WHAT IF HIROSHIMA HAD NEVER HAPPENED?

WHAT IF HIROSHIMA HAD NEVER HAPPENED

It is a hot August evening in Tokyo, just after nightfall, in the summer of 1945. Workers scurry home through darkened streets still littered with the charred rubble of the spring fire-bomb raids. The Cabinet sits late, pondering the accumulating evidence of Japan's almost certain defeat; but the diehards, led by War Minister Korechika Anami, want to fight to the last breath. Suddenly, air-raid sirens wail. In the sky, just short of the city, two Superfortresses wheel, and a single huge projectile drops through the dark toward the bay. A mile above the water, it detonates.

A blinding flash turns the night instantly, terrifyingly, into day. A pillar of fire roils up toward the sky. Windows shatter. A mighty wind whips the stunned onlookers peering upward from the streets, government buildings, the Imperial Palace. But there are few injuries, even fewer deaths. The blast, the Japanese people are told by a U.S. radio broadcast the next day, was a fearful new weapon, the atomic bomb. It had been deliberately triggered at a high altitude, offshore, to show them its power but spare them its hideous consequences. If they do not want the next Bomb on one of their cities, they must surrender within a week. Six days later, the Emperor himself breaks a Cabinet deadlock by declaring that Japan must submit.

IT is one of mankind's many tragedies that the scenario is not true. The facts, so grimly and indelibly recorded a quarter-century ago this week, are quite different. Hiroshima, Aug. 6, 1945: a weapon called Little Boy, right on target; at least 68,000 dead. The actual number of dead may never be known; several estimates place it higher than 200,000 (see THE WORLD). Nagasaki, Aug. 9, 1945: a weapon called Fat Man, over a mile off target; at least 35,000 dead. In the face of such insistent horror, the question still haunts the mind: Was Hiroshima--and was Nagasaki--necessary?

Wishful thinking, and a good deal of armchair remorse, has compounded the question. So have the ironies of history. The Bomb was originally conceived as a counter to the threat of Hitler and the further threat that Nazi Germany might build it first. But it was not ready until after Germany had surrendered. Thus only by historical circumstance was the Bomb ever juxtaposed to an even bloodier alternative--the massive invasion of the Japanese mainland.

By the spring of 1945 the Japanese Empire was clearly sagging, blockaded from vital supplies, harassed daily by air, living precariously off a fast-decreasing cache of fuel and food. But the Japanese refused to surrender, and invasion seemed the only possible next step. A million American casualties were anticipated, including a half-million dead. Japanese casualties would certainly be in the millions.

Millions of dead and wounded on one hand. A single Bomb on the other, a Bomb that still had done nothing to justify three years of intensive work and a cost of more than $2 billion. Save one, spend the other. On the face of it, it was a simple choice. After all, even the Los Alamos laboratory chief himself, J. Robert Oppenheimer, had estimated that a reasonably sheltered population would suffer "only" 20,000 dead. Four times that number had died in a single night of fire raids in Tokyo. More B-29 incendiary raids might have caused havoc even greater than Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

At the end of May, six weeks before the critical test at Alamogordo, the Interim Committee, charged with advising the President on the Bomb and atomic energy, met in a two-day session. The committee --chaired by War Secretary Henry Stimson and including Scientists Vannevar Bush, Karl T. Compton and James B. Conant--recommended that the Bomb should be used against Japan as soon as possible. The objective, they also recommended, should be a "dual target," a military or industrial site surrounded by more lightly constructed buildings. The attack should come by surprise. The argument was that the U.S. must exhibit its new power spectacularly and decisively. "This deliberate, premeditated destruction," wrote Henry Stimson with sad conviction after the war, "was our least abhorrent choice. [It] put an end to the Japanese war. It stopped the fire raids, and the strangling blockade; it ended the ghastly specter of a clash of great land armies."

In reality, the choices were hardly so narrow. Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Staff, resolutely opposed invasion since Japan was "already thoroughly defeated." The Interim Committee itself was not fully convinced that the surprise bombing of a major target was the only way to use the Bomb: it asked its scientific panel to consider other alternatives. The panel ultimately endorsed the committee's decision, but others did not. From the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago, the cover name for the atomic research center there, came the outspoken Franck Report, formulated by Physicists James Franck and Leo Szilard and Chemist Eugene Rabinowitch. Dropping the atom bomb on Japan, the report suggested, might unleash a nuclear arms race and a period of international distrust that would far outweigh any temporary advantage the U.S. might gain.

The report was the beginning of a wave of dissent that spread among many scientists in the atomic laboratories and executives in the Government after the Alamogordo test on July 16 demonstrated what the Bomb could do. Some dissenters demanded that the enemy be warned; critics of this course objected that Allied prisoners might be placed in the target area. Still others proposed demonstrations of various kinds--perhaps before an international inspection group, or as Physicist Edward Teller seems to have suggested offhandedly, a highly visible burst right on the Emperor's front porch, in Tokyo Bay.

Convenient Pretext

Might such a demonstration have worked? Historians are divided. It is true that the one-two punch on Hiroshima and Nagasaki propelled the Japanese war party into an untenable position, gave the Emperor a convenient pretext for intervening in the crisis, and made it appear that the U.S. had Bombs to spare (in fact, there were no more immediately available). But the Nagasaki attack seems to have been lamentably premature. Hiroshima was 400 miles from Tokyo, far from the eyes of those who made national war policy. On the day Fat Man exploded, the Supreme Council was just getting the first fully detailed reports of damage at Hiroshima. Teller's pyrotechnical display over nighttime Tokyo, or a purely military raid on a nearby installation, might have made as much impression on the decision makers at little or no cost to civilian life.

It was not the twin bombings alone, moreover, that influenced the mode and speed of the Japanese surrender. Other factors were involved, some of them impossible to measure. The Russian entry into the war on Aug. 9 surely played a role, most importantly in convincing the Japanese that they could no longer expect mediation through Moscow. Failure of imagination on the U.S. side had prolonged the war. Old Japan hands like Joseph Grew had encouraged the U.S. to declare forthrightly that Japan could keep its Emperor, but his advice was heeded only in the final days of the war. Less reliance on the Bomb might well have produced more creative diplomacy, making a mere demonstration of the Bomb more than enough to tip the balance.

If it had, and Japan had forthwith surrendered, how different would have been the shape and mood of the postwar world? The framers of the Franck Report argued that international control of nuclear armaments--such as later suggested in the Baruch Plan before the U.N. in 1946--would have been much easier to achieve, and the argument seems tenable. A humane precedent would have been set, and the U.S. would have established a standard of trustworthiness even among those who had no will to give it trust, just as later, with the Marshall Plan, it would earn a reputation for generosity even among the most cynical. The nation would be free of the guilt that has nagged at its conscience ever since.

Traumatic Terror

Most important, the new atomic generation might have grown up confident that man was the master rather than the victim of nuclear discoveries, seeing the power of the atom more as opportunity than threat--and making that opportunity flower. Quite probably Japan, for instance, freed of its traumatic terror of atomic energy, would have been among the pioneers in peaceful nuclear research. Instead, an entire generation of children, all around the globe, has reached adulthood with a constant sense of lurking terror that has all too often surfaced in nightmares, or more maturely, in peace demonstrations.

Perhaps more than many other wartime decisions, dropping the Bomb was a consciously moral decision, wrought mostly by good men, mostly for good reasons--or at least for such good reasons as can be perceived under the pressures of war. But the evidence argues that it was a mistake, simply a choice of a lesser evil over a greater one, not so much moral wisdom as moral despair. Historian Gabriel Kolko suggests a political deficiency, calling the use of the Bomb and reliance on Russian intervention "a triumph of conservatism and mechanism" in U.S. policy. Whether the failing be moral or political, however, it remains the same--a lack of imagination, an unwillingness to risk a new tactic even in a new situation.

Edward Teller, one of the inventors of the hydrogen bomb and a champion of thermonuclear deterrent, complains that atomic experience has made Americans Bomb-shy, afraid to consider any rational use of nuclear weapons--worse yet, so fatalistic about nuclear warfare that they cannot bring themselves to build an adequate civilian defense system. It is a questionable complaint; U.S. deaths in a massive nuclear exchange, even in a well-sheltered nation, could approach 40 million--an unfathomable catastrophe for any society. But, in another sense--a sense Teller undoubtedly does not intend--the fatalistic terror about nuclear warfare may indeed be a vice. Because the Bomb is so much more inhuman than conventional arms, we are hypnotized by it and tend to overlook the inhumanity of many lesser weapons, such as the napalm and cluster bombs used in Southeast Asia.

Revisionist historians have found the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki sinister in another--and less persuasive--way. They see them not so much as the closing acts of the Pacific war but the opening acts of the cold war--intended primarily to impress Stalin. There was a time, indeed, Louis Halle observes in The Cold War as History, when the U.S. had an atomic monopoly and might theoretically have challenged Soviet expansion by interposing a threat of nuclear bombing. Stalin, of course, might have chosen to respond by dispatching the giant Red Army to overrun a then poorly defended Europe. But Halle suggests a broader pragmatism in American restraint: the U.S. could not and did not attempt any such nuclear blackmail because it might have threatened "the whole fabric of world order."

With or without the heritage of threat and distrust from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a cold war of some kind seems to have been virtually unavoidable, s In fact--and this is one of the few advantages of the Bomb's fatal use--it seems to have helped prevent the cold war from turning hot. Without Hiroshima's brutal demonstration of the Bomb's power, might not one or another of the contestants have been tempted to test it during a military action such as Korea? Perhaps on the U.N. forces streaming toward the Yalu, or the Chinese forces massed at that border river?

If such temptations have been resisted, it may be because Hiroshima and Nagasaki have assumed the proportions of myth--needed and useful myth. This fact does not justify the toll of dead and wounded, nor lay their ghosts in the national conscience. Yet it gives them meaning. Horrifying as the ghosts of those victims are, there is no comparable meaning in the 135,000 ghosts of Dresden, that totally vengeful, ultimately useless crime of conventional warfare. But Dresden was a massive effort, involving 2,750 bombers. The essential terror of the nuclear bomb is that it is so small, so sudden and so simple to deliver--with the touch of a button.

Two Thousand Hiroshimas

Given this myth, we now measure nuclear and thermonuclear weapons in Hiroshimas. "Thirty megatons" means nothing. Two thousand Hiroshimas--its explosive equivalent--does. We multiply mentally: the dead, the maimed, the burned, the merely (and mercifully) vaporized. The ever-growing sophistication of weapons appalls: a Bomb with the explosive force of Little Boy can now be conveniently carried in a bowling bag and left on a park bench. It is now a fortunate commonplace that nuclear war simply cannot be a rational instrument of international policy.

Once, the U.S. tried to make it so. The alternative was an invitation missed--an invitation to moral heroism and political imagination--and an opportunity forever lost. Yet tragic errors can be the beginnings of new maturity. It may be no coincidence that since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Americans seem to have discerned a dimension of tragedy in their lives, have been more willing to admit their faults, more able to examine the darker side of their actions.

Nations are still invited by the Bomb to heroic virtue and creative politics, but now the stakes are higher, not 100,000 lives but perhaps as many as 100 million. Imagination may demand boldness and risk: such adventurous human gambles, perhaps, as graduated gestures of disarmament, to encourage the larger success of strategic arms limitation agreements and other rational attempts toward mutual reduction of terror among nuclear powers. Such options, for a free nation as for a free man, still remain open. Even with Hiroshima and Nagasaki burned forever in the memory, there persists the hope for new opportunities and fresh choices.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.