An interview with Joseph Gerson.

In his recent book, "With Hiroshima Eyes" (New Society Publishers), Joseph Gerson implicitly - and often explicitly - points out failures by the American press in treating all of the circumstances behind the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Gerson, a graduate of Georgetown University's School of Foreign Services, lectures in the Department of Political Science at Regis College. He participated in "the scholars delegation" that met with officials of the Smithsonian Institution and publicly called for massive revisions to rectify politically induced distortions in the Smithsonian exhibition, "The Last Act."

The following interview with Joseph Gerson was made by Prof. Harry James Cargas of Webster University, the author of 30 books.

SJR: Do you think that nations should be held to the same moral standards as individuals are?

GERSON: Yes. Nations are made up of individuals. How can they be differentiated?

SJR: Some people think that political success can be separated from moral responsibility.

GERSON: Well, Reinhold Neibuhr wrote Moral Man and Immoral Society, but I think that ultimately served to rationalize a lot of inhumanity that has gone down. Even individuals, doing our best, are imperfect. The same with states and nations.

SJR: So, do we need to develop a sense of criticism, particularly self-criticism, particularly Americans?

GERSON: There are two ways to respond to that which come immediately to mind. As we are talking, the debate around McNamara and his book, his choices and his decisions, is raging. I think that's an illustration, to some extent, of the inability ultimately, to differentiate between individuals and the state. This man was, to a degree, the state. His actions contributed to the deaths not only of the 58,000 U.S. troops, but 3 million Vietnamese. It was mass murder. It is very painful for Americans to begin to look at some of the analogies between what the United States did in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with what Germans did. It is necessary that we begin that. I was struck by an incredible piece I came across where the Secretary of War [during WWII] Henry L. Stimson was joking with Truman that he was kind of concerned (it was a serious joke, the kind that hid the truth) that with the firebombings of Japan we would be competing with Hitler in atrocities and that in the end there wouldn't be much left to show off the power of the bomb. When people at the highest levels are comparing themselves to Hitler that says something.

I have read and re-read Karl Jaspers On the Question of German Guilt. It's a very marginalizing position but I think it's absolutely correct: To look at our nation, state and society and to understand that not only it imposed the holocausts on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, totally unnecessarily on the victims, then to see that our foreign and military policies of the last 50 years have had this threat of mass murder even omnicide, at the heart of society and the state and the nation, says something so profound that I am not yet able to put it into words, in terms of what the United States has allowed itself to become.

So, yes, I think we need to find ways to address this system. It's not new.

SJR: You make reference in your book to some of the things you just talked about when you compare Truman and [Harvard president] Conant to Hitler and Eichmann. That's a new comparison.

GERSON: I think for many people it will come as a shock. It will seem inflammatory. I show the analogies and the way they are different too. In both cases, to some extent, you have the logical and illogical outcomes of the industrialization of society, the industrialization of science. You have the dehumanization of the other, whether they are Jews or Slavs or the Japanese who were described in War Department propaganda as vermin to be exterminated. Then you have unnecessary mass murder. I think we have to look it fully in the face, where the country has been if we are going to have any chance of trying to change it.

SJR: One of the facts I learned from your book is that a number of American prisoners of war were killed in Hiroshima.

GERSON: I was just reading in the current issue of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists there is a really fantastic memoir by a woman who was then a child who describes about 40 or 50 U.S. prisoners of war in Hiroshima and her father, who was a military officer at the harbor about two miles from the epicenter - it's an incredible story. Most of the POW's were killed immediately by the blast. Her father came across an American who was dazed and somewhat wounded. Hiroshima people were about to stone this man to death. She describes how her father intervened. Speaking as a Japanese imperial officer, he essentially ordered the people to leave the man be. Her assumption is the man eventually died in any event but - you know you go back to Conant and the decision as to what they were going to bomb - they purposely chose an area that had a concentrated civilian population.

I think it's important to understand that there were dissenting voices at the highest levels. General Marshall, for example, wanted the bomb used in an area which was not populated. There were recommendations that there at least be warnings to the people of the targeted areas before the bombing, so they would have a chance to leave. But there were various military rationale for not doing it. So on the one hand you have to see these many people who think they are doing good and end up doing tremendous evil. McNamara is the most obvious recent case in point.

SJR: The other fact that you mentioned is that thousands of Korean slave laborers were also killed.

