Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: militarism

  • Celebrating Slaughter: War and Collective Amnesia

    This article was originally published on Truthdig

    War memorials and museums are temples to the god of war. The hushed voices, the well-tended grass, the flapping of the flags allow us to ignore how and why our young died. They hide the futility and waste of war. They sanitize the savage instruments of death that turn young soldiers and Marines into killers, and small villages in Vietnam or Afghanistan or Iraq into hellish bonfires. There are no images in these memorials of men or women with their guts hanging out of their bellies, screaming pathetically for their mothers. We do not see mangled corpses being shoved in body bags. There are no sights of children burned beyond recognition or moaning in horrible pain. There are no blind and deformed wrecks of human beings limping through life. War, by the time it is collectively remembered, is glorified and heavily censored.

    I blame our war memorials and museums, our popular war films and books, for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as much as George W. Bush. They provide the mental images and historical references to justify new conflicts. We equate Saddam Hussein with Adolf Hitler. We see al-Qaida as a representation of Nazi evil. We view ourselves as eternal liberators. These plastic representations of war reconfigure the past in light of the present. War memorials and romantic depictions of war are the social and moral props used to create the psychological conditions to wage new wars.

    War memorials are quiet, still, reverential and tasteful. And, like church, such sanctuaries are important, but they allow us to forget that these men and women were used and often betrayed by those who led the nation into war. The memorials do not tell us that some always grow rich from large-scale human suffering. They do not explain that politicians play the great games of world power and stoke fear for their own advancement. They forget that young men and women in uniform are pawns in the hands of cynics, something Pat Tillman’s family sadly discovered. They do not expose the ignorance, raw ambition and greed that are the engine of war.

    There is a burning need, one seen in the collective memory that has grown up around World War II and the Holocaust, to turn the horror of mass murder into a tribute to the triumph of the human spirit. The reality is too unpalatable. The human need to make sense of slaughter, to give it a grandeur it does not possess, permits the guilty to go free. The war makers—those who make the war but never pay the price of war—live among us. They pen thick memoirs that give sage advice. They are our elder statesmen, our war criminals. Henry Kissinger. Robert McNamara. Dick Cheney. George W. Bush. Any honest war memorial would have these statesmen hanging in effigy. Any honest democracy would place them behind bars.

    Primo Levi, who survived Auschwitz, fought against the mendacity of collective memory until he took his own life. He railed against the human need to mask the truth of the Holocaust and war by giving it a false, moral narrative. He wrote that the contemporary history of the Third Reich could be “reread as a war against memory, an Orwellian falsification of memory, falsification of reality, negation of reality.” He wondered if “we who have returned” have “been able to understand and make others understand our experience.” He wrote of the Jewish collaborator Chaim Rumkowski, who ran the Lodz ghetto on behalf of the Nazis, that “we are all mirrored in Rumkowski, his ambiguity is ours, it is our second nature, we hybrids molded from clay and spirit. His fever is ours, the fever of Western civilization that ‘descends into hell with trumpets and drums.’ ” We, like Rumkowski, “come to terms with power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death, and that close by the train is waiting.” We are, Levi understood, perpetually imprisoned within the madness of self-destruction. The rage of Cindy Sheehan, who lost her son Casey in Iraq, is a rage Levi felt. But it is a rage most of us do not understand.

    A war memorial that attempted to depict the reality of war would be too subversive. It would condemn us and our capacity for evil. It would show that the line between the victim and the victimizer is razor-thin, that human beings, when the restraints are cut, are intoxicated by mass killing, and that war, rather than being noble, heroic and glorious, obliterates all that is tender, decent and kind. It would tell us that the celebration of national greatness is the celebration of our technological capacity to kill. It would warn us that war is always morally depraved, that even in “good” wars such as World War II all can become war criminals. We dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Nazis ran the death camps. But this narrative of war is unsettling. It does not create a collective memory that serves the interests of those who wage war and permit us to wallow in self-exaltation.

    There are times—World War II and the Serb assault on Bosnia would be examples—when a population is pushed into a war. There are times when a nation must ingest the poison of violence to survive. But this violence always deforms and maims those who use it. My uncle, who drank himself to death in a trailer in Maine, fought for four years in the South Pacific during World War II. He and the soldiers in his unit never bothered taking Japanese prisoners.

    The detritus of war, the old cannons and artillery pieces rolled out to stand near memorials, were curious and alluring objects in my childhood. But these displays angered my father, a Presbyterian minister who was in North Africa as an Army sergeant during World War II. The lifeless, clean and neat displays of weapons and puppets in uniforms were being used, he said, to purge the reality of war. These memorials sanctified violence. They turned the instruments of violence—the tanks, machine guns, rifles and airplanes—into an aesthetic of death.

