From August 95 Technology Review

Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Politics of Memory
by John W. Dower

The notion that dropping the atomic bombs was simply a brutal necessity for swiftly ending the war continues to dominate the American psyche--despite facts and perspectives to the contrary.

John W. Dower is a professor of history and the Henry Luce Professor of International Cooperation at MIT. He is author of War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (Pantheon, 1986) and, most recently, Japan in War and Peace: Selected Essays (The New Press, 1994).

Fiftieth anniversaries of historical events--particularly wars--breed controversy. The emotion-laden memories of survivors from the events of a half-century ago collide with the skepticism and detachment of younger generations. Historians with access to previously inaccessible (or ignored) material offer new perspectives. Politicians milk the still palpable human connection between past and present for every possible drop of ideological elixir.

The fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II in Asia has become especially contentious. Why is this so, when presumably we are commemorating victory over an enemy generally regarded as aggressive, atrocious, and fanatical? The answer, of course, is that defeating Japan ultimately entailed incinerating and irradiating tens of thousands of men, women, and children with a weapon more terrible than any previously known or imagined.

Unfortunately, Americans have been denied a rare opportunity to use the fiftieth anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to reflect more deeply about these world-changing developments. This opportunity was lost early this year when the Smithsonian Institution, bowing to political pressure, agreed to drastically scale back a proposed exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington depicting the development of the atomic bombs and their use against Japan.

As initially envisioned by the Smithsonian's curators, the exhibition would have taken viewers through a succession of rooms that introduced, in turn, the ferocity of the last year of the war in Asia, the development of the bomb, the unfolding imperatives behind the U.S. decision to use the weapon against Japan, preparation for the Enola Gay mission that dropped the first bomb on Hiroshima (with the fuselage of the Enola Gay itself being the centerpiece of the exhibition), the human consequences of the bombs in the two target cities, and the nuclear legacy to the postwar world. Occasional placards were to have summarized controversies that have emerged in scholarship and public discourse on these matters over the past decades.

This ambitious proposed exhibit proved to be politically unacceptable. The Senate unanimously denounced the original draft script as being "revisionist and offensive to many World War II veterans." It was grossly misleading and morally obtuse, the critics declared, to focus the exhibit so intensely on questions about the bombs, and on the Japanese suffering in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, without comparable portrayal of Japanese atrocities that extended from Nanking to Pearl Harbor to Bataan to Manila. The chief historian of the Air Force (who had privately praised the original draft) asked publicly how the Smithsonian had managed to make a hash of such a "morally unambiguous" subject as the use of the bombs.

Confronted by such criticism, the Smithsonian--like Japan 50 years earlier--surrendered unconditionally. Visitors to the Air and Space Museum will encounter a small exhibition featuring the fuselage of the Enola Gay and a brief tape and text explaining that this was the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb, following which, nine days later, Japan surrendered. The artifact, it is now argued, speaks for itself.

Artifacts do not speak for themselves, and the decision to scrap original plans for an ambitious and nuanced exhibition represents the triumph of patriotic orthodoxy over serious historical reflection and reconstruction. No one denies that the Smithsonian's original script had problems and needed revisions (the curators themselves readily circulated their first draft for critical comments). The benign and minimalist exhibit we have ended up with, however, is a travesty--an appallingly simplistic and nationalistic way of representing one of the most momentous and destructive developments of the twentieth century. Instead of using the fiftieth anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to reflect on the confluence of triumph and tragedy that occurred in August 1945, we have turned this into another occasion to perpetuate a heroic national myth.

Questioning the "Heroic Narrative"

The orthodox account argues that the war in Asia was a brutal struggle against a fanatical, expansionist foe (which is true, albeit cavalier about European and American colonial control in Asia up to 1941). This righteous war against Japanese aggression was ended, the heroic narrative continues, by the dropping of the atomic bombs, which saved enormous numbers of American lives that otherwise would have been sacrificed in the invasion of Japan that was deemed necessary to force a surrender. As the Senate's condemnation of the Smithsonian's plans put it, the atomic bombs brought the war to a "merciful" end.

President Truman and his advisers clearly did consider the bombs as a way of hastening the war's end and saving American lives. Few historians, however, now regard this as the only motivation behind the decision. Facts that complicate the orthodox narrative, for example, include the Soviet entry into the war against Japan on August 8, 1945, two days after Hiroshima. Most Japanese accounts then and since weigh the Soviet declaration of war as being at least as shocking as the Hiroshima bombing to the Japanese leadership. The United States had long solicited Soviet entry into the war against Japan, and knew it was imminent. Why the haste to drop the bomb before the effect of the Soviet declaration of war could be measured?