GERSON. That's right. This [is] something where the Japanese peace movement needs to become more sensitive. To this day in the Peace Park the monument to the Koreans killed remains outside the park.

SJR: The going argument seems to be that dropping the bombs saved American lives. You speak of that in your book.

GERSON: This is the myth. This is the big lie that has now been accepted at one level for the better part of 50 years. It's the argument that ultimately brought down the Smithsonian exhibit. To begin with, as I quote in the book, General MacArthur and Admiral Leahy of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and others made it quite clear that Japan was a defeated nation. It couldn't mount any kind of coordinated offense at the end of the war. It was burning, people were hungry. You had a government which was appointed, I believe, in April in Japan whose mandate was to attempt to negotiate peace with the United States.

There were divisions within the Japanese government but this was their mandate and there were feelers in Europe (Portugal, Switzerland, Rome, the Vatican actually) and in addition the efforts the U.S. was following by breaking the Japanese codes to make a deal with the Soviet Union (to have the USSR intervene with the U.S.); the United States was aware of all of these things. And had the demand of unconditional surrender been removed - in the end they didn't even hold to it and the United States accepted precisely what the Japanese were offering before then. You have these possibilities that the war could have been ended earlier, essentially on the same terms that were finally accepted.

The invasion plan, as is well known, was not until November for Kyushu and 1946 for Honshu. This left lots of time to explore the policy, lots of time if they wanted to demonstrate the power of the bomb on an uninhabited atoll or something like that.

SJR: You call that the third atomic bomb tragedy.

GERSON: Right. That's the way it was perceived by the people in Japan. But I think that all these things point to the fact that it wasn't necessary at all. Gar Alperovitz has argued that the U.S. may well have prolonged the war and may well have inflicted more U.S. casualties in order to be able to test out the bomb. If Japan could have surrendered earlier, one could say that the people died unnecessarily. The figure of either a half a million U.S. casualties or a million dead is basically a propaganda piece that came out of the Truman administration to essentially pacify and make such a great crime palatable to people in this country. The War Department's official estimates were that if the U.S. did go ahead with the invasions that were planned and which they thought would not be necessary, that the U.S. dead would be between 25,000 and 46,000. This is not an inconsiderable number, it's that many human lives. But it is not the half million or million which is the basis of so much of our thinking. And we know there were so many options.

In my book I quote Samuel Walker, the official historian of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, to the effect that the consensus among U.S. historians, those who have really explored this history, is that the bomb wasn't necessary to end the war, that the Truman administration knew this and yet it went ahead.

There were many reasons it happened, I focus on one of them in the book. Obviously, there was a political concern on Truman's part. They spent $2 billion; if they didn't use it there was fear of all kinds of congressional investigations. There was the scientific hubris. But in terms of the articulated reasons - and you see the Postdam Conference being postponed for just this reason - you see Stimson as referring to this as the Royal Straight Flush, as the master card for the cold war era, you see Truman talking about this as a hammer over the Russians - the idea was to use the bomb before the Russians could come in so we didn't have to split the booty of the war as we had to do in Europe. It's this message that the U.S. has both the weapon and the will to use it in the cold war period which had already begun.

SJR: There's another element here. The prime minister of Canada, during WWII, Mackenzie King, would not allow his diaries to be published until 35 years after his death. So they were opened not too long ago. And his entry for August 6, 1945 was "Thank God we didn't drop the bomb on white people."

GERSON: John Dower has done work on the racism in his book War Without Mercy. I make several references in my book to the racism that had built there. But one of my friends, who is a hibakusha, who was seven years old at the time, said her understanding which she experienced during the Vietnam War was once again the United States bombing yellow people. Once again Asians were expendable. Racism has been central to U.S. expansionism, to U.S. imperialism in the world. Things are interactive.

There is a question of whether or not the motivating force for building the bomb grew initially from scientists' fears that because of how advanced German science was, that Heisenberg and others would have it to use against the U.S. But there is an increasing amount of scholarship coming out that from '43 on if not earlier, Germany was not the primary target; it was Japan. There is another piece in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists which got some press play, at least in Boston, that there was fear that if we used it against Germany and it turned out to be a dud, given the level of German nuclear technology, they might have been able to use what was left there as a basis for continuing research, whereas the Japanese were so much farther behind. I make the reference to the Quebec meeting in 1943 where Roosevelt and Churchill essentially agreed that if the bomb is ready, the likely target is Japan, not Germany.