    These memorials, while they pay homage to those who made “the ultimate sacrifice,” dignify slaughter. They perpetuate the old lie of honor and glory. They set the ground for the next inferno. The myth of war manufactures a collective memory that ennobles the next war. The intimate, personal experience of violence turns those who return from war into internal exiles. They cannot compete against the power of the myth. This collective memory saturates the culture, but it is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

    Chris Hedges, whose column is published on Truthdig every Monday, spent two decades as a foreign reporter covering wars in Latin America, Africa, Europe and the Middle East. He has written nine books, including “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle” (2009) and “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning” (2003).

    Chris Hedges spent two decades as a foreign reporter covering wars in Latin America, Africa, Europe and the Middle East. He has written nine books, including “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle” (2009) and “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning” (2003).
  • Understanding a Trillion

    Understanding a Trillion

    This is the way to understand a trillion. Begin by counting 1,2,3…one number each second, and count each second around the clock. In 12 days, you will reach one million. Keep counting. In 32 years, you will reach one billion. Admittedly, this is an impossible task, far beyond our capacities for concentration and focus, not to mention sleep deprivation.

    The really hard part, though, is that to reach one trillion would require counting for 32,000 years. It would require organizing the next 1,280 generations to continue the 24 hour counting in 32 year shifts. This would require passing the baton to future generations for more than three times the span of civilization from its roots in Mesopotamia to the present.

    Now consider that the world is spending over $1.2 trillion annually on military expenditures, and the United States is spending more than half of this amount on its military and its wars. Or consider this: the United States alone has spent some $7.5 trillion on nuclear weapons and their delivery systems since 1942. To count to $7.5 trillion would require counting for the next 240,000 years, through 9,600 generations. And our militarism has created in the US alone $9 trillion in debt which, along with our militarism and nuclearism, is our legacy to future generations.

    David Krieger is the President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org).

  • Nuclearism and the Legacy of U.S. Media Coverage of Hiroshima

    Presented at the “Think Outside the Bomb” National Youth Conference on Nuclear Issues, Washington DC, April 21, 2007

    On August 6, 1945, the bomb that we are trying to think outside of here today was used as a weapon of mass destruction for the first time in history. The United States, engaged in a fierce war with Japan, dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, destroying it almost entirely. The blast, heat, and radiation killed more than 140,000 people. The White House delivered the dramatic news about the dawn of the atomic age through a press release of a presidential statement. The press release set the tone for much of the media coverage to come in the final days of the war and the months after. It emphasized vengeance as a motive for bombing Hiroshima. It focused on the technological achievement in producing the bomb. At the same time it omitted any mention of radiation, a key feature of the new weapon. The White House also implied that Hiroshima had been targeted because it had an army base, but failed to mention that the aiming point for the bomb had been the center of a city of more than 300,000 civilians. [1]

    After the White House statement, came 14 press releases from the War Department. [2] This concerted government media campaign anticipated the possibility of public controversy. As General Leslie Groves, head of the secret project to build the bomb, put it, “it may be necessary to control the situation by the issuance of carefully written press releases.” [3]

    Controlling the situation was exactly what General Groves did. A few months earlier he had hired the New York Times science reporter, William Laurence, to become the bomb’s publicist in waiting. Groves’s investment paid off handsomely. Laurence crafted press releases and stories, many of them rhapsodic, about the exciting dawn of a new scientific age, about the heroic effort to produce and use the bomb, and about the positive aspects of atomic energy. Laurence, perhaps the first fully embedded journalist in history, helped shape how we Americans came to think about nuclear weapons and energy. He and other members of the media helped put in place a narrative that legitimized the use of nuclear weapons and absorbed the bomb into American life. They did this by accepting government control of information about atomic power, downplaying the dangers of radiation and marginalizing the civilian victims, obscuring the fact that President Truman could have avoided the bomb in forcing Japan’s surrender, and, in other ways, normalizing the existence of nuclear weapons.

    There has always been a tension between national security and press freedom [4]—one can see this, for example, in how the Bush administration in its early years enjoyed limited critical scrutiny from the press, mostly because of 911 and the threat of terrorism. The limited scrutiny made it easier for the administration to go to war, despite a case for war that was as weak then as it is now. The same tension between security and freedom held true in World War II. The project to build the atomic bomb was understandably never discussed openly. But the Truman administration kept the existence of the bomb a secret until its combat use.

