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The News International
August 06, 2005
THE WORLD'S WORST TERRORIST ACT
by Praful Bidwai
As the clock struck 8:15 a.m. in Japan this very day exactly 60 years
ago, the world witnessed a wholly new kind and scale of brutality,
leading to mass death. The entire city of Hiroshima was flattened by
a single bomb, made with just 60 kg of uranium, and dropped from a
B-29 United States Air Force warplane.
Within seconds, temperatures in the city centre soared to 4,0000C,
more than 2,5000 higher than the melting point of iron. Savage
firestorms raged through Hiroshima as buildings were reduced to
rubble. Giant shock-waves releasing blast energy ripped through the
city, wreaking more destruction.
Within seconds, 80,000 people were killed. Within hours, over 100,000
died, most of them crushed under the impact of blast-waves and
falling buildings, or severely burnt by firestorms. Not just people,
the body and soul of Hiroshima had died.
Then came waves of radiation, invisible and intangible, but
nevertheless lethal. These took their toll slowly, painfully and
cruelly. Those who didn't die within days from radiation sickness
produced by exposure to high doses of gamma-rays or poisonous
radio-nuclides, perished over years from cancers and leukaemias. The
suffering was excruciating and prolonged. Often, the living envied
the dead. Hiroshima's death toll climbed to 140,000.
This was a new kind of weapon, besides which even deadly chemical
armaments like mustard gas pale into insignificance. You could defend
yourself against conventional-explosive bombs by hiding in an
air-raid shelter or sandbagging your home. To protect yourself from a
chemical attack, you could wear a gas mask and a special plastic
suit. But against the nuclear bombs, there could be no defence
--military, civil or medical.
Nuclear weapons are unique for yet another reason. They are,
typically, not meant to be used against soldiers, but are earmarked
for use against unarmed non-combatant civilians. But it is
illegitimate and illegal to attack non-combatant civilians. Attacking
them is commonly called terrorism. Hence, Hiroshima remains the
world's worst terrorist act.
Hiroshima's bombing was followed three days later by an atomic attack
on Nagasaki, this time with a bomb using a different material,
plutonium. The effects were equally devastating. More than 70,000
people perished in agonising ways.
US President Harry S. Truman was jubilant. Six days later, Japan
surrendered. The US cynically exploited this coincidence. It claimed
that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had saved thousands of
lives by bringing the war to an early end. This was a lie. Japan was
preparing to surrender anyway and was only waiting to negotiate the
details of the terms. That entire country has been reduced to a
wasteland. Most of its soldiers had stopped fighting. Schoolgirls
were being drafted to perform emergency services in Japanese cities.
American leaders knew this. Historians Peter Kuznick and Mark Selden
have just disclosed in the British New Scientist magazine that three
days before Hiroshima, Truman agreed Japan was "looking for peace".
General Dwight Eisenhower said in a 1963 Newsweek interview that "the
Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them
with that awful thing". Truman's chief of staff, Admiral William
Leahy, also said that "the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima
and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan.
The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender".
The real function of the two bombs was not military, but political.
It was to establish the US's superiority and pre-eminence within the
Alliance that defeated the Axis powers, and thus to shift the terms
of the ensuing new power struggle in Washington's favour.
The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings inaugurated another rivalry: the
Cold War, which was to last for four decades. They also triggered
fierce competition among the other victors of the World War to
acquire nuclear weapons. The insane arms race this launched but
hasn't ended yet.
From a few dozen bombs in the early 1950s, the world's nuclear
arsenals swelled to several hundred warheads in a decade, and then
several thousand by the 1970s. At the Cold War's peak, the world had
amassed 70,000 nukes, with explosive power equivalent to one million
Hiroshimas, enough to destroy Planet Earth 50 times over.
One-and-a-half decades after the Cold War ended, the world still has
36,000 nuclear weapons. Nothing could be a greater disgrace!
Nuclear weapons are uniquely destructive and have never ceased to
horrify people and hurt the public conscience. The damage they cause
is hard to limit in space --thanks to the wind-transporting
radioactivity over thousands of miles --or in time. Radioactive
poisons persist and remain dangerous for years, some for tens of
thousands of years. For instance, the half-life of plutonium-239,
which India uses in its bombs, is 24,400 years. And the half-life of
uranium-235, which Pakistan uses in its bombs, is 710 million years!
Nuclear weapons violate every rule of warfare and every convention
governing the conduct of armed conflict, they target non-combatant
civilians. They kill indiscriminately and massively. They cause death
in cruel, inhumane and degrading ways. And the destruction gets
transmitted to future generations through genetic defects. That's why
nuclear weapons have been held to be incompatible with international
law by the International Court of Justice.
The world public overwhelmingly wants nuclear weapons to be
abolished. The pro-abolition sentiment is strong and endorsed by 70
to 90 percent of the population even in the nuclear weapons-states
(NWSs), according to opinion polls. More than 180 nations have
forsworn nuclear weapons by signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty (NPT). But a handful of states remain addicted to their
"nuclear fix". Led by the US, five NWSs refuse to honour their
obligation under the NPT to disarm their nuclear weapons. And three
of them, India, Pakistan and Israel, haven't even signed the treaty.
India and Pakistan occupy a special position within the group of
NWSs. They are its most recent members. They are regional rivals too,
with a half-century-long hot-cold war, which has made South Asia the
world's "most dangerous place". There is an imperative need for India
and Pakistan, rooted in self-preservation, to negotiate nuclear
restraint and abolition of nuclear weapons. But the chances of this
seem rather dim.
Even dimmer is the possibility of the five major NWSs embracing
nuclear disarmament. Their reluctance to do so largely springs from
their faith in nuclear deterrence. This is a dangerously flawed
doctrine. It makes hopelessly unrealistic assumptions about
unfailingly rational and perfect behaviour on the part of governments
and military leaders and rules out strategic miscalculation as well
as accidents. The real world is far messier, and full of follies,
misperceptions and mishaps. Yet, the deterrence juggernaut rolls on.
Today, the system of restraint in the global nuclear order is on the
verge of being weakened. The US-India nuclear deal (discussed here
last week) is a bad precedent. But even worse are US plans to develop
nukes both downwards (deep-earth penetrators or bunker-busters) and
upwards ("Star Wars"-style space-based Ballistic Missile Defence). If
the US conducts nuclear tests in pursuit of this, that will impel
others to follow suit, and encourage some non-nuclear states to go
overtly nuclear, raising the spectre of another Hiroshima.
Sixty years on, that would be a disgrace without parallel. Humankind
surely deserves better.
The writer is a Delhi-based researcher, peace and human rights
activist,and former newspaper editor.
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