The heroic narrative similarly fails to question the need for the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, which occurred before Japan's high command had a chance to assess Hiroshima and the Soviet entry. Indeed, even many Japanese who now accept that Hiroshima may have been necessary to crack the no-surrender policy of Japanese militarists maintain that Nagasaki was plainly and simply a war crime.

Also generally neglected in the heroic narrative is that the United States was not on the brink of invading Japan in August of 1945. The preliminary assault, aimed at the southern island of Kyushu, was slated for no earlier than November 1, and the invasion of Tokyo and the Kanto area on the main island of Honshu would not have commenced until March 1946. There was time to consider options. Other information suggests that an invasion may not have been necessary at all. A famous report by the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, published in 1946, concluded that Japan was so materially and psychologically weakened by August 1945 that it would have been forced to surrender by year's end, and probably by November 1--without the atomic bombs, without the Soviet entry, and without an invasion.

Alternatives to using the atomic bombs on civilian targets also became known after Japan's surrender. Navy planners, for example, believed that intensified economic strangulation would bring Japan to its knees; the country's merchant marine had been sunk by 1945. Within the Manhattan Project, the possibility of dropping the bomb on a "demonstration" target, with Japanese observers present, had been broached but rejected--partly for fear that the demonstration bomb might be a dud and would lead the Japanese to fight even more ferociously. Conservative officials such as Undersecretary of State Joseph Grew, the former ambassador to Japan, argued that the Japanese could be persuaded to surrender if the United States abandoned its policy of demanding unconditional surrender and guaranteed that the emperor would be allowed to keep his throne. Through their code-breaking operations, the Americans also were aware that, beginning in mid-June, the Japanese had made vague overtures to the Soviet Union concerning negotiating an end to the war.

A Complex Question of "Why?"

While it was fear of a Nazi bomb that originally propelled the Manhattan Project, it now is known that U.S. planners had identified Japan as the prime target for the atomic bomb as early as 1943--a year or more before it became clear that Germany was not attempting to build such a weapon. One reason for this shift of target was the fear that if the bomb didn't work, sophisticated German scientists and engineers might be able to disassemble it and figure out how to build their own. (No one worried that the Japanese had this capability.)

The development and deployment of the bombs also became driven by almost irresistible technological and scientific imperatives. J. Robert Oppenheimer spoke for many of his brilliant colleagues on the Manhattan Project when he later acknowledged how "technically sweet" the enterprise had been. Oppenheimer also confided that after Germany's surrender on May 8, 1945, he and his fellow scientists intensified their efforts out of concern that the war might end before they could finish. Secretary of War Henry Stimson, the elder statesman who took deep pride in his moralism, observed at one point that it was essential to try the new weapon out on a real target. The original justification for moving to a new order of destructive weaponry had evaporated, and the weaponry itself had begun to create its own rationale.

Sheer visceral hatred abetted the targeting of Japan for nuclear destruction. Although many critics of the Smithsonian's original plans took umbrage at a statement calling attention to the element of vengeance in the American war against Japan, few historians (or honest participants) would discount that this was a factor. Japan had, after all, attacked the United States. "Remember Pearl Harbor--Keep 'em Dying" was a popular military slogan from the outset of the war, and among commentators and war correspondents at the time it was a commonplace that the racially and culturally alien Japanese were vastly more despised than their German allies.

U.S. leaders also had postwar politics on their minds--both global and domestic. Documents declassified since the 1960s make unmistakably clear that from the spring of 1945, top-level policymakers hoped that the bomb would dissuade Stalin from pursuing Soviet expansion into Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Some individuals closely involved with the development of the bomb (such as Arthur Compton, Edward Teller, and James Conant) further argued that the new weapon's very horrendousness compelled its use against a real city, so that the postwar world would understand the need to cooperate on arms control. At the same time, shrewd readers of the domestic political winds in the United States warned that if the Manhattan Project ended with nothing dramatic to show for its efforts, the postwar Congress surely would launch a hostile investigation into the huge disbursal of secret funds.

The Calculus of Casualties

The Japanese now estimate that within months of the attacks, around 140,000 people probably died in Hiroshima and 70,000 in Nagasaki. That is about double the figures typically reported in Western accounts, which are based on U.S. calculations made shortly after the bombs were dropped.