    The administration could have chosen a different path. For example, many scientists recommended that the administration disclose the existence of the bomb and at least attempt to force Japanese surrender through a nonlethal demonstration of the bomb’s power. But despite the efforts of some scientists and the misgivings of some Truman administration and military officials, the US dropped the bomb on an unsuspecting enemy. Once they used it, the administration had to justify its use and this is where the American media came in.

    Much of the coverage of the first few days after the Hiroshima bombing bore the stamp of William Laurence’s work. [5] Either directly through his New York Times byline or through newspaper stories based on material handed to journalists that Laurence had crafted, the media reflected to a large degree an uncritical pro-bomb viewpoint. News reports noted, for example, that the bomb had obliterated an army base, that science had now harnessed the power of the universe, and that revenge had finally been visited on the Japanese. Initial editorial opinion was almost uniformly supportive of the use of the bomb. [6]

    As the Washington Post commented, reflecting a widespread view, “However much we deplore the necessity, a struggle to the death commits all combatants to inflicting a maximum amount of destruction on the enemy…” [7] It wasn’t until eight years later that the Post appeared to take back these words: On the day of his retirement in 1953, Washington Post editor Herb Elliston told a reporter that he had many regrets as he looked back over his tenure. “One thing I regret is our editorial support of the A-bombing of Japan. It didn’t jibe with our expressed feeling [before the bomb was dropped] that Japan was already beaten.” [8]

    All in all, the initial coverage of the atomic attack was remarkably faithful to the official, pro-bomb viewpoint. [9] As General Groves commented, “most newspapers published our releases in their entirety.” [10] Perhaps not surprisingly (and reflecting the uncritical wartime mood), the Washington Press Club, soon after the Hiroshima bombing, responded to the news by offering its members a new drink, an Atomic Cocktail. [11]

    But Laurence represented a-bomb championing at its most vigilant and enthusiastic. He heralded the bomb in poetic, at times biblical terms. And with his descriptions he helped set the predominant image of the a-bomb and of the atomic era—an enormous, powerful mushroom cloud that held viewers in awe—an image that photography and film cemented through repetition. In Laurence’s atomic portraits, the victims simply didn’t merit attention, but the mushroom cloud did. In his eyewitness account of the Nagasaki bombing, for example, he described the explosion in terms of wonder and incredulity:

    “Awe-struck, we watched [the pillar of purple fire] shoot upward … becoming ever more alive as it climbed skyward through the clouds…. It was a living thing, a new species of being, born right before our incredulous eyes…. [J]ust when it appeared as though the thing has settled down … there came shooting out of the top a giant mushroom…. The mushroom top was even more alive than the pillar, seething and boiling in a white fury of creamy foam… As the first mushroom floated off into the blue it changed its shape into a flowerlike form, its giant petal curving downward, creamy white outside, rose-colored inside.” [12]

    In his long New York Times article, which included eight paragraphs on individual crew members and others on the mission, [13] Laurence said virtually nothing about the victims. When he did, it was just to dismiss them:

    “Does one feel any pity or compassion for the poor devils about to die? Not when one thinks about Pearl Harbor and the Death March on Bataan.”

    Laurence’s dismissal of the victims of the first use of nuclear weapons was not uncommon. Media focus on righteous vengeance, supposed necessity of the bombings, and the technological accomplishment of American and Allied science pushed the dead and dying out of the spotlight. [14] Government censorship aided in this marginalization, especially through censorship about radiation and of visual evidence.

    The first photograph of Japanese victims appeared in Life magazine about two months after the end of the war. [15] But the magazine used a caption to undercut the power of the photos. The caption stated that the photographer “reported that [the] injuries looked like those he had seen when he photographed men burned at Pearl Harbor.” [16] For the most part, photographs of the human cost of the atomic bombings seldom appeared in the American media until the 1950s, [17] by which time they would have had little influence on nuclear policy, which had fully absorbed nuclear arms and power into American military planning and civilian life.

    The early media neglect of Japanese victims was reinforced by the lack of emphasis on radiation In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, due partly to censorship. The first serious attempt at explaining what had happened in Japan came from an Australian journalist, Wilfred Burchett. Almost a month after Hiroshima had been bombed, Burchett arrived there and understood the horror of the bomb for the first time. Initially supportive of the bomb’s use, Burchett ultimately rejected nuclear weapons because of what he had seen in Hiroshima. Reporting from the scene of the devastation, his account differed dramatically from that of other journalists:

    “In Hiroshima, 30 days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world, people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly—people who were uninjured in the cataclysm—from an unknown something which I can only describe as the atomic plague.

