Transcripts
Segment #1
– Dropping the Bomb
Segment #2
–
Cold War Nukes
Segment #3
–
Personal Stories
Segment #4—Commentary
by Walter Cronkite
Segment #1: Dropping the Bomb
Narrator: Reese Erlich
Music: Nightmare, Artie Shaw,
Hollywood Swing &
Jazz
Cronkite: On Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese
military attacked Pearl Harbor, plunging the US into World War II. The
war enjoyed widespread popular support in the US. In August 1945, the US
dropped the first atomic bombs on Japan. At the time, most Americans
supported the bombing because it finally ended the war. But the decision
remains controversial, in no small part because of the subsequent
history of nuclear arms.
On this public radio special, “Lessons of Hiroshima
60 Years Later,” we’ll go back to the World War II years to hear the
stories of a US soldier, a Japanese war veteran, and atomic bomb
survivors. We’ll learn how the US government officially censored news of
the bombs’ impact and why the US began its nuclear arms race with the
Soviet Union. We’ll hear from a former secretary of defense about how
the US could have started a nuclear war – by accident.
Later in the program, you’ll hear my interview with
International Atomic Energy Agency head Mohamed ElBaradei about nuclear proliferation and my personal reflections about the
Hiroshima bomb and its aftermath.
I’m your host Walter Cronkite.
We begin this special, one-hour documentary with a
look back on how the US came to drop the first atomic bomb. It’s
produced by Reese Erlich.
Archival tape, President Roosevelt:
[Roosevelt announces attack on Pearl Harbor]
My fellow Americans. The sudden criminal attacks
perpetrated by the Japanese in the Pacific provide the climax of a
decade of international immorality. Powerful and resourceful gangsters
have banded together to make war on the whole human race.
Grahlfs: The country was pretty well unified
behind the war effort.
Erlich: Lincoln Grahlfs was 19 when he
heeded calls from President Franklin Roosevelt and volunteered for the
Navy. He says in those days, fascism posed a direct threat to the US and
others around the world.
Grahlfs: When people tell me you’re a hero
for being in WWII, I say “so what?” My whole generation was involved.
There were 16 million of us. If you saw a man in his early 20s walking
down the street in civilian clothes, he was abused in those days.
Erlich: War crimes
committed by the German army are well known. Perhaps less well known are
the atrocities committed by the Japanese occupying forces in Asia.
Yoshio Suzuki was drafted in 1941 and served in the Japanese army as an
infantryman, mostly in China.
Suzuki (with voice over): Basically, our
military training taught us not to view the Chinese as human. They were
the same as dogs and cats. If you think of people as human, you can’t
kill them, even if you want to. Sometimes to drive the point home,
they tied a live prisoner to a pillar and we practiced stabbing someone
to death. I was made to do this.
Erlich: Fighting such a merciless enemy, the
US and its allies adopted a now-controversial strategy of “total war.”
The US intentionally bombed civilians in an effort to weaken enemy
morale. That included the fire bombing of Dresden, Germany. And in
February 1945, the US began fire bombing Tokyo and other Japanese
cities, which resulted ultimately in more civilian deaths than the
atomic bombs dropped later that year. Robert McNamara, who later became
secretary of defense in the 1960s, was a young officer who helped plan
those raids. He describes the moral issues facing himself and General
Curtis LeMay in the documentary film “Fog of War.”
McNamara: In order to win a war should you
kill 100,000 people in one night through fire bombing or any other way?
LeMay’s answer was, clearly, yes. Instead of burning to death 100,000
Japanese civilians that night, we should have burned a lesser number, or
none? And allowed our soldiers cross the beaches in Tokyo and been
slaughtered in the tens of thousands? Is that moral?
Erlich: McNamara says that history is always
kind to the winner.
McNamara: LeMay said if we lost the war,
we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals. I think he’s right. He,
and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals.
Erlich: The US efforts to develop an atomic
bomb fit into the total war policy. Initially, the US worried that
German scientists were developing an atom bomb. But after the Nazi
surrender, the US learned that, in fact, the Germans had no real atomic
bomb program. John Dower, a history professor at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, says the US continued its program nevertheless.
John Dower: By April 1945, the Germans were
out of the war, and we couldn't stop because we now had the new weapons.
