By Christopher Harper
With the premiere of the motion picture Oppenheimer, the nuclear naysayers are starting to creep back into the public arena.
Writing in Time, Mary Robinson, the pacifist former president of Ireland, says: “As a young woman, I marched alongside hundreds of thousands of protesters against ‘the Bomb.’ Now a grandmother, I am appalled that my grandchildren still face the same specter of nuclear war.”
When I taught journalism, I had students read two sides of the nuclear debate. John Hersey’s Hiroshima, which many consider the finest piece of journalism in the 20th Century, chronicles the lives of six people who survived the bombing. Hersey’s descriptive prose underscored the horrors of the atomic age.
The other side of the debate—and one few people understand—comes from Paul Fussell’s view from the front lines of Allied soldiers launching an invasion of Japan.
As a lieutenant in a rifle company, Fussell was poised to go to Japan after the Axis had surrendered. He notes that hundreds of thousands of soldiers like him were heading toward Japan in an attack that would take a year and cost one million casualties. That’s one million Allied casualties—most of whom would be Americans.
Fussell writes: “In general, the principle is, the farther from the scene of horror, the easier the talk. One young combat naval officer close to the action wrote home…: ‘When I read that we will fight the Haps for years if necessary and will sacrifice hundreds of thousands if we must always like to check from where he’s talking; it’s seldom out here.’ That was Lieutenant John F. Kennedy.”
Fussell notes that the Japanese government planned to launch counteroffensives with its two million soldiers, 10,000 kamikaze aircraft, and even young people and seniors to defend the islands.
When news of the attack on Hiroshima reached his unit, Fussell and his fellow soldiers almost couldn’t believe the news. He quotes from American historian John Toland:
…[W]ith quiet disbelief coupled with an indescribable sense of relief. We thought the Japanese would never surrender. Many refused to believe it. . .. Sitting in stunned silence, we remembered our dead. So many dead. So many maimed. So many bright futures consigned to the ashes of the past. So many dreams lost in the madness that had engulfed us. The survivors of the abyss sat hollow-eyed and silent, trying to comprehend a world without war.
Fussell returned to the United States and became a well-known scholar of culture and literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He died in 2012.
Despite his many noteworthy articles and books, “Thank God for the Atom Bomb” is the one most people remember.
Here is the entire article: https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/hf/iakh/HIS1300MET/v12/undervisningsmateriale/Fussel%20-%20thank%20god%20for%20the%20atom%20bomb.pdf
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