    “Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller has passed over it and squashed it out of existence. I write these facts as dispassionately as I can in the hope that they will act as a warning to the world.” [18]

    A war correspondent who had reported from many battlefronts, Burchett compared Hiroshima with what he had witnessed elsewhere: “In this first testing ground of the atomic bomb I have seen the most terrible and frightening desolation in four years of war…. When you arrive in Hiroshima you can look around for twenty-five and perhaps thirty square miles. You can see hardly a building. It gives you an empty feeling in the stomach to see such man-made destruction.” [19]

    Burchett’s reference to the atomic plague immediately moved the War Department into action. At first they ordered Burchett to leave Japan. Then the camera he had used in Hiroshima mysteriously disappeared. The US occupation authorities claimed that Burchett had been taken in by Japanese propaganda about radiation. [20] They decided to let him stay in Japan and opted instead to deal with his charges about atomic sickness by simply denying that radiation had caused any problems. As a result, a New York Times reporter who had a week earlier reported witnessing sickness and death due to the lingering effects of the atomic bomb simply reversed the truth. He now reported that according to the head of the US atomic mission to Japan the bomb had not produced any “dangerous, lingering radioactivity.” [21] The Washington Post uncritically noted that the atomic mission staff had been unable to find any Japanese person suffering from radiation sickness. [22]

    To drive home the point that radiation was not a problem, General Groves invited thirty reporters out to the New Mexico site where the bomb had first been tested two months earlier. This effort paid off with a banner headline in the New York Times: “U.S. Atom Bomb Site Belies Tokyo Tales; Tests on New Mexico Range Confirm That Blast, and Not Radiation, Took Toll,” [23] Life magazine concluded after the escorted tour in New Mexico that no Japanese person could have died as a result of lingering radiation. [24]

    In fact, radiation killed thousands of Japanese in the months after the bomb was dropped. The 1960 population census in Japan estimated that the leukemia mortality rate for persons entering Hiroshima within three days of the bombing was three times higher than it was in all of Japan. [25]

    The ease with which many reporters went along with official tales about the bomb is evident as well in their acceptance of the bomb’s necessity for ending the war. Necessity in this case had three aspects: vengeance, war-driven inevitability (which was sometimes regrettable), and absence of other reasonable means for ending the war. The last aspect has survived most tenaciously up to the present. According to this view, Truman simply didn’t have any choice except to use the bomb; if he had not, somewhere between half and one million American casualties would have resulted from an invasion of the Japanese homeland. I won’t address this issue here, except to say that historians have picked apart this myth over the years, so much so that even the former chief historian of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission calls the bomb vs invasion view of history a myth. [26]

    As the media helped to cleanse the new weapon of criticism, it also exalted the benefits of nuclearism to American life. A few months after the bombing, Atlantic magazine commented that “Through medical advances alone, atomic energy has already saved more lives than were snuffed out at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” [27] Life magazine regularly featured picture spreads and stories about the beauty and splendor of atomic energy and the glory of atomic miracles such as a Million Volt Cancer Treatment. [28] The magazine did this hand in hand with the government. For several years after the war, the photos of atomic images that Life published came mostly from the Army or the Atomic Energy Commission, rather than from its own photographers. [29] In the imagery and narrative that unfolded over time, the magazine implicitly urged its readers to set aside residual fears of atomic weapons—just as the arms race was heating up—and instead focus on the benefits and benevolence of the nuclear establishment. [30] Thus the dual nature of most media coverage—limiting the negative view of Hiroshima and Nagasaki while playing up the positive aspects of nuclearism—not only eased the bomb into American life, but it also eased the way for an all out arms race with the Soviet Union.

    As the bomb got absorbed into American life and military planning, the media largely continued to toe the administration’s line about nuclear issues. Nuclear weapons testing in the Marshall Islands and in the American heartland—in places like Nevada—produced little scrutiny. As the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been marginalized, so were the radiation victims in the Marshall Islands and the downwinders at home.

    To be sure, the mass media did pose some challenges to the official narrative—John Hersey’s Hiroshima is the premier example. News outlets did publish contrary opinion and information occasionally. [31] But there was no concerted effort to investigate government claims and challenge the view of nuclear weapons that settled into place after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

    * * * * * * * *

    Having laid out this rather bleak story, I do want to end with a quote from Wilfred Burchett, who along with Hersey and a few others, showed what the media was capable of doing when it sided with humanity rather than with official narratives and nuclear glory: As Burchett put it,

    “In visiting Hiroshima, I felt that I was seeing in the last days of [World War 2] what would be the fate of hundreds of cities in a [World War 3]. If that does not make a journalist want to shape history in the right direction, what does?” [32]

    Uday Mohan is the Director of Research for American University’s Nuclear Studies Institute.

    Footnotes

    [1] Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial (New York: Grossett/Putnam, 1995), 5.

    [2] Ibid., 10. Compare Lifton and Mitchell’s account with the Department of Energy’s account of the Manhattan Project’s public relations campaign (www.mbe.doe.gov/me70/manhattan/public_reaction.htm).

    [3] Quoted in ibid., 12.

    [4 See, especially, Jeffery A. Smith. War and Press Freedom: The Problem of Prerogative Power (New York: Oxford University Press,1999).

    [5] For Laurence’s impact, see ibid.; Beverly D. Keever, News Zero: The New York Times and the Bomb (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 2004); and Spencer Weart, Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).

    [6] Lifton and Mitchell, Hiroshima in America, 24.

    [7] Quoted in ibid., 24.

    [8] “Elliston Reviews Post’s Role in Tackling Public Problems,” Washington Post, April 20, 1953, 7. For more on journalistic dissent, see Uday Mohan and Leo Maley III, “Orthodoxy and Dissent: The American News Media and the Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb Against Japan, 1945-1995,” in Cultural Difference, Media Memories: Anglo-American Images of Japan, ed. Phil Hammond (London: Cassell, 1997), and Uday Mohan and Leo Maley III, “Journalists and the Bomb,” op-ed distributed by the History News Service (HNS) in 2000 and published in several US newspapers, including the Atlanta Constitution (published as “Blasting the A-Bomb,” 8/7/00, A11). HNS version available at www.h-net.org/~hns/articles/2000/080100a.html.

    [9] An important issue not addressed here is the sense of dread the atomic bomb introduced into American life. News coverage and commentary reflected this sense of dread, but a public conversation about nuclear weapons never developed, partly because the media helped justify the atomic bombing of Japan and legitimize the existence of nuclear weapons.

    [10] Lifton and Mitchell, Hiroshima in America, 10.

    [11] Allan M. Winkler, Life Under a Cloud: American Anxiety about the Atom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 27.

    [12] William L. Laurence, “Atomic Bombing of Nagasaki Told By Flight Member,” New York Times, September 9, 1945, 1 and 35.

    [13] Keever, News Zero, 70-71.

    [14] This media emphasis was perhaps understandable given the wartime mood, hatred of the Japanese, and government censorship. But at the same time, there were dissenters who suggested that a different perspective was possible regarding the use of the bomb. See references in endnote 8 and Leo Maley III and Uday Mohan, “Time to Confront the Ethics of Hiroshima,” op-ed for History News Service (www.h-net.org/~hns/articles/2005/080405b.html) published in 2005 in various U.S. newspapers; Uday Mohan and Leo Maley III, “Hiroshima: Military Voices of Dissent,” op-ed for History News Service (www.h-net.org/~hns/articles/2001/072601b.html) published in 2001 in various U.S. newspapers; and Leo Maley III and Uday Mohan, “Second-Guessing Hiroshima,” op-ed for History News Service (www.h-net.org/~hns/articles/1998/072998a.html) published in 1998 in various U.S. newspapers.

    [15] George H. Roeder Jr., “Making Things Visible: Learning from the Censors,” in Laura Hein and Mark Selden, eds., Living with the Bomb: American and Japanese Cultural Conflicts in the Nuclear Age (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1997), 93.

    [16] Quoted in ibid.

    [17] Ibid.

    [18] Quoted in Richard Tanter, “Voice and Silence in the First Nuclear War: Wilfred Burchett and Hiroshima,” in Ben Kiernan, ed., Burchett Reporting the Other Side of the World, 1939-1983 (London: Quartet, 1986), 18.

    [19] Ibid.

    [20] Amy Goodman with David Goodman, “Hiroshima Cover-Up: How the War Department’s Timesman Won a Pulitzer,” in Goodman with Goodman, The Exceptions to the Rulers (New York: Hyperion, 1994), 295.

    [21] Lawrence’s September 5, 1945 article quoted and described in Goodman with Goodman, “Hiroshima Cover-Up,” 299-300. However, Lawrence does note in his later article that the atomic mission chief confirmed that some Japanese had died because of low counts of white corpuscles, rather than from blast- or burn-related wounds: William H. Lawrence, “No Radioactivity in Hiroshima Ruin; What Our Superfortresses Did to a Japanese Plane Production Center,” New York Times, September 13, 1945. 4. Three days earlier, Lawrence had largely dismissed Japanese claims of the lingering dangers from the atomic attack, but did note that a Dutch medical officer had confirmed that “some persons” (presumably referring to Allied POWs) had died from a “mysterious relapse” and that four Dutch soldiers had died both of their wounds and uranium after-effects: Lawrence, “Atom Bomb Killed Nagasaki Captives; 8 Allied Prisoners Victims– Survivor Doubts After-Effect,” New York Times, September 10, 1945, 1.

    [22] “Radioactivity at Hiroshima Discounted,” Washington Post, September 13, 1945, 2.

    [23] William L. Laurence, “U.S. Atom Bomb Site Belies Tokyo Tales; Tests on New Mexico Range Confirm That Blast, and Not Radiation, Took Toll,” New York Times, September 12, 1945. 1 and 4.

    [24] Lifton and Mitchell, Hiroshima in America, 52.

    [25] Tanter, “Voice and Silence in the First Nuclear War,” 26.

    [26] See J. Samuel Walker, Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs against Japan (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 5-6. For detailed accounts of the decision to use the bomb, see Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth (New York: Knopf, 1995) and Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005).

    [27] Quoted in Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon), 123.

    [28] Peter Bacon Hales, “The Mass Aesthetic of Holocaust: American Media Construct the Atomic Bomb,” Tokyo Daigaku Amerika Kenkyu Shiryo Senta Ninpo 17 (March 1996): 10.

    [29] Ibid., 10.

    [30 Ibid., 11.

    [31] A few U.S. officials and leaders responded to these challenges with an article intended to silence the critics. Henry Stimson, who had been secretary of war under Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, responded with a seemingly authoritative essay (written with the assistance of General Groves, Harvard University President James Conant, and others): “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb,” published in the February 1947 issue of Harper’s. For background on the intent behind and drafting of this article, see Barton J. Bernstein, “Seizing the Contested Terrain of Early Nuclear History: Stimson, Conant, and Their Allies Explain the Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb,” Diplomatic History 17 (Winter 1993), 35-72; James Hershberg, James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age (New York: Knopf, 1993), 279-304; and Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, 445-492.

    [32] Quoted in Tanter, “Voice and Silence in the First Nuclear War,” 37.

  • Fearing the Aftermath

    America and Americans on September 11th experienced the full horror of the greatest display of grotesque cunning in human history. Its essence consisted in transforming the benign everyday technology of commercial jet aircraft into malignant weapons of mass destruction. There has been much talk about Americans discovering the vulnerability of their heartland in a manner that far exceeds the collective trauma associated with the attack on Pearl Harbor. But the new vulnerability is radically different and far more threatening. It involves the comprehensive vulnerability of technology so closely tied to our global dominance, pervading every aspect of our existence. To protect ourselves against such the range of threats that could be mounted by those of fanatical persuasion is a mission impossible. The very attempt would turn America quickly into a prison state.

    And yet who could blame the government for doing what it can in the coming months to reassure a frightened citizenry. Likely steps seem designed to make it more difficult to repeat the operations that produced the WTC/Pentagon tragedy, but it seems highly unlikely that a terrorist machine intelligent enough to pull off this gruesome operation would suddenly become so stupid as to attempt the same thing soon again.

    The atrocity of September 11th must be understood as the work of dark genius, a penetrating tactical insight that endangers our future in fundamental respects that we are only beginning to apprehend. This breakthrough in terrorist tactics occurred in three mutually reinforcing dimensions: (1) the shift from extremely violent acts designed to shock more than to kill to onslaughts designed to make the enemy’s society into a bloody battlefield, in this instance, symbolically (capitalism and militarism) and substantively (massive human carnage and economic dislocation); (2) the use of primitive capabilities by the perpetrators to appropriate technology that can be transformed into weaponry of mass destruction through the mere act of seizure and destruction; (3) the availability of competent militants willing to both carry out such crimes against humanity at the certain cost of their own lives. Such a lethal, and essentially novel, combination of elements poses an unprecedented challenge to civic order and democratic liberties. It is truly a declaration of war from the lower depths.

    It is important to appreciate this transformative shift in the nature of the terrorist challenge both conceptually and tactically. Without comprehending these shifts, it will not be possible to fashion a response that is either effective or legitimate, and we need both. It remains obscure on the terrorist side whether an accompanying strategic goal accompanies this tactical escalation. At present it appears that the tactical brilliance of the operation will soon be widely regarded as a strategic blunder of colossal proportions. It would seem that the main beneficiaries of the attack in the near future are also the principal enemies of the perpetrators. Both the United States globally and Israel regionally emerge from this disaster with greatly strengthened geopolitical hands. Did the sense of hatred and fanaticism of the tactical masterminds induce this seeming strategic blindness? There is no indication that the forces behind the attack on the 11th were acting on any basis beyond their extraordinary destructive intent.

    And so we are led to the pivotal questions: what kind of war? What kind of response? It is, above all, a war without military solutions. Indeed it is a war in which the pursuit of the traditional military goal of “victory” is almost certain to intensify the challenge and spread the violence. Such an assessment does not question the propriety of the effort to identify and punish the perpetrators, and to cut their links to governmental power. In our criticism of the current war fever being nurtured by an unholy alliance of government and media we should not forget that the attacks on the 11th were massive crimes against humanity in a technical legal sense, and those guilty of their commission should be punished to the extent possible. Having acknowledged this legitimate right of response is by no means equivalent to an endorsement of unlimited force. Indeed, an overreaction may be what the terrorists were seeking to provoke so as to mobilize popular resentment against the United States on a global scale. We need to act effectively, but within a framework of moral and legal restraints.

    First of all, there should be the elementary due process of identifying convincingly the perpetrators, and their backers. Secondly, there should be a maximal effort to obtain authorization for any use of force in a specific form through the procedures of the United Nations Security Council. Unlike the Gulf War model, the collective character of the undertaking should be integral at the operational level, and not serve merely as window-dressing for unilateralism. Thirdly, any use of force should be consistent with international law and with the just war tradition governing the use of force- that is, discriminating between military and civilian targets, proportionate to the challenge, and necessary to achieve a military objective, avoiding superfluous suffering. If retaliatory action fails to abide by these guidelines, with due allowance for flexibility depending on the circumstances, then it will be seen by most others as replicating the fundamental evil of terrorism. It will be seen as violence directed against those who are innocent and against civilian society. And fourthly, the political and moral justifications for the use of force should be accompanied by the concerted and energetic protection of those who share an ethnic and religious identity with the targets of retaliatory violence.

    Counseling such guidelines does not overcome a dilemma that is likely to grow more obvious as the days go by: something must be done but there is nothing to do. What should be done if no targets can be found that are consistent with the guidelines of law and morality? We must assume that the terrorist network has anticipated retaliation even before the attack, and has taken whatever steps it can to “disappear” from the planet, to render itself invisible. The test then is whether our leaders have the forbearance to refrain from uses of forces that are directed toward those who are innocent in these circumstances, and whether our citizenry has the patience to indulge and accept such forbearance. It cannot be too much stressed that the only way to win this “war” (if war it is) against terrorism is by manifesting a respect for the innocence of civilian life, and to reinforce that respect by a credible commitment to the global promotion of social justice.

    The Bush Administration came to Washington with a resolve to conduct a more unilateralist foreign policy that abandoned the sorts of humanitarian pretenses that led to significant American-led involvements in sub-Saharan Africa and the Balkans during the 1990s. The main idea seemed to be to move away from a kind of liberal geopolitics and downsize the American international role by limiting overseas military action to the domain of strategic interests and to uphold such interests by a primary reliance on its own independent capabilities. Behind such thinking was the view that the United States did not need the sort of help that it required during the cold war, and at the same time it should not shoulder the humanitarian burdens of concern for matters that were remote from its direct interests. Combined with its enthusiasm for missile defense and weapons in space, such a repositioning of US foreign policy was supposed to be an adjustment to the new realities of the post-cold war world. Contrary to many commentaries, such a repositioning was not an embrace of isolationism, but represented a revised version of internationalism based on a blend of unilateralism and militarism.

    In the early months of the Bush presidency this altered foreign policy was mainly expressed by repudiating a series of important, widely supported multilateral treaty frameworks, including the Kyoto Protocol dealing with global warming, the ABM Treaty dealing with the militarization of space, and Biological Weapons Convention Protocol dealing with implementing the prohibition on developing biological weaponry. Allies of the United States were stunned by such actions, which seemed to reject the need for international cooperation to address global problems of a deeply threatening nature.

    And then came the 11th, and an immediate realization in Washington that the overwhelming priority of its foreign policy now rested upon soliciting precisely the sort of cooperative international framework it had worked so hard to throw into the nearest garbage bin. Whether such a realization goes deeper than a mobilization of support for global war only time will tell. Unlike the Gulf War or Kosovo War, which were rapidly carried to their completion by military means, a struggle against global terrorism even in its narrowest sense would require the most intense forms of inter-governmental cooperation ever experienced in the history of international relations. Hopefully, the diplomacy needed to receive this cooperation might set some useful restraining limits on the current American impulse to use force excessively and irresponsibly.

    A root question underlying the American response is the manner with which it deals with the United Nations. There is reportedly a debate within the Bush Administration between those hardliners who believe that the United States should claim control over the response by invoking the international law doctrine of “the inherent right of self-defense” and those more diplomatically inclined, who favor seeking a mandate from the Security Council to act in collective self-defense. Among the initiatives being discussed in the search for meaningful responses is the establishment through UN authority of a special tribunal entrusted with the prosecution of those indicted for the crime of international terrorism, possibly commencing with the apprehension and trial of Osama bin Laden. Such reliance on the rule of law would be a major step in seeking to make the struggle against terrorism enjoys the genuine support of the entire organized international community.

