Sleepwalking With the Bomb (27 page)

41.
Ultimately Johnson decided not to run again, but in any case, his warm support for Israel went beyond politics to religious identity. LBJ was a Christadelphian; the sect believes that the Kingdom of God will be seated on Earth in Jerusalem. LBJ also forged a warm bond with fellow farmer Levi Eshkol, Israel’s Prime Minister.

42.
Indeed, in September 1970 Jordan’s King Hussein (whose son Abdullah now rules the kingdom) decided to end Palestinian unrest inside Jordan by driving the Palestinian Liberation Organization military units out of the West Bank and into Lebanon. Jordan’s British-trained army slaughtered thousands of PLO fighters and West Bank civilians. One of the terrorist groups took the name “Black September” after the debacle. The world stood mute. Israel warned off Syria and Iraq.

43.
Note that in the decades before Suez, Britain and France had combined to give the Mideast the grim gift of the Grand Mufti. In 1922, early in its 30-year Palestine Mandate, Britain revived the office of Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. The apointee, Amin el-Husseini proved a vile anti-Semitic demagogue who conspired with Hitler to kill Jews. The French held him as a war criminal at war’s end, but in 1946 let him escape to Egypt, and he fomented hatred of Jews and preached radical politics until his death, at age 80, in 1974.

I thought the mushroom cloud had followed me from Hiroshima.

T
SUTOMU
Y
AMAGUCHI, SOLE OFFICIAL SURVIVOR OF BOTH
H
IROSHIMA AND
N
AGASAKI

I
t
IS ESTIMATED THAT 165 PEOPLE SURVIVED BOTH BOMBS DROPPED
on Japan, but Tsutomu Yamaguchi was the only one officially recognized by the Japanese government to have done so. The 2010
New York Times
obituary of the 93-year-old survivor reported that Yamaguchi had been in Hiroshima on a business trip, and then returned home to Nagasaki the next day. Though his eardrums were ruptured and upper torso burned by Hiroshima’s “Little Boy” explosion, he went to the office. He was telling his boss about Little Boy two days later when “Fat Man” lit up the room—and all of Nagasaki—with blinding white light.

The unspeakable human misery and horrific carnage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and fears of generations of genetic mutants, gave birth to a vigorous popular disarmament movement. Stalin’s refusal to play along, even while he had no nuclear bomb himself, in no way deterred disarmament dreams. Focusing first on superpower arsenals, disarmament advocates pressed for a “nuclear-free” world. This chapter looks closely at popular movements to disarm and offers the Ninth Lesson of nuclear-age history: P
OPULAR PRESSURE FOR UNILATERAL DISARMAMENT CAN PREVAIL UNLESS
W
ESTERN GOVERNMENTS EXPLAIN ITS HIDDEN, GRAVE DANGERS.

T
HE BOMBS
dropped on Japan in August 1945 finally ended a world conflagration that had already claimed 50 million lives. It is not hard to understand, however, why they were the beginning of massive public revulsion against nuclear weapons.

The raids were conducted by the Boeing B-29 Superfortress, the world’s finest strategic bomber, whose $3 billion development cost exceeded the cost of the Manhattan Project. In the predawn darkness of August 6, a B-29 nicknamed Enola Gay (after the pilot’s mother) barely cleared the end of the runway on the tiny Pacific island of Tinian, its ungainly five-ton payload still unarmed in case of a crash. From the runway plateau it dipped towards the sea and then climbed to cruising altitude.

Upon reaching Hiroshima, Enola Gay released the A-bomb at 31,600 feet. It took 45.5 seconds for the bomb to fall to the detonation altitude of 1,900 feet, selected to be high enough so that the fireball would not touch the ground and the radius of total destruction would be maximal: 3,000 feet. The uranium-fueled bomb detonated at 8:15 a.m., right on target in the center of the city, killing some one-third of the city’s 365,000 inhabitants, many within minutes. Only 1.4 percent of the bomb’s 140 pounds of uranium fissioned before the assembly blew apart and its mass became instantaneously subcritical, ending further chain reaction. The estimated yield for Little Boy was 14 kilotons, equivalent to 14,000 tons of TNT. This was 2,300 times the explosive power of the six-ton “Tallboy” bombs the British used to sink the super-battleship
Tirpitz
. Enola Gay’s crew could still see the mushroom cloud from 360 miles away, looking back while returning to base.
⁴⁴

Three days later another B-29,
Bock’s Car,
took off from Tinian. It dropped the plutonium-fueled 10,800-pound Fat Man on Nagasaki, struck because primary target Kokura was closed in by cloud cover. The bomb detonated 1,800 feet above ground. It was more powerful due to the greater efficiency of plutonium fission: 17 percent of its 13.6 pounds of plutonium fissioned, giving it 12 times the efficiency of Little Boy. It yielded some 21 kilotons. Nearly half—5,300 pounds—of its weight was conventional high explosive encircling the plutonium; it would compress the dense plutonium into the size of a tennis ball—about the size of the orange-sized bomb Winston Churchill envisioned in 1924 someday destroying a city.
⁴⁵

While many scientists who worked on the bomb expressed regret later, President Truman never looked back. Once, Oppenheimer met with President Truman and told him: “I feel I have blood on my hands.” To which Truman was later heard to mutter: “Blood on his hands! Dammit, he hasn’t half as much blood on his hands as I have. You just don’t go around bellyaching about it.”

Already in 1944, the U.S. had begun the landmark Strategic Bombing Survey to assess the effects of long-range bombing on Germany. The survey found that bombing Germany would in many respects be ineffective. Targets like ball-bearing plants proved easy for the Germans to rebuild. The Allies had ignored hard-to-replace transportation and electric grid networks until late in the war. Their early destruction would have accelerated the war’s end.

When it went to Japan, the survey’s findings were far different. The intense bombing campaign inaugurated by General Curtis LeMay began with the Tokyo raid of March 9–10, 1945. It killed over 100,000 people and erased one-quarter of the city. Fire bombings claimed far more total lives than the two atomic bombs. In all, 600,000 Japanese were killed in the B-29 raids during the last five months of the war. The survey noted that with enough incendiary bombs LeMay’s B-29 air armada could have destroyed every city in Japan with a population of more than 30,000 people.

The survey reached three important conclusions as to atomic weapons. First, the firebombing aerial campaign alone—without atomic bombs—would have forced Japan’s leaders to accept unconditional surrender. (This conclusion was disputed by many commanders and by President Truman—diehards in the militarist Japanese cabinet wanted to fight on, even after the A-bomb dropped. Only the intervention of Emperor Hirohito, then still regarded as divine, tilted the balance towards surrender.) Second, the atomic bomb multiplied a bomber’s destructive power by 50 to 250 times, depending upon the nature and size of the target. Third, while the basic principles of war (unstated in the report), and units such as ships and infantry, would remain in use, atomic weapons would force radical alteration in tactics.

Strategically, on the other hand, the surveyors thought the impact of the atomic bomb would be modest. Only the advent of a practical, deliverable hydrogen bomb, with its thousand-fold increase over the atom bomb’s destructive power, convinced planners and commanders that the strategic world had fundamentally changed too.

President Truman decided to drop the bomb to bring the quickest possible end to what had been nearly four years of sanguinary conflict in the Pacific. He had been advised that troops invading the Japanese Home Islands would suffer roughly the 35 percent casualty rate that had proven the case during the spring 1945 Okinawa campaign. With 750,000 troops slated to land on the largest island, Kyushu, that likely meant more than a quarter-million Allied toll for taking a single one of Japan’s four Home Islands. Indeed, fear of mass troop carnage led FDR’s chief of staff, General George C. Marshall, to inquire of Manhattan Project chief General Leslie Groves if atom bombs could be used as tactical weapons to drop on Japanese defenders in event of a Kyushu landing.

To forestall such a landing Truman warned after Hiroshima: “If [Japanese leaders] do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the likes of which has never been seen on this Earth.” Truman was relieved when the Japanese surrendered, because of Allied lives thus saved, and because he had planned to drop the third atom bomb on Tokyo (already ravaged by the March 1945 fire raid). Yet Truman said in his 1953 farewell address that “starting an atomic war is totally unthinkable for rational men.”

C
ALLS FOR
world disarmament began almost immediately after General Douglas MacArthur accepted Japan’s surrender on the deck of the battleship
Missouri
on September 2, 1945. But as noted in
chapter 4
, the movement for world disarmament dates back to the late nineteenth century. Utopian views became commonplace among disarmers in the run-up to World War I.

In his 1914 novel
The World Set Free
, H. G. Wells foresaw a war with “atomic bombs” releasing the energy of the sun, followed by total disarmament and world peace. Wells offered a vision of World War I biplanes carrying small bombs that an aviator could push out. Derived from a fictional element called “carolinum,” the devices did not simply explode, but burned for a month, releasing toxic elements and fire. Targets hit during the imaginary conflict included London, Berlin, Paris, and the dikes that protect Holland from the sea, causing that country to be submerged. Following a series of intrigues, the heroes stop the secret plot of a small cabal of evil leaders and, as a result, world peace blossoms and wars end.

The real world challenge was, however, to prove far more complex and less amenable to utopian solutions. On June 11, 1945, a group of scientists led by physicist Leo Szilard called for demonstrating the bomb’s power but urged it not be used against Japan:

If the United States would be the first to release this new means of indiscriminate destruction upon mankind, she would sacrifice public support throughout the world, precipitate the race of armaments, and prejudice the possibility of reaching an international agreement on the future control of such weapons.

But such predictions proved mainly wrong. As noted earlier Andrei Sakharov, the father of the Soviet H-bomb, made clear in his memoirs that Joseph Stalin would have gone ahead with his nuclear program—having already gotten the secrets well before the July Trinity test—even if America did not. In 1946 America did offer to give up its small nuclear arsenal to international control by the United Nations. But Stalin rejected the proposal in 1948—even
before
the first Soviet atomic bomb was tested. On the fair evidence of it, nothing like the future envisioned by Szilard and his fellow signatories came to pass.

Public support for America was strong in many allied countries. The captive peoples enslaved by the Soviet Union regarded America as the “last, best hope on earth,” in Abraham Lincoln’s famous words. Thus Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky, released in 1986, reported that he and fellow prisoners had been thrilled to hear President Reagan use phrases like “locus of evil” and “evil empire” in describing the USSR, because they told them America would not give up. The people of Eastern Europe were then and remain today among America’s finest friends on the planet.

But the public, as well as prominent public figures, were galvanized by the bombings. In 1949 Indian Prime Minster Jawaharlal Nehru said his countrymen “exulted” at not having the bomb, which he called “the symbol of incarnate evil.” (Despite this, Nehru enrolled India in the Atoms for Peace program, putting in his country’s hand the material to make nuclear bombs, as his successors were to do.)

Nehru’s phrase—as opposed to Reagan’s—calls to mind an enduring difference between disarmament advocates and skeptics: Advocates ascribe evil to inanimate, weaponized objects, drawing no moral distinction between civilized and uncivilized leaders possessing such weapons. Skeptics ascribe evil to human actors and argue that it makes a huge difference which country has the bomb. The latter view is more credible. During the Cold War, most Americans were worried about Russia’s arsenal, while few were worried about Britain’s. Today many more Americans fear an Iranian bomb, while few fear a nuclear Israel. The Arab states agree, as WikiLeaks cables showed.

The “Ban the Bomb!” movement gathered real steam when in 1954 the U.S. conducted its Castle Bravo H-bomb test, whose 15 megatons released three times the total energy released by all bombs dropped during World War II. In fact, the test was designed to yield five megatons, but a subtle error in calculation caused the vast underestimate. It was discovered before the test, but the message did not reach the test site in time. The permanent atmospheric test ban finally enacted in 1963 was the culmination of public alarm in the wake of Castle Bravo. The vast majority of citizens opposing the bomb were patriotic people who feared the destruction atomic war would bring. It was a perfectly reasonable fear, and one shared by those who supported the bomb programs as necessary. (Not everyone protested. In the late 1950s Las Vegas hotels ran bus tours to viewing vantage points for atomic tests. Viewers could sip “atomic cocktails” but were warned to protect their eyes, lest their macabre fascination prove injurious.)