Was Hiroshima a war crime?

This is a Global Player Original Podcast.

A short time ago, an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima and destroyed its usefulness to the enemy. That bomb has more power than 20,000 tons of TN. The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid many fold, and the end is not yet. That is President Harry S. Truman eighty years ago announcing the first time. that the world had seen an atomic bomb.

Even by the scale of devastation that the world had been through up until 1945, this was something completely different. With the questions still reverberating today about whether what happened then was something beyond what war should allow. It changed the world. It ushered in a new era in which we are still living in the long shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But eighty years on to the day, as Hiroshima remembers.

Should we remember those events in a different way? Was it a moment of triumph and victory, or was it a moment that in fact was the biggest war crime we've ever seen in history. Something that many politicians today believe, including Jeremy Corbyn, who has said that it is a crime against Humanity. How should we remember the use of the atomic bomb? And should we be less afraid of looking at our own history in the eye and calling it for what it was? Welcome to the newsagents. The news agents.

It's John. It's Lewis. And in case you are not familiar with the events that took place 80 years ago or don't know much about it, it's worth just doing a brief history. On the morning of August 6th, 1945. A US B twenty nine bomber named the Enola Gay took off from the island of Tinian, heading for Japan. They see these are the last days of the Second World War. Germany had already been defeated.

But the war in the Far East in Japan was still raging. Thousands of American soldiers and and civilians and Japanese dying every single week. On board that plane was a single bomb. codenamed Little Boy. It was a uranium based atomic weapon, the first of its kind ever developed. At eight fifteen in the morning the bomb was dropped over the southern Japanese city of Hiroshima, Big industrial base, big military base. The device explodes.

six hundred meters above the city centre and it unleashed a blast. equivalent to roughly fifteen thousand tons of TNT. The fireball unleashed Instantly vaporize. everything within about a mile radius. It melted steel. It turned tens of thousands of people to ash in seconds. And by the end of that day, an estimated seventy thousand to eighty thousand people were dead.

Thousands more would die from burns, radiation sickness and injuries, pushing the total death toll to over one hundred and forty thousand. There was a second bomb a few days later in Nagasaki. And a few days after that the Imperial Japanese government surrendered. And we're not trying to do a history podcast. But we're trying to look at why this is w maybe we are. Maybe we should audition for that. Maybe that's our next kind of branching out.

The news agents history. Yeah. The news agents are history. Um yeah, so the questions still reverberate today about what happened. At Hiroshima and Nagasaki about whether it was a war crime. And looking through a lens of 80 years on. Yeah. I mean is it okay to go and kill a hundred and forty thousand people with the dropping of one bomb? No, it's horrible.

Horrendous. Well we know what we would say if, say, Vladimir Putin were to unleash a nuclear weapon, which obviously we've been worried about for three years during the duration of the of the war, right? If he were to unleash a a bomb on Kyiv or wherever it happens to be. But then you have to look at the context

text in which the decision was made by President Truman. To drop that bomb, which was that the fighting in Japan had been particularly brutal. According to the Royal British Legion, you were seven times more likely to die in a Japanese prisoner of war camp than you were to die in a German one. Twenty seven thousand Americans had died in those prisoner of war camps.

It was the most hideous conditions where people were dying of starvation, were dying of disease, were being forced to slave labor to build the railway between Burma and Saham. All those other things. And there were one hundred and thirty thousand Allied prisoners of war who were still being held. And who were at risk of death. And so th that's the context.

in which the decision was taken, we have somehow got to end this war in Japan and not a lot is going to do it easily. Well, funnily enough, one of the reasons that Hiroshima was chosen was that were there were other targets which the Allies believed that there were

Allied POWs there when they didn't want to vaporise them. So it wasn't the only reason but it but it was one reason chosen. And look, this is a debate which has raged and it's not just a historical debate, of course, because it has so many contemporary

Contemporary echoes and resonances. You know, as I said at the start there, we're still living in the shadow of the nuclear age. I mean the nuclear bombs that are at the disposal of governments today are infinitely more powerful The H bomb was developed in the nineteen fifties and the technology has developed In leaps and bounds he had since then. So it is something that has terrified the world.

ever since, and obviously with the world as unstable as it is now, continues to create that terror. I mean I know today for example, I mean there've there have been all of these, as you would imagine, commemoration ceremonies in Hiroshima.

