William Hartung: Lessons from Hiroshima and Nagasaki Not Yet Fully Learned

William Hartung of the New America Foundation recently penned an exceptional op-ed for the History News Network in which he argues, “It has been 62 years since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the moral and strategic lessons of those devastating acts have still not been fully learned.”

Hartung spends the first half of the article outlining the greater historical context for the use of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, before moving into the crux of his argument. He writes that even though the world has not seen nuclear weapons used anew,

the foundations of U.S. nuclear policy remain morally suspect. There has not been another Nagasaki, but it is U.S. policy to engage in veiled threats to launch just such an attack, even if the target nation does not possess nuclear weapons.

Case in point: the criticism Obama drew for his statements taking the nuclear option off the table in potentially attacking al Qaeda in Afghanistan or Pakistan.

Hartung also posits that the threat of using nuclear weapons is also counterproductive at the strategic level.

The threat to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states is only liable to spur them to seek their own. Taking this stance toward Iran -- even if the actual use of the weapons is extremely unlikely -- will undermine prospects for negotiations to curb Teheran's program while giving leverage to officials within Iran who want to go from nuclear enrichment to nuclear weapons.

Hartung rightfully concludes,

Short of getting a global agreement to abolish nuclear weapons -- a goal worth striving for no matter how difficult it may be to achieve in practice -- one of the most important steps the U.S. could take would be to adopt a policy of "no first use" of nuclear weapons against any nation that is not literally poised to launch a nuclear attack on the United States. This shift in U.S. policy would suggest that it is possible to reverse the mentality that led to the bombing of Nagasaki, even at this late date.

Nagasaki Remembered

Sixty-two years ago today, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki Japan, killing an estimated 74,000 people. It was the second and last ever use of such a weapon on a civilian population. Like the bomb that had been detonated over Hiroshima three days prior, the bomb dropped on Nagasaki had been similarly loaded aboard a plane on the island of Tinian in the Pacific Ocean. The primary target was actually Kokura, but the plane was diverted to its secondary target of Nagasaki due to cloud cover. The Nagasaki bomb was also different in that its design was an implosion-design plutonium bomb, tested only weeks earlier in New Mexico. A third bomb had been scheduled for use on either August 17 or 18, but was called off when Japan finally capitulated on August 15.

Click here to watch a portion of the BBC’s documentary, “Hiroshima,” which details the bombing of Nagasaki and provides accounts of the American justification for dropping a second bomb in Nagasaki.