Americans’ Hiroshima: wrong is right, a “dangerous state of mind”

The Trinity test
Image at Wikipedia

Only the people of the United States believe this country won a war by bombing ─ with weapons of mass destruction ─ cities, children, the defenseless, the nonthreatening. Only Americans believe, Daniel Ellsberg writes, that the bombing of Hiroshima and other places in Japan “was fully rightful.”
Editing by Carolyn Bennett

Death Toll Hiroshima, Nagasaki

The real mortality of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan will never be known. The destruction and overwhelming chaos made orderly counting impossible. Estimates of killed and wounded in Hiroshima (150,000) and Nagasaki (75,000) are likely overly conservative.

Members of a survey team divided the morbidity and mortality into these phases:

Very large numbers of people were crushed in their homes and in the buildings in which they were working. Their skeletons could be seen in the debris and ashes for almost 1,500 meters from the center of the blast, particularly in the downwind directions. 

Large numbers of the population walked for considerable distances after the detonation before they collapsed and died. 

Large numbers developed vomiting and bloody and watery diarrhea (vomitus and bloody feces were found on the floor in many of the aid stations) associated with extreme weakness. They died in the first and second weeks after the bombs were dropped. 

During this same period deaths from internal injuries and from burns were common. Either the heat from the fires or infrared radiation from the detonations caused many burns, particularly on bare skin or under dark clothing. 

After a lull, without peak mortality from any special causes, deaths began to occur from purpura (Any of several hemorrhagic states characterized by patches of purplish discoloration resulting from forcing out or escape of blood into the skin and mucous membranes), which was often associated with epilation (hair loss), anemia, and a yellowish coloration of the skin. The so-called bone marrow syndrome, manifested by a low white blood cell count and almost complete absence of the platelets necessary to prevent bleeding, was probably at its maximum between the fourth and sixth weeks after the bombs were dropped. [From Children of the Atomic Bomb]

Ellsberg’s comments 

In his 2009 article “Hiroshima Day: America Has Been Asleep at the Wheel for 64 Years,” former RAND and Defense Department staffer and whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg wrote: “Before that day (August 6, 1945) perhaps no one in the public outside our class—no one else outside the Manhattan Project (and very few inside it)—had spent a week, as we had, or even a day thinking about the impact of such a weapon on the long-run prospects for humanity.”  

The Manhattan Project was a research and development program by the United States with the United Kingdom and Canada that produced the first atomic bomb. Research and production took place at more than 30 sites, some secret, across the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada.  

Two types of atomic bomb were developed during the war. A relatively simple gun-type fission weapon was made using uranium-235, an isotope that makes up only 0.7 percent of natural uranium. Parallel with the work on uranium was an effort to produce plutonium. Reactors were constructed at Hanford, Washington, in which uranium was irradiated and transmuted into plutonium.  

The first nuclear device ever detonated was an implosion-type bomb at the Trinity test conducted at New Mexico’s Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range on July 16, 1945. Little Boy, a gun-type weapon, and the implosion-type Fat Man, respectively, were used in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

The Manhattan Project is said to have begun modestly in 1939 and grew to employ more than 130,000 people, at a cost of nearly $2 billion (in 2012, roughly equivalent to $25.8 billion). More than 90 percent of the cost went to building factories and producing fissionable materials, less than 10 percent for development and production of the weapons.

Atomic Attack Death Toll
Children of the Atomic Bomb

Insider’s clear-sightedness 

Ellsberg continued. “We were set apart from our fellow Americans in another important way.  

“Perhaps no others outside the project or our class ever had occasion to think about the Bomb without the strongly biasing positive associations that accompanied their first awareness in August 1945 of its very possibility: that it was ‘our’ weapon, an instrument of American democracy developed to deter a Nazi Bomb, pursued by two presidents, a war-winning weapon and a necessary one—so it was claimed, and almost universally believed—to end the war without a costly invasion of Japan.  

“Unlike nearly all the others who started thinking about the new nuclear era after August 6, 1945, our attitudes of the previous fall had not been shaped or warped by the claim and appearance that such a weapon had just won a war for the forces of justice, a feat that supposedly would otherwise have cost a million American lives (and as many or more Japanese).”  

Outsiders’ delusion then and now 

“For nearly all other Americans, whatever dread they may have felt about the long-run future of the Bomb (and there was more expression of this in elite media than most people remembered later) was offset at the time and ever afterward by a powerful aura of its legitimacy and its almost miraculous potential for good which had already been realized.  

“For a great many Americans, still, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs are regarded, above all, with gratitude, for having saved their own lives or the lives of their husbands, brothers, fathers or grandfathers, which would otherwise have been at risk in the invasion of Japan.  

“For these Americans and many others, the Bomb was not so much an instrument of massacre as a kind of savior, a protector of precious lives.” 

Delusion makes wrong right 

“Most Americans ever since have seen the destruction of the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as necessary and effective—as constituting a just means; in effect, just terrorism under the supposed circumstances─ thus legitimating, in their eyes, the second and third largest single-day massacres in history.  

The largest (also by the U.S. Army Air Corps) was the firebombing of Tokyo five months before on the night of March 9, 1945, which burned alive or suffocated 80,000 to 120,000 civilians.  

Most of the very few Americans who are aware of this event at all accept it, too, as appropriate in wartime. 

Ellsberg concludes: “To regard those acts as other than criminal and immoral, as most Americans do, is to believe that anything—anything—can be legitimate … if done by Americans on the order of a president, during wartime.  

“We are the only country in the world that believes it won a war by bombing—specifically by bombing cities with weapons of mass destruction—and believes that it was fully rightful in doing so.”  

This, Ellsberg says, “is a dangerous state of mind.”

Sources and notes

DANIEL ELLSBERG

Daniel Ellsberg (b. April 7, 1931) is a former United States military analyst who, while employed by the RAND Corporation, precipitated a national political controversy in 1971 when he released to The New York Times and other newspapers the “Pentagon Papers,” a top-secret Pentagon study of U.S. government decision-making related to the Vietnam War.  

RAND Corporation (Research ANd Development) is a nonprofit global policy think tank originally formed by Douglas Aircraft Company to offer research and analysis to the United States armed forces. It is currently financed by the U.S. government and private endowment, corporations, including the healthcare industry, universities and private individuals. 

This organization’s work reaches farther in working with other governments, private foundations, international organizations, and commercial organizations on a variety of non-defense issues. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAND_Corporation 

Since the end of the Vietnam War, “Ellsberg has been a lecturer, writer and activist on the dangers of the nuclear era, wrongful U.S. interventions and the urgent need for patriotic whistleblowing.” 

Ellsberg’s latest books are Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (2002) and Risk, Ambiguity and Decision (2001). In 2006 recognized “for putting peace and truth first at considerable personal risk and dedicating his life to inspiring others to follow his example,” he was awarded a Right Livelihood Award. 

In 1959, Ellsberg was a strategic analyst at the RAND Corporation and consultant to the U.S. Defense Department and White House, specializing in problems of the command and control of nuclear weapons, nuclear war plans, and crisis decision-making.  

In 1961 he drafted the guidance from Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the operational plans for general nuclear war. He was a member of two of the three working groups reporting to the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (EXCOM) during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. 

Ellsberg moved to the U.S. Defense Department in 1964 as Special Assistant to Assistant Secretary of Defense (International Security Affairs) John McNaughton, working on the escalation of the war in Vietnam. He transferred to the State Department in 1965 to serve two years at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, evaluating pacification in the field. 

In 1967, he returned to the RAND Corporation and worked on the top secret McNamara study of U.S. Decision-making in Vietnam (1945-68), which later came to be known as the “Pentagon Papers.” 

In 1969, he photocopied the 7,000-page study and gave it to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; and in 1971, he gave it to the New York Times, the Washington Post and 17 other newspapers. His trial on twelve felony counts posing a possible sentence of 115 years was dismissed in 1973 on grounds of governmental misconduct against him.” 

 “Hiroshima Day: America Has Been Asleep at the Wheel for 64 Years” (Ellsberg.Net) August 6, 2009, http://www.ellsberg.net/archive/hiroshima-day-america-has-been-asleep-at-the-wheel-for-64-years

Ellsberg bio
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg
http://www.ellsberg.net/bio

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project

Wikipedia image The Manhattan Project created the first nuclear bombs. The Trinity test is shown.

Image Atomic Attack Death Toll, http://www.aasc.ucla.edu/cab/200708230009.html

From Children of the Atomic Bomb, a research website project developed by Dr. James N. Yamazaki, UCLA professor emeritus of pediatrics, together with the UCLA Asian American Studies Center

Death Toll at Hiroshima and Nagasaki

The mortality was greater in Hiroshima because the city was located in a flat delta, in contrast to Nagasaki’s Urakami Valley (northern part of the city). The Nagasaki-Urakami is enclosed by mountain ridges that shielded the city.

The real mortality of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan will never be known. The destruction and overwhelming chaos made orderly counting impossible. The estimates of killed and wounded in Hiroshima (150,000) and Nagasaki (75,000) are likely overly conservative.

At no time during the period between 1943 and 1946 were facilities allotted or time provided for the Medical Section of the Manhattan Engineer District to prepare a comprehensive history of its activities. Regulations forbade taking notes. Official records were scanty. There were few charts and photographs. 

Members of the survey team (from their own observations and from testimony of Japanese) divided the morbidity and mortality of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan into the following phases:  

Very large numbers of people were crushed in their homes and in the buildings in which they were working. Their skeletons could be seen in the debris and ashes for almost 1,500 meters from the center of the blast, particularly in the downwind directions. 

Large numbers of the population walked for considerable distances after the detonation before they collapsed and died. 

Large numbers developed vomiting and bloody and watery diarrhea (vomitus and bloody feces were found on the floor in many of the aid stations) associated with extreme weakness. They died in the first and second weeks after the bombs were dropped. 

During this same period deaths from internal injuries and from burns were common. Either the heat from the fires or infrared radiation from the detonations caused many burns, particularly on bare skin or under dark clothing. 

After a lull, without peak mortality from any special causes, deaths began to occur from purpura (Any of several hemorrhagic states characterized by patches of purplish discoloration resulting from forcing out or escape of blood into the skin and mucous membranes), which was often associated with epilation (hair loss), anemia, and a yellowish coloration of the skin. The so-called bone marrow syndrome, manifested by a low white blood cell count and almost complete absence of the platelets necessary to prevent bleeding, was probably at its maximum between the fourth and sixth weeks after the bombs were dropped, http://www.aasc.ucla.edu/cab/200706100001.html

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