And the mayor of Hiroshima today calling for the world's most powerful countries to abandon nuclear deterrence because of what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki eighty years ago. Residents and survivors From a hundred and twenty countries gathering at the city's peace memorial park this morning. and the mayor there warning that conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East have contributed to a growing acceptance of nuclear weapons and the idea of their being deployed. So this is a very

This is an old event, but it is one which feels very now, and perhaps more now than it would have done if we'd been having this conversation, say, in the nineteen nineties or even the two thousands. So this is very, very active. I think though, on the question of whether it needed to be deployed and that is the sort of central question. I think we do have to remember that

It wasn't just what happened that day in terms of the vaporization and the death of of so many people. This was something and and I do think this is something that does distinguish nuclear weapons from other types of armaments and other types of incendiary warfare. Because this lingered for decades and decades. People who were caught up

in the after effects of what happened in Hiroshima that day, who weren't killed, but they went on to develop leukemias, cancers, deformities, and being unable to produce children. People were discriminated against. From within Japan. Because they had been affected or been there that day and there was this assumption that somehow they might be able to

pass on the effects of the disease or that they may have had or that it was contagious, nuclear contamination was contagious. This is something with which people are still living. Because there is obviously the moral question, which is to say, Well what's the difference between using one bomb, which vaporizes seventy thousand people and say what was happening earlier on in that same year with the firebombing.

of Tokyo, which was actually more lethal than what happened in Hiroshima that day. The the use of B twenty nine bombers which were this, you know, very new technology at the time. which basically created massive fireballs. There was nothing left of Tokyo. There was absolutely nothing left. One of the reasons that Tokyo wasn't chosen as a target in August nineteen forty five is because the Americans said, Well, there's nothing left of it. We've already completely

destroyed it. What's the moral difference between those two things? I think there must be a moral difference. in the sense of the lingering effects of nuclear weapons or biological weapons by comparison to normal armaments. And that is what the argument is in saying this is a war crime. There is no escape from an atomic weapon. There is no escape from a nuclear weapon. You can't do anything to

uh prevent uh you can't do anything to save yourself from it, which you can potentially from traditional bombs. Yeah, I suppose the you know d the Jeremy Corbyn point about it's a crime against humanity. There were an awful lot of crimes against humanity that were taking place in Japan during the Second World War. The savagery with which the battles were being fought, the Battle of Okinawa, you know, a hundred thousand people die in the space of three months in the fighting there.

the should America try to mount an invasion of Japan itself. I mean that was considered to be so fraught with risk. And there was also the Japanese people were under the control of Emperor Hirohito. and where the clear message was it was better to die than surrender. You know, the whole legend of kamikaze pilots, you know, using their planes as missiles. And I you know, how else were you going to end the war?

in the Pacific, given that Japan had no intention of surrendering. It was holding thousands of Allied prisoners of war. I remember years ago meeting someone who was a Labour Party member but who had been a Japanese prisoner of war, who was progressive Who was A kind of a pacifist in the sense that he never wanted to see anything like it again, but he thought it was justified because it ended the war that was just going on without any reprieve whatsoever. So I think that this is

the crux of the question of whether it was a war crime or not. And I think what is interesting about this entire debate of course is that we remember the history we want to remember. Right. I mean we all have our national versions of the Second World War. I actually think one of the sort of defining features of our age right now is the sort of collective memory of the Second World War, you know, rapidly receding and vanishing from collective memory, from living memory.

And I think the thing about the use of the atomic bomb is that and and Truman, President Truman's decision to use it, which is a d a debate which rages among historians. Gotta remember the context is that Truman has only recently become president. Roosevelt dies in nineteen forty five.

Truman didn't know anything about the Manhattan Project. Nothing. Nothing. The Manhattan Project being this astonishing obviously anyone who's seen Oppenheimer will know all about it. This astonishing civil engineering project. Which was designed to create the nuclear bomb. Enormous resources being devoted to it across the United States, being developed in the Las Los Alamos lab laboratory. Roosevelt dies not longer after he's won the nineteen forty four presidential election.

