With Hiroshima Eyes: Atomic War, Nuclear Extortion, and Moral Imagination.

When at age sixty Edward Albee was asked how long it took him to write the play, Three Tall Women, he replied, "Sixty years and four months." Joseph Gerson might make a similar response if asked how long it took him to write With Hiroshima Eyes: Atomic War, Nuclear Extortion, and Moral Imagination. Gerson's twenty-five years of studying, organizing against, and writing about nuclear weapons and U.S. military intervention have been crystallized in this work.

With Hiroshima Eyes offers the reader a historical account of the decision to build and then use nuclear weapons on the Japanese during World War II, and the subsequent decisions to use the weapons (just as one may "use" a loaded gun even though the trigger is never actually pulled) in times of crisis to maintain American hegemony.

The book provides us with a survey of fifty years of "atomic diplomacy" and an analysis of the regions and wars in which nuclear weapons have played a major role in American foreign policy in the post-Cold War era.

It's a far cry from the dry and technical discussion of atomic war you often hear in the media. Gerson has brought a remarkable intensity to his subject. For many years the peace secretary of the New England office of the American Friends Service Committee, he cares a great deal about the material he is covering.

In the preface, he tells us he struggled with the title of the book, since he was hesitant to use Hiroshima to symbolize the two nuclear holocausts inflicted on Japan. But, Gerson points out, just as Auschwitz has become emblematic of the entire European Judeocide," Hiroshima has come to represent far more than the single atomic bomb dropped on that city at 8 A.M. on August 6, 1945.

The book is dedicated to, and incorporates the teachings of, the hibakusha - the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - and he writes movingly about the lessons he has learned from the hibakusha who have been his guides, hosts, teachers, and friends during his many trips to Japan.

Chapter Two of With Hiroshima Eyes, "The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Playing the Master Card," may be the most remarkable chapter in this remarkable book.

Revealing the many layers of the story surrounding the bombing of the two cities, Gerson explains how Hiroshima and Nagasaki were selected, how the groundwork was laid, and how the falsehoods about the necessity of the bombings were crafted.

Because Mr. Gerson's detailed account of the bombings is mixed with photographs, drawings, and poetry, the book provides an unusual combination of meticulous research, scholarly writing, and wellcrafted artistry.

After the discussion of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Gerson continues his analysis of U.S. military policy by examining cases of what he calls "nuclear extortion." Dissatisfied with the more common use of the term "nuclear blackmail," Gerson is specific and intentional about his use of the word "extortion." His case studies include the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, and the Middle East.

In the three chapters devoted to these conflicts, Gerson condenses an enormous amount of material to demonstrate how nuclear weapons have been used to achieve various political and military effects without actually being detonated.

When discussing the Cuban Missile Crisis, Gerson reports that Dean Rusk, Kennedy's Secretary of State, later remarked that the missile crisis was the "moment in history when we came closest to nuclear war" - apparently forgetting the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Gerson concisely summarizes the lasting and dangerous legacies of the Missile Crisis, among these that "U.S. nuclear threats and the practice of escalation dominance had forced the Soviet Union to back down," and thus the "U.S. commitment to, and practice of, building and threatening to use its first-strike nuclear arsenal was reinforced."

Throughout the book, Gerson points out the subtle but pervasive racism that influenced most discussions surrounding the use or possible use of nuclear weapons. When focusing on Vietnam, for instance, Gerson recounts the pain and outrage expressed by many Japanese when President Johnson refused to rule out the possibility of using nuclear weapons a second time on Asian people.

Many hibakusha feared that "the United States would use any means whatsoever to win the war," including nuclear weapons. In fact, U.S. military forces were placed on DEFCON 1 alert status - maximum-force readiness - for a full twenty-nine days in 1970.

After following the harrowing tale in With Hiroshima Eyes, one finds it astonishing that the use of nuclear weapons was averted in the Vietnam war. Gerson only suggests, by quoting the politically engaged hibakusha, that "worldwide public opinion against nuclear weapons" prevented the United States from using them, though it wanted badly to do so. After documenting how close the United States came to using nuclear weapons in Vietnam, Gerson needs to provide the reader with a more complete explanation as to how and why their use was actually avoided.

Turning next to the Middle East, Gerson summarizes how nuclear weapons were used in shadowy, secretive ways to maintain U.S. power in the region for four decades.

While much of this is persuasive, Gerson moves into questionable territory when he discusses "Desert Storm, Nukes, and the New World Order."

Suggesting that there might have been a "Kuwaiti-U.S. conspiracy" to lure the Iraqis into Kuwait in August 1990, Gerson leaves the reader hungry for more details; however, he offers no elaboration and only one footnote in support of this theory.

The writing also includes passages that are so dense that it is hard to follow the many references and illusions. For example, in one long sentence that describes the "devaluation of human life" and the routinized industrialization of terror and murder," Gerson tosses off references to both Robert Jay Lifton and Hannah Arendt.

I regret to say that I was lost by the end of that one.

Thankfully, these problems are uncharacteristic. By and large, this is a well-researched, well-argued, well-written book. Gerson's great strength is the depth of his knowledge coupled with his first-hand experience with the hibakusha.

In the final chapter, "Approaching the Twenty-first Century: The Continuing Imperative of Nuclear Weapons Abolition," Gerson discusses the continued possibility of regional nuclear holocausts. He warns the reader that, "In the post-Cold War era, the possibility of another Hiroshima had increased."

Hence the need to be ever more vigilant.

Gerson is bold and direct at the close of his book. There is a "fundamental choice facing humankind . . . widespread nuclear proliferation or nuclear abolition." Gerson advocates a world free of nuclear weapons.

Political or technical proposals are not lacking, he argues. "Missing are the moral and political will to envision a nuclear-weapons-free world order and to transform that vision into a binding treaty."

According to Gerson, "Many of the technical steps necessary for the abolition of nuclear weapons have been identified, implemented, and calibrated in the nuclear, chemical, and biological arms-control agreements of the Cold War and immediate post-Cold War era. A nuclear weapons abolition treaty would require intense negotiation of the specifics, but the essential elements are common knowledge."

As we prepare for the fiftieth anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the debates that surround this painful time, With Hiroshima Eyes brings our attention to essential questions asked so rarely in 1995 about how nuclear weapons have been used and with what justification in the years since 1945.

Timely, scholarly, and passionate, this is both a textbook and a moving narrative. With Hiroshima Eyes can help us shape the debates and discussions about the morality of nuclear weapons and the continued cry for nuclear disarmament as we mark the upcoming anniversary and face the horrors in our past.

(Andrea Ayvazian is the director of Comunitas, Inc., in Northampton, Massachusetts, which provides anti-racism education, training, and consultation.)