Traister's note: Peter Nichols originally sent the following essay to Traister on August 19th, 1997; a revised version arrived on January 20th, 2000. It has a point of view worth making available to students here. This essay remains the property of its author. No permission to reprint it or use it any way whatsoever without his express authorization (his mail address appears at the end of the essay) is implied by its accessibility at this site.

In his cover letter, Nichols added: "I am a child of the Cold War and have vivid memories of 'duck-and-cover' exercises under my grammar school desk during air raid drills in the 1950s. I never believed the propaganda that said my little desk would keep me safe from a thermonuclear blast."

Nichols begins with an epigraph, also inset immediately below.

Now that Hitler has gone, we know a certain number of things. The first is that the poison which impregnated Hitlerism has not been eliminated; it is present in each of us.Albert Camus

Not long ago, my wife and I were sitting together in our living room watching a news account of the most recent developments in the controversy issuing from the attempt to mount an exhibit of the Enola Gay at the Smithsonian Institute's National Air and Space Museum. Our 18-month-old son was playing nearby. To provide background for the report, the broadcast showed a film clip of the atomic blast that consumed Hiroshima. As the explosion's long, deep, elemental thunder began to pour forth from the television, our son stopped his play. Poised on the top step of a red and blue plastic sliding board, he stared at the screen, transfixed by an aerial view of the vicious cloud of smoke and fire boiling up from the place that was Hiroshima. Turning his gaze from the television to us, he uttered gravely, "uh-oh!"

To my mind, that pretty much sums up everything that needs to be said about the matter. For the veterans, politicians, and academicians swept up into this quarrel, there is, of course, far more complication.

The vehemence of the response by veterans groups to the proposed exhibit on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima -- "The Crossroads: The End of World War II, the Atomic Bomb, and the Origins of the Cold War" -- reveals the presence of something other than devotion to historical fact. Instead of marshaling evidence and analysis to support a persuasive argument against the exhibit's claims, thereby contributing to thoughtful public debate, these groups mobilized political forces in Congress and suppressed the exhibit altogether. The mute husk of the exhibit as originally conceived -- the fuselage of the Enola Gay without accompanying text, without context, without even other artifacts to provide depth and perspective -- bears powerful testimony to something from which these groups feel compelled to turn away. (One Air Force historian dismissed the vacuity of the exhibit's final minimal-text version as "a beer can with a label.") The fiftieth anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb provides an opportunity to reflect upon this unspoken something.

In selecting the site on which to drop the first atomic bomb, President Truman reports enlisting the service of the Secretary of War: "Stimson's staff had prepared a list of cities in Japan that might serve as targets." Note that the list did not consist of military installations, troop concentrations, or munitions plants. What's more, the aiming point for the Enola Gay's bombardier was the Aioi Bridge, a conspicuous T-shaped structure in the densely populated city center. The target, in short, was purely and simply the city -- selected from a list of cities that in effect had become "targets." Indeed, Hiroshima's value as a strictly military target was so inconsequential that it supplied one of the chief criteria for its selection as a target for the atomic bomb: because it had been virtually untouched by America's numerous, massive, and unrestricted bombing raids, the city was still intact and, therefore, would provide a suitable demonstration of the bomb's destructive power.

By this point in the war, the Allies had abandoned their early-held resolve to attack by precision bombing only strategic and military targets and had adopted the ruthless tactics of the Axis powers: the deliberate and indiscriminate killing of men, women, children, the old, and the infirm. "City busting," the systematic reduction of entire cities to heaps of rubble and corpses -- most notably in the fire bombings that incinerated Dresden and Tokyo -- was not a new development with the obliteration of Hiroshima. Only the employment of atomic technology to more efficiently carry out the mass killings and enhance the effects of "morale bombing" -- that is to say, terrorism -- was unprecedented.

The traditional moral standards informing the concept of the just war require both that there be a just cause -- in this case, the need to stop an unjust and brutal aggressor nation -- and that the means to accomplish the end also be just. The killing of defenseless civilians in war has always been forbidden by every interpretation of just-war morality. To claim the mass killings were intended to "break enemy morale" and "shorten the war" is an argument in support of terrorism. The decision to kill, wholesale, the population of noncombatants inhabiting Hiroshima in order to "save" the lives of American combatants is an expedient calculation based on short-term speculation about possible consequences; it is not a decision informed by traditional moral principles. No doubt those who make these awful decisions from within the furnace of war would regard arguments such as these as the musings of dilettantes. They would probably be right.

One might contend -- I believe, accurately -- that the very nature of modern war, perhaps of all wars, renders such decisions inescapable. In war, the neat distinctions of armchair philosophers and the humane sensibilities imbued by civilized living give way to the efficient and cruel expediencies of killing. Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian military theorist, taught that war is a rational undertaking whose ultimate objective is political: "War is the continuation of politics by other means." In his construal, war is the use of naked force as a means to secure some end beyond the violence. Clausewitz, however, also understood that war imposes its own implacable law, independent of every political objective, upon all who take it up. "If one side uses force without compunction," he writes, "undeterred by the bloodshed it involves, while the other side refrains, the first will gain the upper hand. That side will force the other to follow suit; each will drive its opponent toward extremes, and the only limiting factors are the counterpoises inherent in war." Major General Curtis LeMay, a commander of bombing operations in both the European and Pacific theaters, put it this way: "A war is a very tough kind of proposition. If you don't get the enemy, he gets you." Therefore, according to Clausewitz, "there is no logical limit to the application of that force."

The only limits that curtailed the extreme violence of the Second World War were established not by the commonly recognized boundaries of moral action but by the technological ingenuity and industrial capability to implement the science of mass destruction and killing -- that and the capacity of the maimed and bereaved to endure it. Abjuring the rhetoric of high purpose in favor of a soldier's blunt frankness, LeMay declared, "I'll tell you what war is about. You've got to kill people, and when you've killed enough they stop fighting." Colonel Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the Enola Gay and commander of the Hiroshima mission, summarized the essence and meaning of war more succinctly: "War," he said, "is killing."

Everyone swept up by war is transformed by the encounter, whether it is by the violence, deprivation, and humiliation the vanquished must suffer or the savagery and indifference that war demands of victors to overthrow their enemies. Those who presume to wield it as a political instrument soon find themselves, together with their enemy, subjected to a tyranny whose empire is ruled by a cold and unyielding necessity. Once the hounds of war have been unleashed, victory must become the chief objective, displacing every other goal. By taking up arms to turn back by force an unjust aggressor and reestablish an order conceived as just, the defender undergoes a startling transformation in which the means -- overthrowing the opponent or, more accurately, killing -- come to replace the end. By subjecting ourselves to the necessities of war, we abdicate the capacity to choose what is just and good; we are transformed into the very thing against which we have taken up arms, even if we do so "justly."

Shakespeare understood this deforming mechanism well. In the play King Henry V, he has the king proclaim, "We are no tyrant, but a Christian king." Presumably the declaration implies that the king, who is making war on France, intends to act in accord with Christian principles and virtue. Nevertheless, at the siege of Harfleur, he offers the city one last chance to surrender, vividly invoking with a frankness of language worthy of General LeMay what is about to befall the city's populace at the hands of the English army:

The gates of mercy shall be shut up,
And the flesh'd soldier, rough and hard of heart,
In liberty of bloody hand shall range
With conscience wide as hell, mowing like grass
Your fresh-fair virgins and your flow'ring infants
....................................................
What rein can hold licentious wickedness
When down the hill he holds his fierce career?

Many argue convincingly that the motives that drove the decision to use the atomic bomb were more complex and muddled than the official version suggests, that the Soviets were among those meant to be impressed by the catastrophe unleashed upon Hiroshima. The great geopolitical game of the Cold War was already under way. This "peace," which was also a "war," was carried on for almost 50 years by commanders and crews in bombers, missile silos, submarines, and command and control centers -- each trained and poised at every moment to incinerate millions for the noblest and most just of causes. The containment of communism and the defense of the Free World is the way it was put. World War II's strategic bombing practices became institutionalized in deterrence doctrines like Mutual Assured Destruction, a strategy founded upon the willingness to carry out a systematic campaign of transcontinental slaughter. We still live in the midst of a ruined moral cityscape, laid waste by the ruthless practices of total war. We have not recovered from the necessity and the "realism" that collapsed and gutted of meaning appeals to the just war. Nor has the end of the Cold War brought new life to this moral wasteland.

Curtis LeMay recounts the psychological process that permitted commanders and bomber crews to carry out the mass destruction of cities. "You drop a load of bombs," he says, "and, if you're cursed with any imagination at all, you have at least one quick, horrid glimpse of a . . . three-year-old girl wailing for Mutter! Mutter! because she has been burned. Then you have to turn away from the picture if you want to retain your sanity -- and also if you intend to keep on doing the work your nation expects of you."

The general's account recalls the disturbing image of the unimaginative bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann, who dutifully and with meticulous care went about his desk work -- the work his nation expected of him, which happened to be the administration of the transportation infrastructure that supported the Final Solution. Psychiatrists who examined Eichmann before his trial in Jerusalem pronounced him "sane." He was by all accounts not a Nazi fanatic or ideologue, neither a pervert nor a sadist, but a committed soldier and model citizen: dedicated to duty, kind, diligent, respectable-a good family man. General LeMay lays out for us the valiant struggle against imagination undertaken by those the nation charged with the massacre of civilians. The suppression of nausea, the turning back of compassion and of too vivid a representation of what one is doing -- in order to do it -- is the price one pays for Eichmann's kind of sanity. One cannot allow the powerful up-surge of emotion to impede the imperturbable calm needed to follow orders and operate complex modern weapons systems. Neither, apparently, can one allow a representation of these deeds as anything but patriotic, self-sacrificing, and heroic. General LeMay suggests that the account of veterans is itself dishonest, or at least that certain aspects of their narrative are suspect by virtue of the psychological violence they were bound by duty to inflict upon themselves in order to wreck the massive and indiscriminate physical violence our nation expected of them.

The final words of Adolf Eichmann at the foot of the gallows are darkly prophetic: "After a short while, gentlemen, we shall meet again. Such is the fate of all men." The execution of Eichmann, we now see, was not sufficient to rid the world of him -- or at least of that demon political thinker Hannah Arendt called the "fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil" that spoke through him. We have not done with Eichmann; we meet him again and again in those terrifyingly normal people who coolly and efficiently and without malice (but also without mercy) go about their appointed tasks of readying the bombs and missiles, and in those good family men who calculate with expert precision how many millions of killings -- inflicted and absorbed -- can be deemed "acceptable." Such is the fate of all men.

To say such things might seem outrageous, but that is because we have grown accustomed to seeing "the evil empire," a caricature for representing official enemies, only in others. More clear sighted and candid than the groups who endeavored to censor viewpoints at variance with the official, heroic rhetoric commemorating Hiroshima's destruction, General LeMay summarized, without sentimentality, his role as commander of bombing operations in Japan: "I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal. Fortunately, we were on the winning side."

Hannah Arendt called Eichmann hostis generis humani -- the enemy of the human race. In her "Report on the Banality of Evil," the subtitle of her book on the Eichmann trial, Arendt called attention to a new kind of criminal: one who "commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well nigh impossible for him to know that he is doing wrong." LeMay recognized that, in essential respects, the difference between belligerents in war is not really a moral one -- or at least that the attribution of criminality is the prerogative of victors. The general understands well the incommensurability of moral purpose and the deadly exigencies imposed upon those who take up the instruments of war. Are those who have been hanged for their "crimes against humanity" greater criminals than those who have not been hanged -- or than those who have maintained the Cold War's peace by training for and being willing to carry out even greater crimes on a global scale?

A commonly voiced charge against the original, ill-fated "Crossroads" exhibit was that it represented "revisionist history," as if understanding of the past were somehow enshrined for all time in a nation's war memorials. The criticism betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how historical scholarship develops. Representative Sam Johnson, a Texas republican and Air Force veteran who was appointed to the Smithsonian Board of Regents, drew a sharp distinction between reality and unreality in the historical enterprise -- not sensing how the former often has currency with the latter. "We've got to get patriotism back into the Smithsonian," he urged. "We want the Smithsonian to reflect real America and not something that a historian dreamed up."

The historical analysis that was to accompany the original exhibit told a complex and nuanced story of the atomic bomb -- its use and its legacy -- casting it as both savior and destroyer. Like a bad dream that persists in bringing to consciousness what we would rather forget, the exhibit's curators and historians insisted on examining the valor of American veterans in the context of the nightmare images that so trouble our patriotic sleep. In doing this, they inadvertently summoned up the spectres and phantom images inhabiting the shadows of America's dreamscape -- the history "real" America is not yet prepared to face.

Perhaps the greatest offense of the exhibit was not so much the accompanying text, as the display of photographs and artifacts in the possession of those who burned, bled, and perished fifty years ago in the blast at Hiroshima. The charred lunchbox of little Shigero Orimen, a student caught in the atomic attack, now sits under glass in a display at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. The child's mother could not identify the burnt corpse but recognized the broken lunchbox and its melted contents. The Museum offered the lunchbox along with other artifacts to the Smithsonian to show Americans what Hiroshi Harada, the Museum's curator, calls "the real picture of what nuclear weapons can do." The artifacts were rejected. Americans, observed Smithsonian secretary Michael Heyman, "don't want analysis." The Smithsonian's miscalculation, Heyman recognized, was to mount a substantive exhibit that explored the atomic bombing beyond the scope of official cant and bland clichés.

Charred watch dials and the crushed lunchboxes of children tear away the veil of abstraction thrown up by numbers -- 145,000 killed -- and confront us with the flesh-and-blood individuals "whose guiltless drops are everyone a woe." We cannot bear to hear the little girls' cries for Mutter! Mutter! that haunt and sting us still, and we are not yet free from the struggle to maintain our "sanity." Even fifty years later, we persist in turning away from what LeMay and Hiroshi Harada call "the picture."

Are we not comforting ourselves with an Orwellian calculus that insists on characterizing the deliberate execution of civilians in Hiroshima -- and Dresden and Hamburg and Tokyo and so on -- as the saving of lives? Who are we really when "hungry war opens his vasty jaws?" When we are the agents of war's prodigious devouring, are we "defenders of freedom" or are we simply killers? Who are we when we do things that, if they were the deeds the vanquished, would be condemned as war crimes? It is not for nothing that the Axis commanders responsible for the mass bombings of Allied cities like London and Coventry were not tried in Nuremberg.

Veterans groups and legislators must eschew historical debate over the meaning of the atomic bombing and resort to empty slogans, invective, and censorship because, finally, in defending America's waging of the "just war," the last "Good War," they must defend the necessity-indeed, the legitimacy-of mass murder. This is the unthinkable that we cannot allow ourselves to think. Nor can we allow it to be spoken or pictured in a museum exhibit.

In the aftermath of the "Crossroads" debacle, the Senate Rules and Administration Committee conducted hearings on decision-making guidelines for the Smithsonian. Committee Chairman Ted Stevens, a veteran of the Pacific theater, angrily posed what he intended as a rhetorical question regarding a later and still unacceptable version of text that was to accompany the exhibit: "You want my grandson to read that and say, 'Grandpop, why did you do that?'"

Surprisingly, and no doubt unintentionally, the senator's question objects to what historians and curators had selected to include in the exhibit's text but casts that objection in terms that do not contest the exhibit's truth. It is an important query -- both the grandfather's and the grandson's -- and underscores how hard we are struggling to forget. Recognizing that the exhibit would sufficiently inform and shock his grandson, the senator impresses upon the lips of the child a judgement pronounced in the form of a question: Why did you do that? Senator Stevens clearly implies that this is a question he prefers not to be posed.

If we are in earnest about extricating ourselves from our nuclear predicament -- or at least of living with it -- if we wish to "save" the lives of our descendants, we need our grandchildren to pose this aweful question, and we must answer them with the truth we simultaneously recognize and deny. We need them to understand how easy it is, not only to carry out unspeakable atrocities, but to do so without feeling guilt. We need them to see that we can kill on a mass scale and nevertheless believe that we remain righteous and just.

Who are we? We not only have killed indiscriminately, we have harnessed the indiscriminate nature of our technology and employed it deliberately to turn whole cities into great crematoria; we have designated entire cities "targets" and then -- either with one mighty atomic blow or more methodically with conventional explosives -- proceeded to execute those who happened to be within the city's perimeter. We continue to create even greater instruments of destruction; we continue to be willing to use them on a scale greater than ever before; and we continue, like Adolf Eichmann, not to regard any of it as doing wrong.

Those who fought in the just cause of World War II are tied to a heroism tainted by mass murder. The legacy of their valor is a world -- at least in the West -- free from a tyranny that endeavored to enslave it at that time, but also one in which the fear generated by a monstrous willingness to slaughter on a grand scale has served as the very foundation of "peace." Whether the tyranny of necessity to which we have shackled ourselves will honor our longings for peace or will carry us even further along the path implicit in the logic and psychology of that necessity is a question no one can answer.

The mass execution of Hiroshima's people demonstrates the ease with which the unprecedented can be introduced into history. Once it has appeared, the precedent for future appearances is in place, awaiting with a kind of inevitability that has already been chosen and rehearsed. In a moment of crisis, we will awaken to discover that the murderers are already among us, trained to carry out, with rote proficiency, the technical procedures that will set in motion the machinery of mass death. And the thing that was thought to be a dream, we will then see, held within it the seeds of our destruction. "Today the truth has come home," writes Arendt, "there is no protection in heaven or earth against bare murder."

I do not find it hard to summon up in my imagination the picture of a little charred heap that I could identify as my son only by the melted lump of blue-and-red plastic beside it. In a near panic, anxious and earnest veterans and politicians succeeded in pushing the pictures away -- but the burnt girls will not let us forget. To heal, we need to respond to our grandchildren's fearful question: Grandpop, why did you do that?

Did we do it because our nation expected us to follow orders? To defend freedom? To further the cause of justice? To save lives? If we look into the mirror of our offsprings' faces, we can detect a chill emanating from the source of their query and thereby catch a glimpse of the evil empire's mighty reign within ourselves. It is we that they are afraid of. The question posed by Senator Stevens conveys the unspoken understanding that they ought to be.