Original Child Bomb: What We Talk About When We Talk About The Bomb (Part 5)

This is the fifth part in the series, Original Child Bomb. Below I've given an all-too-brief description of the environmental devastation, close calls, and insanity of nuclear deterrence policy: all are part of the legacy of those first bombs dropped on Japan. You can find the rest of the series here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

Environmental Devastation

The history of US nuclear weapons since Hiroshima and Nagasaki is a history of tragedy and poison - for the environment, below ground and above ground, for many who were used as guinea pigs, and for those unfortunate enough to be downwind to test sites. Results: cancer, tortured landscapes and people, superfund sites, waste. There has been the loss of staggering amounts of money that went into research and development for bigger and bigger weapons…and now, smaller and smaller weapons (mini-nukes, bunker-busters).

The Realm of Pluto

Rocky Flats being disassembled

Back in the fall of '98, I went on a tour of Rocky Flats, a former nuclear weapons production plant that was in the process of being disassembled. For forty years Rocky Flats had manufactured what were called plutonium triggers, or "pits". When I was there most of the buildings had been broken down and shipped to salt caves beneath the earth near Carlsbad, New Mexico (Waste Isolation Pilot Plant), a place licensed to permanently dispose of transuranic radioactive waste left over from the research and production of nuclear weapons (more on that below).

Here are a few of the incidents that occurred at Rocky Flats over the years:

Glove-box after fire, 1957

"On September 11, 1957, a plutonium fire occurred in one of the gloveboxes used to handle radioactive materials, igniting the combustible rubber gloves and plexiglas windows of the box.  The accident resulted in the contamination of Building 771, the release of plutonium into the atmosphere, and caused $818,600 in damage. An incinerator for plutonium-contaminated waste was installed in Building 771 in 1958.

"Barrels of radioactive waste were found to be leaking into an open field in 1959. This was not made publicly known until 1970 when wind-borne particles were detected in Denver.

"In 1967, 3,500 barrels (560 m3) of plutonium contaminated lubricants and solvents were stored on Pad 903. A large number of them were found to be leaking, and low-level contaminated soil was becoming wind-borne from this area. This pad was covered with gravel and paved over with asphalt in 1969." (Rocky Flats Plant/Wikipedia) 

A close encounter with Pad 903

On the Rocky Flats tour, we had a guide who worked for the Department of Defense (Dante had his Virgil, as a guide through the underworld, the realm of Pluto, and we had a former journalist, who made cliché statements about the harmlessness of current radioactive levels by talking about how much radiation a banana gives off. I ended up naming him our "Crap Virgil."). At one point, we were standing on the edge of Pad 903, and Crap Virgil told us about the leakage and how the problem of the contaminated soil was solved by paving it over. Those of us on the tour looked out over the pad (you could see Denver and the northern suburbs of Denver in the distance). There were numerous cracks in the asphalt. Mullein and thistle were growing out of the cracks. Someone pointed at one of the larger cracks and said, "But…" And then everyone laughed. A high, keening, nervous kind of laughter.

The list of accidents and leaks of radioactive materials continued through 1989. In 1989, things got so bad at the facility that it was raided by the EPA and the FBI and was shut down. Operators of the plant eventually pleaded guilty to criminal violations of environmental law.

Nuclear Industrial Complex/Nukewatch

These accidents were not isolated to Rocky Flats. They have happened throughout the nuclear-industrial complex. But if you think that nuclear accidents are now a thing of the past, think again. There have been recent accidents, one of which may be one of the worst (and costliest) since the nuclear age began: a drum of radioactive waste blew up in an underground cave at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico on February 14, 2014. The long-term cost of the clean-up could be more than $2 billion. Because it has contaminated the place where nuclear weapons grade waste is dumped (and probably the larger region - the Carlsbad desert community), thousands of tons of radioactive waste has been backed up across the country, waiting for transport. (Nuclear Accident in New Mexico among costliest in US history, August 22, 2016, LA Times)   

What is not listed here are all the accidents that are constantly happening among the other nuclear powers. And there are now nine: The US, Russia, China, the UK, France, Pakistan, India, Israel, and North Korea. God knows what has gone on and is still going on in their nuclear industrial complexes.

