The bomb ended World War 2: And other myths about nuclear weapons

Sixty seven years ago on this day, a bomb fueled by the nuclear fission of uranium leveled Hiroshima in about six seconds. Since then, two foundational beliefs have colored our views of nuclear weapons; one, that they were essential or at least very significant for ending the war, and two, that they have been and will continue to be linchpins of deterrence. These beliefs have, in one way or another, guided all our thinking about these mythic creations. Historian Ward Wilson who is at the Monterey Institute of International Studies wants to demolish these and other myths about nukes in a new book titled "5 Myths about Nuclear Weapons", and I have seen few volumes which deliver their message so effectively in such few words. Below are Wilson's thoughts about the two dominant nuclear myths interspersed with a few of my own.

"Nuclear weapons were paramount in ending World War 2".

This is where it all begins. And the post facto rationalization certainly bolsters the analysis; brilliant scientists worked on a fearsome weapon in a race against the Nazis, and when the Nazis were defeated, handed it over to world leaders who used to it bring a swift end to a most horrible conflict. Psychologically it fits into a satisfying and noble narrative. Hiroshima and Nagasaki have become so completely ingrained in our minds as symbols of the power of the bomb that we scarcely think about whether they really served the roles that they have been ascribed over the last half century. In one sense the atomic bombings of Japan have dictated all our consequent beliefs about weapons of mass destruction. But troubling and mounting evidence has emerged in the last half century that is now consequential enough to deal a major blow to this thinking. Contrary to popular belief, this is not "revisionist" history; by now the files in American, Soviet, Japanese and British archives have been declassified to an extent that allows us to piece together the cold facts and reveal what exactly was the impact of the atomic bombings of Japan on the Japanese decision to end the war. They tell a story very different from the standard narrative.

Wilson draws on detailed minutes from the meetings of the Japanese Imperial Staff to make two things clear; first, that the bomb did not have a disproportionate influence on Japanese leaders' deliberations and psyche, and second, that what did have a very significant impact on Japanese policy was the invasion of Manchuria and the Sakhalin Islands by the Soviet Union. Wilson reproduces the reactions of key Japanese leaders after the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6. You would expect them to register shock and awe but we see little of this. There was no major meeting summoned after the event and most leaders seemed to display mild consternation, but little of the terror or extreme emotion, that you might expect from such a world-shattering event. What does emerge from the record is that the same men were extremely rattled after the Soviets declared war on August 8.

The reason was that before Hiroshima the Japanese were contemplating two strategies for surrender, one political and the other military. The military strategy involved throwing the kitchen sink against the Americans when they invaded the southern part of the Japanese homeland in the coming months and causing them so many losses that their victory would be be a pyrrhic one at best; the Japanese could then seek a surrender on their own terms. The political strategy involved negotiating with the Allies through Moscow. With Hiroshima, both these options remained open since the Japanese army and Soviet relations were still intact. But with the Soviet invasion in the north, the concentration of troops against the Allied invasion in the south and the seeking of favorable surrender terms through the Soviets suddenly turned into impossibilities. This double blow convinced the Japanese that they must now confront unconditional surrender. When the Emperor finally implored his people to surrender and cited a "new and most cruel bomb" as the reason, it was likely to save face so that the Japanese could blame the bomb rather than their own instigation of the war at Pearl Harbor.

Why were the Japanese not affected by the bombing of Hiroshima? Because on the ground the bombing looked no different from the relentless pounding that dozens of major Japanese cities had received at the hands of Curtis Le May's B-29s during the past six months. The infamous firebombing of Tokyo in March, 1945 had killed even more civilians than the atomic bomb. As Ward details it, no less than 68 cities had been subjected to intense attack, and aerial photos of these cities are strikingly almost indistinguishable from those of Hiroshima. Thus for the Japanese, Hiroshima was one more casualty in a long list. It did little either to shock them or to weaken their resolve for continuing the war. This was especially true when the event was too soon for people to truly take stock of what had really happened.

Unfortunately the perception of the bombing of Hiroshima also fed into the general perception regarding strategic bombing, itself a myth largely perpetuated by the air forces of the U.S. and other European nations which wanted to convince leaders that they could win wars through air attack alone. The conventional wisdom since before World War 2 was that strategic bombing can deal a deadly blow to the enemy's moral and strategic resources. This wisdom was perpetuated in the face of much evidence to the contrary. The bombings of London, Hamburg, Dresden and Tokyo had little effect on morale; in fact, postwar analysis indicated that if anything, they made the survivors of the bombing more determined and resilient and had a minor impact on war production capability. The later follies of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos also proved the futility of strategic bombing in ending wars. And the same was true of Hiroshima. The main point, as Ward makes it clear, is that you cannot win a war by destroying cities because ultimately it's the enemy's armies and military resources that are involved in fighting a war. Destroying cities helps, especially when the means of war production are grounded in civilian activity, but it is almost never decisive. 

One instructive example which Wilson provides is the burning of Atlanta and then Richmond during the American Civil War which did little to crush the South's fighting ability or spirit. Another example is Napoleon's march into Russia; after setting fire to Moscow and destroying scores of Russian cities, Napoleon was still defeated because ultimately his army was defeated. These facts were conveniently ignored in the face of beliefs about bombing whose culmination seemed to be the destruction of Hiroshima. These beliefs were largely responsible for the arms race and the development of strategic hydrogen bombs which were again expressly designed to bring about the annihilation of cities. But all this development did was raise the risk of accidental devastation. If we realize that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and the general destruction of cities played little role in ending World War 2, almost everything that we think we know about the power of nuclear questions is called into question.

"Nuclear weapons are essential for deterrence".

Conventional thinking continues to hold that the Cold War stayed cold because of nuclear weapons. This is true to some extent. But what it fails to realize is how many times the war threatened to turn hot. Declassified documents now provide ample evidence of near-hits that could have easily led to nuclear war. The Cuban Missile Crisis is only the most well-known example of how destabilizing nuclear weapons can make the status quo.

The missile crisis is in fact a fine example of how conventional thinking about deterrence presents gaps. Kennedy's decision to blockade Cuba is often touted as an example of mild escalation and the resolution of the crisis itself is often held up as a shining example of how tough diplomacy can forestall war. But Ward takes the opposite tack; he says that the Soviets had made it clear that any action against Cuba would provoke war. Given the nature of the conflict almost everybody understood that war in this case could mean nuclear war. Yet Kennedy chose to blockade Cuba, so deterrence does not seemed to have worked for him. The consequent set of events brought the world closer to nuclear devastation than we think. As we now know, there were more than 150 nuclear weapons in Cuba which would have carpeted most of the eastern and midwestern United States and led to the deaths of tens of millions of Americans. A subsequent second strike would have caused even more devastation in the Soviet Union, not to mention in neighboring countries. In addition there were several relatively minor events which were close calls. These included the depth mining by the US Air Force of submerged Soviet submarines that almost caused one submarine commander to launch a nuclear torpedo; it was an unsung hero of the crisis named Vasili Arkhipov who prevented the launch. Other examples cited by Ward include the straying of an American reconnaissance flight into Soviet airspace and the consequent scrambling of American and Soviet fighter aircraft.

One could add several other examples to the list of close calls; a later one would be the Able Archer exercise of 1983 that caused the Soviets deep anxiety and borderline paranoia. In addition, as documented in Eric Schlosser's book Command and Control, there were dozens of close calls - swiftly classified, of course - in the form of nuclear accidents which could have led to catastrophic loss of life. The fact is that deterrence is always touted as the ultimate counter-argument to the risks of nuclear warfare, but there are scores of examples where political leaders decided to escalate and provoke the other side in spite of deterrence. From the other side of the fence it looks like deterrence ultimately worked, but often by a very slim margin. Add to this the fact that the vast network of nuclear command and control centers and protocols developed by nuclear nations are manned by fallible human beings; they are examples of complex systems subject to so-called "normal accidents". There is also no dearth of examples during the Cold War where lowly technicians and army officers could have launched World War 3 because of miscalculation, misunderstandings or paranoia. The fact is that these weapons of mass destruction have a life of their own; they are beyond the abilities of human beings to completely harness because human weaknesses and flaws also have lives of their own.

The future

Nuclear weapons are often compared to a white elephant. A better comparison might be to a giant T. rex; one could possible imagine a use for such a creature in extreme situations, but by and large it only serves as an unduly sensitive and enormously destructive creature whose powers are waiting to be unleashed on to the world. Having the beast around is just not worth its supposed benefits anymore, especially when most of these benefits are only perceived and have been extrapolated from a sample size of one.

Yet we continue to nurture this creature. Much progress has been made in reducing the nuclear arsenals of the two Cold War superpowers, but others have picked up the slack and continued to pursue the image and status - and not actual fighting capability - that they think nuclear weapons confer on them. The US currently has about 5000 weapons including 1700 strategic ones, many of which are still on hair trigger alert. This is still overkill by a huge margin. A hundred or so, especially on submarines, would be more than sufficient for deterrence. More importantly, the real elephant in the room is the spending on maintaining and upgrading the US nuclear arsenal; several estimates have put a figure of $50 billion on this spending. In fact the US is now spending more on nukes than it did during the Cold War. In a period when the economy is still not exactly booming and basic services like education and healthcare are underfunded, this kind of spending on what is essentially a relic of the Cold War should be unacceptable. In addition during the Bush administration, renewed proposals for "precision" munitions like the so-called Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP) threatened to lower the bar for the introduction of tactical nuclear weapons; detailed analysis showed that the fallout and other risks from such weapons far outweigh their modest usefulness. The current administration has also shown a dangerously indifferent, if not downright irresponsible, attitude toward nuclear weapons.

More importantly, experts have pointed out since the 1980s that technology and computational capabilities have now improved to an extent that allows conventional precision weapons to do almost all the jobs that were once imagined for nuclear weapons; the US especially now has enough conventional firepower to protect itself and to overpower almost any nuclear-armed state with massive retaliation. It's worth noting the often quoted infamous fact in this regard that the United States spends more on conventional weapons every year than the next several countries combined. The fact is that nuclear weapons as an instrument of military policy are now almost completely outdated even from a technical standpoint. But until zealous and paranoid politicians in Congress who are still living in the Cold War era are reined in, a significant reduction on maintaining the nuclear arsenal doesn't seem to be on the horizon.

Fortunately there are renewed calls for the elimination of these outdated weapons. The risk of possible use of nuclear weapons by terrorists calls for completely new strategies and does nothing to justify the growth and preservation of existing strategic arsenals by new and aspiring nuclear states. The most high-profile recent development has been the introduction of a bipartisan proposal by veteran policy makers and nuclear weapons experts Henry Kissinger, William Perry, Sam Nunn, George Schultz and Sidney Drell who have called for an abolition of these weapons of war. Some would consider this plan a pipe dream, but nothing would be accomplished if we don't fundamentally alter our thinking about nuclear war. There are many practical proposals that would thwart the spread of both weapons and material, including careful accounting of reactor fuel by international alliances, securing of all uranium and plutonium stocks and the blending down of weapons-grade uranium into reactor-grade material, a visionary policy started in the 90s through the Megatons to Megawatts program. For me, one of the most poignant and fascinating facts about nuclear history is that material from Soviet ICBMs aimed at American cities now supplies about half of all American nuclear electricity.

Ultimately as Ward and others have pointed out, nuclear weapons will not go away unless we declare them to be pariahs. No number of technical remedies will cause nations to abandon them until we make these destructive instruments fundamentally unappealing and start seeing them at the very least as outdated dinosaurs whose technological usefulness is now completely obsolete, and at best as immoral and politically useless tools whose possession taints their owner and results in international censure and disapproval. This is another myth that Wilson talks about, the myth that nuclear weapons are here to stay because they "cannot be uninvented". But as Wilson cogently argues, technologies don't go away because they are uninvented, they go away simply because they stop being useful. An analogy would be with cigarettes, at one time seen as status symbols and social lubricants whose risks have now turned them into nuisances at best. This strategy has worked in the past and it should work in the future. We can only make progress when technology becomes unattractive, both from a purely technical as well as a moral and political standpoint. But key to this is a realistic appraisal of the roles that the technology played during its conception. In case of nuclear weapons that mythic appraisal was created by Hiroshima. And it's time we destroyed that myth.

The enduring legacy of Leo Szilard, father of the atomic age

70 years ago on this day, a flash above Hiroshima silenced a hundred thousand voices and heralded the beginning of a new Faustian relationship between man and his machines. But one man had seen the flash 12 years before at a traffic light in London. Here's an account of my minor pilgrimage to that traffic light and a rumination on the enduring legacy of physicist Leo Szilard on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

A few years ago I made a research-related trip to London. While making headway on a collaboration to discover new anticancer drugs was the stated purpose of the trip, my other key goal was to simply stand at a particular traffic light near the British Museum in Bloomsbury and take a photo of myself standing there. I was so drawn to this mundane everyday object that I had made up my mind to visit London at least once in my lifetime for the sole purpose of standing at the intersection. What was so special about this traffic light? The answer had to do with Leo Szilard.

Leo Szilard – peripatetic Hungarian genius, impetuous habitué of hotel lobbies, soothsayer without peer among scientists – stands as a unique signpost at the intersection of twentieth century science and politics. Among his fellow scientists he was the great prophet who anticipated both the advent of Nazism and the coming of the nuclear arms race. To the few members of the public who are familiar with his name, he is perhaps best known as the man who persuaded Albert Einstein in July 1939 to send the famous letter to President Franklin Roosevelt warning the president of the consequences of nuclear fission which had been discovered eight months earlier in Germany. Szilard’s role in the Einstein letter was entirely consistent with his predilection for prediction. Part of the group of brilliant Hungarian “Martians” – scientists like John von Neumann and Edward Teller whose intellects and achievements were considered almost preternatural – Szilard was the most perspicacious in anticipating world events, and the most politically savvy. Even as a student in Berlin, where he hobnobbed with the likes of Einstein, Max Planck and Max von Laue, Szilard was convinced that Europe would soon go to war and that world government was the only solution to our collective problems; this conviction was only strengthened after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Partly by accident and partly by design, Szilard played a key role in some of the most important scientific events of the twentieth century. He always saw key world events before anyone else, and planned accordingly. Born at the turn of the century to a well-off civil engineer and his wife, Szilard’s background prepared him well for anticipating consequential events. Steeped in languages and showing precocious talent for mathematics at an early age, he also became mindful of changing political fortunes after a succession of communist and fascist regimes took over Hungary after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1919.

Like so many of his fellow scientists he left Hungary for Germany whose scientists were heralding new horizons in physics. It was German scientists like Planck and Einstein who, within a span of only twenty years, had fomented both the quantum and the relativity revolutions. In Berlin Szilard befriended Einstein and later filed a patent for a safe refrigerator with the technically savvy former patent clerk. Filing patents became a Szilard trademark; in fact his penchant for exploiting the commercial benefits of his ideas through would have made Szilard feel at home in the twenty-first century world of venture capitalism. Predating Claude Shannon by forty years, he also made important contributions to what we now call information theory. Politically Szilard could see that the country was a mess; while the 1920s Berlin of Christopher Isherwood’s “Goodbye to Berlin” (later turned into the musical "Cabaret") gleamed with dizzying decadence, unprecedented inflation, political instability and social discontent had brought people to their knees and were encouraging the slow but steady rise of fascist elements, ingredients which were congealing into a recipe for a major disaster. 

It was clear to Szilard, even in the 1920s, that the short-term future for Europe was dismal. He soon started living out of a suitcase, a habit that was certainly prudent and prescient for a Jewish intellectual in 1930s Germany. Acutely aware of the fate of colleagues who had been driven out of their jobs, he became active in a British committee which was helping expelled Jewish scientists secure employment. A man who was averse throughout his life to stable, salaried jobs that would deny him the pleasure of travel and squelch his free-thinking spirit, Szilard spent his time taking long walks and hounding the delis of European capitals in search of his beloved pastrami. 1933 found him living in London on a modest budget, subsisting on money earned from patents and private physics lessons. It was during one of his walks that Szilard had an epiphany that would gain him a place in the history books and, six decades later, compel a callow student of the history of science to seek out a traffic light in London.

Adolf Hitler had come to power in January, The Depression was raging and the future looked bleak to many. On the morning of September 12, 1933, on a miserable, wet English autumn day, at the intersection where Russell Square meets Southampton Row, Szilard waited impatiently at a traffic light waiting for it to change from red to green. He had just been sitting in a cafe, reading an article in The Times reporting a lecture by the great English physicist Ernest Rutherford. Rutherford, known to many as the father of nuclear physics, was discussing the newly prophesied release of energy from atoms, most notably by science-fiction pioneer H G Wells in his book “The World Set Free” which Szilard had recently read. It had been only one year when a Rutherford protégé named James Chadwick had discovered the elusive neutron, the third component of the nuclear atom along with electrons and protons. The past few years had seen a succession of experiments designed to shoot various particles into the heart of the atomic nucleus to probe its structure. Since every one of these particles had been charged they had to contend with the fearsome charged barrier erected by protons and electrons; lacking charge, the neutron was considered an ideal candidate as an atomic projectile. 

The science of nuclear physics was then in its heyday, as were social strife and the rise of fascism. Wells was not averse to speculating on a potentially explosive meld of the two. In his book the great powers of the world wage war with what Wells calls “atomic bombs”, gadgets deriving their enormous stores of energy from the forces holding the atomic nucleus together. Wells’s prognostications as well as Rutherford’s response to it had both made the front page of The Times. When asked whether there was any realistic chance of harnessing energy from the atom, Rutherford in his baritone voice dismissed this fanciful idea as nonsense. Any thought of releasing the energy locked inside the nucleus, he said, was “moonshine”.

Szilard was irritated by this flippant repudiation. Accomplished as he was, how could even the great Lord Rutherford know what the future held in store? During his own days Szilard had seen the great scientific minds of his time not fly but grope toward the truth and he was well aware how unpredictable the course of scientific discovery can be. Steeped in the pioneering discoveries in physics over the last four decades, Szilard himself had thought deeply about nuclear matters before, most often during extended morning bathtub ablutions in expensive hotels. Now, waiting for the light to change, he pondered Rutherford’s words…

What happened next has been immortalized by historian Richard Rhodes in his seminal work, “The Making of the Atomic Bomb”. The first time I read about it the words got seared into my mind.

“In London, where Southampton Row passes Russell Square, across from the British Museum in Bloomsbury, Leo Szilard waited irritably one gray Depression morning for the stoplight to change. A trace of rain had fallen during the night; Tuesday, September 12, 1933, dawned cool, humid and dull. Drizzling rain would begin again in early afternoon. When Szilard told the story later he never mentioned his destination that morning. He may have had none; he often walked to think. In any case another destination intervened. The stoplight changed to green. Szilard stepped off the curb. As he crossed the street time cracked open before him and he saw a way to the future, death into the world and all our woes, the shape of things to come”…

Time cracked open indeed. What Szilard realized as he stepped off that curb was that if we found an element that when bombarded by one neutron would release two neutrons, it could lead to a chain reaction that could possibly release vast amounts of energy. Leo Szilard had discovered the nuclear chain reaction long before anyone else, six years before the discovery of nuclear fission and any inkling that anyone could have had about the release of atomic energy, let alone the woeful apocalyptic future that would await the world because of its release. In his later days Szilard told an audience, “Physics and politics were always my two great interests”. That September morning the two unexpectedly collided at the traffic intersection and foretold a chain reaction of world events.

I first read Rhodes’s book in college; it was one of the books that sealed my resolve to become a scientist. The book begins with this story. Since then the event has been etched in my mind like words in red-hot steel. The description is so riveting, the tale so profound and evocative, the person so singular and the implications so prophetic, that I resolved to visit Szilard’s traffic light even if I had to once make a trip to London for just this purpose. Several years later I had the opportunity.

The traffic light itself is completely nondescript, standing among dozens of other nondescript lights. My friend and I almost missed it. As I mused aloud about my great disappointment in a cafe and wished I had a map, a Spanish tourist sitting at the next table saved my life and procured one. The intersection was there; we had missed it by a block. Back we went and indeed there it was, with not an indication that a famous and prophetic physicist had seen into the future at that light some 75 years ago. I stood at the intersection and had my friend take a photo for posterity. A moment captured in time, in homage to another moment prophesying the possible end of time.

As it happened, Szilard’s choice for the element he was thinking about turned out to be wrong. He dutifully filed a patent about his idea with the British Admiralty, which promptly stashed it away in the dark as the fanciful meanderings of an eccentric scientist. In fact nuclear fission would be discovered only six years later in Germany after a series of close misses in Italy and France. When Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman reported the unexpected breaking up of the uranium nucleus, it was Szilard’s vision on that wet English day that allowed him to grasp the significance of the discovery instantly and prompted him to persuade Einstein to send his famous letter to FDR. He would go on to work with Enrico Fermi on the world’s first nuclear reactor, exasperate Manhattan Project security with his contempt for compartmentalization and unsuccessfully try to get another letter to FDR - this time presciently warning that direct use of the bomb would spark an arms race - before a stroke unexpectedly cut the president’s life short. Ironically when the first atomic bomb test was conducted on July 16, 1945 in the deathly stillness of the New Mexico desert, the flash was so bright that it would have been seen reflected off the moon. It was, literally, “moonshine”. The rest was history. Leo Szilard died peacefully in his sleep in 1964, hoping that the genie he and his fellow scientists had unleashed would co-exist harmoniously with mankind.

But that day I lived one of my minor dreams at that traffic light in London. A light illuminating a tale of human triumph and folly. Leo Szilard’s light. Standing at the intersection, I could not help but feel my mind racing across gulfs of time and forging a connection with this remarkable man. I stood there in silence for a few minutes, contemplating the consequences of Szilard’s vision for the future. Then we went on our way. A light rain began to batter the sidewalk.

References:
1. William Lanouette - Genius in the Shadows (this remains the best and most authoritative biography of Szilard)
2. Richard Rhodes - The Making of the Atomic Bomb (this remains the most eloquent and definitive history of the birth of the atomic age).

The intersection of Russell Square and Southampton Row where I stood. Of course, it's probably impossible to say which of the four lights Szilard was standing at (I was at the one to the right myself).

Remember

From Nobel Laureate Kenzaburo Oe:

Sixty-five years ago, after learning that a friend who was reported missing after the bombing of Hiroshima had turned up in a hospital there, my mother put together a meager care package and set out from our home in Shikoku to pay a visit. When she returned, she shared her friend’s description of that morning in August 1945.

Moments before the atomic bomb was dropped, my mother’s friend happened to seek shelter from the bright summer sunlight in the shadow of a sturdy brick wall, and she watched from there as two children who had been playing out in the open were vaporized in the blink of an eye. “I just felt outraged,” she told my mother, weeping.

Even though I didn’t fully grasp its import at the time, I feel that hearing that horrifying story (along with the word outrage, which put down deep, abiding roots in my heart) is what impelled me to become a writer. But I’m haunted by the thought that, ultimately, I was never able to write a “big novel” about the people who experienced the bombings and the subsequent 50-plus years of the nuclear age that I’ve lived through — and I think now that writing that novel is the only thing I ever really wanted to do.

In Edward W. Said’s last book, “On Late Style,” he gives many examples of artists (composers, musicians, poets, writers) whose work as they grew older contained a peculiar sort of concentrated tension, hovering on the brink of catastrophe, and who, in their later years, used that tension to express their epochs, their worlds, their societies, themselves.

As for me, on the day last week when I learned about the revival of the nuclear-umbrella ideology, I looked at myself sitting alone in my study in the dead of night . . . . . . and what I saw was an aged, powerless human being, motionless under the weight of this great outrage, just feeling the peculiarly concentrated tension, as if doing so (while doing nothing) were an art form in itself. And for that old Japanese man, perhaps sitting there alone in silent protest will be his own “late work.”