ALL GOVERNMENTS lie, and big Governments tell big lies. One of the biggest was about the dropping of the atom bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Were those bombs dropped (a) to force a Japanese surrender? or (b) to demonstrate to Stalin and the USSR that the Americans had a new wonder weapon?
Of course (a) was the official version, and that was a lie. Japan was suing for peace long before August 1945. Just before writing this I heard a BBC Radio 4 report of a speech President Bush made in Thailand on his way to Beijing for the opening of the Olympic Games. He once again berated the Chinese for their poor human rights record.
The hypocrisy of this is mind-boggling, coming as it does from an administration that ordered the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan on the basis of fabricated evidence, and denies even basic rights to all those incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay.
But the darkest stain on the USA’s record remains the mass civilian slaughter in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, acts described by the author John Pilger as “pre-meditated mass murder”, as was the case in the bombing of Dresden by the British. The official lies continue.
Twenty-five years ago I stood on the spot where the world changed forever in a flash. On an August morning in 1945, time stopped for Hiroshima at 8:16am, the moment at which the first atomic bomb reduced a city to rubble and made all humankind an endangered species.
On 6 August, amid a blinding flash and searing heat, a city was obliterated, and with it 85,000 people. And it all took just seconds. The consequence for the rest of us is that we have had to live with the nuclear threat even since.
At what was the epicentre of the blast there is now a memorial park, with a shrine where I prayed for the victims and ourselves, and a museum where reminders of the horror of nuclear extermination are preserved: a shoe, pieces of scorched clothing, a watch, and poignant photographs. Preserved to this day nearby is what is known as the ‘atomic dome’, a symbol of the destruction of Hiroshima.
Three days later the city of Nagasaki suffered a similar fate. Most of the history books say that the decision by President Harry Truman to drop two A-bombs on Japan brought the war in the Pacific to an end months sooner than would otherwise have been the case, saving thousands of American lives.
Before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, however, the Japanese had been using back channel methods to end the war, their key precondition being that Emperor Hirohito would lose neither his life nor his status. He did, however, renounce his divinity in a New Year radio message in 1946.
Some critics of the USA contend that the bombs were dropped for an altogether different reason, not to end the war, because the Japanese were ready to concede defeat anyway, but to send a clear message to Stalin and the Soviets.
That message from Washington, translated into the ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was simple, watch out, boys, we’ve got the Bomb and if you mess with us in the post-war world, this is what will happen to you.
In July 1947 a scientist called Robert Oppenheimer caused consternation in the USA when he denounced the A-Bomb. Oppenheimer, one of its inventors, told a group of physicists of his fears about nuclear warfare.
The atomic bomb, he said, “mercilessly dramatized the inhumanity and evil of modern war”. How right he was.
