defensible, but it also generates moral outrage that quickly turns into self-righteous lecturing of average white Americans who, it is presumed, are completely oblivious to that history.
This is not fair and it does not help us solve the complex problems of policing policies and funding. And in the case of the atomic bombings of 1945, is it really helpful to throw the treatment of Native Americans in the colonial era into the debate?
Jeff Singleton is a former academic historian who lives in Montague.