UWEC Atomic Reaction The American Reaction to the Atomic Bomb: 1945-1946 Blum, Philip James 3/5/2013 Copyright for this work is owned by the author. This digital version is published by McIntyre Library, University of Wisconsin Eau Claire with the consent of the author. Table of Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................................... i Introduction .............................................................................................................................................. 1 The Dawning of a New Era ................................................................................................................... 3 Moral Capacity……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………4 American Public Opinion in the Immediate Aftermath .............................................................................. 5 Religious Response ................................................................................................................................... 6 Racial Perspectives……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………13 World Government? .......................................................................................................................... 16 Government Transgressions……………………………………….............................................................................18 The Military is No Democracy…………………………………………………………………………………….………….…………22 Racial Perspectives…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….23 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………28 Abstract This event bound Americans together in their experience of it because it was a unique event in human history. American’s reacted to the atomic bombing with a range of emotions; some were convinced of man’s irresponsibility. They deplored its use and protested the existence of something with so great an indiscriminate killing power. Others were more optimistic, sure that man’s rational nature assured an end to war, and that the future technical improvement of nuclear energy would lead to an abandonment of coal, oil, and falling water. Among these diverse concerns and remonstrations raised is the United States government influencing the way the story was reported in the media through censorship, journalistic preference, and wide propaganda powers. Enforced via the Espionage Act, an enormous amount of information related to the atomic bombing as well as the effects of radiation was withheld or otherwise partially explicated. i Introduction The American people woke up in cities all across America on August 7th, 1945 and read in their newspapers and were read on the radio a statement by President Harry Truman. Time Magazine summarizes this presidential statement, “Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of TNT. … It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe…. What has been done is the greatest achievement of organized science in history…”1 While nobody knew the exact future power of nuclear energy, it was recognized that the atomic bomb was arguably the most important scientific achievement since fire. Humanity’s destructive capability rocketed to frightening and unknown levels. “Now I am become death; the destroyer of worlds.” J. Robert Oppenheimer quoted the Bhagavad Gita2 when he uttered those immortal words at the conclusion of the Trinity Test on the Alamogordo Reservation in Los Alamos, New Mexico on July 16th, 1945.3 The Trinity Test was the culmination of over $2,000,000,000 in government expenditure and in effect ushered in the nuclear age. Virtually all Americans knew nothing about the Manhattan Project or the prospects of harnessing nuclear energy at the time of the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945. After learning about the nuclear bomb, some people protested in print as well as radio with soaring rhetoric, and abhorrence at the state of mankind. Many others felt quiet approval, and even optimism, citing social, religious, racial, militaristic, industrial, and scientific reasoning. People wondered what it meant for the present state of humanity, as well as the 1 “Birth of an Era,” Time Magazine, August 13th, 1945 2 Bhagavad Vita. Chapter 11:32 3 “The Eternal Apprentice,” Time Magazine, November 8th, 1948 1 future. Many predicted the coming of the apocalypse; after all, man had not been able to cure himself of war yet, why now? Others still were confident that atomic weapons would end war once and for all. Regardless of where Americans lived, where they worshipped, or what color their skin was, their reactions were indirectly influenced by their government as it sought to build a favorable collective memory of the development of and decision to use the atomic bomb. The US government undertook great effort to shape and mold the reaction of the American people to the atomic bomb. To their credit, Americans everywhere reacted with great variety, but a manipulative dissemination of information silenced academic criticism of the decision until the mid 1960s and prevented most Americans from learning the full story. The war-weary American public heard a half truth about this weapon and relevant information was closely controlled by the government. This was done in pursuit of shaping the collective memory about the end of the war, and it what light American’s would remember it in. This process was facilitated through press releases, the censure of media, and control of classified information. Before unpacking America’s reaction to the Atomic Bomb, the lens in real time needs to be recreated while at the same time deconstructing the fog of war that permeated people’s minds. The period between the first atomic bombing on August 6th, 1945 and the surrender of Japan aboard the USS Missouri on September 2nd, 1945, contains several events that impacted American perceptions of the last stages of the war in the Pacific. Included among these are the Soviet invasion of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo, the dropping of the 2nd bomb on Nagasaki, and finally the surrender. It is important to understand the war-time backdrop because these events heavily influenced decision making in the government and how people perceived the decisions. 2 Previous scholarship surrounding the atomic bomb is abound, but the real scholarly discussion began in 1965 with Gar Alperovitz’s, “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb” which was the same title used by Secretary of war Henry Stimson in his defense of the decision. Alperovitz criticized the Truman administration for inadvertently starting the Cold War by dropping the bomb. The argument is twofold in that it frightened the Soviet Union into occupying Eastern Europe as a security guarantee, and it also shut the communists out of post- war Japan. He coins the term nuclear diplomacy and his work largely frames the debate on the atomic decision. Paul Boyer is another significant scholar in my question. Chapter 10 from, By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age is where most of the evidence for government misuse of power is found.4 Boyer recounts instances of government control of information which didn’t allow for much information to be released. Wartime propaganda controls of the press through enforcement of the Espionage Act forbid the publishing of individual stories of suffering Japanese. Numbers of civilian casualties were edited out and only ‘military targets’ were reported in numbers destroyed. The gruesome reality of the atomic bomb was censured in all US media, with only photos of the mushroom clouds or the destruction printed. There were no pictures of the dead bodies, or the burn victims, or the radiation victims. The Dawning of a New Era What Americans learned when they opened their newspapers and turned on their radios on that fateful summer morning was that this atomic bomb signified a new time. It was such 4 Boyer, S. Paul. “By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age” (NY: Pantheon, 1985; 2nd edn. with a new introduction, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994) 3 sensational news that by August 8th, two days after the bombing, already 97% of Americans had heard about it5, and naturally everybody had an opinion. The American people reacted to atomic bombings of the Empire of Japan in a multitude of ways. The foremost of these was the recognition of a new time. It was deemed the “Birth of an Era” 6 by Time Magazine, and around the nation and the world it was evident that today, was different than yesterday. It was the kind of event that typifies a global watershed moment; it was perceived universally as the final triumph of man over nature. Science had willed civilization to a place where the destructive capabilities of man far outweighed the level of moral maturity that he possessed. The Negro Star, out of Wichita, Kansas reaffirmed the feeling of different and new eras, it states, “The Atomic Bomb that prefaced the final outcome marked the end not only of a war but of an era.”7 The truth of these statements couldn’t ring truer, as 1945 marked the beginning of a different kind of war, the Cold War. This sentiment is echoed by others in New York Times as one of the many columns headlined, “New Age Ushered”8, with another exclaiming that humanity had reached “the age of atomic energy,”9. Eminent French Physicist Duc de Groglie