power in Asia that a major share in defeating Japan would afford.
What Hiroshima suggests is not that a liberal, humane society can make a mistake and commit mass murder for political ends, but that it is characteristic for modern societies to do so. The evidence for this harsh conclusion is in the explanations for the atomic bombings, advanced by the government and generally accepted by the American public, and it is reinforced by the behavior of the United States prior to and after Hiroshima. Granted that Hitlerism was a monstrous evil, were the attitudes toward human life demonstrated by the Allies during the war, and perpetuated after the war, such as to make the difference between theirs and Hitler’s worth fifty million corpses?
In World War II the two nations credited with being the most enlightened, liberal, democratic, and humane—the United States and England—agreed on the efficacy of saturation bombing of the German civilian population. As early as 1942 the British Bomber Command staff, according to the United States Strategic Bombing Survey’s official report, “had a strong faith in the morale effects of bombing and thought that Germany’s will to fight could be destroyed by the destruction of German cities. … The first thousand-bomber raids on Cologne and Essen marked the real beginning of this campaign.” At the Casablanca Conference in January, 1943, this faith was affirmed as Allied strategy; larger-scale air attacks would be carried out to achieve “the destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial and economic system and the undermining of the morale of the German people to the point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened.”
It was the same strategy Mussolini had used in dropping bombs on civilians in the Ethiopian campaign and the Spanish Civil War, and it was the same strategy used in bombing civilian populations from Kiev to Coventry—all to the horrified outcries of the liberal, democratic, capitalist nations of the West. The only difference in the two strategies was that the English and American attacks on German, French, Czechoslovakian, and other cities made the Fascist bombing of civilians seem puny.
World War II did not end, but rather sustained, the Fascist notions that war is a proper mode of solving international political problems, and that, once a nation is at war, any means whatsoever justify victory. The saturation bombing of Vietnamese villages by American bombers dropping napalm and cluster bombs, which are deliberately intended for people, not bridges or factories, and leave particularly cruel wounds, has been in accord with the thinking of the Allies in World War II—that “the morale” of the enemy could thereby be destroyed. In 1968 Daniel Ellsberg, at the time an official in the Department of Defense, publicly described this psychological objective in the strategic bombing of Vietnam. But Vietnam is only another example of the post-World War II acceptance of mass slaughter. When British historian A. J. P. Taylor was asked how he could place Hitler in the same broad context of evil shared by other nations, in view of the killing of six million Jews, he responded that those nations that had defeated Hitler were now stockpiling weapons capable of killing far more. American strategist and governmental adviser Herman Kahn suggested in his book On Thermonuclear War that atomic warfare did not necessarily mean the end of the human species; it might result in only thirty million American deaths.
Would thirty million American deaths be too high a price to pay for megadeaths among enemy civilians? By the end of the 1950s, the idea of nuclear war was becoming acceptable in the United States. All that people required was a reasonable provocation. In one nationwide poll conducted in 1961 among twelve hundred students, 72 per cent agreed that the United States “must be willing to run any risk of war which may be necessary to prevent the spread of Communism.” During the Berlin crisis in the summer of 1961, polls taken in various American cities, including Denver and Atlanta, indicated that most people were willing to risk atomic war with the Russians over the status of West Berlin.
All societies justify the most cruel acts of war by pointing to their superior culture. Thucydides, without making the accusation himself, shows Athens guilty of such arrogance. But whatever differences there are in the qualities of nations—and one can say there were differences between Sparta and Athens, as one can say there were differences between Nazi Germany and the United States—the act of total war reduces and sometimes obliterates these differences. Even if a society waging war possesses admirable features—the welfare system of the Soviet Union, the Bill of Rights in the United States—it is a fallacy to think that war is a valid means of spreading the good features to other nations in the process of “liberating” them from the enemy. Socialism did advance after World War II, but most effectively in those countries (China, Yugoslavia, Vietnam) where the local population fought its own guerrilla warfare and was not dependent on the massive strength of the Red Army. The Soviet Union supported socialist revolutions in certain places (Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria), but was reluctant to support them in others (Greece, Italy, France, China) because its main concern was its own national power, not changes in social systems. The historian Gabriel Kolko writes in The Politics of War: “The Russians had not created the left and they ultimately could not stop it, though they might try. … The two genuinely popular communist parties to take power—in Yugoslavia and in China—did so over Soviet objections and advice. …”
Similarly, the United States supported democratic institutions in Japan and undemocratic institutions elsewhere—Greece, Turkey, the Middle East, Latin America, and South Africa. Its main priority was not the social welfare or the human rights of the local populations, but whether the existing government would support and augment the power of the United States in the world. The strange combination of regimes supported by the Soviet Union and the United States is proof enough that their major postwar aims have been to buttress their own national power. It is easy for Americans to accept this realpolitik as Soviet policy—they know Communist states are ruthless. It is harder to accept the same truth about themselves.
The romantic aura surrounding sociopolitical theories—the enthusiasm for “socialism,” “fascism,” “democracy,” “liberalism”—has obscured the fact that all ideologies in modern times have been morally limited by national boundaries. This has enabled political leaders to pass off external conflicts over national power as conflicts between ideologies, that is, between good and evil. Nationalist feelings are played upon too, of course; in the Soviet Union it was a war for the motherland as well as for socialism, and in the United States it was a war for national identity as well as for democracy. But nationalism came into the modern world as an ambiguity—it meant the safety and unity of people formerly divided or formerly controlled, as well as the rule by national leaders over their own people, and over others.
It was not the actions of Japan, Germany, and Italy against other people that prompted the United States to go to war. The United States had maintained neutrality while the Fascist powers destroyed a moderately left-wing parliamentary democracy in Spain; it did not protest against the deliverance by France and England of part of Czechoslovakia to Hitler; it continued to send scrap iron to Japan even after the Japanese slaughter of Chinese in Nanking and Shanghai. True, the United States did begin to give material aid to the Allies after the fall of France in June, 1940. But it did not fully enter the conflict against the Axis until the American naval base at Pearl Harbor had been attacked by the Japanese.
It was this challenge to the national power of the United States, which meant the power and the prestige of those who held office and wealth in America, that was the main reason America entered World War II. The welfare of the American people—or of any people, as American inaction in rescuing Jewish refugees in Germany attests—was not the chief concern of America’s wartime leaders. The rhetoric might deal with fighting for freedom, but the reality was expressed by Henry Luce, the multimillionaire publisher of Time, Life, and Fortune; in a Life editorial in 1941, entitled “The American Century,” Luce said it was time “to accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world and in consequence to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.”
This bald assertion of power as the justification for American involvement in World War II was avoided in the language of Roosevelt and other national leaders. Nonetheless, the behavior of the United States during the war was clearly in line with Luce’s ideas about “the American Century,” and after the war