When the sun dawned on August 6, 1945, > Hiroshima was just a large Japanese city with a population of 3,50,000 that had escaped the destruction of massive aerial bombing. That day ended early, at 0815 hours when Colonel Paul Tibbets, flying a U.S. B-29 Super Fortress bomber named ‘Enola Gay’ (after his mother), dropped the Little Boy over the city, making Hiroshima an unforgettable chapter of human history.
Little Boy was a three metre-long gun-type nuclear device using highly enriched uranium. Its 16 KT explosion killed over 70,000 persons instantly, with the toll doubling before the end of the year, and flattened all the buildings in a 3-km radius from the hypocentre. The fireball raised temperatures to over 3,000 degrees Celsius and roof tiles bubbled; a stone step carries the shadow of a person as he/she just evaporated. A sixth of the energy release was in the form of radiation to which 3,00,000 people were exposed. The skies darkened with the mushroom cloud and as temperatures came down, there fell a black rain of radioactive soot and dust. Sixteen hours later, U.S. President Harry S. Truman announced to the world that Hiroshima had been destroyed by a new kind of weapon, the atomic bomb.
Three days later, the U.S. dropped another device, Fat Man, a plutonium based implosion bomb of 20 KT explosive power on Nagasaki, a major shipbuilding centre. Given the topography of the town, the number of casualties was slightly lower. The original target was the nearby city of Kokura but because it lay covered under a pall of smoke arising from the previous days’ conventional bombing strikes, visual sighting was not possible and Major Charles Sweeney, commanding the B-29 Bockscar turned southwards to Nagasaki, the alternative target. On August 15, the war ended with Japan’s unconditional surrender.
Today, Hiroshima ranks as one of Japan’s industrialised cities, with a population of over a million. Its > nuclear past renders it unique though. The Governor of the Prefecture, Hidehiko Yuzaki, launched a Hiroshima for Global Peace Plan in 2011, as a symbolic point of origin for pursuit of peace, abolition of nuclear weapons, post-conflict reconstruction and hope in the spirit of man. Mayor Kazumi Matsui chairs an initiative called Mayors for Peace which brings together over 6,700 cities worldwide that are committed to seeking global nuclear disarmament by 2020. Around the hypocentre, a Peace Memorial Park has been created overlooked by the skeletal remains of the dome of the Exhibition Hall. In addition to a museum and an eternal flame, it contains a cenotaph where the names of those affected by the explosion continue to be inscribed after their death. Currently, it bears nearly 3,00,000 names. The hibakusha s (atomic bomb survivors) today number about 1,80,000 and at an average age of 80, remain a potent reminder of the agony and suffering that this city has witnessed.
Every year, a peace memorial ceremony is held on August 6, marked by remembrance but also coloured by the politics of remorse. People gather to pray for their relatives; make paper cranes, in memory of Sadako Sasaki who succumbed to leukaemia in 1955 before her 13th birthday, believing that making a thousand paper cranes would make her wishes come true; and at dusk, float thousands of paper lanterns on the river with messages to guide the spirits of the departed.
This year, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s speech in Hiroshima skipped the three traditional non-nuclear pledges (not possessing, producing or permitting nuclear weapons on Japanese territory) which were first spelt out in 1967 by Prime Minister Eisaku Sato and have been reiterated since, including by Mr. Abe in 2013 and 2014. The omission immediately stoked speculation and wanting to avoid further controversy, Mr. Abe reiterated the pledges in his Nagasaki speech on August 9. There is a rising tide of nationalism in East Asia which reveals that historical memories of the regional conflicts are deep-seated and overshadow the remorse that Hiroshima generates.
Looking beyond the myths
The horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have helped generate a norm against nuclear weapons and this gets strengthened with every year. Yet, it has not proved possible to take decisive steps towards nuclear abolition. Part of the reason is the myth-making that has been associated with this issue since the very beginning.
For a long time, the prevalent view was that dropping the atomic bombs in 1945 helped end the war because the only alternative was an invasion of Japan which would have claimed the lives of half a million U.S. soldiers, and a greater number of Japanese lives. New scholarship now makes it clear that it was the USSR’s entry into war against Japan on August 8 which convinced the Japanese leadership that it had no choice now but to surrender.
Second, contrary to popular belief, no specific warnings were given to the Japanese people about the bomb and the idea of a demonstration explosion was rejected on the ground that it might not work and as there were only two devices available. Politically, the use of the bomb did not yield any advantage to the U.S. in its post-World War-II negotiations with the USSR but hardened Stalin’s resolve to accelerate its nuclear programme, setting the stage for a long-drawn Cold War accompanied by an obscene accumulation of more than 70,000 nuclear weapons by the two superpowers.
During the Cold War, another myth got generated that the best route to nuclear disarmament lay through nuclear non-proliferation. The Treaty on the > Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) took shape during the 1960s and today enjoys widespread adherence. It may have helped prevent proliferation but even its staunch supporters are hard-pressed to show that it has made any impact on nuclear arms reductions. The fact that the five countries acknowledged as nuclear-weapon-states in NPT are the same as the five Permanent Members of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) may have been a coincidence in the 1960s, but today, is a liability that diminishes the NPT.
The NPT framework cannot accommodate India’s position or tackle China’s flagrant assistance to Pakistan; its review conferences have repeatedly failed in grappling with Israel’s programme; the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea walked out of the treaty; and most recently, Iran ensured that it will retain a non-weaponised capability in terms of its enrichment programme. Clearly, the NPT has reached the limits of its success and even exhausted its normative potential.
Today’s nuclear world is very different from the bipolar world of the Cold War dominated by the superpower nuclear rivalry. The centre of gravity has shifted from the Euro-Atlantic to the Asia-Pacific region and this is a more crowded geopolitical space without any overarching binary equation. Different players have widely disparate nuclear arsenals and different doctrinal approaches. Even as the number of variables and the number of equations have grown, there is an absence of a security architecture in the Asia-Pacific region.
As a nuclear conscience keeper, Hiroshima can provide the world a dialogue platform to explore new thinking for lowering the risks associated with nuclear weapons and doctrines, reducing numbers of weapons to minimal levels and eventually creating conditions for abolition of nuclear weapons. Such a platform will certainly strengthen the norm against the use of nuclear weapons. However, there must be a willingness to go beyond the myths that have coloured the discussions on nuclear proliferation and disarmament. From a city of remembrance, Hiroshima can then become a city of hope where the first meaningful steps for a nuclear weapon free world were negotiated.
(Rakesh Sood, a former Ambassador, was the Prime Minister’s Special Envoy for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation till May 2014. Email: rakeshsood2001@yahoo.com )