The clean-up (List of Superfund Sites/Wikipedia ) from all the chemicals, the radioactive materials, has cost and is currently costing the US billions of dollars that could be have been funneled back into our crumbling infrastructure, into our schools, into job skills programs, into rebuilding our inner cities and our rural areas, into rehabilitation-oriented drug programs, into clean energy research…the list seems endless. 

With this tremendous power has come tremendous waste.  

Bombing Ourselves: Close Calls, Tests

Nevada Test Site, 1951

It has been sheer luck that the world (or, at the very least, a city or two) hasn't burned in a nuclear conflagration. There are no highly qualified, omniscient "masters" at the helm of all this power who will protect us from harm. There are only human beings working in this underworld - human beings just like you and me. I find this terrifying.

Nuclear Explosion seen from Las Vegas, 1950's

The list of military nuclear accidents since 1944 is quite long (and can be found here: List of Military Nuclear Accidents/Wikipedia). In fact, there are so many incidents that I'll only list one, from 1966: A B-52 bomber, carrying four hydrogen bombs, was on routine patrol and collided with a re-fueling jet over Spain. The four nuclear weapons fell to earth. There were explosions, but the warheads did not detonate. One bomb was temporarily lost in the ocean, and two bombs exploded, spreading plutonium over the village of Palomares. "In

Fuselage in field/Palomares accident, 1966

1966, American troops removed about 5,000 barrels of contaminated soil after the accident and called the cleanup complete. But about a decade ago, the Spanish authorities found elevated levels of plutonium over 99 acres. Some of the areas of elevated radioactivity almost touched private homes, as well as fields and greenhouses. (4 Hydrogen Bombs from '66 Scar Spanish Village, NYT, June 20, 2016)

Nuclear Fallout from Tests/Nukewatch

It is common knowledge that the US tested in Nevada and the Pacific across four decades - above ground and then below ground. There were numerous "tests" on soldiers in the field, resulting in thousands of deaths from cancer many years later. Those living downwind from these tests had inordinate amounts of cancer compared to the rest of the population. (You can see on the Nukewatch chart above where the radioactive waste was carried.)  

The Psychopathology of Deterrence

Since WWII, nuclear deterrence theory postulates that possessing nuclear weapons is a deterrence against nuclear attack by another nation. Nuclear strategy and "security" has relied on Mutually Assured Destruction" (MAD): the idea that that any attack would result in massive retaliation and ultimately the annihilation of ALL combatants. By destroying your enemy, you destroy yourself. What is rarely pointed out is that nuclear weapons have not secured the world against war at all - they have only deterred the world from nuclear war. A strange irony, that. The creation and possession of the weapon gives rise to the deterrence of war with that very weapon? Some dark humor involved in that. Hideously dark. It seems once you become a nuclear power, you become a nuclear target…

Two men, one in the military, the other a civilian - but both involved in the nuclear military-industrial complex, have had important things to say about its psychopathology: General George Lee Butler, commander of SAC (1991-2) and head of Strategic Command (1993-4); and William Perry, Secretary of Defense (1994-7).

Butler has said: "Mankind escaped the Cold War without a nuclear holocaust by some combination of diplomatic skill, blind luck and divine intervention, probably the latter in greatest proportion." He also said that nuclear deterrence is "a slippery intellectual construct that translates very poorly into the real world of spontaneous crises, inexplicable motivations, incomplete intelligence and fragile human relationships." (Many articles on and speeches by Butler can be found at wagingpeace.org)

Perry described strategic nuclear thinking in the 60's (of which he was a part) as "surreal." In his book, My Life at the Nuclear Brink (Stanford University Press, 2015), he says:

 "When I look back on those years I see a historically all-too-familiar irrational, impassioned thinking, a thinking that has led to wars throughout human history and a thinking in the nuclear age more dangerous than ever. This thinking drove the frenzied debates on nuclear strategy, drove the huge additions in destructiveness we made to our nuclear forces, and brought us to the brink of blundering into a nuclear war. It was a colossal failure of imagination not to see where this was leading. Even before the nuclear arms buildups of the 1970's and 1980's, our nuclear forces were more than enough to blow up the world. Our deterrent forces were fearsome enough to deter any rational leader. Yet we obsessively claimed inadequacies in our nuclear forces. We fantasized about a 'window of vulnerability.' Both governments - ours and that of the Soviet Union - spread fear among our peoples. We acted as if the world had not changed with the emergence of the nuclear age, the age in which the world had changed as never before."