SJR: Your book is not focused solely on Hiroshima. You look at Cuba, Lebanon, Iraq through Hiroshima eyes.

GERSON: To the extent that it is possible for me to do that.

SJR: We can never be the same. It's like trying to look at the world without Auschwitz.

GERSON: Yes, but we've had replays to some extent of variations of Auschwitz in Cambodia, in Rwanda, to a lesser extent in Bosnia, so that the kinD of genocidal, tribal racism remains with us as well as the technology to do it, but we have not had the kind of long term systemic ovens, cars, that whole process - we haven't seen that model in it's own way. To some extent if the model exists at this juncture, it may be more in the threat and production of nuclear weapons because here it is institutionalized. Here it is in the heart of the industrial and scientific society. What I am saying is that these are threats which are very public and we know about - for example the Cuban missile crisis - although there are details there that most Americans don't know. The Russians, for instance, had had actual nuclear weapons in Cuba and McNamara and others didn't know that at the time. They were talking about invading and the possibilities of escalation were much greater than they thought and advisors were thinking then that the chances of the U.S. initiating a nuclear war were a half to a third.

Most recently, we surrounded Iraq with 700 or 1000 nuclear weapons and threatened to use them. Clinton threatened North Korea. Structurally with a non-proliferation review conference, the U.S. and other nuclear powers are attempting to maintain a discriminating international system. We can have it, you can't. What this is based on is the terrorism of mass murder. It is not the kind of thing that Americans will find easy to contemplate. We need to think about what words can best be used to help people to find a vocabulary to explore what it is we have become.

SJR: Do you have some sense as to why we cannot face our shortcomings as the Smithsonian incident indicates as well as other events.

GERSON: We'll find that reasons are many. On the one hand it is the basic desire of most people to identify with their nation, wanting to think that their country is good. I'm inclined to think that religion plays a role in terms of the idea that whether we are Christian or Jewish or Muslim we have an element of the truth so, therefore, we shouldn't be challenged. We are the civilized people.

But also our economy in our society is very dependent on the military industrial complex. Without the military-industrial complex we would have enormous unemployment in this country, enormous displacement. There is at least a subconscious understanding of the dependence of our society on this kind of death machine.

The other things we had with the Smithsonian were vested interests, particularly the Air Force Association. The way the government intervened is a kind of McCarthyism where the history is being kept from people. On one hand many veterans were doing it for very understandable psychological and sentimental reasons. They risked their 'lives, they were told the bomb saved their lives, they lived their lives with this belief for 50 years and to have people come along and say that it's a bunch of poppycock. Well, of course, people will be upset and will have cognitive dissidence and will lash out in anger.

SJR: You mentioned McNamara several times. I just finished writing an article in which I say he has turned loyalty which is ordinarily a virtue into something else.

GERSON: He had loyalty to the wrong object.

SJR: I think that this enters into the whole discussion. "My country right or wrong" can be interpreted several ways.

GERSON: Exactly. And then the question is, Who is my country? Is it the president "I am the State" or is it the people?

SJR: Did you complete your thoughts on technology?

GERSON: The people of my generation and younger have come to believe that nuclear weapons exist like a natural force and that because the technical know how exists to make these weapons, it can't be unlearned. It's a utopian fantasy that you can actually abolish nuclear weapons. It's become increasingly clear to me, from the moral vision of the hibakusha, and from people like Joseph Rotblat, who was a Manhattan Project scientist, from people like Daniel Ellsberg, who helped design U.S. nuclear policy under Nixon, Kennedy, and Johnson, that, in fact, there are very practical means by which nations can ultimately abolish nuclear weapons. As early as 1964, as the result of a debate whether to give India the bomb in the Johnson administration, they essentially hammered out what essentials were for the abolition of nuclear weapons. The question is simply to find the will to do it.

SJR: You mentioned towards the end of your book that what we need is political imagination.

GERSON: Political imagination and will. Two things are sorely lacking in our society. On the one hand to imagine alternatives and the second is to have the will to make change. One of my criticisms of the peace movement in this country, and many other social movements, has been that there is a real lack of will. This in part reflects a lack of commitment and of competing with values of a consumer culture that leads us to be confused about what it means to be human.