Five Days in August by Michael D. Gordin

Author:Michael D. Gordin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2015-03-10T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

Beginnings

THE TRANSFORMATION OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS from tactical ordnance delivered from Tinian conventionally and repeatedly into their contemporary role as stand-ins for the Horsemen of the Apocalypse turns out to be more than a historical curiosity. Both the process by which this elevation of atomic bombs took place and its final result began to structure multiple features of the Cold War. Unlike many of the guiding precepts of Cold War diplomacy that now lie discarded, “nuclearism”—the attitude toward strategy, tactics, and politics that builds on the notion of nuclear bombs as “absolute weapons”—has outlived its Soviet-American incubation period and retained a dominating force in the contemporary world. The image formed in those days of late August 1945, shaped by William Laurence and proselytized by scientists, journalists, and politicians, is still very much with us. The point is not whether nuclearism has shaped how individuals the world over view these weapons, but how it has done so. In both the United States and Japan, in particular, the sudden end of World War II inscribed nuclear weapons as the symbols of our modern age and as the key to unlocking both past and future. That this was not inevitably built into the hardware of the weapons does not make its power any less real.

In this final chapter, some of the legacies of this way of thinking about atomic warfare will be traced out. In exploring three specific areas—the creation out of nowhere of the discipline of nuclear strategy, the development of thermonuclear weapons and the ensuing arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the abiding failure of segments of the Japanese polity to acknowledge responsibility for atrocities committed in the Second World War—one finds the fingerprints of the concept of nuclear weapons as “special.” Because these bombs, and only these bombs, carry a unique aura of inviolability, they have deeply shaped considerations of the morality of nuclear warfare as well; each of the three areas just mentioned, in fact, is upon inspection to some degree concerned with the moral valences of atomic warfare. Given the preceding account of how atomic weapons came to acquire their aura, certain dilemmas and paradoxes of the nuclear age can be seen in a fresh light. It is the manifest goal of this chapter, and this book, to so illuminate them.

The first instance of this lasting legacy can be seen at the very core of the arms race that characterized the half-century of the Cold War. The discourse and doctrines of nuclear strategy remain some of the most distinctive aspects of the imagined nuclear universe. As embodied in figures like Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, the doctrines of how to calculate and plan for a global nuclear war were both easy to parody and in deadly earnest about the implications of living on a planet occupied by two atomic antagonists. Of course, it stands to reason that if both the United States and the Soviet Union possessed thousands of nuclear missiles that could reach

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