How I Learned to Love the Bomb

The Resuscitation of Patriotic Lies in Nolan’s Oppenheimer

History is constantly rewritten as each generation learns it anew. Sometimes we uncover new lessons, sometimes we forget things that should never be forgotten. As there are fewer and fewer people remaining who survived the horrors of World War II, that story is being rewritten at an accelerating pace. And it doesn’t look good.

Most immediately, I’m referring to Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. Throughout, the film trivializes the evil that is atomic warfare by being disproportionately engrossed with J. Robert Oppenheimer’s big ambitions and big feelings. To be clear, I believe it can be both appropriate and powerful to examine a global tragedy through the lens of a single person’s life. Are we responsible for how our work gets used? How do we navigate a situation of political persecution when we identify as somewhere in between the persecuted and their persecutors? So many people right now could benefit from such stories, if they were told right. Nolan, though, does not. Instead he gives us an off-kilter drama that stumbles through a genius-man’s struggle with his own conscience (I’m such a genius that I just have to invent this new weapon of mass murder, but then it might be used for mass murder! Gosh darn it’s hard being such a genius!) and then stutteringly shifts to a principled-man’s forbearance under the persecution of conniving politicians. To beat that, he just has to sit back, let his wife get a few lines, let his enemies strut and puff, and wait for the moral arc of the universe to bend back towards justice. Because, as all true Americans know, every story has a happy ending.

This isn’t just narrative clumsiness. It is the same self-absorption and lack of empathy that the movie requires so we don’t notice what else it is doing. The film is, at its heart, an effective alibi for US mythologies, cementing the patriotic lies of the Cold War in the minds of a new generation.

The lie is this: the US had to drop two atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945 as the only way to end the war; and in fact by doing so they saved lives. This lie rests heavily on racist depictions of the Japanese, who supposedly would have fought to the death.

The US government actively promoted racist stereotypes during the war, but seventy years have passed. Nonetheless, that particular trope is alive and well today. When I searched Google for the terms “Japanese negotiating surrender”, the second suggested search term was “why do Japanese never surrender”.

The US government and military planners who made the decision to drop the bombs and murder around 300,000 people, nearly all civilians, were not just deluded by the racist attitudes of the day. They were conscious architects of those attitudes. For example, they were well aware that the Japanese government had already surrendered or signed ceasefire agreements in three different wars just in the prior three decades. As soon as it became politically strategic to do so, though, the US government used pre-existing racist mechanisms to justify unleashing massive violence.

USians who grew up during the Cold War will typically summon the argument of the Japanese soldiers who came in from the jungle 28 and 29 years after the war ended as a proof. Actually, this evidence undermines their argument: since the US military had already island-hopped to within striking distance of the main islands of the Japanese archipelago, it demonstrably did not matter if Japanese soldiers cut off from naval and air support refused to surrender.

In fact, there was never a military necessity to drop the atomic bombs on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These acts of mass murder were a geopolitical strategy of the United States, and the opening salvos in the next war, the Cold War.

Let’s address these two assertions in turn.

First, the Japanese government was already in the process of surrendering. And that was the only logical option for them, since they had already been defeated militarily. Before the atomic bombs, another superweapon had revealed itself in the battles raging across the Pacific: the aircraft carrier. In 1941, Japan had 10 aircraft carriers, the largest fleet in the world. By the summer of 1945, they only had 3 (the US sank a total of 22 throughout the war). Those three remaining carriers were restricted to port, some of them damaged. They had no fuel, and they did not have enough aircraft or carrier-capable pilots. From a military standpoint, they effectively did not exist.

The US had occupied Iwo Jima and Okinawa, allowing them to bombard the main islands extensively and subject them to a naval blockade. Because of the blockade and the bombing, Japan had no industrial capacity to build any more,and they couldn’t get the fuel to operate the few they had left.

Japan was not a threat. But it was also not an ally, the way the US and USSR would forcibly turn their respective Germanies into allies after an extensive military occupation at the end of the war.

