9. Exhibit A
When you raise doubts about whether Hiroshima forced Japan to surrender, nuclear believers often say, “Well, you may be right. But that was ancient history. The weapons are bigger now. We know deterrence works.”
But the thing about Hiroshima is that it is vital to beliefs about nuclear deterrence.
Imagine that the debate about the importance of nuclear weapons as a trial in a U.S. courtroom. Trials in ancient Rome were mostly about oratory and character assassination. Cicero was successful in part because he knew what Romans considered the manly virtues and knew how to exploit accusations of scandal so well that he could get a conviction against even the most upright or even innocent person. Trials in the U.S., on the other hand, have a remarkable emphasis on evidence. The evidence is carefully marked, sometimes protected in plastic bags to preserve it—treated almost reverentially. And the great majority of the time spent during the trial is not spent arguing—that is reserved for the closing of the trial. The main activity of the trial is a slow, careful presentation of evidence. We sometimes take this emphasis on evidence for granted.
It’s useful to think about the debate about nuclear weapons as a trial in a courtroom because it reminds us that there is strikingly little evidence for our policies about nuclear weapons. In fact, if nuclear weapons are actually weapons and therefore should be judged in the context of war, there is only one piece of evidence that counts: Hiroshima. Think of it. There is only one time when nuclear weapons were used, a threat was issued, and an adversary changed his behavior (or didn’t). Only one real “field test” of nuclear weapons.
That’s a lot of weight of policy resting on a single thread of evidence.
And the importance of the event is reflected in another way. It’s obvious that many of the ideas about nuclear weapons were shaped by that first experience. For example, one of the standard assumptions about nuclear weapons is that they have a special ability to coerce and deter. Unlike ordinary weapons, they carry a special halo of meaning that allows them to be more effective at scaring our adversaries and reassuring our friends. This idea comes from Hiroshima. Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of War from 1940 to 1945, published the first (semi) official description of the events that ended World War II in February 1947 in an article in Harper’s. In it he explained that nuclear weapons were “psychological weapons.” Only they were able to deliver the remarkable “shock” that drove home to Japan’s leaders the necessity of surrender. Other means had been tried—fire bombing, submarine blockade, a series of conventional defeats, and so on—but only nuclear weapons could do the job. Only nuclear weapons had the unique ability to get inside an adversary’s head and coerce or deter him.
After World War II, we might have ended up feeling about nuclear weapons the way we feel about blunderbusses: they’re really too big, sort of a clumsy weapon, hard to find any real use for. But we didn’t. That first experience of unexpected surrender shaped our ideas about what to expect from nuclear weapons. If nuclear weapons were a religion, Hiroshima would be the first miracle.
So it’s somewhat disconcerting to find that a good deal of the evidence shows that Japan’s leaders were not impressed by the bombing of Hiroshima. I’m not going to rehearse all the evidence here; most of you have seen the articles in International Security and Foreign Policy. But just one quick point. The strongest piece of evidence supporting the idea that nuclear weapons deliver a unique psychological “shock” to an opponent is that the Emperor said that surrender was necessary because of a new and “most cruel” bomb. Besides the fact that he had a strong motive for misleading people (the bomb made the perfect excuse for losing the war, and he had to find a formula to sooth the military’s feelings about surrender—they were virtually in control of the government at that point), he also contradicted himself in less than 48 hours. The recording announcing surrender was broadcast to the people on August 15th. It mentioned the bomb, didn’t mention the Russians. Two days later he sent a second message to the members of Japan’s army and navy that said the reason for surrender was the Russians. That message didn’t mention the bomb.
The chief witness—the testimony that so much of the case depends on—contradicted his own story.
Hiroshima is vital to our attitudes toward nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence. It sets the stage for all the ideas that follow. If we believe in evidence, it is a crucial piece of evidence. We have built an entire system of thought on a series of assumptions, an entire policy world, and an academic discipline. But they are all supported by only the slenderest pillars of evidence.