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The Daily Times (Pakistan) August 08, 2005 Editorial Hiroshima -- the American myth and its cursed legacy As in past years, August 6 has aroused patriotism in the United States to justify what it did on that fateful day back in 1945. What happened was this: the US dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima without warning, killing over 140,000 people, more than 95 percent of them women and children. The Japanese tell us every year how horrible their loss was, hoping that their account will deter the world from developing nuclear weapons. But back in Washington, the narrative is different: the bombs that destroyed human life in Hiroshima and - three days later - in Nagasaki, they say, were the weapons of 'last resort' that saved a million American lives. The message is that the Japanese military was out of control and wanted to fight kamikaze-style even after the war had folded in Europe earlier in 1945. Today everyone who doesn't have the bomb wants to have it, but the truth about how the Americans came to destroy Hiroshima is out, if the proliferators would care to lend an ear. The bomb-carrying Enola Gay did not obviate a much more damaging invasion of the Japanese islands. The Japanese military leadership was willing to surrender. The Americans bombed an already defeated country. The surrender, when it came, was due to the Soviets entering the war against Japan on August 8. The story that the Japanese crown prince tried to get the Soviets to convey the message of surrender over the heads of the Japanese military high command - and that Stalin ignored the Japanese overture of a truce - has also been debunked. The fact is the Americans were already anticipating a post-war competition with the Soviet Union. And the atomic bomb was dropped to inaugurate the premier weapon of the Cold War. Some of the scientists who put together the bomb for the United States felt the danger to which they were exposing humanity; there were others who thought they didn't have to think about politics because that was a discipline they did not fully understand. The division has come down to us in our nuclearised world. In India, Homi Bhabha recalled top Indian scientists working abroad in 1947 with the express purpose of making the bomb - and no one objected. In Pakistan, where the military put it together through various devious means, it couldn't convince the major scientists in the country about the morality of the weapon. The dilemma is bequeathed to the world by the United States. Behind it is the more Hobbesian concept of becoming strong enough to deter and dominate other nations. America rolled the world back from the post-World War II realisation that collective security was more important than war in a Darwinian competition. If America made itself the exception to the rule of collective security - on the claimed ground that it had to live in a dog-eat-dog world - others followed suit, mostly in perverse opposition to America's assertion of power. Washington looked at the United Nations with suspicion because it threatened to curtail its Big Power status through the fiat of consultation. Inside the United Nations, however, other nations saw through the screen of collective security and went for the reality of the world that America was in the process of creating: if you have the bomb you can claim Big Power status. This is what converted India from a conscientious objector to the monopoly of nuclear power by the Big Powers to a rejecter of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). This was followed by an even more frightening example: Pakistan acquired the bomb defensively in opposition to India, then "proliferated" in the nuclear underworld to use the bomb as an economic tool. America used the Japanese bombs in 1945 as an expression of power to scare the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, its use squared with some of the dicta of its founding fathers, but with the passage of time the bomb and its progressive sophistication - the arms race with the Soviet Union - introduced the world to fear as never before in human history. Some nations acquired bombs even when they didn't need it - as in the case of France - simply to be viewed as powerful. Others thought they needed it more than alleviation of poverty to throw their weight around in their region. As America watched, the real consequences of what it did in 1945 unfolded in the shape of "rogue states" trying to acquire nuclear bombs to avoid being attacked. Who could have dared invade Iraq had Saddam actually acquired the capability? Today North Korea is proving a hard nut to crack for its neighbours because of its bomb, and Iran thinks the only way it can remain safe against a hostile world is by making its own bomb. America may have actually got the Hobbesian world along with the possibility of the terrorists acquiring "suitcase bombs". Intelligence agents in the United States are building all sorts of scenarios of Al Qaeda having got its hands on miniaturised bombs that it could deliver inside the United States. The Japanese are today one of the few sane nations forswearing the bomb. But the rest of world is regrettably dreaming about acquiring one in pursuit of the very objectives the United States doesn't wish to own up to. * _________________________________ SOUTH ASIANS AGAINST NUKES (SAAN): An informal information platform for activists and scholars concerned about Nuclearisation in South Asia South Asians Against Nukes Mailing List: archives are available @ two locations May 1998 - March 2002: <groups.yahoo.com/group/sap/messages/1> Feb. 2001 - to date: <groups.yahoo.com/group/SAAN_/messages/1> To subscribe send a blank message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> South Asians Against Nukes Website: www.s-asians-against-nukes.org SOUTH ASIANS AGAINST NUKES (SAAN): An informal information platform for activists and scholars concerned about the dangers of Nuclearisation in South Asia SAAN Website: http://www.s-asians-against-nukes.org SAAN Mailing List: To subscribe send a blank message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] SAAN Mailing List Archive : http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SAAN_/ ________________________________ DISCLAIMER: Opinions expressed in materials carried in the posts do not necessarily reflect the views of SAAN compilers. 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