    It needs to be understood that the huge challenge posed by the attacks can only be met effectively by establishing the greatest possible distance between the perpetrators and those who are acting on behalf of their victims. And what is the content of this distance? An unconditional respect for the sacredness of life, and the dignity of the human person. One of the undoubted difficulties in the weeks and months ahead will be to satisfy the bloodthirst that has accompanied the mobilization of America for war while satisfying the rest of the world that it is acting in a manner that displays respect for civilian innocence and human solidarity. A slightly related problem, but with deeper implications, is to avoid seeming to exempt state violence from moral and legal limitations, while insisting that such limitations apply to the civic violence of the terrorists. Such double standards will damage the indispensable effort to draw a credible distinction between the criminality of the attack and the legitimacy of the retaliation.

    There are contradictory ways to address the atrocities of the 11th: the prevailing mood is to invoke the metaphor of cancer, and to preach military surgery of a complex and globe-girdling character that needs to be elevated to the status of a world war, and bears comparison with World War I and II; the alternative, which I believe is far more accurate as diagnosis and cure, is to rely on the metaphor of an iceberg. The attack on America was the tip of an iceberg, the submerged portions being the mass of humanity that is not sharing in the fruits of modernity, but finds itself under the heel of American economic, military, cultural, and diplomatic power. To eliminate the visible tip of the iceberg of discontent and resentment may bring us a momentary catharsis, but it will at best create an illusion of “victory.” What needs to be done is to extend a commitment to the sacredness of life to the entire human family, in effect, joining in a collective effort to achieve what might be called “humane globalization.”

    The Israel/Palestine conflict, its concreteness and persistence, is part of this new global reality. All sides acknowledge relevance, but the contradictory narratives deform our understanding in serious respects. Israel itself has seized the occasion to drop any pretense of sensitivity to international criticism and calls for restraint in its occupation of the Palestinian Territories. Israeli spokespersons have been active in spreading the word that now America and the world should appreciate what sorts of adversaries Israel has faced for decades, and should learn from Israel’s efforts to control and destroy its terrorist enemies. Those supporting Palestinian rights in contrast argue that the sorts of violence generated by Israeli oppression and refusal to uphold international law and human rights gives rise to a politics of desperation that includes savage attacks on Israeli civilian society. They argue that giving a suppressed people the choice between terrorism and surrender is abusive, as well as dangerous.

    On the deepest levels, the high tech dominance achieved by American power, so vividly expressed in the pride associated with “zero casualties” in the 1999 NATO War over Kosovo, is giving to the peoples of the world a similar kind of choice between poverty and subjugation and vindictive violence.

    Is our civil society robust enough to deliver such a message in some effective form? We cannot know, but we must try, especially if we value the benefits of discussion and debate as integral to the health of democracy. Such an imperative seems particularly urgent because of the vacuum at the top. There has been in these terrible days of grieving for what has been lost, no indication of the sort of political, moral, and spiritual imagination that might begin to help us all better cope with this catastrophe. We should not fool ourselves by blaming George W. Bush or Republicans. The Democratic Party and its leaders have shown no willingness or capacity to think any differently about what has occurred and what to do about it. Mainstream TV has apparently seen its role as a war-mobilizing and patrioteering mechanism with neither interest nor capacity to include alternative voices and interpretations. The same tired icons of the establishment have been awakened once more to do the journeyman work of constructing a national consensus in favor of all-out war, a recipe for spreading chaos around the world and bringing discredit to ourselves.

    We are poised on the brink of a global inter-civilizational war without battlefields and borders, a war seemingly declared against the enigmatic and elusive solitary figure of Osama bin Laden stalking remote mountainous Afghanistan while masterminding a holy war against a mighty superpower. To the extent that this portrayal is accurate it underscores the collapse of world order based on the relations among sovereign, territorial states. But it also suggests that the idea of national security in a world of states is obsolete, and that the only viable security is what is being called these days “human security.” Yet, the news has not reached Washington, or for that matter, the other capitals of the world. There is still present the conviction that missile defense shields, space weaponry, and anti-terrorist grand coalitions can keep the barbarians at bay. In fact, this conviction has turned into a frenzy in the aftermath of the 11th, giving us reason to fear the response almost as much as the initial, traumatizing provocations. As the sun sets on a world of states, the sun of its militarism appears ready to burn more brightly than ever!