Emperor Hirohito recognized his military was defeated, that plans for a protracted defense of the main islands were actually not as promising as some military leaders claimed, and that a popular rebellion was likely to break out in the fall, when serious famine was expected to set in. So, in June of 1945, Hirohito secured the agreement of his inner cabinet to approach the Soviet Union to negotiate terms of surrender. The Japanese government itself proposed disarmament and loss of their overseas colonies.

All through June and July, Japan was negotiating with the USSR. The US government, thanks to its cryptographers, was aware of this. Unfortunately for the Japanese state, the USSR wanted to prolong the war so it could capture more territory on the Pacific. It was the USSR, and not Japan, that the US government was worried about. The military carried out mass murder in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to demonstrate their new superweapon to the Soviets, and to make sure the Japanese government conceded to an unconditional military occupation by the US, rather than surrendering to the USSR.

This is how we can make sense of the fact that President Truman had approved the schedule for dropping the atomic bombs two days before the Japanese government rejected the Allied demands for unconditional surrender drafted at the Potsdam Conference on 27 July.

This also explains why, after the bombing of Hiroshima, the Japanese military decided to fight on, arguing, fairly accurately, that the US only had one or two more bombs ready for use. The dropping of the second bomb on Nagasaki, therefore, was fully within the Japanese military’s expectations. So what changed that led them to accept an unconditional surrender when Hirohito announced it on August 10? On August 9, the USSR had invaded Japan.

In other words, the Japanese government had to accept that military occupation was inevitable, and they had a chance to choose between two occupiers, while also facing the possibility of being divided up by multiple occupiers, as was happening to Germany. They had seen what had happened to the tsar and his family when the USSR inherited the Russian empire. They chose to surrender to the US.

And this is exactly what the US was aiming for when it dropped the bombs. Not to end a war that was already winding down; to get in the best possible position for the next war, a war it was already starting, the clear aggressor.

A war that would lead to three million deaths in Korea; three and a half million deaths in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia; two million deaths in Afghanistan (during the Soviet occupation); 200,000 deaths in Guatemala; assassinations, torture, murder, and repression carried out across the world, also inside the US and USSR. A war that should never be forgotten, nor justified.

A Note on Exceptionalism

It feels necessary to point out that the first atomic bombs did not increase the level of violence being utilized in World War II. Their primary contribution was that so much destruction could be delivered by a single airplane instead of multiple squadrons, and that most of the deaths would occur months and years later from poisoning.

The US firebombing of Tokyo and the US and British firebombing of Dresden each killed 100,000 people, mostly civilians, overnight, which was greater than the first-day death tolls of the atomic bombs.

For this reason, it is important not to treat the horror of the first atomic bombs as something entirely exceptional or unique: all the state actors in World War II were carrying out acts of genocide and mass murder.

But since I’ve brought up Dresden and the killing of civilians, I feel the need to also address other forms of exceptionalism. This mass murder of civilians has been used as a major rallying point for German neo-Nazis since the war. Meanwhile, Japanese society on the whole continues to deny or ignore their genocidal and imperialist campaigns during and before the war. I think it’s important to name that these civilians were largely compliant citizens of imperial, colonizing powers, each with their own version of racial supremacy and each carrying out major campaigns of genocide. But of course, the US is in no position to throw the first stone when it comes to imperialism and genocide.

The point is, these tools of mass murder are the tools of the state. We should never justify them, contemplate using them, nor trust those who defend their institutional existence by falling back on them. Nor should we put ourselves in the strategic shoes of those institutions that always demand we side with them.

To simplify, World War II was a conflict between two groups of bad guys, and a loose network of good guys. One of the groups of bad guys won and they still rule the world, they’re still cooking up the future wars. The good guys were the anticapitalist and anticolonial resistance fighters who didn’t have the backing of any of the major players. In the 1940s, after the obliteration of movements from below that really began to accelerate in 1917, the good guys didn’t stand a chance.

But what we could do now is tell their stories, understand their choices, mistakes, and innovations. We don’t have to keep giving our sympathy and our attention to the self-appointed Gods who believe themselves entitled to our entire world, every ounce of our strength, our every dream, our whole future.

header image from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament