5O Years After Hiroshima
Elshtain, Jean Bethke
In 1989 a young scholar named Jeff Smith published a book entitled Unthinking the Unthinkable: Nuclear Weapons and Western Culture, a book that received too little attention at the time or...
...Beginning with the startling and nigh obscene fact that the first atomic test was code-named Trinity and was thought of by at least some of its participants in quasi-religious terms (the release of "forces heretofore reserved to the Almighty"), Smith notes that such language "expresses the feeling that atomic weapons are a radically new thing, so different from all other weapons and devices in the magnitude of their power as to be indescribable in everyday terms...
...322 • DISSENT 30 Years After Hiroshima For our war, for our purposes, to save American lives, we have reached the point where we say that anything goes...
...But there is a distinct tendency to put conventional weapons and atomic weapons on two altogether separate tracks...
...If one strips away the eschatological fever that such a focus seems to invite, there is still ample reason to be interested, in part because of the very uniqueness of the weapon's use—two times, fifty years ago, not since...
...Fussell mocks historians who were infants in prams in 1945, who make pronouncements on the bomb today...
...The good reason is that Hiroshima and Nagasaki must inevitably become reinserted in the warp and woof of history, not viewed as symbols hovering above the bloody ground that was World War II but as particularly powerful and tormenting events on that very ground...
...Hiroshima seems long ago and far away...
...Inevitably, when we read about ethnic cleansing, our minds are carried back to events in Central Europe a half century ago...
...More horrific than the fire storms that ravaged Tokyo or Dresden...
...Oddly enough, what might be called "nuclear exceptionalism" spurred a good bit of anti-nuclear politics...
...What ethical restraints persisted despite the war's toll on our collective moral wits...
...Because Hiroshima, however hideous and—in my view—unjustified, can still be seen as an act of war, whereas the Nazi machinery of mechanized death seems something else altogether, my own sense is that interest in the bombings will wane over the next quartercentury...
...It would mean whites couldn't write about slavery—Eugene Genovese's classic would never have appeared...
...There will be good and bad reasons for that...
...participants or bystanders...
...But stripped of their situatedness in time and place, terrible happenings become awfully abstract, grist for many mills...
...We rightly accord great weight to what veterans and survivors have to say, but that isn't the same thing as giving them the only word or the final one...
...That is changing, in the United States at least, but not by much...
...John Keegan wasn't at Agincourt, but has written vividly and brilliantly about it...
...As World War II recedes into the historic distance, the tendency for certain events to stand out, even to stand alone and somewhat untethered to SUMMER • 1995 • 321 SO Years After Hiroshima politics, grows apace, especially, or so I shall suggest, regarding the Hiroshima event...
...We are not the Germans and not the Japanese, and we have less to answer for...
...As the World War II generation dies—that generation of Americans that served so well and gave so much—the passion will perhaps go out of this and other issues, like air escaping a punctured tire...
...What kept our preoccupation with nuclear weapons alive for so long was our ongoing fear that they might be used in a major strategic exchange between the two great superpowers...
...But, in part because of the embrace by so many of nuclear exceptionalism, the massive use of conventional weapons—say U.S...
...Not by an actual calculus of immediate loss of life...
...Now that an era has ended—now that we have entered the long tunnel at the end of the light, as Vaclav Havel puts it—my hunch is that how we remember and what we remember of events in midcentury is bound to be altered...
...In truth, no one can claim to have a privileged position from which to proclaim the "last word" in the matter of the atomic bomb...
...In 1989 a young scholar named Jeff Smith published a book entitled Unthinking the Unthinkable: Nuclear Weapons and Western Culture, a book that received too little attention at the time or subsequently, for that matter...
...There is nothing more dangerous, many people argued, nothing more psychically corrupting, nothing more to be abhorred, and the like...
...Perhaps the best one can do so many years later is to keep atomic bombs in one's sight as a historical and political phenomenon...
...Still, a hard version of their claim—say Paul Fussell's insistence that only soldiers who were about to be sent to invade the Japanese mainland are now in a position to make strong arguments ("Thank God for the atom bomb")—goes too far...
...The minority favoring ethical restraint was not the dominant voice, but it was an important voice and it should not be forgotten...
...The bad reason is the deepening of the view that what is done in the heat and fog of a terrible war cannot and should not be revisited critically and ethically (by contrast to tendentiously and with an eye to setting up new demons and angels—as in the Smithsonian fracas, which has only reinforced militant self-exculpation by those angered at the arch-revisionists...
...For example: in today's climate of cultural criticism, one hears the question: Who has a right to speak...
...The bombs used on Japan were not "smart" bombs: they obliterated in a horrific way...
...carpet bombing of Iraqi forces in the Gulf War—is dwarfed by comparison...
...This tended to draw a sharp line between nuclear weapons and all other kinds...
...In the meantime, our weapons technology has grown less blunt, less clumsy...
...SUMMER • 1995 • 323...
...They are history's prototypical noncombatants...
...As a result, these latter seemed less awful, despite the fact that the body counts from conventional destruction in World War II were far higher than those caused by the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki...
...Yet we remain uniquely fascinated and horrified...
...what other options might have been present...
...Well, we do not look back in horror, not as we should...
...The dropping of the bombs was an occasion for sorrow and criticism on the part of several leading Protestant and Catholic writers...
...Once we have won our war, we say that there must be international law...
...That is what the Germans said at the beginning of the war...
...By contrast, the Holocaust, or the matter of genocide, is ever more vivid because we have seen so many subsequent genocidal initiatives—not abstractly cast but concretely manifest...
...The truth of the matter is we can now be much more precise in targeting, much more cautious in what we destroy and what we spare...
...slowness to respond to possible peace overtures...
...That I took to be Smith's most salient point: take nuclear weapons off their quasi-metaphysical pedestal...
...Commonweal concluded its editorial condemning the atomic bombs in these words...
...The debates will become more abstract, more depersonalized, less interesting...
...Dissatisfied with economic and psychological analyses of "the bomb," Smith decided the discussion of nuclear weapons needed to be placed in a much longer historical perspective than the past fifty years...
...Why focus on nuclear weapons, then...
...The victory of nuclear exceptionalism tends to decouple the use of "conventional" weapons from the use of atomic weaponry...
...For example, Commonweal, the Catholic lay journal, condemned terror bombing in 1942, as did many other Catholic journals of opinion—on moral grounds...
...Will it be revisionist historians or World War II vets...
...The Smithsonian Institution skirmish over the Enola Gay exhibition is but the latest, and one of the most bitter, of many controversies...
...Without indulging in counter-factual games, it is important to ask whether things might have gone differently...
...Who is authorized to define the bomb's meaning and purpose...
...The civic energy that sustained our dominant "reading" of events is depleted...
...To be fair, our use of airpower in Iraq was designed to kill combatants, not non-combatants, but the sheer number of sorties and tons of ordnance was mind-boggling, yet all this quickly disappeared from our mental radar screens...
...As I note in my book, Women and War, Fussell's argument means that women by definition cannot write about wars since they haven't fought in them...
...How large a role did sheer technological drive play—"We've got these things and by god we're going to use them"—or our commitment to unconditional surrender, long suggested as a reason for U.S...
...This brief argument against nuclear exceptionalism is meant to remind us of the multiple routes to high body counts...
...But describe them we must and, in the process, engage in acts of demystification that put nuclear weapons back into history, back into the sphere of political contestation and debate...
...victims or victors...
...We don't say that we care less about what is happening in the Balkans because it comes nowhere near to what happened in Nazi-occupied Europe...
...Consider concentration camps, systematic rape, rounding up and "disappearing" people, mass shootings in the forests— old fashioned methods of destruction, recently revived for the purpose of ethnic cleansing...
...But the question, in one form or another, has been there for a long time...
...Undoubtedly...
...Nuclear weapons were in a class by themselves, contrasted with the all-purpose category of "conventional weapons...
...Before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Reinhold Niebuhr called the total war mentality "nauseous self-righteousness...
...But if one pushes this idea, it would mean the end of history and intellectual life altogether...
...This is very odd on the face of it...
...I am sympathetic to the concerns expressed by veterans over the way in which the original text for the Smithsonian was cast—for the Japanese were by no means "innocent" defenders of a unique culture and nothing more in this matter...
...When it is created, Germans, Japanese, and Americans will remember with horror the days of their shame...
...Consider, for example, the hideous bloodletting in Rwanda carried out by machete, a very old-fashioned instrument for hacking people to death...
...Here the dominant discourse has virtually guaranteed discontinuity...
...In the matter of genocide, however, we routinely situate subsequent events in a comparative continuum with the horror of Nazi genocide...
...This tends to place nuclear weapons outside the bounds of rational discourse— we murmur about the ineffable, about horrors no words can describe...
...But answer we should and must...
Vol. 42 • July 1995 • No. 3