What truly alarmed both Perry and Butler was that strategic planning "saw nuclear weaponry as the high end of conventional weaponry - and could be used tactically." (The Violent American Century, 2017, John W. Dower, p 41)

Mini-Nukes

& The New Nuclear Weapons Race

The belief that nuclear weapons can be used tactically is still very much in vogue. Although the world's nuclear arsenals have been decreased by substantial amounts since the end of the Cold War, production on new forms of nuclear weaponry has resulted in a new Cold War pace of production.

"Moscow is fielding big missiles topped by miniaturized warheads, and experts fear that it may violate the global test ban as it develops new weapons. According to Russian news reports, the Russian Navy is developing an undersea drone meant to loft a cloud of radioactive contamination from an underwater explosion that would make target cities uninhabitable…. The Chinese military…is flight-testing a novel warhead called a 'hypersonic glide vehicle.' It flies into space on a traditional long-range missile but then maneuvers through the atmosphere, twisting and careening at more than a mile a second. That can render missile defenses all but useless…and as part of the modernization process, it (the US military) is also planning five classes of improved nuclear arms and associated delivery vehicles that, as a family, are shifting the American arsenal in the direction of small, stealthy and precise." (Race for latest class of nuclear weapons, New York Times, April 16, 2016)

And this: Military experts argue that miniaturized weapons will help deter an expanding range of potential attackers. "The United States needs discriminate nuclear options at all rungs of the nuclear escalation ladder," said a report in 2015 from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a research group in Washington.

And this: "Selva, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, has confirmed that as part of the Pentagon's ongoing nuclear posture review, it is looking at a new generation of low-yield 'mini-nukes' in order to ensure that the threat from America's nuclear arsenal remains credible."(Pentagon considering mini-nukes for maximum deterrence, Washington Examiner, August 5, 2017)

How This Will Play Out:

Money, Money, & More Money

"You might think that the most powerful weapons in the U.S. arsenal -- nuclear warheads -- would be paid for out of the Pentagon budget.  And you would, of course, be wrong.  The cost of researching, developing, maintaining, and “modernizing” the American arsenal of 6,800 nuclear warheads falls to an obscure agency located inside the Department of Energy: the National Nuclear Security Administration, or NNSA. It also works on naval nuclear reactors, pays for the environmental cleanup of nuclear weapons facilities, and funds the nation’s three nuclear weapons laboratories, at a total annual cost of more than $20 billion per year." (William D. Hartung in an article at Tomdispatch)

There's gold in them thar bombs! That's why they keep getting made, why there is more and more research done. There are people and corporations out there making a killing. Once again, as it was in the beginning, it's clear that very few involved in the making of or the strategy about nuclear weapons are facing the consequences. Who among them will have the courage to look back at the devastated cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and say "Stop"? Who among them will ask who was that person standing in front of a bank when the first bomb exploded, leaving only an anonymous shadow on the stone steps?

Next:

(the final section...for now)

Shadow: Absence

Original Child Bomb: What We Talk About When We Talk About The Bomb (Part 3)

Today is the 72nd Anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. This is the third section of the series, Original Child Bomb, some of which explores why it's important to acknowledge this anniversary each year. The past is present. The decision-making process that led to the dropping of the bomb has had a direct influence on both conventional US military strategy and US views about its nuclear arsenal. 

The first part in the series can be found here (part 1). The second can be found here (part 2).

The Conventional Narrative

August 6th, 1945: the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved countless lives.

This is the story we in the US are continually told: because of the fierce and almost suicidal fighting on Okinawa by the Japanese (true), and the appearance of kamikaze pilots in the war at sea (true), many in the Pentagon assumed that an invasion of the Japanese home islands would cost the lives of up to a million US soldiers. The story goes on to say that, because the US made the decision to drop two atomic bombs, Japan immediately surrendered - saving countless US and Japanese lives. As Ward Wilson said in Five Myths about Nuclear Weapons (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2013): "If nuclear weapons were a religion, Hiroshima would be the first miracle." (p 23)

The lesson learned - and the legacy for military strategy - was that overwhelming force caused the capitulation of the enemy. So, the question is: did the weapons work in the way American history says they did?

Five Months of Saturation Bombing

Nothing exists in a vacuum. The months leading up to the decision to drop the bomb are as important to remember as the dropping of the bomb itself. In the last five months of the war there was an intense fire-bombing campaign over Japan. Incendiary bombs, filled with napalm (what were then called "jelly bombs"), were dropped on a total of sixty-three cities.

Tokyo Firebombing

On March 9th, 1945, Tokyo was fire-bombed. 334 bombers dropped 2000 tons of bombs on a target measured three by four miles. Winds generated by the flames ranged from 28 to 55 miles an hour. It was claimed by B-29 crews flying at 6000 feet that "the heat was so intense the crews had to don oxygen masks." (John W. Dower, Cultures of War, p 181) Japanese authorities put the fatalities at about 84,000 (most historians find this a conservative number - it was probably more like 100,000). One million were left homeless.

Tokyo Firebombing

Because most of the buildings in Japanese cities were built of wood and paper, they easily burnt to the ground, leaving very little after the fire-storms. What John Swope, a photographer for Life Magazine, and one of the first American photographers to land on the islands, called "Ghost cities" or "Dead Cities." (A Letter From Japan: The Photographs of John Swope) Several thousand US airmen lost their lives in these raids - and the tragedy of most of these deaths is that they were predominantly due to mechanical failure. By this time, the Japanese offered very little resistance. There was nothing left to resist with. Many US airmen, in diaries and journals from the time, called the raids "milk runs."

Between March 9-19, 1945, there was the saturation bombing of Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe, Yokohama, and Kawasaki. In late May, the saturation bombing continued on Tokyo. The NY Times headline on May 30, 1945 read: "Fifty-One square miles burned out in six B-29 attacks on Tokyo." (Dower, p 183) These raids were in keeping with the Allied strategy of saturation bombing in Germany, specifically targeting civilian populations, from 1942 through the end of the war.

Tokyo Firebombing (mother & child)

Franklin D. Roosevelt had, in 1939,  beseeched all nations to refrain from “inhuman barbarism,” of attacking civilian centers. In the recent past, he noted such assaults had “resulted in the maiming and in the death of thousands of defenseless men, women, and children.” (The German bombing of Guernica, The Japanese bombing of Shanghai) But by 1942, targeting civilian populations had become a routine Allied strategy. 

Callousness on Both Sides

Tokyo

A report from the US Office of Information Services that was released after the war claimed that in those five months 310,000 Japanese civilians had been killed, 412,000 injured, and 9 million rendered homeless. "For five flaming months…a thousand all-American planes and 20,000 American men brought homelessness, terror and death to an arrogant foe, and left him practically a nomad in an almost city-less land." ("Highlights of the Twentieth Century Air Force," Office of Information Services, Headquarters, Army Air Force, 1945; Dower, p 192) A side note about the saturation bombings: the transportation system that fed the industrial war machine was largely left untouched. The Americans did not want to have to rebuild the system when they finally occupied the mainland. If you think about it, the callousness generated over those five months made the decision to drop a nuclear bomb on civilians that much easier.

Hirohito walks through ruins of Tokyo

While these bombings were going on - rendering most of the cities to sticks and ash, US submarines were blockading the home islands. Nothing was coming or going from the mainland. Did the saturation bombing or the blockade cause the Japanese High Command to consider surrender? No, not to an unconditional surrender. But at the time, they were seeking back channels - through the Soviet Union and others - for a negotiated peace. What they were looking for was a guarantee that the imperial system would remain intact. While hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians were dying all around them, they were still looking for a way out of unconditional surrender, for a "peace with honor." Honor, namely, for themselves. During the summer of 1945, war crimes trials were beginning in Germany, and it must not have been lost on Japanese generals that this would be their fate if they surrendered unconditionally.

The US Decision 

Meanwhile, back in the US, the Interim Committee (a secret high-level group created in May 1945 by United States Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, at the urging of leaders of the Manhattan Project and with the approval of Harry S. Truman to advise on matters pertaining to nuclear energy) were meeting to decide what to do with the nuclear weapon, the product of The Manhattan Project. The project had been started with the belief that the scientists were in a race against Germany. But through intelligence reports, it was clear that by 1944 Germany did not have the capabilities to build a bomb. So, who were we continuing to build the bomb for?

Oppenheimer with General Leslie Groves at Trinity Site

There were misgivings in the Interim Committee, and among the scientists who had created the bomb, about its use on civilians. There was the Franck Report of June 1945, a statement issued by scientists at the metallurgical laboratories in Chicago against the use of the bomb on civilians, and the Szilard Petition, a group of 70 scientists at Los Alamos who signed a petition that made a similar statement. It was much too little, too late. Only a few scientists actually quit the project because of ethical qualms. The project was, in Oppenheimer's terms, "too technically sweet" to walk away from. 

Oppenheimer himself was for the use of the weapon because, in his own convoluted thinking, he believed that "if the bomb is to make war impossible, it must have a very strong effect." So, like the military, he sought peace - even an ultimate global peace - through overwhelming use of force. He also said this: "The elements of surprise and terror are intrinsic to the use of nuclear weapons." (Dower, p 211) Between Stimson, on the government side, and Oppenheimer, on the production side, it was almost unanimous that the bomb be used as a test on some city that was relatively untouched - a test for both physical and psychological damage.

Surprisingly, there was a lone dissenter on the Interim Committee. Under Secretary of the Navy, Ralph Bard, who wrote the "Memorandum on the use of the S-1 Bomb," argued for warning the Japanese ahead of time of the exact nature of the bomb, fearing the decision to drop it on civilians would have an adverse effect on "the position of the US as a great humanitarian nation." (Dower, p 232)

When the decision was made, the actual invasion plans had already been drawn up, and were set to begin in November of 1945 on a southern island, followed by an invasion force into the Tokyo-Yokohama area around March of 1946.  Knowing what they knew about Japanese resistance during the bombings, and how few actual cities were left standing, why the extreme haste in using the bombs? By the fall, starvation alone, and the unrest it would have created for the government, would have brought the Japanese to the table. Surrender could have happened without the bombs, Soviet entry into the war, or an allied invasion.

By this time, because of the massive incendiary bombing of civilians (for years, on all fronts, by everyone), reliance on overwhelming force had become gospel and second nature. In May of 1945, the Interim Committee decided that "the number of people that would be killed by the bomb would not be greater in general magnitude than the number already killed in fire raids." (Dower, p 225)

Hiroshima aftermath

In the documentary The Fog of War, former US Secretary of Defense, Robert S. McNamara, recalled that General Curtis LeMay, the man who relayed the Presidential order to drop the nuclear bombs on Japan, had said: "If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals…" 

"And I think he’s right," McNamara said. "He, and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?"

Enola Gay flying from explosion over Hiroshima

Next:

Finishing the history of the decision making process (the Soviet angle, partisan politics, the bomb as the first shot fired in the Cold War, and the spread of the Bomb Myth with help from the Japanese High Command)

 Nukewatch: Nuclear Watch New Mexico

Shadow of someone running,
etched in stone by the Hiroshima blast

Original Child Bomb: What We Talk About When We Talk About The Bomb (Part 1)

Peace Vigil, Los Alamos, NM, August 6, 2015

We are coming up on the 72nd Anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (August 6th and 9th). Which got me to thinking about two years ago, on the 70th anniversary, when Michaela and I went to the annual Sackcloth and Ashes vigil in Los Alamos (where the original bomb was designed and made, and continues to be a major laboratory complex for nuclear and conventional weapons manufacture), protesting against the continual existence of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (and all other laboratories and factories that include the vast nuclear-industrial complex), keeping a nonviolent witness for those that had suffered from the bombings, and, most importantly, through that witness imagining the possibility of a universal nuclear weapons ban.   

           

There was a rally at Ashley Pond, a park that rests on the physical site where the original bomb was made, and then we walked up Trinity Drive, towards the laboratory entrance. Most wore burlap, some covered themselves with ashes. We sat for an hour on the sidewalk in silence before heading back to the pond. Many cars drove by. Some honked in support. Some honked and yelled in disgust or anger. Some - mostly the young - looked confused, having no idea why we were there.  

           

Most of the cars that drove by were probably driven by those employed or related to those employed in some capacity by the Department of Defense. They work at the laboratory. They make a good living. There is a lot of money in weapons research. The county that contains Los Alamos is one of the richest counties in the United States. The county that houses the Santa Clara Pueblo in the valley below is the second poorest county in the nation. It's clear where our priorities lie.

           

While sitting on the sidewalk, I began to think about how little I knew about the decision- making process over the dropping of that first nuclear bomb. I have, for the most part, focused on the consequences of the bomb - and the economic and environmental devastation left in the wake of the nuclear-industrial complex. Since that vigil two years ago, I've read about the history of the making of the first nuclear bomb and the factors that went into using it on Hiroshima and Nagasaki - and discovered how that history has had a direct influence on how the US views its nuclear arsenal today - and has helped shape conventional military strategy and thinking. I'll be posting some of that information in the next few posts.  

But first…

           

Hope?

A Global Treaty to Ban Nuclear Weapons

UN Treaty Negotiations, 2017

I want to start with a glimmer of hope. On July 7, 2017, a global treaty was approved to ban nuclear weapons. 122 nations in the UN endorsed this treaty (two thirds of the 192-member body). Within two years the treaty could have the 50-state ratifications it needs to become international law. To no one's surprise, all those nations who have nuclear weapons, and those that come under their protection or host weapons on their soil, boycotted the negotiations.

There was very little coverage of this event in the US media. So, here's a little more detail from a Guardian article:

“'It’s a prohibition in line with other prohibitions on weapons of mass destruction,' said Beatrice Fihn at the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons in Geneva. 'We banned biological weapons 45 years ago, we banned chemical weapons 25 years ago, and today we are banning nuclear weapons.' Within two years the treaty could have the 50-state ratifications that it needs to enter into international law, she said.

"Previous UN treaties have been effective even when key nations have failed to sign up to them. The US did not sign up to the landmines treaty, but has completely aligned its landmines policy to comply nonetheless. 'These kinds of treaties have an impact that forces countries to change their behavior. It is not going to happen fast, but it does affect them,' Fihn said. 'We have seen on all other weapons that prohibition comes first, and then elimination. This is taking the first step towards elimination.'” (Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapons Approved, The Guardian, July 7, 2017)

It's a given that the nuclear powers would not sign this treaty - who wants to give up such power? - but the treaty is a step in the right direction. If only giving voice to the desire to eliminate the threat of nuclear annihilation. Especially now that nuclear weapons are back on the menu, what with all the nuclear saber rattling between North Korea and the US.

***

Next: A Poem by Tōge Sankichi,
activist, poet, survivor of the atomic bomb

***

(Original Child Bomb is a mistranslation of the Japanese term for the atom bomb, genshi bakudan. Genshi, which means "atom," contains root characters which, when rendered individually, can possibly mean "original" and "child." There is a Thomas Merton poem and a documentary of the same name. It was supposed for years that this was the literal translation of atom bomb because the Japanese saw it as the first of its kind. As far as I can tell, original child bomb was never used by the Japanese - and yet it seems to contain, in English - because of it's strange and innocent distance from the horrors of the explosion and its aftermath - a more appropriately ominous and terrifying feel than "atom bomb.")