After the Germans surrendered we redoubled our efforts because we were
afraid the war would end before we could bring this to a conclusion.
Then you get into incredible, what we call technological imperatives,
psychological imperatives.
Erlich: On August 6, 1945, the US dropped
the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima and three days later used another on
Nagasaki. President Harry Truman addressed the nation on radio.
Harry Truman: A short time ago one plane
dropped a bomb on Hiroshima and destroyed its usefulness to the enemy.
That bomb has more power than 20,000 tons of TNT. The world will note
that the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was
because we wanted to avoid, as far as possible, the killing of
civilians.
Erlich: In fact, Hiroshima had a few
military factories and soldiers, but the city was not a military base.
The US dropped the bomb on Nagasaki because the original target city of
Kokura was obscured by bad weather, and the pilot was running out of
fuel. Over 200,000 people were killed in the attacks, mostly civilians.
Perry: Had I been Secretary of War at the
time, I would have taken the same actions he took.
Erlich: William Perry was Secretary of
Defense from 1994-7 and is now a fellow at the Hoover Institution at
Stanford University.
Perry: The reason for that was simple and
straight forward given that Japan was not surrendering. And that was the
casualties that would have been imposed, not just on the US by invading
Japan.
Erlich: Perry says the US had just fought a
fierce battle on the Japanese island of Okinawa, a precursor to what the
US would have faced in a direct invasion the Japanese mainland.
Perry: In the battle of Okinawa, we had
50,000 American casualties. We lost more than 30 ships. That was bad
enough. The Japanese lost about 200,000. Very few were taken prisoners,
many committed suicide. Many civilians committed suicide. That fanatical
defense, I think we would have seen in Japan.
Erlich: But what seemed like a reasonable
military decision in Washington looked very different on the ground in
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Retired school teacher Masahito Hirose explains
that the bomb exploded very close to where he is now standing.
Masahito Hirose: The actual bomb exploded
500 meters above the ground. In the playing ground right behind us,
there were about 1,500 children who had just come out of the air raid
shelters and were playing. They were all killed; not a single one
survived. And the heat was so intense that their bodies just burned
within that second or two. They say when you look at this ground here
now, if you came within several days, several weeks, the whole ground
was covered with bodies; you couldn't see anything but bodies of
children.
Erlich: Akio Sakita, who was 16, says that
day is seared in his mind as well.
Akio Shirakita (with voice over): I saw
orange colored fire ball rise in the sky. It looked almost as big as
the size of the sun. It did not emit a blinding flash right away. But,
within a second, beams in many colors -- red, blue, and yellow --
suddenly started to spread in every direction from the orange colored
fire ball. It hit my face so I felt great pain. I just touched my face.
And then I felt my skin come off my face and hang down.
Erlich: Survivors
describe streets filled with severely burned victims pleading for water.
Keiko Ogura, who was only 8 years old at the time, brought them some.
Ogura: But some of them, after drinking, say
thank you and they drank water; and soon after they died in front of
me. And that made me scared. I felt so guilty – that kind of guilty
feeling continuously made me so sad and I felt guilty so many years. I
don't know, still now, maybe 40 years, 50 years. I can't- I always
recall that dreadful sight, dreadful experience.
Erlich: For a time Sakue Shimohira, aged 10,
lived with her two younger siblings in a bomb shelter, really a cave dug
into the side of a mountain. After the Nagasaki bomb fell, she went back
to try to find her house.
Shimohira (with voice over): We found a
broken gate pole, so we thought, "This was my house," and we found a
charred body under the rubble, and the body was covering eyes and ears
with its hands. We turned over the body, and took the hand off the face
and found our elder sister.
Erlich: Shimohira says the bodies continued
to glow because the radiation affected the bone calcium.
Shimohira: Even seven or eight months after,
the phosphate, phosphorous light was giving out from the ashes. It was
called "corpse candle."
Erlich: The Nagasaki residents didn’t know
what caused the eerie glow. Some thought it was the spirit of the dead.
traditional koto music
Erlich: Radiation sickness caused tens of
thousands to die or be permanently deformed. However, the destruction in
Hiroshima and Nagasaki was largely hidden from the world. US occupation
authorities banned news stories and photos. The first photos of civilian
casualties didn’t appear in Japan until 1952, seven years after the end
of the war. Historian John Dower.
Dower: As part of a more general censorship
policy, writings about the effects of the bombs in Hiroshima and
Nagasaki were basically censored by American occupation authorities.
Photographs taken by the Japanese were ordered to be turned in to the
Americans. And the film footage the Americans took of the immediate
aftermath of the bombs was held secret until the 1960s.
Erlich: And since journalists weren’t
allowed to report from the bombed cities, the censorship effectively
extended worldwide. A few courageous journalists defied the
censorship in 1945, but most cooperated fully. One leading journalist
for the NY Times reported on the atomic bomb while simultaneously
writing press releases for the War Department about the lack of danger
from radiation. Walter Cronkite had first hand experience with these
restrictions when he covered Hiroshima for CBS TV news in 1958.
Cronkite: In Hiroshima I saw the results of
the bombing, a flattened city, a destroyed city, a population walking
around in a daze. It was in a city that didn’t exist. You wondered where
they came from because there was no housing. I’d seen bombed out cities
in Germany and England. They weren’t a semblance of what the atomic bomb
did. We weren’t permitted to film. We could tell what we saw but we
didn’t have any pictures to back it up. And for TV, that’s a no-no.
Erlich: Today, journalists in Japan say
that, had the press been doing its job, it could have impacted the
nuclear arms race. Akira Tashiro is a veteran reporter for the Hiroshima
daily Chugoku Shimbun.
Tashiro: So, I
think that if the same thing had happened today, with this advancement
of media and technologies,
if they televised the whole consequence of the atomic bombing, right
after the bombing, for a few days or so, probably there wouldn’t be the
nuclear arms race between the United States and former Soviet Union. Actually the majority of the people of the world really don’t know what
happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Nightmare, by Artie Shaw
I’m Reese Erlich.
Segment #2
–
Cold War Nukes
Traditional koto music
Cronkite: For seven years after the dropping
of the bombs on Japan in 1945, the US occupying authorities censored any
news of the impact of the radiation on survivors. But US scientists were
studying those effects. Reese Erlich continues the story.
Erlich: Japanese scientists quickly learned
that the after-effects of radiation exposure were truly horrendous.
People who survived the blast with no apparent injuries suddenly became
icy cold and died. Others faced life long medical horrors. Mr. Akio
Sakita was a teenager living in Nagasaki in 1945.
Sakita: Since the explosion, I have been in
and out the hospital around 17 times. My stay varied in length from as
short as two or three months, and as long as two or three years. During
that time, I underwent as many operations while hospitalized. I had 30
centimeters of my large intestine removed and my both thighs were
operated on.
Erlich: The hibakusha were not the only ones
exposed to radiation from atomic blasts.
All the observer ships are in position on the open
sea.
Archival Tape: [Countdown begins] Five, four,
three, two, one (explosion)
The atomic bomb exploded today at 8:35 am Bikini
time. I will make my first official statement two hours from now. [fade]
Erlich: In 1946, Lincoln Grahlfs was
stationed on board a Navy salvage tug at the Bikini atoll during the
first post-war atomic tests.
Grahlfs: We were 9 miles away when each of
the bombs was detonated. There were two bombs that summer. One was an
air drop. Three weeks later there was an underwater shot. In each case,
four hours later we were back inside the lagoon next to the target
vessels, putting out fires and doing whatever we could to keep the ships
afloat so survey crews could go aboard to assess the damage.
Erlich: From their studies of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, US military scientists were well aware of the dangers of
exposure at a nuclear explosion site. Yet the Navy never informed its
sailors.
Grahlfs: We were told very little. We were
told about the dangers in a vague way. In your early 20s, you’re
invincible, at least in our mind. We used to joke about being exposed to
radiation, ha, ha ha. We’ll tell all the girls that we’re sterile.
Music: “Accentuate the Positive,” From Pearl Harbor
to VJ Day.
Grahlfs: We had no protective clothing. We
ran around that lagoon all summer. We pumped up the contaminated water
and ran it through our evaporators, which was used to make fresh water,
for eating, cooking, washing clothes. We didn’t have much choice. We
were ordered to be there. There was an awful lot of ocean between there
and Pearl Harbor if we wanted to get away.
Erlich: Within a few months of this intense
exposure, some of his friends were showing signs of radiation sickness.
Grahlfs himself developed a large abscess on his face.
Grahlfs: I had a high fever. They gave me a
blood test and discovered my white count was way out of whack. They gave
me all the usual things like massive doses of penicillin, hot Epsom
salts. Finally they took me to X-ray. An old Navy doc said we’re going
to give you some hair of the dog that bit you. Two x-ray treatments and
the abscess went away. For 6-8 months, I had boils all over my body.
Nobody ever told me they connected it with
radioactivity. In my service record, it doesn’t say anything about
radiation sickness.
Erlich: The Army conducted similar above
ground tests in the Nevada desert, which exposed thousands of GIs and
civilians to radioactive dust. Years later, Grahlfs became a leader in
Veterans for Peace. He wrote his PhD thesis about atomic test survivors.
He found that 27% of vets questioned reported radiation-related
illnesses. And, like the hibakusha, the radiation
exposure affected the next generation.
Grahlfs: My daughter, who was conceived
about a year after I was exposed, had trouble all through her teenage
years with her endocrine system. Her pancreas was removed when she was
20 years old. And she ultimately died of a brain tumor. Her daughter, in
turn, was born with a deformed foot.
Erlich: Some hibakusha
shared the same fate. As a result many Japanese discriminated against
residents from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hiroshima bomb survivor Keiko Ogura was a
teenager after the war.
Ogura: As soon as I said, I’m from
Hiroshima, and other children started to look at me, to stare at me.
Also, later, some young people moved into Hiroshima City. And I asked,
“Was there any warning from your mother or parents, not to marry
Japanese Hiroshima girls?” And most of the young people said, “Yes, my
parents, mother, especially, told me, be careful not to fall in love
with a Hiroshima girl.”
Erlich: But few Americans knew much about
the effect of radiation on either the Japanese or American GIs. They
were getting a very different message from the government and the media.
Ambience, Archival sound:
Bell clangs, “Town Hall Meeting tonight from Ann
Arbor, Michigan. Are you worried about the atomic bomb?” (applause)
Erlich: This “town hall” radio program was
typical of the information Americans were getting in the early 1950s.
There was a nuclear danger, and it came from the Soviet Union. Dr. Ralph
Lapp worked on the Manhattan Project that developed the first atomic
bomb.
Lapp: Time is running out for us. Make no
mistake about it, the Soviets are stockpiling A-bombs at an increasing
pace. They have the bombers and submarines and agents to deliver them.
Erlich: Former Defense Secretary William
Perry says, in reality, the US always had nuclear superiority over the
Soviet Union, both in absolute number of bombs and ability to deliver
them. The US nuclear arsenal served another purpose, according to Perry.
The USSR had a larger army and numerical superiority in some
conventional weapons. Back in the 1950s, Perry says President Eisenhower
was given a choice by the generals.
Perry: In order to enforce containment and
deterrence, he would have to increase the size of the army
substantially. He rejected it on the basis that it would cripple the
economy of the US. Indeed, that eventually was a factor in crippling the
economy of the Soviet Union. Eisenhower decided, wisely, not to make
that increase in the army. He decided to offset that superiority with
our superiority in nuclear weapons. And that was the policy for many
presidents, both Democrat and Republican for many administrations after
that.
Erlich: Fortunately, the US and USSR never
did use nuclear weapons against one another. They came very close during
the Cuban Missile crisis of 1962. Perhaps less well known is how a
nuclear crisis almost erupted in the Middle East. The Kennedy
Administration had opposed Israel developing nuclear weapons. But, with
help from France in the late 1960s, Israel secretly built nuclear bombs
and the means to deliver them. Aaron Tovish, campaign manager of the
Mayors Campaign for Peace in Hiroshima, describes what happened in the
1973 war between Israel and Arab countries.
Tovish, NYC: During The Yom Kippur War, the
Israelis were caught by surprise. In the early days of the war, things
weren’t looking good for them. They got in touch with Washington.
Kissinger told them we can re-supply you but it will take some time.
Golda Meir, through various channels, said we don’t have time. We’re
arming our nuclear missiles. Just want to let you know, it’s that
desperate.
Erlich: Tovish notes that the Nixon
administration speeded up the supply of ammunition and spare parts to
Israel.
Tovish: Israel was able to reverse the
situation on the battlefield and the missiles were taken off of alert.
There was a moment there where Israel at least appeared to be prepared
to draw the entire world into a nuclear holocaust. This type of
situation could develop again with any number of countries. We should be
very thankful that we made it through that Cold War period when there
was such readiness to launch massive numbers of nuclear weapons.
Erlich: During the Cold War, the US and USSR
were prepared to launch nuclear weapons within minutes. So back then,
and even today, there is a danger of an accidental nuclear attack.
William Perry says he knows of 3 or 4 such incidents, including one that
happened to him in the late 1970s when he was an undersecretary of
defense in the Carter Administration.
Perry: I got a call from the North America
Air Defense at 3 am telling me that his computer indicated there were
200 missiles on the way from the Soviet Union to the US. I have a very
vivid recollection of that. He was thinking it was a computer
malfunction. It turns out it was not that. An operator had put a
training tape in the computer. The computer tape was designed to look
like a real launch.
Erlich: Perry says, in that case, the error
was caught early. But he notes that for many years, the world lived
within 15 minutes of nuclear war.
Perry: From North American Air Defense to
the president, we had about 15 minutes to make it. That’s why it was so
dangerous. It was on a hair trigger alert.
Segment #3
–
Personal Stories
Cronkite: The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs
have profoundly affected the lives of everyone involved, whether war
veterans, government decision makers or hibakusha. In this, the final
segment of the documentary, we look at the modern legacy of nuclear arms
as seen through the eyes of people we met earlier in the program. We
begin with Nagasaki atomic bomb survivor Sakue Shimohira.
Ambience #1
Traditional koto music
Shimohira: Survivors always felt the
conflict of finding courage in life or finding courage in death. My
sister died from the poverty and the feeling missing our mother.
One day I stood in front of an oncoming, steam
train. In those days it was not such a nice engine like today. I stood
in front of it, but I couldn't keep standing and finally got away.
I chose to live, and I now appreciate peace. But I
underwent surgery four times in my stomach, and for 12 years I got no
aid from the government. Government aid to the survivors was only given
starting in 1957.
Ambience #2 – koto music
Ogura: None of my family talked about that
day — 6 of August. We tried to forget.
Erlich: Atomic
bomb survivor Keiko Ogura helped found Translators for Peace in Hiroshima.
Because she wasn’t physically wounded, she thought she had overcome the
trauma of August 6th. That is, until the day she accompanied a group of
survivors in Washington DC to see the Smithsonian’s exhibit of the Enola
Gay, the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.
Ogura: All of a sudden, when I saw the Enola
Gay, I saw myself, I felt like an eight year girl, and I was so scared.
And I just continued to cry for one hour or so. That was so many people
some of the survivors or peace activists of America, they were doing
protests against the atomic bomb. But to me, that almost sixty years
later, that fear, I didn’t know about that myself. I didn’t know that so
hidden unconscious fear within myself. I think about the children in
Iraq and so many countries, who had very sad experience the fear, that
won’t gone completely, even 60 years later, they will recall and
react toward the fear. So that was the reaction. And so I just cried.
Ambience #3 – koto music
Ogura: But to tell the truth, almost 99% of
Hiroshima people, even though they lost their family, do no hate
Americans—ordinary people. But I think they hate the American policy
of militarism.
Ambience #4 – koto music
Erlich: War veteran Yoshio Suzuki now lives
in retirement north of Tokyo. His personal experiences as a draftee
during World War II have profoundly effected his life. While some
Japanese remember the horror of being bombed, he has nightmares about
the horrors he was forced to perpetrate against civilians in China.
Suzuki (with voice over): There in a small
room was a young woman of about 25 or 26. Not knowing who it was I
flipped the blanket off of her with the stock of my gun. Next to the
woman who was shaking in fear, was a newborn baby. I was speechless and
I did pity them. But I went out and lit bundle after bundle of straw and
threw them all one after another into the room with the mother and her
child then slammed the door shut. Smoke billowed out from the windows
and I could hear the screams from inside.
Erlich: Suzuki’s experiences have made him a
life long opponent of Japanese militarism. He supports the US decision
to drop the atomic bombs.
Suzuki: At the time, I was very bitter about
it, but later after studying the war in more depth, I came to believe
that the U.S. had saved Japan. Just what you would expect from a great
country. If it hadn’t been for the U.S., who knows how far Japan would
have pursued the war. All American attacks were conducted to vanquish
Japanese militarism. They were good.
Erlich: Suzuki also opposes current efforts
for Japan to upgrade its army and station troops abroad. Under pressure
from the US, Japan has sent troops to Iraq, the first such foreign
commitment since the end of World War II.
Suzuki: I am totally opposed. I was part of
the occupying army in China, right? We have reverted to the position we
were in when we occupied China! It is not a force just to keep the
peace. I don’t think we need an army.
Erlich: The Japanese government has
announced plans to withdraw its troops from Iraq, in part because of
strong public opposition.
US Navy veteran Lincoln Grafhls also went through
personal tumult as a result of radiation exposure during the Bikini
A-bomb tests.
Grafhls: I have non-malignant nodules on my
thyroid. I’ve had malfunctions of my thyroid, but they been regulated.
I’ve had problems with my digestive system, a hypersensitivity in the
lining of my digestive system. I’m fairly sure they are related to
radiation.
Erlich: Grahlfs has devoted a good portion
of his life to examining the impact of atomic radiation on Americans.
Grafhls: One of the things I discoverd in my
research is that almost everyone I interviewed who had been Marines in
the occupation of Nagasaki, ended up with leukemia, sometimes as much as
20 years later. This is a weapon that is deadly not only to the people
you’re using it against, but to the people who are using it.
Ambience # - Artie Shaw music
Grafhls: I think the US gets all upset at
the possibility that somebody is developing nuclear weapons. We have
more nuclear weapons than anyone else. We’re in a position to say, OK,
let’s start disarming in a nuclear way. We don’t have to cut down so we
have less than anybody. But we can take the lead as long as we’re in
that dominant position.
Ambient sound: swing jazz
Erlich: William Perry was an army officer
who participated in the US invasion of Okinawa in 1945. He later became
Secretary of Defense in the Clinton Administration and today is a fellow
at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. He is a forceful proponent of a strong
US military. He says, however, that the US and other nuclear powers have
not lived up to their commitments under the Nuclear Non Proliferation
Treaty.
Perry: That treaty was based on a grand
bargain. And that grand bargain was that the non nuclear powers would
abstain from becoming nuclear powers, voluntarily, and the nuclear
powers would work towards a major reduction in their weapons, ultimately
to zero. It seems to me we’re not keeping our end of the bargain.
Erlich: He also worries about the spread of
nuclear weapons to other countries.
Perry: Every country that has gotten nuclear
weapons has been guilty of what chess players call the fallacy of the
last move. They think if only I had nuclear weapons, I could protect my
security. They think that’s the last move. India gets nuclear weapons to
protect their security. Then Pakistan gets nuclear weapons. It’s never
the last move. When Israel got nuclear weapons, it was an impetus for
Iraq and Iran to get nuclear weapons. They simply add to the impetus for
the countries who are sworn enemies of Israel to get nuclear weapons and
that adds to the chance we could have a nuclear confrontation in the
middle east. So for those reasons I think it was a mistake for Israel to
get nuclear weapons.
Sound of Nagasaki kids
Erlich: Back in Nagasaki, atomic bomb
survivor Fumiko Matsuda considers herself a peace activist. But it takes
a very unusual form.
Matsuda: I always try to talk to the kids in
my neighborhood. When I get out of my car, then the kids in the
neighborhood run up to me. And I really love them and I care about them,
I cherish them and I always talk to them. This is how I try to
disseminate my feeling about peace. Maybe it is too much to call that
peace activity. Mine is very, very basic and very simple. It is part of
my daily life. But I think peace is there, or the very first step of
peace is there.
Ambient sound – kids playing
Erlich: Not far from Nagasaki’s Ground Zero,
children are gardening and cleaning up their school yard. The school
curriculum here teaches the history of the atomic bomb and the peace
movement that developed from it. A ten year old stops playing for a
moment and answers the question “What does peace mean to you?”
Children answer, with Dr. Jenny Beer voice over:
– It means a world where there's no war, where there
are no conflicts and oppression or discrimination, where we're friendly
with each other.
Segment #4—Commentary
by Walter Cronkite
LESSONS OF HIROSHIMA 60 YEARS LATER
The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were
stunning and sobering events. They brought World War II to an end, and
everyone was thankful for that. Not too many of us stopped to think
about the full implications of those bombs for our future. We were too
busy celebrating the end of that terrible war.
One of the people who had it absolutely right at
the very beginning about the meaning of Hiroshima was the great French
writer Albert Camus. He wrote in the French resistance newspaper, “Our
technological civilization has just reached its greatest level of
savagery. We will have to choose, in the more or less near future,
between collective suicide and the intelligent use of our scientific
conquests.” We are still facing that choice.
Another person who had insight was Eleanor
Roosevelt. She wrote, “The only safe counter weapon to this new power
is the firm decision of mankind that it shall be used for constructive
purposes only.” Of course, this wasn’t to be the case, and the world
launched quickly into a nuclear arms race.
In retrospect we can say that US leaders missed the
opportunity to nip the arms race in the bud. Instead, within four years
the Soviet Union had tested their first nuclear weapon.
Both the US and USSR tested nuclear weapons in the
atmosphere until the early 1960s, while they continued to create more
weapons and more efficient ones.
It didn’t take either country long to get those
weapons on intercontinental ballistic missiles and then submarine
launched ballistic missiles, creating a situation in which the world
could be destroyed in a matter of minutes. This threat of a massive
nuclear exchange was thought to provide an ad hoc policy to prevent
nuclear war. It was called the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction,
for which the acronym was M.A.D. or MAD. Never was an acronym more
accurately descriptive.
We came very close to a nuclear exchange between
Washington and Moscow in 1962 with the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was a
very frightening time, and we can all be thankful that sanity managed to
prevail. There were high-ranking US officials at the time who were
pressing for bombing Cuba, which would have meant a nuclear war with the
Soviet Union. That was one of many close calls during the Cold War.
With the end of the Cold War, there seemed to be a
real chance again to put nuclear dangers behind us, and once again the
opportunity was largely missed. Today, in the 60th year of the Nuclear
Age, we still have some 30,000 nuclear weapons in the world, and some
4,000 of these are on hair-trigger alert. You have to wonder about a
species that seems so incapable of eliminating the greatest danger to
its own survival. Not so incidentally, the United States has more
nuclear weapons in its arsenal than any other nation.
Today there is much concern about the increasing
numbers of nuclear weapons, and rightly so. The public is largely
unaware that nuclear disarmament is a central component of the
non-proliferation bargain. On the one hand, the Non-Proliferation
Treaty provides obligations to halt nuclear proliferation; on the other,
it provides obligations to achieve nuclear disarmament.
This makes good sense, for the two obligations are
tightly interlinked. Without fulfilling disarmament obligations, it
will not be possible to prevent proliferation. And should there be
further nuclear proliferation, disarmament will be all the more
difficult.
There has been much emphasis in the news about the
dangers of nuclear proliferation. Unfortunately, the disarmament
obligations of the nuclear weapons states receive far less attention in
news reporting, at least within the United States. I think this may be
because the continuing existence of our own vast arsenal doesn’t seem to
Americans, even if they are aware of it, to be nearly as dangerous as
the threat of new nations acquiring the ghastly weapons.
Frankly, I’m worried. It seems that the United
States and the other nuclear weapons states are trying to evade their
obligations and responsibilities under this critical non-proliferation
treaty.
Such behavior strains the credibility of these
countries and actually encourages more nuclear weapons, including the
development of so-called “tactical” nuclear weapons.
The survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the
hibakusha, have continually warned, “Nuclear weapons and human beings
cannot co-exist.” In the end, I believe this is the most important
lesson of Hiroshima. We must eliminate nuclear weapons before they
eliminate us.
As a species, we are neither smart enough nor
careful enough to continue to live with nuclear weapons in our midst.
So far we have been very fortunate that since the end of World War II
these weapons have not been used again in war. But there is no telling
how long our luck will hold, and we certainly cannot count on it to hold
indefinitely.
The best security, perhaps only security, against
nuclear weapons being used again, or getting into the hands of
terrorists, is to eliminate them. Most of the people of the world
already know this. Now it is up to the world’s people to impress the
urgency of this situation upon their governments. We must act now as if
the future depended upon us.
Anything less would be to abandon our
responsibility to future generations.