Such figures fail to take into account the peculiar long-term legacies of nuclear devastation. Because of the uncertain genetic effects of radiation poisoning, for example, hibakusha, as the atomic bomb survivors are known, became undesirable marriage prospects. And although no genetic harm to succeeding generations has been identified, irradiated survivors and their progeny have lived with gnawing fear that the curse of the bombs may be transgenerational. In the Japanese idiom, many survivors suffer "keloids of the heart" and "leukemia of the spirit."

More concretely, Japanese continue to die of atomic-bomb related diseases. Survivors suffer higher-than-normal rates of leukemia and cancers of the thyroid, breast, lung, stomach, and salivary glands. The Japanese government now estimates total nuclear fatalities in the two cities--including belated deaths that can be traced to the bombs--at between 300,000 and 350,000. (Total U.S. combat deaths in the Pacific War numbered slightly less than 100,000.) Moreover, infants exposed to radiation in utero before the eighteenth week who were born mentally retarded now are 50-year-old retarded adults, many with elderly parents who agonize over what will become of these microcephalic "pika babies" after the parents die.

Another fact commonly neglected in the orthodox American treatment of the bomb is that thousands of the victims were not Japanese. According to Japanese estimates, between 6,500 and 10,000 Koreans were killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Koreans themselves put the number even higher. (Most of these Koreans were colonial subjects of Japan who had been conscripted for heavy labor.) The bomb also killed more than 1,000 second-generation Japanese-Americans who had been temporarily living in Hiroshima when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941 and whom the war had prevented from returning to the United States. Several hundred Chinese likely died in the nuclear blasts as well, along with small numbers of Southeast Asian students, British and Dutch POWs, and European priests. About two dozen Caucasian-American POWs survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, only to be beaten to death by Japanese hibakusha.

The Japanese Perspective

In Japan, as might be expected, popular memory of the atomic bombs tends to begin where the conventional American narrative leaves off--with what took place beneath the mushroom clouds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Japanese dwell on the extraordinary human misery the bombs caused, providing intimate stories about the shattering of individual lives. Oe Kenzaburo, the 1994 Nobel laureate in literature, called attention to this in a series of influential essays written in the early 1960s. In Oe's rendering, the hibakusha were "moralists," for they had experienced "the cruelest days in human history" and never lost "the vision of a nation that will do its best to materialize a world without any nuclear weapons."

This perception of the significance of Hiroshima and Nagasaki--starkly different from that conveyed in the triumphal American narrative--clearly has the potential to become myopic and nationalistic. Japan risks turning the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki into a "victimization" narrative, in which the bombs fell from the heavens without context--as if war began on August 6, 1945, and ended on August 9, and innocent Japan bore the cross of witnessing the horror of the new nuclear age. But Oe's account, like most other popular Japanese discourse on these matters, is more subtle than this. Since the early 1970s, the Japanese media have devoted much attention to the thesis that "victims" can simultaneously be the victimizers of others--as the hibakusha in Hiroshima demonstrated when they beat to death American POWs.

It is virtually a cliche in the U.S. media that the Japanese suffer from historical amnesia and are incapable of honestly confronting their World War II past. There is much truth to this. For many years, Japanese textbooks presented a sanitized version of the conflict. Schoolchildren were taught that Japan "advanced" into China, rather than "invaded" its neighbor. Doubt was cast on the reality of the Rape of Nanking. Japan's colonial repression of other Asians was barely mentioned. To the present day, conservative politicians have refused to support a clear and unequivocal official statement acknowledging Japan's acts of aggression and atrocity and forthrightly apologizing for them.

At the same time, however, domestic debate on these matters has been far more intense than the foreign media usually acknowledges. In recent years--especially since the death of Emperor Hirohito in 1989--the textbooks have become more forthright, while the Japanese national media have carried detailed commentary on virtually all aspects of Japan's war behavior. In this context, certainly in light of the fiasco at the Smithsonian, it is anomalous for Americans to be accusing others of sanitizing the past and suffering from historical amnesia.

In the end, one of the great legacies of World War II was the redefinition of the legitimate targets of war to include noncombatant women, children, and men. Japan itself was one of the first countries to act out this new view of war; its bombing of Chinese cities in 1937 was passionately condemned by the League of Nations and the United States as behavior beyond the pale of civilized people. Picasso's great mural of the bombing of Guernica in the same year by the fascists during the Spanish civil war evoked the shock that similar barbarity aroused.

By the end of World War II, however, even the democratic nations had accepted the targeting of civilian populations as proper and inevitable. Earlier in 1945, British and U.S. air forces obliterated much of Dresden after previously fire-bombing other German cities. In Japan, U.S. saturation bombing devastated Tokyo and 63 other cities, killing around 100,000 civilians in Tokyo alone. The atomic bombs were simply a more efficient way of terrorizing enemies and destroying a newly legitimized target of war: civilian morale.

In the fires of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, triumph and tragedy became inseparable. At the same time, America's victory became fused with a future of inescapable insecurity. The bombs marked both an end and a beginning. They marked the end of an appalling global conflagration that killed more than 55 million people and the beginning of the nuclear arms race--and a world in which security was forever a step away.

Let's Not Talk About the Bad Things
by Paul Rogat Loeb

Clinging to a rosy view of nuclear history denies Americans an opportunity for healthy reflection.

Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of Nuclear Culture: Living and Working in the World's Largest Atomic Complex (New Society Publishers, 1986), Hope in Hard Times (Lexington Books, 1986) and, most recently, Generation at the Crossroads: Apathy and Action on the American Campus (Rutgers University Press, 1994).

Fifty years after the plutonium factory at Hanford, Wash., produced the raw material for Alamogordo and Nagasaki, the local high school team, the Richland Bombers, still wears mushroom clouds on its football helmets. When I asked about the ubiquitous image that at one point even decorated graduation programs, the principal called it a symbol of peace. The student president explained, "It's just a cool aggressive symbol. We win lots of games with it. Did you know we went to State last year?" Most defenders treat the logo as having no more consequence than if the community had built its economic base on Colgate and its high school teams had decorated their helmets and jerseys with miniature toothpaste tubes.

Some students did try to change the high school emblem in the sixties, at the height of Vietnam-era protests. Peers called them names. Teachers questioned their patriotism. Anonymous callers left threats. In 1988 a handful of teachers and students tried again to change the logo. Again, the Hanford community closed ranks and said the mushroom cloud was a symbol of pride, and that to change it would betray local tradition. Some 90 percent of students and 75 percent of the staff voted to retain it. When a visiting group of bomb survivors from Japan asked them to reconsider, the principal responded, "We did not start that war," and abruptly walked out of the room.

I thought of the Richland Bombers during the recent debate over the Smithsonian's representation of Hiroshima. From the vantage point of the American Legion and other critics, it was unpatriotic, "one-sided," and "politically correct" even to include the voices of men like Dwight D. Eisenhower or Admiral William Leahy, Roosevelt's chief of staff during World War II, who doubted the necessity of dropping the bomb. Never mind that such dissent reflected gloriously on the Legion's constituency (for if the Pacific War was essentially won by August 1945, it was thanks to the soldiers, sailors, and fliers who had carried the day in battles like Midway, Iwo Jima, and Guadalcanal). To the critics, it was a betrayal of sacrifice even to question.

Why couldn't the Hanford teams change their logo? Why can't ordinary Americans be trusted to hear the contending voices on whether the bomb should or should not have been dropped? Why is questioning our past so difficult?

I spent three years in and out of Hanford's surrounding communities, writing about what it meant to live and work in a complex that has produced the plutonium for over half the atomic weapons in America's arsenals. I found that Hanford residents systematically buried questions about the purpose and consequence of the enterprise. Workers went to their jobs day after day, explaining in retrospect, "I could have been making lightbulbs. I could just as easily have been working in a coal plant." In the words of one veteran engineer, "The government presented us with what they needed, and we went out and built it."

When workers did have qualms, they deferred to those they called "The Men Who Know Best," the people in Congress and the Pentagon who gave the directives to make the weapons they fueled. One night, at a bridge club, I asked the women what their husbands did and did not tell them about workplace accidents. One participant exclaimed, "Let's not talk about the bad things," then changed the subject to presidents who had visited the site and a local graduate who played for the Pittsburgh Steelers. The shift in topic was near-automatic, like a switch shunting a train onto a different track.

Look Back in Blinders

Part of the difficulty with raising such prickly historical questions as the necessity or legacy of the bomb is simple inertia. We don't talk about these matters in our daily lives. We aren't used to questioning. It's easier simply to ignore them.

Yet America also has a strain of triumphalism, which insists that all this nation has done is right, good, and just. It's hard to acknowledge that the dedicated efforts of Hanford's workers have produced not a cause for jubilation but for concern: about the stack releases of hundreds of thousands of curies of radioactive materials--as in the deliberate 1949 test called the Green Run--that have left a plague of cancer, thyroid illness, and other health problems in downwind communities; about the waste tanks, ostensibly temporary, from which hundreds of thousands of gallons of radioactive materials have leached into the ground, in some cases reaching the water table; about the ultimate brinksmanship of weapons systems that retain the capacity to annihilate the human species.

After Secretary of Energy Hazel O'Leary announced the declassification of long-secret energy documents in December 1993, America seemed ready to begin facing this legacy. But the brouhaha at the Smithsonian signals a different path, one that clings to the myths of this nation's immaculate perfection.

These myths nestle closely with those that buttress a national security state whose proponents call for continued military expansion even though America's post-Cold War Department of Defense allotment totals $265 billion, or more than the combined military budgets of the next half-dozen biggest-spending countries in the world. If citizens can be convinced that everything this enterprise has done is right and necessary, they will not question its current path. If they are allowed a glimpse of the awful assumption behind the development of nuclear weaponry--that ordinary human lives are expendable--citizens are far more likely to be restive.

The history of the bomb is particularly loaded because it brought the potential for global annihilation. A few voices from the thick of the arms race, like H-bomb developer Edward Teller, have argued that there was no need to drop the original weapon on a civilian population. Yet most conservative commentators have treated the necessity of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a theological first principle, an action that cannot be questioned lest the entire edifice that followed collapse in its wake. They have framed the decision to create and use the Bomb as part of a continuing American narrative of destiny and virtue, beginning with the first white settlement of the continent and continuing to a present era where history has ended and the corporate market system is becoming the universal human future.

Proponents of such grand narratives rationalize them through specific pulls of loyalty, notably to brave men and women in uniform. But if critics suggest Hiroshima was needless, do they really betray the GIs who fought and lost their lives in the Pacific War, and were ready to fight and die in the invasion of Japan? We saw the emotional impact of such calls for solidarity in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, which, when it wasn't a Fourth of July spectacle portrayed literally from the point of view of the bombs, was presented almost as if it were being fought for the safety of the very American soldiers who were over there at risk.

Sacrifice is redeemed neither by blind faith nor by a retrospective chorus of unanimity, but by preserving the freedom for which the sacrifice was made. Freedom in this case includes the ability to look, without blinders, at our past national choices so that we can better shape our future ones. If Hiroshima and Nagasaki signaled not just the ending of one war but the first shots fired in a new one, if America's military has since participated in repeated undertakings of dubious morality and wisdom, and if needless military spending continues to starve both economic infrastructure and urgent human needs, then we ought to examine the critical junctures where we first headed down the paths we continue to follow.

The dropping of the bomb is one of those key actions whose consequences continue to rebound. Its legacy is no more explained by the mute fuselage of the Enola Gay--about all that remains of the original Smithsonian exhibit--than by mushroom clouds on high school football helmets. Whatever we believe about the necessity of the decision to use the bomb, Americans at least deserve the opportunity to hear the contending voices and arguments. We deserve at least the chance to reflect upon it.

Keep the Bomb
by Alex Roland

The hundreds of thousands of lives lost at Hiroshima and Nagasaki must be weighed against the hundreds of millions of lives saved by the existence of nuclear weapons.

Alex Roland, a professor of history at Duke University, teaches military history and the history of technology.

A Marine Corps major in the late 1970s decorated the door of his office at the Pentagon with a poster trumpeting "Ban the Bomb!" Barely visible at the bottom margin was the riposte: "Make the World Safe for Conventional War."

The poster was intended to be funny. Its premise, however, is not. With the world's major military powers paralyzed in a nuclear balance of terror, conventional war between them--the large-scale, mechanized, resource-intensive campaigning made familiar by the two world wars--has become unthinkable, lest it escalate into nuclear war. The result has been a far more peaceful world over the last 50 years than the one that surely would have existed without nuclear weapons. They have done more good than harm in the world.

Those of us who lived through the Cold War are not accustomed to thinking of nuclear weapons in these terms. Especially in the 1950s, when the insanity of the Cold War was at its peak, just the opposite seemed likely. Atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons poisoned the air. Krushchev threatened to bury us. In response, we prepared to bury ourselves in bomb shelters. The besetting question about nuclear war was not if, but when.

And the danger was real. At the climax of the Cold War, during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the superpowers came closer than ever before or since to unleashing their nuclear arsenals.

To those who formed their opinions about nuclear weapons during this early and dangerous era, nuclear weapons seemed likely to kill more people than any other technology in human history. Happily, such a cataclysm has never occurred. Instead, consider how many deaths have been prevented by nuclear weapons. An ever-growing body of evidence suggests that the number of people whose lives have been saved by nuclear weapons reaches into the hundreds of millions.

Through most of human history, death in war has been constant, horrible, and scant. Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin estimated that war casualties in the Roman empire ranged from .07 percent to .36 percent of the empire's population. By comparison, the Soviet Union lost an estimated 14 percent of its population in World War II.

The reason that ancient warfare did not wipe out more people was not human kindness but limited technology. Killing was simply a labor-intensive enterprise. Virtually all deaths in combat came from sword stroke, spear thrust, or the discharge of some muscle-powered missile. Fights to the death were the exception rather than the rule. Armies losing ground in an engagement would more often flee than fight; victors seldom had the energy or the will to hunt them down. Even in naval warfare, where the sinking of a ship held out promise of mass casualties, most battles were decided by boarding, hand- to-hand combat, and the capture of prisoners. Humans were surely bloody in tooth and claw, but their reach was limited.

Two revolutions broke through this ceiling. The invention of gunpowder in the late Middle Ages allowed soldiers and sailors to kill their enemies at greater distance and in greater numbers. In her book World Military and Social Expenditures, Ruth Sivard, former chief of the economics division of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, has compared global war casualties over the past five centuries. Her research shows that with the aid of gunpowder, worldwide deaths in warfare quadrupled from an estimated 1.5 million during the sixteenth century to 6.2 million during the seventeenth.

Worse still, the Industrial Revolution mechanized warfare, further expanding its reach. Vast quantities of weapons could now be produced to supply armies of unprecedented size. Inventions such as the steamboat, railroad, and telegraph allowed those armies to be transported around the globe, resupplied for indefinite campaigns, and directed from afar in their grisly business. According to Sivard, global deaths caused by war increased from 6.4 million during the eighteenth century to 20 million in the nineteenth.

And the power to kill has continued to grow exponentially. The twentieth century has the grim distinction of being the most deadly in human history, with approximately 103 million war-related deaths so far. The first half of the century and the world wars that scarred it may be seen as the culmination of the gunpowder and industrial revolutions.

But after the midcentury mark, things change. According to Sivard's calculations, 84 percent of the casualties from war in this century occurred before 1950. Moreover, the ratio of casualties to world population is now decreasing. By the latter measure, the rate of war- related deaths in the second half of the twentieth century is one-tenth that in the first half, lower than in the second half of the nineteenth century, and almost as low as in the first half of the nineteenth century.

The world has not been this safe since 1850. And the peace holds. The so-called proxy wars, in which the superpowers armed and aided the protagonists--Korea, Vietnam, Angola--have subsided. Certainly conventional armed conflict has persisted in the form of the Falklands War, the Iran-Iraq War, the Gulf War, and the war in Bosnia, but these remain localized conflicts with relatively limited casualties. It is hard to imagine an approaching cataclysm on the trajectory set up by the Napoleonic Wars, our Civil War, and the two world wars.

Had there been conventional war in the second half of the twentieth century on the scale seen in the first half, we could have expected more war deaths than occurred throughout recorded history up to the twentieth century--and more than piled up in the two world wars combined. Extrapolating from Sivard's figures, we can reasonably project that another world war, say in the decade of the 1980s, could have killed 250 million people--5 percent of the world population--even if the combatants used only conventional weapons.

Since Sivard calculates that some 17 million people died in war between 1949 and 1990, we might conclude that more than 230 million people have been spared from the trajectory of death laid out by the Industrial Revolution and the world wars. Those people lived because of nuclear weapons.

With the advent of nuclear weapons, humans finally succeeded in devising an instrument of war so terrible that other means had to be found to settle political conflicts. Surely there has been no lack of conflict. Surely man's inhumanity to man is still a potent force in world affairs. Surely the United Nations and other institutions of collective security have proven ineffective. Yet the fear of conflict in many cases has become more powerful than the forces of conflict themselves.

Throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, visionaries as disparate as John Donne and Robert Fulton hoped that cannons, ships, and other artifacts of humanity's triumph over nature would make war too horrible to pursue. But only in the desert of New Mexico, in the summer of 1945, did the scientists and engineers of the Manhattan Project finally realize that goal. J. Robert Oppenheimer looked at the result of their labors and feared, "Now I have become death." For the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, his fears proved true enough. But the legacy of that bomb has been life for hundreds of millions of people.

What reason is there to think that, in the absence of these terrible weapons, there would have been conventional war on such a massive scale? At no time in human history have two major powers, divided by ideology and ambition and united by proximity and conflicting interests, resisted the temptation to settle their differences on the battlefield. The rhetoric of the Cold War, and the huge conventional military forces amassed by both sides, give every reason to suspect that without nuclear weapons there would have been a World War III by now. Perhaps it would have come during one of the Berlin crises, or the Korean or Vietnam wars, or one of the countless other confrontations between East and West. But come it would have.

Still, it may be argued, the success of nuclear weapons in preventing World War III is hardly grounds for believing that these horrendous instruments have not posed--and do not still pose--a threat to humanity that entirely outweighs the fragile peace they have so far forced upon us. What about proliferation? What about the possibility of terrorists brandishing these weapons on the world stage? What about the argument of Admiral Noel Gaylor (a cold warrior turned peace activist) that these weapons, like all others in human history, will be used eventually--and with results that will obliterate the transient gains of the last 40 years?

Predictions of the imminent use of nuclear weapons have been made since 1946, and all have proven false. The darkest forecasts accompanied China's acquisition of nuclear weapons in the 1960s. But Mao and his successors have been true to their promise to use nuclear weapons only to ensure that China would not be attacked. Indeed, unlike the other major powers, China does not rattle the nuclear sabre.

Six to twelve nations now possess nuclear weapons, and the technology is within the reach of many more states and even some terrorist groups. Yet none have used them; most have foregone even developing them. The record grows stronger every year.

And what if nuclear weapons were to be used again? What if, for example, India and Pakistan--widely regarded as having nuclear weapons or the capacity to acquire them-- drove each other, in extremis, to push the button? The casualties would surely be horrendous, but they would amount to only a fraction of the number that would have been killed by now without nuclear weapons.

The argument made here is not new. Historian Bruce Mazlish made a similar case in the 1960s; so have political scientists Kenneth Waltz and John Mearsheimer. But all of them wrote during the Cold War, too close to the event for their ideas to win broad acceptance.

Now the Cold War is over. What it has wrought may finally be viewed without the passions bred by fear. The great bloodletting engendered by the Industrial Revolution has peaked. We need to acknowledge this blessing and preserve the relative peace that it has brought--even if the price of peace is to live in apprehension, even dread, of our own capabilities for destruction.

Keep the bomb. Save the world from conventional war.

Clearing the Debris
by Bernard Lown

Nuclear weapons have exacted heavy costs--economic, environmental, medical, political, and social--and these shadows will not recede without substantial public initiative.

Bernard Lown, a professor of cardiology emeritus at the Harvard School of Public Health and a senior physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, was co-recipient with Eugene Chazov of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the group they founded, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.

The scale of the devastation that took place at Hiroshima and Nagasaki 50 years ago was nothing new: the fire bombings of Dresden, Tokyo, and Hamburg had killed more people and induced equal havoc. The qualitative uniqueness of those atomic bombs was in the sheer concentration of their power. Instead of resulting from a 1,000-plane raid, the destruction was wrought by 25 pounds of uranium that could fit inside a basketball.

Yet compared with the power of today's weapons, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts were mere puffs. A device like the Hiroshima bomb became the fission trigger for thermonuclear weapons--the match, so to speak, to light a fusion reaction that was 1,000 times more destructive.

The technological prowess of the atomic age gave rise to an unprecedented question: whether human beings, and indeed life on earth, had a future. The fact that either of the superpowers could destroy the other at will spread fear, suspicion, and distrust. Reason was suspended as the adversaries sought security in burgeoning arsenals of overkill.

The avowed rationale for possessing genocidal weapons was to deter their use. But if the intent had been deterrence, even a single bomb would have sufficed, since it could inflict unacceptable damage by destroying a metropolis like Moscow or Washington. Nuclear planners, like the sorcerer's apprentice, did not know how to stop, and eventually amassed 50,000 weapons. At the height of the Cold War, both superpowers had accumulated the equivalent of four tons of dynamite for every man, woman, and child inhabiting the earth. The race to Armageddon had no visible constraints, and it seemed inevitable that sooner or later we would get there.

Mercifully, the age of nuclear confrontation between the superpowers is over. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, people have placed the nuclear threat on the back burner of their social concerns. But the Cold War and the nuclear arms race have left various kinds of debris that will not be cleared for many generations. From 1945 to 1992, U.S. military outlays amounted to $11 trillion, half again as much as the present value of the entire American industrial plant and infrastructure. The resources expended on the superpower confrontation could have solved all global health problems, with enough funds left to end world hunger, arrest population growth, and halt degradation of a fragile environment. Instead, after nearly five decades of fiscal neglect of the social sector, we must contend with decaying schools, potholed streets, deteriorating mass transit, inadequate health care, noncompetitive civilian manufacturing industries, dilapidated and inadequate housing, rotted urban centers, growing masses of homeless, and a pervasive drug culture. And it is perhaps no coincidence that both superpowers have experienced steep rises in violence and crime.

Another casualty is the standard of living, which for a majority of people in the two countries is declining and will continue to go down for the foreseeable future. In no small measure this stems from astronomic debt. For example, the U.S. government owes some $4 trillion, incurred largely during the final decade of the Cold War. It is ironic that while the two superpowers have burdened generations of their children with debt, they invest only niggardly in their health and education.

Even though the United States suffers pain as a result of the Cold War, it has experienced a soft landing compared with Russia, where the consequences have been catastrophic in all sectors. Since 1992 the average life expectancy for Russian men has fallen from 62.1 to 58.9 years, 17 years less than in the United States. Infant mortality has risen from 18 per 1,000 to 19.9 per 1,000--more than twice our toll--just in the last year. Yet this year Russia has allocated less than 1 percent of its annual budget for health, about the magnitude of support encountered in sub-Saharan Africa. This egregious underfinancing occurs at a time when, as the Russian Health Ministry acknowledges, half the country's 21,000 hospitals do not have adequate plumbing, hot water, or modern means for sterilizing instruments. No wonder infection afflicts half of those undergoing surgery.

There is yet another awesome legacy of the Cold War. Both superpowers are facing mammoth technical challenges in dismantling their nuclear arsenals and coping with the growing garbage of the atomic age. Millions of pounds of highly radioactive reactor fuel are sitting in rusting storage vessels and are spreading radioactivity. Notwithstanding the $3 billion the United States has spent in its search for a permanent waste repository, no solution is in sight for long-term disposal of plutonium and highly enriched uranium, and nuclear waste is accumulating with nowhere to go. There can be little satisfaction in knowing that the disposal problem in the former Soviet Union is an order of magnitude worse.

Yet I believe the most negative impact of the bomb is a cultural one. Science, once regarded as embodying the majesty of human achievement, is viewed with suspicion, disrespect, and even hostility. The image of the scientist conjures up Dr. Strangelove.

A Cloud over Science

From the eighteenth-century Enlightenment through the nineteenth century, a buoyant optimism reigned with regard to the human condition. Surely, it seemed, national and tribal passions would die out, and disease and poverty would be eliminated. This romantic positivism was propelled by the daily demonstration of the extraordinary potential of science and technology to enrich every facet of human life. Nothing in prior history had promised more abundance than the ever-upward advance of science, which affirmed life at its best.

The mushroom cloud, culminating two world wars in which the march of science and technology brought steadily worsening destructiveness, changed all that. Of course, it would be a vast oversimplification to blame all public disaffection with science on nuclearism, for a counterstrain of pessimism has always coexisted with popular faith in science. The attacks against Galileo started centuries ago and have never ceased. Frankenstein was dreamed up long before the atomic age. Nevertheless, it is safe to say that nuclear arms have contributed to a deepening public ambivalence. While craving the miracles wrought by modern medicine and eager to embrace technological conveniences, people have become suspicious of the scientific outlook in general. In a world perceived to be overrun with nuclear weapons and nuclear waste, carcinogenic agents of every description, ozone depletion, greenhouse warming, and reckless genetic engineering, science is no longer a moral beacon and a source of hope.

If there is one bright spot in the nuclear legacy, it is what the arms race has revealed about the human instinct for survival. Just as an organism develops antibodies to a threatening antigen, society appears to evolve immunologic mechanisms to cope with danger. The nuclear threat spurred millions of people to engage in social activism. A telling example was the burgeoning physicians' movement.

In a remarkably brief time, 200,000 health workers in nearly 80 countries responded to the call by the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, and a novel brand of people's diplomacy sprang into being. Grassroots organizations such as this one spurred millions of people in both adversarial camps to penetrate the fog of denial and confront for the first time the unthinkable reality of nuclear war. It is no exaggeration to say that citizens' groups were instrumental in dismantling the Cold War.

Although the worst may now be behind us, experience has convinced many of us that the deadly nuclear shadow will not vanish without public education and involvement. Politicians do not respond to the beckoning of history. They rise to the challenge only when public opinion obstinately clamors for change. In this respect, citizen diplomacy is as essential now as it was at the height of the nuclear terror. The bestialities unleashed in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Chechnya provide evidence, if such be needed, that barbarism is just below the integument in all human societies, whatever their purported moral values or avowed religious persuasions. In the words of an Auschwitz survivor, the psychotherapist Victor Frankl: "Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake." It would be no small contribution for generations yet unborn to declare genocidal weapons the exclusive property of the savage twentieth century.