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CHAPTER TWO. The American Paradigm and Early Efforts to Limit Proliferation
- State University of New York Press
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CHAPTER TWO The American Paradigm and Early Efforts to Limit Proliferation The Americans developed nuclear weapons because they believed that the Nazis were making an effort to gain control of such weapons in conditions of total war.1 The road to World War II and the onset of war itself combined to produce theory and praxis in the West concerning the bomb. Nazism had deliberately broken the rules of international behavior before the war and had brutalized them in various spheres to such a degree that winning a possible nuclear race against Hitler in the middle of a world war seemed a matter of life and death. The Nazis had invoked "conventional" means and new technologies, such as cruise and ballistic missiles, and through their use of "revenge weapons," had shown that they were ready to use anything-even nuclear weapons (had they been available). Despite Hitler's beliefs in the racial superiority of the German people, one wonders whether even he would have regarded that superiority as an asset at the outset of a conflict involving nuclear weapons; in such a conflict racial qualities have no meaning. In the unique circumstance of a conventional war during which Hitler might have gained unilateral access to nuclear weapons the issue seemed, rightly, to be that of survival not only for the United States but for all human civilization. Another point in our paradigm is that the American covert effort was made public by the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan, an ally of the already-defeated Hitler, with the ostensible purpose of concluding World War II as early as possible and, thereby, saving many Allied and enemy lives. Even without reviewing the serious arguments presented against these bombings, we are well aware that they were 17 18 The Politics and Strategy of Nuclear Weapons in the Middle East seen as setting a precedent instead as a warning or demonstration of a power that must never be actually used. The ensuing call was to share the new power with the Soviets, or even to use it to create some kind of world government to control global order, in the fear that otherwise the world might not survive this deadly invention.2 Among American policymakers, however, as we are told by McGeorge Bundy and John Newhouse in their works about the nuclear age, the use of the bomb was entirely justified in terms of shortening the war; it was anticipated that the atomic bomb would succeed where firebombing had failed. Winston Churchill later formulated the Hiroshima decision as follows : The President invited me to confer with him forthwith .. . Up to this moment we had shaped our ideas towards an assault upon the homeland ofJapan by terrific air bombing and by the invasion of very large armies. We had contemplated the desperate resistance of the Japanese fighting to the death with Samurai devotion, not only in pitched battles , but in every cave and dug-out . .. To quell the Japanese resistance man by man and conquer the country yard by yard might well require the loss of a million American lives and half that number of British ... For we were resolved to share the agony. Now all this nightmare picture had vanished. In its place was the vision-fair and bright indeed it seemed-of the end of the whole war in one or two violent shocks. I thought immediately myself of how the Japanese people, whose courage I had always admired, might find in the apparition of this almost supernatural weapon an excuse which would save their honour and release them from their obligation of being killed to the last fighting man .. . At any rate, there never was a moment's discussion as to whether the atomic bomb should be used or not. To avert a vast, indefinite butchery, to bring the war to an end, to give peace to the world, to lay healing hands upon its tortured peoples by a manifestation of overwhelming power at the cost of a few explosions, seemed, after all our toils and perils, a miracle of deliverance.3 The Japanese did not respond immediately to the Allied nuclear challenge. The Japanese cabinet was hopelessly split on accepting defeat, even though, conventionally, Japan was in extremely bad shape. It took the emperor to make the actual decision for them. Hirohito's decision allowed the institution and the person of the mikado to remain in power in the shadow of occupation, and thereby, legitimize it for the Japanese...