On May 27, Barack Obama became
the first sitting American president to visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial,
the site of the world’s first atomic bombing. Though highly photogenic,
the visit was otherwise one that avoided acknowledging the true history of the
place.
Like his official predecessors
(Secretary of State John Kerry visited the Peace Memorial in early April, as
did two American ambassadors before him), Obama did not address the key issues
surrounding the attack. “He [Obama] will not revisit the decision to use the
atomic bomb,” Benjamin
Rhodes, deputy national
security adviser for strategic communications, stated.
With rare exception, the question
of whether the atomic bombs were necessary to end World War Two is debated only
deep within the safety of academic circles: could a land invasion have been
otherwise avoided? Would more diplomacy have achieved the same ends without
the destruction of two cities? Could an atomic test on a deserted island have
convinced the Japanese? Was the surrender instead driven primarily by the entry
of the Soviets into the Pacific War, which, by historical accident, took place
two days after Hiroshima – and the day before Nagasaki was immolated?
But it is not only the history of the decision itself that is side stepped.
Beyond the acts of destruction lies the myth of the atomic bombings,
the postwar creation of a mass memory of things that did not happen.
The short version of the atomic
myth, the one kneaded into public consciousness, is that the bombs were not
dropped out of revenge or malice, immoral
acts, but of grudging military necessity.
As a result of this, the attacks have not provoked or generated deep introspection
and national reflection.
The use of the term “myth” is
appropriate. Harry Truman, in his 1945 announcement
of the bomb, focused on vengeance, and on the new, extraordinary power the United
States alone possessed. The military necessity argument was largely created
later, in a 1947 article
defending the use of the atomic bomb, written by former Secretary of War Henry
Stimson, though actually drafted by McGeorge Bundy (later an architect of the
Vietnam War) and James Conant (a scientist who helped build the original bomb).
Conant described
the article’s purpose at the beginning of the Cold War as “You have
to get the past straight before you do much to prepare people for the future.”
The Stimson article was a response
to journalist John Hersey’s account of the human suffering in Hiroshima,
first published
in 1946 in the New Yorker
and later as a book. Due to wartime censorship, Americans knew little of the
ground truth of atomic war, and Hersey’s piece was shocking enough to
the public that it required that formal White House response. Americans’
general sense of themselves…