Daily Maverick
Dailymaverick logo

World

World, Maverick Life

As Japanese WW2 nuclear survivors’ group wins Nobel Peace Prize, a new book sheds light on today’s dangers

As Japanese WW2 nuclear survivors’ group wins Nobel Peace Prize, a new book sheds light on today’s dangers
Atomic bomb destruction, Hiroshima, Japan. The city of Hiroshima was destroyed towards the end of World War 2, on 6 August 1945, by a 13-kiloton nuclear weapon dropped by a US bomber. Around 90% of the buildings were destroyed, with only a few concrete-reinforced buildings surviving. Some 70,000 people died instantly, with tens of thousands more dying in the aftermath. This is an official US Army photograph, from the New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection. (Image: USF / Gallo Images)
J Brooks Spector
By J Brooks Spector
20 Oct 2024
Facebook
0
The 2024 Nobel Peace Prize to the Japanese nuclear survivors’ body, the Nihon Hidankyo, is meant as a global heads-up over the dangers of nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, a new book examines the path of Japan’s surrender in 1945. Together, they help focus on that continuing nuclear challenge.

Ever since World War 2 reached its end following the atomic weapons unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – the only time nuclear weapons have been used in conflict, so far – people have pondered the implications of this fundamental change in warfare. 

In America, the publication of John Hersey’s massive essay, Hiroshima, in The New Yorker, as the sole work of the 23 August 1946 issue, brought the nuclear question to the broad attention of the public in the West, well beyond its initial meaning as the punctuation mark that had concluded the war.

The Japanese public, naturally, has been wrestling with such questions in political discourse and popular culture since the bombs were used against it — most especially whether or not the use of the two bombs and the death and destruction they caused could be justified. Important in that regard was the 1965 novel, Kiroi Ame, or Black Rain, by Masuji Ibuse, a work that helped keep this question vivid in public discourse. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b78fpFLK_qE

Further, in the popular imagination, the entire Godzilla corpus has been rooted in the idea that the French nuclear testing in the South Pacific led to a mutation that gave birth to the creature that has repeatedly devastated Tokyo. Another work, Akira Kurosawa’s 1991 film, Rhapsody in August, was based on Kiyoko Murata’s novel, Nabe no Naka (In the Pot), which spoke to the ongoing hardships and memories faced by nuclear survivors, decades later. 

In political terms, what has been labelled “the nuclear allergy” has also meant the Japanese have not, so far, tolerated the idea of developing an independent nuclear deterrent of their own, despite their technological nous and growing potential threats emanating from North Korea. (Even the construction of nuclear reactors has generated much public controversy as well, fuelled anew by the disaster at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi reactor.) Further, the Japanese government has, so far, declined to insist on declared clarity from the US about whether any American naval vessels forward deployed to bases in Japan might have nuclear weaponry in their arsenals, lest such a declaration trigger protest.

Now, with the recent announcement that the Nihon Hidankyo, the Japanese organisation of atomic blast survivors, has received the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize, fears about the terrifying possibilities of the use of nuclear weapons in current or future conflicts would seem to be moving back onto the front burner yet again. At the very least, that was the hope of the awards committee.

nuclear nobel peace prize Atomic burst over Hiroshima. Coloured image of smoke from the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, on 6 August 1945. The base of the smoke is spread over three kilometres and the column of smoke is rising six kilometres into the air. (Image: USF / Gallo Images)



The committee described the rationale for its decision: “This grassroots movement of atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, also known as Hibakusha, is receiving the Peace Prize for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again.

“….[Because of their efforts] a global movement arose whose members have worked tirelessly to raise awareness about the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of using nuclear weapons.

“Gradually, a powerful international norm developed, stigmatising the use of nuclear weapons as morally unacceptable. This norm has become known as ‘the nuclear taboo.’

“…These historical witnesses have helped to generate and consolidate widespread opposition to nuclear weapons around the world by drawing on personal stories, creating educational campaigns based on their own experience, and issuing urgent warnings against the spread and use of nuclear weapons. The Hibakusha help us to describe the indescribable, to think the unthinkable, and to somehow grasp the incomprehensible pain and suffering caused by nuclear weapons.

“The Norwegian Nobel Committee wishes nevertheless to acknowledge one encouraging fact: No nuclear weapon has been used in war in nearly 80 years. The extraordinary efforts of Nihon Hidankyo and other representatives of the Hibakusha have contributed greatly to the establishment of the nuclear taboo. It is therefore alarming that today this taboo against the use of nuclear weapons is under pressure.

“The nuclear powers are modernising and upgrading their arsenals; new countries appear to be preparing to acquire nuclear weapons; and threats are being made to use nuclear weapons in ongoing warfare. At this moment in human history, it is worth reminding ourselves what nuclear weapons are: the most destructive weapons the world has ever seen.” 

Upon hearing the news of the award, Nihon Hidankyo co-chair Toshiyuki Mimaki told a press conference in Hiroshima, “I can't believe it’s real. [The win] will be a great force to appeal to the world that the abolition of nuclear weapons and everlasting peace can be achieved. Nuclear weapons should absolutely be abolished.”

New threats


As of March 2024, there were still 106,825 atomic bomb survivors registered with the Japanese health department and their average age is 85.6 years. Over the years, many were effectively shunned by the rest of Japan and their struggle has been to gain a public embrace as victims and to insist their group’s goals remain firmly in the public eye.

Adding to the timeliness and forebodings of the Nobel announcement, in recent months there have been not-so-veiled threats by Russian officials about their possible deployment of tactical nuclear weapons should things go south for them in their Ukrainian invasion. In the Middle East, there remains the possibility of missile attacks on nuclear facilities in several nations. Meanwhile, North Korea continues to carry out missile and nuclear device tests, and threats towards South Korea, the US, and Japan. 

On the announcement of the Peace Prize, Reuters noted that “Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly warned the West of potential nuclear consequences since Russia's 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He declared last month that Russia could use nuclear weapons if it was struck with conventional missiles, and that Moscow would consider any assault on it supported by a nuclear power to be a joint attack.

“This month, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said his country would speed up steps towards becoming a military superpower with nuclear weapons and would not rule out using them if it came under enemy attack, while widening conflict in the Middle East has prompted some experts to speculate Iran may restart its efforts to acquire a nuclear bomb.”

Road to Surrender


Coincidentally, this Nobel Prize announcement came just as I had finished reading editor/reporter/historian Evan Thomas’s most recent book, Road to Surrender. Thomas took on the task of examining the hard calculations made by Japanese and American leaders in the final months of the war as they — separately — struggled with the choices before them in the last days of the war. 



Thomas has been able to make use of a vast shelf of studies on this period, but he has also been able to draw on the personal diaries of people like US Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Japanese Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo, among others, for rich insights.

Any thinking about the nuclear blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki requires interrogation about whether those were truly necessary to preclude the predicted still more horrific carnage that would have been the result of a full-scale Allied invasion of the home islands.

This is in contrast to the view Japan was so thoroughly beaten that a naval blockade (and the ensuing national starvation) and yet more conventional bombing would lead to its inevitable surrender. (See below our earlier Daily Maverick article on the bomb.) Yet another position asks if Allied leaders would have recoiled from the expected death toll – on both sides – from an actual seaborne invasion.

Read more: Hiroshima 70 years on: Was the Armageddon worth it?

All of these positions must grapple with the reality that the officers of the Japanese Imperial Army were, even after two nuclear explosions, still preparing for a near-suicidal national last stand. The home army, supplemented by large reserves of old men, women and children, had remained intact and undefeated in combat. In such an event, when the fighting finally ended, those who remained, per an old adage, would have envied the dead. 

For Thomas, his under-appreciated hero is Shigenori Togo, the Japanese foreign minister, and the author recounts his efforts to chivvy the country’s other leaders — including the emperor — into accepting an unconditional surrender, especially after the two nuclear disasters and the entry of the Soviet Union into the war finally. But Togo’s efforts were taking place even as the military leaders of Japan’s war cabinet continued to manoeuvre, blocking any such outcome. Right at the end, fanatical soldiers tried to seize and destroy the Emperor’s pre-recorded surrender message before it could be broadcast over the national radio network.

Ultimately, Thomas reaches the conclusion that despite a growing realisation by senior military and official Americans, although not yet, perhaps, by the new president, Harry Truman, of the power of the new weapon, its use was a military necessity. Truman had just taken over after Franklin Roosevelt’s death and had been unaware of the details of the Manhattan Project until he entered the Oval Office.

The US military’s calculations about battle casualties had led them to the inevitable conclusion they had no real choice but to use the bomb to end the slaughter. But the horrors of radiation sickness and long-term death tolls were still not yet fully understood by scientists, let alone military commanders. Even the first Japanese medical and scientific investigators who went to the scene believed, somehow, that wearing white clothing had warded off the worst aspects of heat and radiation.

nuclear nobel peace prize Atomic bomb destruction, Hiroshima, Japan. This is an official US Army photograph, from the New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection. (Image: USF / Gallo Images)



Unsurprisingly, the personal agonies among many Americans about having used the bomb (or helping create it) began to grow, nearly from the moment of the first test in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Dr Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who more than anyone else had guided the scientific and technological team into creating the weapon came to that view almost immediately as he watched that Trinity test detonation in the desert. (See below our review of the 2023 film on Oppenheimer’s life.)

Read more: Nolan’s Oppenheimer weaves a modern master tale into the historical tapestry of the atomic bomb tug-of-war

Witnessing the test explosion, the physicist had uttered his often-reported quotation from the Bhagavad Gita, “I have become death, the destroyer of worlds.” Along with quantum theory, Oppenheimer was a student of Hindu literature and the line must have come to him almost automatically at that baleful moment. 