Truman comes to office. He's only recently become vice president. Roosevelt rather sort of burnt through vice presidents. He had been a senator. He comes in, is told about it for the first time. He sees nobility. To end the war by using it. Remember Truman had fought, unlike Roosevelt, in the First World War, he'd actually worked as an artilleryman in the First World War. So when he's told that this has the destructive potential of 15,000 tons of TNT, Truman knows. Truman understands, right?

what actually this potentially means, at least in terms of i its incendiary power. And obviously as you say John I think our collective memory in Britain is is rather weaker, even though we had so many soldiers fighting in it. We tend to focus on what was going on in Europe, D Day, Normandy, We focus a lot on V Day, we don't think very much about V J Day in nearly the same way. So it's sort of a little bit sort of willowy in in our collective memory. But it was

horrendous, beyond horrendous. It was bloodlands beyond anything that we can possibly imagine. The Japanese always literally did it as cliche with his true, they would fight to the last man. It was a highly martial society, a highly militarised society.

they would not surrender. Truman's facing six to seven thousand US soldiers dying every single week. He's getting those reports to his desk every day. The traditional The history of this, certainly in the immediate aftermath, was that Truman had no choice, or at least it was the best option available to him.

It has to be said though, there has been more and more history done about this in recent years where there are lots of historians who take a very different view now. they say that Japan was starving. Japan was on the verge of surrender. What Japan really wanted, which is something that the Allies hadn't given, Was an assurance that Emperor Hirohito would be able to remain on the Japanese throne because the Japanese believed at that time that he was a divine figure.

and that therefore they wanted an assurance that hadn't been provided by the Truman administration. They also point to the fact and I think this is something that is also forgotten, that there is actually now contention as to whether It was the use of the atomic bomb.

that actually was the thing that prompted and provoked the Japanese into surrender. Because something else happens in those weeks, which is forgotten about now, but which many historians think is The Soviets. As important The Soviets. Exactly. People forget You know, that you assume that the Japanese must have been at war with the Russians. They weren't. The Japanese were hoping that the Russians or Soviets would actually

come together would actually um negotiate, help them negotiate a deal with the Americans, which was something short of unconditional surrender. But in the week or two leading up to the use of the atomic bomb Stalin declares war on Japan, and suddenly he's moving loads of troops from the west to the And Stalin had plans to occupy northern Japan. The island of Hakida.

And this is something that terrifies the Japanese. So in the end it's that, as mu many historians believe now, as much as of the use of the atomic bomb, Which provokes the surrender and the fact that Japan was just finished, industrially it was basically completely destroyed, it was starving the blockade works. So there is And far more active debate these days about Truman's decision and actually whether it needed to happen.

Of course. But that's the beauty of eighty years of hindsight, scholarship. True. But there were people at the time who said it. Eisenhower, who was Truman's successor, of course, said that the atomic bomb never needed to be used and there were other people in the American military at the time, including one of the top defence chiefs, one of Roosevelt's top allies at the time, the head of the Navy

who abhorred the bomb and said it should never have been used and didn't need to be used. So even at the time there was debate. But but you're Truman, you've just become the president of the United States of America. You've been a vice president for a very short time. You were kept completely in the dark about the Manhattan Project and suddenly You learn about this thing and as you say, Lewis, you're getting reports Of the daily death toll.

of the suffering of prisoners of war, of the starvation and the disease and the famine and all the rest of it and you think, Jesus, I've got to do something and I you can imagine that the pressure that he felt under to have something that could change the game And it was a game changer. I think the other thing that's worth talking about, eighty years old.

is it does live, you know, th the the success of the film Oppenheimer. When you say Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I think people have an instinctive sense of what that means. The terror Oh there must never be another nuclear war. that it was kind of ingrained on us, we must never do this again.

Which is part of the reason why the piece has been kept in the world that it hasn't been used again because of this kind of crazy nineteen sixties doctrine of if you bomb us, we bomb you and we blow up the world, you know, which had the acronym MAD, mutually assured destruction. You know, there have been times, you know, Cuban missile crisis where it came pretty close, but nuclear weapons have not been used. Since Nagasaki is not a very good thing.

