Warriors, Rebels, and Saints by Moshik Temkin

Author:Moshik Temkin [Temkin, Moshik]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2023-07-11T00:00:00+00:00

There is an assumption behind the American use of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that “the war needed to be won,” that whatever decision American leaders made needed to address this imperative. But here is where leaders needed to be able to step outside their circumstances, question their most basic assumptions, free themselves from the mental chains that the momentum of history put them in. Because if indeed “the war needed to be won” at any price, that meant that leaders were allowed to do basically anything in pursuit of victory. If winning a war is the most important thing, it follows that leaders can kill an endless number of people, perhaps every single person on the other side. It means there are no lines that cannot be crossed.

In this regard, American leaders who were deciding to drop atomic bombs on Japanese cities in the summer of 1945 were in a situation parallel to the one the Japanese leaders had been in four years earlier, when they calmly discussed their crazy plans before their silent emperor and decided to attack Pearl Harbor. The same emperor finally broke his silence in August 1945 and instructed his government to surrender to the United States after he understood what the American atomic bombs could do to his country. In both cases, the momentum of history felt overwhelming. The machine seemed to be making decisions on its own. Leaders (like Truman) seemed almost an afterthought. One difference between the Americans in 1945 and the Japanese in 1941 is that the Japanese decision brought disaster on themselves, whereas the American decision brought about disaster for others.

There is a somewhat more optimistic way of seeing the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki than the one I have described: as a preemptive event, a terrifying spectacle that not only ended the worst war in history faster than it otherwise would have ended, but also shut the door on the possibility of using such weapons again. Seeing and understanding what nuclear weapons could do, as an international community we have worked to keep them under control. This all might be true, but I am skeptical. The machine of death, of which nuclear weapons are a part, was never dismantled. The weapons available to the leaders of nuclear powers today make the Little Boy and Fat Man that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like sticks of dynamite. We know (and we will see) how close the world came to nuclear destruction, on more than one occasion, during the Cold War.

World War II was not the end of an era, as many postwar elites believed, but the dawn of the era in which we are living. We have not truly renounced its heritage or learned its lessons. The machine of death is today bigger and stronger than ever. But it does not simply keep itself going. It is sustained and propped up by people in power who have an interest in doing so, from nationalist politicians to weapons merchants to those who simply profit and prosper from its size and growth.

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