Bureaucratic struggle


In his book, Thomas thoroughly explores the state of mind and thinking of the secretary of war, Henry Stimson, in the months before the end of the war. Even before the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were used, he had already concluded the weapon was fraught with issues.

Stimson confided to himself about the ethical challenge of deploying a weapon whose impact could never be limited to military or industrial targets. But he also allowed that conventional bombing of major cities like Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama, and Nagoya had already devastated such metropolises.

The civilian death toll from the explosions and the firestorms they started were numbered in the hundreds of thousands. However, the secretary understood that Japan’s military potential had not yet been reduced enough to allow for the success of an invasion that also would have had horrific numbers of casualties.

Stimson also understood the meaning of the city of Kyoto for the Japanese, even as he remembered his and his wife’s visit there 20 years earlier. Accordingly, he waged a bureaucratic struggle to keep Kyoto off the atomic bomb target list (although approving other cities), arguing if Kyoto’s cultural and artistic heritage were obliterated, it would ensure the Japanese would bear a perpetual hatred of America.

As an aside, at the height of the Cold War, some historians had argued an important additional justification for using the bomb – particularly by Secretary of State Jimmy Byrnes – was it would deliver a message to the Soviet Union’s leadership that they should proceed with caution, once they finally entered the Pacific War in August, following Germany’s defeat. But the US and the USSR were still allies and Truman had told Stalin at the Potsdam summit after Germany’s surrender about a new weapon, albeit in general terms.

More importantly, Stalin was already apprised of the weapon through the Soviet’s espionage network in the Manhattan Project itself. In any case, the Russians succeeded in developing their own atomic weapon just a few years later, and so the race to develop newer and more powerful weapons was on, as well as the evolution of the balance of Mutual Assured Destruction and Deterrence.

A ‘necessary’ horror


In a recent interview on the National Public Radio programme, Fresh Air, Thomas said, “Japanese armed forces were, by and large, intact. Although we had fought this heavy campaign through the Pacific Islands, the Japanese still had millions of men in their army. Many of them were in Asia, occupying China and Southeast Asia, but there were about a million of them collecting on the southern tip of Kyushu, the southernmost Japanese island, waiting there for an invasion they knew was coming. 

“They also had 7,000 kamikaze planes and all sorts of kamikaze swimmers and frogmen and divers waiting there to inflict bloody harm on the American invasion.” (That did not include teenagers trained to act as a suicide corps to attack tanks, as with an acquaintance of the author of this article).

Discussing Foreign Minister Togo’s lonely, generally under-appreciated role in moving the government into embracing surrender, Thomas added, “….We should have given Togo a medal. He saved millions of people, but he got swept up in this desire to have a broad victor’s justice, to punish aggression by a nation…. He wasn’t sentenced to death like seven of them [the generals and admirals]. He was given a 20-year sentence, but he died in prison. Now, interestingly, he was at peace.

“Although my American heroes in my book – Stimson and [Army Air Corps General] Spaatz – were wracked with guilt to their dying day, Togo was at peace because he felt that he had done everything he possibly could to bring peace. And he had. It was close. He almost failed. He had pernicious anemia. He was sick as a dog, but he worked towards a just end and he got it.”

Thomas concluded, “There’s an endless debate over dropping these bombs, and I think that’s a good thing. What did [historian Arthur] Schlesinger say, that history is a never-ending argument? And there’s been a never-ending argument over the correctness and justice and rightness and morality of dropping those bombs. And I think that’s proper because they’re so horrific. I just think that, at this stage, the evidence shows – and I say this, you know, obviously with sorrow – that it was, at the end of the day, necessary. 

“You know, it’s – you can’t prove the opposite. You can’t prove for a fact that if we offered the Japanese to keep their emperor, they might not have surrendered. But I think the evidence is pretty overwhelming that they would not have. And therefore we had to use these weapons. And as I said, ending the war stopped carnage that was just going to go on and on and on.”

Renewed attention


Now, of course, in our present circumstances, with those sotto voce threats from governments about the possible use of nuclear weapons in current conflicts, the Nobel Prize committee’s decision was clearly correct to focus world attention on the continuing presence of nuclear arsenals and the threats to use them. 

There is also the baleful possibility other nations beyond the current roster of nuclear powers may join the nuclear weapons club. Further, there is also the chance a conventional inter-state conflict could spiral out of control, bringing on the use of such weapons as a last resort or trump card.

For many years, despite the large and dangerous inventories of nuclear weapons, the impetus internationally had been on nuclear weapons treaties, holding out hopes those arsenals could be steadily decreased. But that energy seems to be fading as countries like North Korea have also joined the club and other nations are undergoing or planning upgrades and renovating their current nuclear arsenals. 

The example and role of the Nihon Hidankyo as an international lobbyist opposing such weapons remains important and the Nobel Peace Prize committee has been right in highlighting this role, even as Evan Thomas’s book points out how difficult it can be to stop a war before such weapons are used. Again. DM

Categories:

Tags: