On this anniversary of the atom bomb, can the children of Japan, and of the world at large, tell their parents and grandparents to ‘give peace a chance’?
by Sehdev Kumar
The Peace Park in Nagasaki, and the Atomic Bomb Museum next to it, try to memorialise a day in human history that cannot be, and should not be, forgotten. It was here, in the Japanese city of Nagasaki that the second atom bomb was dropped by the Americans on August 9, 1945. It was less than three days after the first bomb had stunned the city of Hiroshima and the warring nation of Japan on August 6.
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| Peace Park in Nagasaki |
The two new, and unheard-of, weapons of destruction instantly killed more than 2,00,000 men, women and children, and left hundreds of thousands more to suffer for decades. A new kind of warfare had started, the like of which, with all our warring addictions for millennia, we humans had never even imagined in our wildest nightmares. Today, more than seven decades later, this nuclear warfare, with its mind-boggling capacity for Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) of the whole world many times over, has become the centrepiece of defence and offence of all ‘civilised’ nations.
In the 1950s, after witnessing the two world wars that killed more than 70 million people, towards the end of his life, as the great scientist Albert Einstein watched with dismay the relentless and fierce nuclear arms race, he was once asked, “What kind of weapons do you imagine would be used in the Third World War?” He said he didn’t know what the weapons might be in the Third World War, but the weapons in the war after that would be ‘stones and arrows’.
Einstein saw, as many others have seen time and again, how in the face of thousands of nuclear weapons, human civilisation, in fact all life, is faced with obliteration and extinction.
In the wake of these new weapons, as a new nation of India was forging ahead, scientists wanted to know of Mahatma Gandhi what they should do if they were asked by the state to engage in research for atom bomb and other weapons. Gandhi replied unflinchingly: “Scientists to be worth the name should resist such a State unto death.”
Peace Park in Nagasaki
Here in the Peace Park in Nagasaki, where thousands of schoolchildren come every week from all over Japan, the destruction wrought by two atom bombs is only a distant memory, perhaps of their grandparents. But, in truth, this is a story that needs to be known by everyone all over the world, because human survival and the fate of the earth depend on how we learn to live with each other, not by waging wars but by waging peace. As part of the Manhattan Project, during the war in the 1940s, the US spent more than $2 billion (equivalent of more than $38 billion today) in developing these new kinds of weapons. Since then, trillions of dollars have spent on more and more deadly weapons.
After the bombs had been exploded and more than 2,00,000 people killed, and a devastating new era in warfare had been ushered in, and new stories of continuing death and destruction kept coming in from Japan, there were many scientists who felt a profound sense of remorse in doing the ‘devil’s work’.
At a meeting in the White House with President Truman in November 1945, the ‘father of atomic bomb’, scientist Robert J Oppenheimer, confessed: “Mr President, I feel I have blood on my hands.” The President pulled out a handkerchief from his pocket and contemptuously offered to Oppenheimer: “Well, here, would you like to wipe off your hands?” After he left the Oval Office, Truman turned to Dean Acheson, Undersecretary of State, and said: “I don't want to see that son of a bitch in this office ever again.”
The ‘devil’s work’ that Oppenheimer believed that scientists were engaged in had now moved securely into the hands of the father of H-Bomb, Edward Teller, who considered nuclear arms synonymous with progress. “To abstain from progress is a medieval idea,” he argued. “I am in favour of any advance in knowledge or any development of the greater power of man.” He went on to propose and plan the ‘Star Wars’ defence initiative for President Reagan in the 1980s.
Scientists’ movement against N-arms
The unimaginable destruction at Hiroshima and Nagasaki did, nevertheless, prompt a vigorous movement among scientists against nuclear arms. The scientists’ movement for world government and international control of atomic energy was sustained by the prevailing belief that commitment to science almost automatically gave one an internationalist perspective and a unique ethical vintage point. For many, as distinguished physicist James Frank put it, scientists were members of a “kind of international brotherhood, comparable in many ways to religious order”, whose public activities were “dictated solely by our social conscience.”
Yet, the arrogance of power and money, and the clever rationalising skills of the politicians and the technocrats have dulled many a conscience and put it to deep sleep. In the words of Martin Luther King: “We have guided missiles and misguided men.”
In the 1960s, during the Vietnam War, King argued: “A nation that continues, year after year, to spend more money on military defence than on programs of social uplift, is approaching spiritual death.” Since then, in the past 50 years, the defence budget of the US, as of other countries, has increased at least tenfold.
It is one of the ironies of politics that no less than an American President, Dwight D Eisenhower — military commander in WW-II — at the end of his eight-year term spoke passionately against the Military-Industrial Complex and the futility of militarism: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hope of its children.”
On this anniversary of the atom bomb, can the children of Japan, and of the world at large, tell their parents and grandparents to ‘give peace a chance’?
( The writer, Professor Emeritus, University of Waterloo, Canada)
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