And maybe it has done something, but the kind of contrary to that Is that more and more countries think, geez, I wish I had new you know, if you're Colonel Gaddafi and you had a nuclear weapon, would you have been overthrown? Because, you know, the Americans would have been and the French and the British would have been too fearful. Would uh Saddam Hussein have been overthrown?

You know, Kim Jong un is still there in North Korea. Why? Because he's got nuclear weapons. Particularly but more of historians of the Cold War. as to whether or not, as you say, John, the use of those bombs eighty years ago acted as a a sort of moral lesson to the world that they ought not to be used, a deterrent

or whether it in fact legitimized their use. I mean we shouldn't forget, and this is what I mean about squaring up to our history, there is only, and this is sometimes something that the Russians like to point out, the Chinese like to point out, there is only one country which has ever used a nuclear weapon.

And it is that great Empire of Liberty, the leader of the West United States. Now you can have that debate about whether Truman was right or wrong, but that is just an indisputable historic fact. And I don't know if really it is true that their use in nineteen forty five acted as a sort of inhibitor on anything. Not least because go forward just a few years. in the Korean War that's largely forgotten now, uh and it shouldn't be'cause it has such contemporary significance.

But there were American military chiefs at the time urging Truman to use the bomb in Korea. Now Truman to his credit refused to do so, perhaps because of I mean Truman, interestingly, never really

talked about regret in terms of using the bomb, but it's interesting that privately he was absolutely adamant that it would not and ought not to be used in Korea. But when you think about how many times we got really close ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r

inhibiting effects. And as you say, in terms of today, and maybe this is because that memory is rapidly diminishing as well, but in terms of today, as you say, John, More and more states want nuclear weapons. No one is sitting around going, Oh my goodness gracious, we ought not to have nuclear weapons because of what happened in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. They want those nuclear weapons because they see it as a form of

geopolitical power. And that's the other thing about what happened eighty years ago. Some historians believe

that what was partly motivating Truman and there is disagreement about this, what was partly motivating Truman, and if this is true, then this is much darker, is that he wanted to send a message to the USSR and to Joseph Stalin that the United States had this bomb.

and that there was one powerful there was at least for a while there was gonna be a unipolar power in the world because they had this bomb. Indeed, you know, it was probably partly because of the use of the bomb that Stalin backed down and did not invade.

northern Japan. There is a an alternative history where Japan had been invaded and it could have been divided, as Germany was into West and East Germany, or as Korea later became into North and South Korea, that Japan had been Split down the middle, or not quite down the middle, but had certainly been split between a northern communist zone and a southern capitalist zone. This is How we see our own history is such a fascinating question. I mean we talk about kind of alternate facts.

today and fake news and, you know, the spin doctors who try and tell you a version of events and you think that's all bullshit. I mean, you know, look at the legend of Dunkirk and the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force. And it's told as a story of plucky Brits, the small boats going over. It was a military catastrophe.

This expeditionary force It's so British to remember a failure though, isn't it? Yes, but we but we manage it we remember the failure and treat it as a success. Oh when I was the Paris correspondent in two thousand There was still an awful lot of French history that seemed to kind of have its mm let me put it gently, that the French in the Second World War was full of resistance fighters and no one was really collaborating with the Nazi occupation.

That just doesn't bear scrutiny. There were some fantastically brave people who were part of the resistance. But there were an awful lot. who made their peace with Marshal Pétain and carried on in the collaboration and allowing, you know Nazi rule in France. And so, you know, again, it's history as you want it to be seen. Your national story as you choose to construct it, rather than based

On the reality. I think in Britain we have done a bit of soul searching and there was the whole kind of firebombing of Dresden. And you know, whether there should be a plaque unveiled, a statue unveiled to Bomba Harris, who was the head of the RAF. who sanctioned the bombing of Dresden with the terrible consequences that followed from that. I do I do think we ought to

be braver in terms of looking at the darker parts of our own history. Even in the Second World War, which you know, was you know, without no doubt Britain was fighting on the right side and and Churchill in nineteen forty does the world an enormous service in refusing to capitulate to Hitler. Global history would have been very, very, very different. Had Churchill chosen a different course in nineteen fourteen there were other politicians available who would have

without doubt, chosen a different course. But you know, when we were involved in the firebombing of a city in Dresden, for example, which killed twenty five thousand people, we never talk about that. We never talk about that. And history I have such disagreements.

