Tag: Japan

Earlier this week, the world marked the 70th year of the first and hopefully the last time of tactical use of the atomic bomb in warfare. This incident changed the course of history. Ironically, the use of such destructive arsenal has helped to prevent global war since the end of the Second World War in 1945. It has not brought universal peace because there have been several proxy wars such as the Korean, Vietnamese wars, several military confrontations between the forces of global capitalism and socialism in Latin America and the various liberation wars in Africa  and the current wars in Ukraine following other wars in Georgia and in the Caucasus areas of Russia where national groups are justly struggling to be free of Resurgent Russia.

Following the successful development of nuclear weapons towards the tail end of the Second World War, it was left to President Harry Truman and his advisers to take the decision of if or when nuclear weapons will be deployed in the titanic struggle between the Axis and the Allied powers. It was not an easy decision. The forces of the Nazis were on their knees in Europe and American forces were closing in on the Japanese after rolling them over in the Philippines  and were on their way to take Okinawa in the Japanese homelands. The Japanese were still fighting ferociously in the name of their God-emperor  Hirohito. Each soldier rather than surrender was prepared to commit hara-kiri.  And to knock out Japan, America decided to use the ultimate weapon in their arsenal, the nuclear bomb.  The argument then was that this act would save the lives of American service men and put an end to the suffering of everybody including the Japanese! Once the decision to use the bomb was taken, the Pentagon awaited the go-ahead to drop the fat boy from President Harry Truman.

It is now known that when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima about 125,000 people mostly civilians were incinerated while more were to die later from radioactive fallout. A few days later another bomb was dropped on Nagasaki which also wiped out about 70,000 souls not counting those who died later from their injuries. If the import of the first bomb was unclear, the second quickly led to Japan’s surrender. Their war leader Hideki Tojo and others were tried and hanged and there were demands for trial and execution of the emperor himself but good sense prevailed and the frail old man was spared while all his powers were taken away from him and a constitution imposed on Japan forbidding it to rearm.

The effect of the atomic weapon was dramatic globally. Movement for nuclear disarmament sprang up especially following the ability to split the atom by Russia on the heels of the American success. Even many top nuclear physicists like the famous Albert Einstein began to fear for the survival of the human race. Einstein once said if nuclear weapons were ever used in the Third World War, the 4th world war will be fought with sticks and stones, meaning human civilization would have been wiped as a result of nuclear holocaust.

The immediate result of the use of nuclear weapons was that it stopped the war as was predicted. It is also clear that if the Japanese had developed it first, they would have had no qualms or scruples in using it against their American enemies. Adolph Hitler would probably would have used it if he won the nuclear race before the Allies. This is however not to downplay the doubts raised by the use of this war changer of a weapon. Nowadays with new morality people are asking if the use of the atomic weapons on civilians was not a war crime. Some people have even read racial motives into its use on Japanese – a non-white race while the Germans were spared of this horrific consequence of the use of this revolutionary weapon. There is evidence that tens and tens of Germans were deliberately targeted by aerial bombing by the British carpet bombing of the city of Dresden towards the end of the war in Europe with apparent no strategic significance than to punish German civilians and to carry the war to them so that there will be no question that they lost the war unlike in the First World War when Germans saw no enemy troops on their soil but rather thousands of German troops had to withdraw from enemy territories after the armistice of 1918.  This led the Germans to feel that it lost the First World War because it was stabbed in the back by internal enemies. Anti German feelings in Britain was so high that if it had the bomb it would have used it against the Germans while with a preponderance of German descendants in the USA using nuclear bombs against them was out of the question. The use of atomic weapons in tightly packed Europe may also have had unintended consequence on other people other than the Germans. Whatever the case may have been, 1945 was a watershed in military history.

It meant that wars would have to be fought with either conventional weapons or nuclear weapons with a range of strategies including  use of tactical neutron bombs in war theatres, strategic bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles, consideration of second strike capability  and even possibility of deployment of anti-missile systems in space to prevent being hit by enemy nuclear weapons. The futility of this has however made the use of nuclear weapons unthinkable by rational human beings. The fear of these weapons in the hands of rogue or unstable states led to the signing nuclear non proliferation treaty which unfortunately has not prevented determined states such as Israel, North Korea, India and Pakistan acquiring the weapons. The fear of Iran following suit has led to the recent signing of an international treaty with Iran with the hope that the Islamic republic can only use its nuclear know-how for peaceful purposes and not for making atomic weapons. What is clear is that some countries now see nuclear weapons possession as the ultimate deterrent against possible attack by enemies. It is now seen as the ultimate symbol of equality in the international system. They are probably right. It is inconceivable that a nuclear power will ever be attacked but this is not the same as putative nuclear power taking on a global power.

The saddest part of the possibility of the use of nuclear bombs is that if it is ever used, it is likely to be in South Asia where India and Pakistan face each other with both countries possessing nuclear weapons and hating each other so much that they would use these weapons in the face of a conventional military defeat. Furthermore religion which is sometimes irrational has been brought into the cauldron with Pakistan claiming it has the Islamic atomic bomb and evidence that it shared its knowledge with North Korea and Iran in the past. One can only imagine the dangerous consequences of introduction of nuclear weapons into the tinderbox of Middle East politics. The prognosis is not too good.

Even now the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, dancing to the tune of Japanese nationalism wants to remove the peace clauses in the Japanese constitution preventing the country from rearming. One cannot blame him in the face of growing militarism in China and provocation by North Korea which regularly tests missiles across Japan. This is why the world needs to listen to the plea of the Japanese government for universal nuclear disarmament. Nigeria and the rest of Africa should support and embrace the Japanese position. We in Africa should not be smug about our continent being  a nuclear weapons free  zone because in the event of a global nuclear holocaust, we would not be spared. We may not be hit directly but mankind would wither away as a result of radioactive fallout. This is the scenario President John Fitzgerald Kennedy meant when he said in 1962 that in the event of a nuclear war the living will envy the dead!