with, you know, the people particularly on the cultural right, the radical right, who who seem to imply or don't just imply, they st say that looking bravely at your own history and acknowledging where your own country has fallen short or perhaps done terrible things, that somehow that is a diminishment of history.

that it's sort of cancelling history. No, it's a it's a fuller, richer understanding of history. It's actually, I would argue, a far more patriotic approach to history because it's looking at your own country's hist history squarely. in the eye and saying, yes, we did these great things, we also did these bad things. And, you know, in on the Japanese side, for example, there is a whole history to that as well, which is still playing out in contemporary geopolitics.

Japan is a country that unlike Germany to have that honest conversation about their own r role in the Second World War. I mean again, it's not a history that we really are very aware of very much in this country. But, you know, if you ask someone in China when did the Second World War start, they won't say nineteen thirty nine. They'll say nineteen thirty one. With the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. Absolutely. And the crimes I mean we're talking about whether

the atomic bomb was a war crime. There is no doubt whatsoever that what Japan did In China. in the lead up to what we would call the Second World War Frat, the nineteen thirties and nineteen forties were some of the most abhorrent war crimes that

has eb humanity has ever, ever seen. We're talking probably modern historians would say that between if you take the totality of everything that happened in China in those years, between twenty to thirty million civilians died, partly motivated by the most

profound xenophobia, racism, imperial colonial outlook. You know, the Nanjing massacre Japanese soldiers choosing to just indiscriminately shoot to kill women, children, using extr things that we would consider completely barbaric, dropping plague inf in plague infested fleas onto Chinese cities.

Spread the bubonic plague. Horrendous biological experimentation on civilians. You know, the list just goes on and on and on. And again to go back to the Truman point. Truman would have been aware of this and knew that. So you can't wrench These decisions from the historical context. You know, it had V E Day, people were just desperate.

to get the troops home, to get the prisoners of war back, to start a new life in the post Second World War era. And, you know, in that context is when Truman took the decision that it was time To drop the bomb. I just going back to your point about I think nations are pretty bad looking at their own history squarely and terrible.

There's one place I just want to talk about the experience I had at Mount Vernon. Mount Vernon, which is George Washington's home on the Potomac River on this magnificent bluff. It's and now a visitor centre. You can go round and see, you know, where he lived and where he kept his horses and the st you know, all the rest of it. But you pick up a voice kind of you know, headphones, a headset.

And you can listen to the history of the house and the Washingtons and where the children were buried and you know, his military career and political career and all the rest of it. But you can also have it on the slave section. Where it describes what the slave's life was. Oh, that's so interesting. Working at that estate.

at that time. And I thought it was absolutely fantastic. And I'm sure there will be people in Magaland who will say we don't need to know about this. Why don't we just keep the history that George Washington was the founding president of the United States of America and great man and you don't need all that. I think we are all the better for understanding historical context.

That's completely right. And I I suppose in a way it is um this is sort of weirdly fresh in my mind, not j partly because just by complete coincidence, having been in Japan a couple of weeks ago and g and visiting the Hiroshima Peace Museum. Which is an astonishing place. Anyone who's who's been to it.

Can hardly fail to be moved by obviously there's a famous dome which which is the only building which still exists because it was literally the place right underneath the bomb, so miraculously survived because it was right underneath. But again in terms of the sort of how a country like Japan remembers this, what I found so interesting is it is an extraordinary the museum which has been set up there, it is an extraordinary

museum. It was the most affecting museum certainly that I've ever been to. I think there was barely a dry eye in the house by the time you get to the end of it. Because what it does is that it for most of the actual exhibits it is just Telling the human stories. you know, the kids who were desperately looking for their parents. you know, after the initial explosion.

of old ladies and old men going into the water and finding that the water was actually burning them, the black rain which appeared an hour or so after the initial explosion which was corrosive and acidic and burned people's skin off and on and on it goes the discrimination that those involved, as I say, faced in the in the decades t to come, and on and on it goes. And what's extraordinary about it is how weirdly unpolitical it is. This is the most extraordinary

military event, but it's also an event of profound political significance. Obviously it presages the surrender o of this country. But the way it's talked about, and I think you know, from reading about it a bit more because it piqued my interest so much I think it mirrors the way that Japan thinks about its history and that moment more generally.

It talks about it almost as if it was the weather, as if it was just bound to happen, as if it was just sort of inevitable, with almost no attempt to address the causes of it on the American side or indeed on their own side of the fact that obviously Japan had been an an imperial aggressor of its own history and so on and and that that as I say does continue to create contemporary political problems.

Because I mentioned what happened in China, we could talk about what happened in Korea with Japan. Ch it is still a bone of diplomatic and profound political contention. and aggression between China, Japan, Korea, which lives on to this day, that Japan, they feel, has not sufficiently and adequately addressed its crimes in the Second World War and lead up to the atomic bomb and what we saw there in a way that one would say Germany, by contrast, most profoundly has and does so

repeatedly. So this question of of history, it's not just history. As someone said, you know, the past is never dead, it's not even past. i it continues to have such significant contemporary political implications in almost every way we see. And even in the United States. I mean the the the history of the United States I was amazed to learn the other day.

that the first president to visit Japan in any kind of real official capacity I thought, assume, given that you know, you had tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands hundreds of thousands of American soldiers stationed in Japan from nineteen forty five onwards. It wasn't Eisenhower, it was it was George H. W. Bush. When Emperor Hirohito died, it was the Emperor during the war and controversially was allowed by the Americans to s to stay on and reigned on until nineteen eighty-nine. He was

Died in 1989. It was George H. W. Bush who first visited because up to then it was still so controversial among American POWs, and it was controversial. On that visit as well, and of course Bush had been a POW and had actually been a soldier in the Pacific, so he had the cachet to do it in a way. But for him to visit and it'd still be controversial as late as nineteen eighty nine, it just shows you kind of the long shadow of it all.

And you're talking about kind of coming to terms with your own history and the fact that Japan hasn't, you know, in terms of in its terms of its relationship with China and Korea, in the way that Germany has with Europe and the United States. It's also striking that you talk about George H. W. Bush. I mean, Barack Obama went to Hiroshima And he spoke, and that again was still controversial, but there was no apology from him for the dropping of that atomic bomb.

Death fell from the sky and the world was changed. A flash of light. And a wall of fire destroyed a city. And demonstrated that mankind possessed the means to destroy itself. Why do we come to this place? We come to ponder a terrible force unleashed in a not so distant past. We come to mourn the dead. including over a hundred thousand Japanese men, women and children. Thousands of Koreans. A dozen Americans held prisoner. Their souls speak to us. They ask us to look inward.

to take stock of who we are. And what mean might become? I think what you can hear in Obama there is it's probably something that Obama was uniquely placed to do. And I think actually he does it very elegantly, characteristically. Yeah. Which is to walk the line where he nods to The we can argue whether it was a war crime or not, but how grave it was, what a terrible legacy it has left for so many people and an acknowledgement of that fact.

Whilst not apologising for it because if he had done so, the controversy of that in itself. And also there was an argument whether he ought to, because that's exactly the discussion we've just been having about basically you're arguing about whether Truman was right or wrong or maybe He was damned if he did and he was damned if he didn't. And whether another politician would have made a different decision in his shoes, we'll never know. And whilst the memory of the Second World War is dimming

in terms of the battles and maybe some of the lessons that should be learnt and taken out from it and the reasons why we got to that stage. There are some arguments that are going to carry on. and that have relevance to our politics today. And Hiroshima and Nagasaki are part of the future arguments to be had about our politics, of peace and of war. Their names Willivo. We'll be back in just a moment. And on the subject of presidents and the controversial decisions, they have to make the

Let me just push you in the direction of Newsagents USA, where we'll be talking about Donald Trump and the No way. Yeah, equally momentous decision about where to build a ballroom in the White House ground. Truman thought it had it bad. Yeah, I know. Tum where am I gonna put this ballroom? And is it gonna be like Versailles? Is it gonna be Louis the Fourteenth? I think it will be. That's all on Newsagents USA. And we'll be back tomorrow.