Although it is now 20 years since the English edition of my Japan: The Toothless Tiger best seller first appeared, everything that has since happened has confirmed its thesis that East Asia is a powder keg that Japan cannot contain.

Although China’s Belt and Road Initiative is inexorably falling into place, so too is the South China Sea. Although a British convoy, supported by German and American cruisers, recently sailed through the area, they, like the Australians, who are being butt hurt by Chinese sanctions, are not serious players.

South Korea, Taiwan and Japan are the region’s heavy hitters. Though Taiwan would give an excellent account of itself in any future encounter, there is little they could do when faced with overwhelming Chinese firepower. Taiwan could be East Asia’s Arch Duke Ferdinand moment.

South Korea, however, remains the real dagger to Japan’s heart. There are more than five million men under arms on the Korean peninsula – far more armed soldiers than either the United States or Russia maintains. Vladivostock, Russia’s military headquarters in the Far East, is only fifty miles away from North Korea! The resulting geostrategic rivalries make Korea the most militarized piece of real estate on the planet and it is the only place the United States has (repeatedly) declared it has locked and loaded nuclear weapons. As there is no way Seoul can be defended from a determined attack, the USMC is heavily embedded in Okinawa to where they hastily retreated at the height of the Korean War and to where they most likely will have to retreat again. Though Japan needs South Korea as a buffer state against North Korea and its historical Russian and Chinese sponsors, the Belt and Road Initiative would marginalize Japan and make her almost irrelevant to this Chinese minted version of The Great Game.

China views its own naval expansion as vital to protecting her sea routes and, just like Washington, Beijing is deploying her navy to ensure that the black gold continues to arrive to her shores. The fact that this policy poses a threat to Japan is not Beijing’s primary concern. They have the much more daunting task of keeping their vast nation afloat. For that overriding purpose, they need a strong navy to guarantee their oil supplies and a steely determination to defend and promote their national objectives.

Japan’s looming quandary is that, with Taiwan and South Korea, it has been a vassal of America’s East Asian policy, trading economic advancement for American political and military hegemony in contrast to China’s unfettered development. That bill is now due.

China is involved in a great strategic game that she cannot afford to lose. Kazakhstan is China’s natural bridge to the lucrative Iranian and Iraqi fields. Such a link-up would advance China’s standing as a world power. It would also cripple United States’ efforts to secure the Caspian Sea’s oil for the West. China also wants to secure central Asia’s economic cooperation to help mollify Xinjiang, which Erdoğan’s Muslim Uighur fifth columnists are charged with subverting. About 200,000 Uighurs live in Kazakhstan and opposition Islamic terrorist groups have their bases in Almata, its largest city. China hopes to neutralize this U.S. sponsored internal ISIS threat by its oil diplomacy in Kazakhstan, and its arms diplomacy in Pakistan, Iran and Iraq.

NATO’s ongoing belligerence in Eastern Europe has transformed the pipeline poker China has been playing with Russia and the other regional powers, forcing Russia and oil rich Kazakhstan to fully throw their lot in with China. Siberian oil will flow southwards to China and, if Korea and Japan wish it, onwards to them as well.

Iran meanwhile, is helping China wrest the vast oil reserves of the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf from Uncle Sam . If Iran and China control the flow of oil from the region, the United States will lose control not only of the Caspian Sea but also of the Persian Gulf’s vast and vital oil supplies. Japan best urgently take stock.

China’s missiles nullify America’s capacity to militarily dominate Asia’s vast geography with its small, dispersed pockets of marine forces, whose forward deployment policy bases are much too vulnerable. Without forward bases in Asia, there can be no concentration of American military power: weapons cannot even be stored, let alone massed for use.

This vulnerability of their bases to Chinese missiles is America’s singular military weakness in Asia. America’s powerful Seventh Fleet cannot make up for the loss of Asian land bases. The Seventh Fleet cannot generate anything like the military power or psychological effect of fixed bases.

The most important of these forward bases are those in Japan. Guam, like mainland America, is simply too far away to fill this role. Okinawa is the pivotal, preferred spot. And China’s missiles are gradually making those bases redundant to America’s strategic thinkers.

China is devoting vast resources to her missile program. This is a war of nerves where time and, ultimately, technology, is on the side of Mainland China. This psychological aspect explains China’s widespread use of ballistic missiles, which are, in essence, really psychological weapons – paper tigers if you will. Although Taiwan might protect itself from an amphibious assault, protecting Taipei from surgical missile strikes – or the threat of surgical strikes – by Beijing’s ballistic missile units is a more daunting task. Beijing knows this and will continue to tighten and loosen the screws, as she deems appropriate.

Japan has a glass jaw, one that China could easily break if Japan does not act responsibly over the next few years. Japan is the only major nation in the world that has explicitly renounced war as a tool of policy. Article 9.1 of the Japanese constitution renounces war “as a sovereign right of the nation”. Article 9.2 asserts that “land, sea and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained”.

That said, Japan maintains very substantial “land, sea and air forces”. Japan’s military expenditures are, in fact, the third highest in the world. Tokyo has stockpiled over 100 tons of plutonium that would be relatively simple to transform into weapons’ grade material. Japan’s fast-breeder reactors (FBRs) have the capacity to squeeze over 60 times more energy from uranium fuel than can the light-water reactors of most other countries. Japan will, in other words, have the capacity to make more nuclear weapons than the combined arsenals of the United States and Russia hold. If nothing else, this arsenal makes an impressive bundle of bargaining chips.

Because its major challenges will come from the air, Japan has developed formidable anti-aircraft and anti-ballistic missile defense systems. Japan’s radar and its accurate Tomahawk missile technology far excel their American prototypes. Other Japanese strengths in miniaturization, automation, telecommunications and the development of durable, lightweight advanced materials further enhance their military capabilities.

Japan’s plutonium purchases have allowed it develop the necessary nuclear submarine technology to counter China’s blue water navy. Though impressive, a handful of nuclear submarines and a couple of batteries of missile defenses do not make Japan impregnable.

Bizarre as it seems, Japan’s expertise in these niche areas is a cause for concern in Washington. America fears lost market share if Japan exports its expertise – and, to develop the required expertise, Japan would have to copy the examples of Israel, Sweden, South Africa and other small countries and aggressively export. The United States fears that Japan would win export orders at its expense.

Japanese dual-use technological capabilities in commercial fields related to military use threatens the preeminent position American producers currently enjoy in the world’s arms’ markets. This is ironic as, historically, the United States encouraged Japan in its development of dual use capabilities. Spin-offs from the radio industry, for example, helped kick-start the Japanese commercial television industry, which eventually obliterated their American competitors.

Japan’s defense industry is, however, an inconsequential part of Japan’s overall industrial output. It accounts for less than 1 percent of Japanese gross domestic product (GDP) and even those firms, such as Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) and Kawasaki Heavy Industries (KHI), which are most heavily involved in it, are there mostly because of the spin-off technological benefits it has given them.

Whereas Japan has some particularly strong trees of knowledge, the forest overwhelmingly belongs to America. Japan just does not have the logistical depth of America or the European Union to be a major league player. While Japanese industry has established a global position in a wide range of critical modern technologies, Japan’s defense industry has lagged behind. At the systems level, military technology has simply moved faster than Japan’s ability to catch up.

Japan, in other words, does not have an autonomous arms industry. Today, the defense industry accounts for less than 0.6 percent of total industrial production, an almost insignificant amount in Japan’s overall context. Though Japan produces about 90 percent of its own military requirements, much of that is built under license from American firms and a considerable amount of the technology is black-boxed – sealed so that Japanese engineers cannot study and copy them.

In summary then, East Asia is in a state of chassis. Although Japan has neither the heart nor the materiel for what lies ahead, she, together with South Korea and Taiwan, must develop not only their autonomous defense systems but their own autonomous diplomatic voices as well. Japan’s future, whether she likes it or not, will be with its East Asian neighbors’ Belt and Road Initiative when the U.S. 7^th Fleet, however belatedly, scuttles back to Pearl Harbor.

The Asia Pacific region has come in for much attention in recent years. Most of it a transparent attempt to contain China and its spectacular rise, remember Obama’s pivot to Asia? The dominant narrative is that China poses an imminent threat to its near neighbours. Rarely do we ever hear from the inhabitants of the region regarding their feelings about the threat. For Westerners who are constantly bombarded with the anti-China rhetoric, it is understandable that they think the Asians are terrified of China and are grateful to their Western guardians for protecting them. Let us examine that.

To understand the mindset we must revisit some inconvenient history. With the exception of Thailand, all of the S.E. Asian countries have been the victim of Western colonisation. Vietnam, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia and China all suffered mightily under Western oppression. The Philippines, South Korea and Japan still host American bases and are de-facto client states as a result. Overwhelmingly the citizenry of these countries greatly resent this fact, countless anti-imperial demonstrations have made this plain, all ignored by minority factions in Government. It is the history of Asia that when white men with guns show up professing good intentions, Asians suffer. This has been the case for more than four hundred years and it persists to this day. Western rhetoric falls on deaf ears in Asia, every promise ever made to them by the West has been broken and they know that the west doesn’t regard or treat them as equals. Once again, they can see that they are being expected to suffer to serve Western imperialist interests.

Over the last 40 years the region as enjoyed a period of peace, stability and prosperity unprecedented in its long history. To be clear, there is much historical enmity in the hemisphere, Japan and Korea, Japan and China and others have a tragic history of conflict. There is little love and much residual resentment among them. There are disputes regarding the South China Sea, many of the countries have overlapping claims. The sea treaties that define the current maps are disrupted by all and recognised by none. These treaties were drawn up in the West in the post WWI era and were done without a single Asian present. They represented Western imperial interests, not those of the Asians. In the Asian way, they resolve these differences through diplomacy, no one is prepared to go to war over it. All still enjoy freedom of navigation, it is not the big issue that it is made out to be in the West.

When Trump first took office, he locked in on North Korea, while posing zero threat to America his interference in a long dormant issue was the cause of much uneasiness in the region. South Koreans as expected were particularly alarmed, the consensus view of the majority in this peaceful country was that they wished he would shut up and go home. Likewise, in Taiwan the majority accept that China wants peaceful reunification as it has clearly stated for more than 70 years. Despite constant provocations China has remained calm on the issue, which absent American interference, will likely resolve itself peacefully in time.

Japan has long been the reluctant local point man for America’s aggression against China. While the Japanese people are not friendly to China, China didn’t unnecessarily drop any nuclear bombs on them or occupy them and treat them as second-class citizens for the last 70 years. They have no interest in suffering further on behalf of the hated Americans. Japan and China have recently had productive bi-lateral meetings to dial back the American rhetoric. Left to their own devices the Asians will find resolution to their differences with reporting to hostilities. Obvious to all is that America is prepared to make sacrifices to contain China. It would sacrifice all its so-called “friends” in the region if it would slow China’s rise.

Parallels to the Asian situation can be found now in Europe with the manufactured Ukraine crisis. The Europeans are well aware that America sees the European interest in peace and stability as a threat to American hegemony. While Germany badly needs Russian gas and has heavily invested in the Nord Stream pipeline, America is prepared to see Europeans freeze rather than buy Russian gas. Its naked aggression in Ukraine seeks to provoke Russia into a conflict on European soil. Russia wisely has not taken the bait, much like China over Taiwan. The worst-case scenario for America is that the Europeans accept Russia as a peaceful member of the community of nations and continue to develop mutually beneficial economic ties. Without big bad Russia as the enemy, there is no need for NATO and the call for America to depart from all their European military bases would be resounding.

Any war with Russia or China would have unthinkable consequences for the world, and it seems clear that no one but America wants conflict. The Germans and French have been trying to make their own peace with Russia outside of the NATO clique. The NATO faction are Americas only real allies in Europe, this a Globalist faction, they don’t represent any countries national interest. The failing Empire is on its last legs, crumbling socially and economically at home, a war, any war, would serve as a useful distraction. It appears clear now that the Empire would see the world burn if it can rule over the ashes.

By Prabir PURKAYASTHA

The Quadrilateral group’s leaders’ meeting in the White House on Sept. 24 appears to have shifted focus away from its original framing as a security dialogue among four countries: the United States, India, Japan and Australia.

Instead, the United States seems to be moving much closer to Australia as a strategic partner and providing it with nuclear-powered submarines.

Supplying Australia with U.S. nuclear submarines that use bomb-grade uranium can violate the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) protocols. Considering that the United States wants Iran not to enrich uranium beyond 3.67 percent, this is blowing a big hole in its so-called rule-based international order — unless we all agree that the rule-based international order is essentially the United States and its allies making up all the rules.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had initiated the idea of the Quad in 2007 as a security dialogue. In the March 12 statement issued after the first formal meeting of the Quad countries, “security” was used in the sense of strategic security.

Before the recent meeting of the Quad, both the United States and the Indian sides denied that it was a military alliance, even though the Quad countries conduct joint naval exercises — the Malabar exercises — and have signed various military agreements. The Sept. 24 Quad joint statement focuses more on other “security” issues: health security, supply chain and cybersecurity.

Has India decided that it still needs to retain strategic autonomy even if it has serious differences with China on its northern borders and therefore stepped away from the Quad as an Asian NATO? Or has the United States itself downgraded the Quad now that Australia has joined its geostrategic game of containing China?

AUKUS

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison on video with U.S. President Joe Biden during Sept. 15 announcement of the AUKUS pact. (C-Span clip)

Before the Quad meeting in Washington, the United States and the U.K. signed an agreement with Australia to supply eight nuclear submarines — the AUKUS agreement.

Earlier, the United States had transferred nuclear submarine technology to the U.K., and it may have some subcontracting role here. Nuclear submarines, unlike diesel-powered submarines, are not meant for defensive purposes. They are for force projection far away from home. Their ability to travel large distances and remain submerged for long periods makes them effective strike weapons against other countries.

The AUKUS agreement means that Australia is canceling its earlier French contract to supply 12 diesel-powered submarines. The French are livid that they, one of NATO’s lynchpins, have been treated this way with no consultation by the United States or Australia on the cancellation.

The U.S. administration has followed it up with “discreet disclosures” to the media and U.S. think tanks that the agreement to supply nuclear submarines also includes Australia providing naval and air bases to the United States. In other words, Australia is joining the United States and the U.K. in a military alliance in the “Indo-Pacific.”

Earlier, French President Emmanuel Macron had been fully on board with the U.S. policy of containing China and participated in Freedom of Navigation exercises in the South China Sea.

France had even offered its Pacific Island colonies — and yes, France still has colonies — and its navy for the U.S. project of containing China in the Indo-Pacific.

France has two sets of island chains in the Pacific Ocean that the United Nations terms as non-self-governing territories — read colonies — giving France a vast exclusive economic zone, larger even than that of the United States.

The United States considers these islands less strategically valuable than Australia, which explains its willingness to face France’s anger. In the U.S. worldview, NATO and the Quad are both being downgraded for a new military strategy of a naval thrust against China.

Australia has very little manufacturing capacity. If the eight nuclear submarines are to be manufactured partially in Australia, the infrastructure required for manufacturing nuclear submarines and producing/handling of highly enriched uranium that the U.S. submarines use will probably require a minimum time of 20 years. That is the reason behind the talk of U.S. naval and air bases in Australia, with the United States providing the nuclear submarines and fighter-bomber aircraft either on lease, or simply locating them in Australia.

Maritime Powers

Ships from the navies of the U.S., Australia, India and Japan participate in Malabar exercises in the North Arabian Sea on Nov. 17, 2020. (U.S. Navy, Elliot Schaudt)

I have previously argued that the term Indo-Pacific may make sense to the United States, the U.K. or even Australia, which are essentially maritime nations.

The optics of three maritime powers, two of which are settler-colonial, while the other, the erstwhile largest colonial power, talking about a rule-based international order do not appeal to most of the world. Oceans are important to maritime powers, which have used naval dominance to create colonies. This was the basis of the dominance of British, French and later U.S. imperial powers. That is why they all have large aircraft carriers: they are naval powers that believe that the gunboat diplomacy through which they built their empires still works. The United States has 700-800 military bases spread worldwide; Russia has about 10; and China has only one base in Djibouti, Africa.

Behind the rhetoric about the Indo-Pacific and open seas is the U.S. play in Southeast Asia. Here, the talk of the Indo-Pacific has little resonance for most people. Its main interest is in the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), which was spearheaded by the ASEAN countries. Even with the United States and India walking out of the RCEP negotiations, the 15-member trading bloc is the largest trading bloc in the world, with nearly 30 percent of the world’s GDP and population. Two of the Quad partners — Japan and Australia — are in the RCEP.

The U.S. strategic vision is to project its maritime power against China and contest for control over even Chinese waters and economic zones. This is the 2018 U.S. Pacific strategy doctrine that it has itself put forward, which it de-classified recently.

The doctrine states that the U.S. naval strategy is to deny China sustained air and sea dominance even inside the first island chain and dominate all domains outside the first island chain. For those interested in how the U.S. views the Quad and India’s role in it, this document is a good education.

A virtual Quadrilateral group summit with Australia, India and Japan at the White House on March 12. (White House, Adam Schultz)

As India found to its cost in Lakshadweep, the U.S. definition of the freedom of navigation does not square with India’s either. For all its talk about rule-based world order, the United States has not signed the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) either.The United States wants to use the disputes that Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia have with China over the boundaries of their respective exclusive economic zones. While some of them may look to the United States for support against China, none of these Southeast Asian countries supports the U.S. interpretation of the Freedom of Navigation, under which it carries out its Freedom of Navigation Operations, or FONOPS.

So, when India and other partners of the United States sign on to Freedom of Navigation statements of the United States, they are signing on to the U.S. understanding of the freedom of navigation, which is at variance with theirs.

The 1973 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty created two classes of countries, ones that would be allowed to use a set of technologies that could lead to bomb-grade uranium or plutonium, and others that would be denied them.

There was, however, a submarine loophole in the NPT and its complementary IAEA Safeguards for the peaceful use of atomic energy. Under the NPT, non-nuclear-weapon-state parties must place all nuclear materials under International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards, except nuclear materials for nonexplosive military purposes.

No country until now has utilized this submarine loophole to withdraw weapon-grade uranium from safeguards. If this exception is utilized by Australia, how will the United States continue to argue against Iran’s right to enrich uranium, say for nuclear submarines, which is within its right to develop under the NPT?

India was never a signatory to the NPT, and therefore is a different case from that of Australia. If Australia, a signatory, is allowed to use the submarine loophole, what prevents other countries from doing so as well?

Australia did not have to travel this route if it wanted nuclear submarines. The French submarines that they were buying were originally nuclear submarines but using low-enriched uranium. It is the retrofitting of diesel engines that has created delays in their supplies to Australia. It appears that under the current Australian leadership of Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Australia wants to flex its muscles in the neighborhood, therefore tying up with Big Brother, the United States.

For the United States, if Southeast Asia is the terrain of struggle against China, Australia is a very useful springboard. It also substantiates what has been apparent for some time now — that the Indo-Pacific is only cover for a geostrategic competition between the United States and China over Southeast Asia.

And unfortunately for the United States, East Asia and Southeast Asia have reciprocal economic interests that bring them closer to each other. And Australia, with its brutal settler-colonial past of genocide and neocolonial interventions in Southeast Asia, is not seen as a natural partner by countries there.

India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi seems to have lost the plot completely. Does it want strategic autonomy, as was its policy post-independence? Or does it want to tie itself to a waning imperial power, the United States? The first gave it respect well beyond its economic or military clout. The current path seems more and more a path toward losing its stature as an independent player.

consortiumnews.com

Myth: The war in the Far East only ended in the summer of 1945, when the US president and his advisors felt that, to force the fanatical Japanese to surrender unconditionally, they had no other option than to destroy not one but two cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with atom bombs. This decision saved the lives of countless Americans and Japanese who would have perished if the war had continued and required an invasion of Japan.

Reality: Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed to prevent the Soviets from making a contribution to the victory against Japan, which would have forced Washington to allow Moscow to participate in the postwar occupation and reconstruction of the country. It was also the intention to intimidate the Soviet leadership and thus to wrest concessions from it with respect to the postwar arrangements in Germany and Eastern Europe. Finally, it was not the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the Soviet entry into the war against Japan, which caused Tokyo to surrender.

With the German capitulation in early May 1945, the war in Europe was over. The victors, the Big Three,^[1] now faced the complex and delicate problem of the postwar reorganization of Europe. The United States had entered the war rather late, namely in December 1941. And the Americans only started to make a major contribution to the victory against Germany with the landings in Normandy in June 1944, that is, less than one year before the end of the hostilities in Europe. When the war against Germany came to an end, however, Uncle Sam occupied a seat at the table of the victors, ready and eager to look after his interests, to achieve what one might call the American war aims. (It is a myth that the presumably deeply isolationist Americans just wanted to withdraw from Europe: the country’s political, military, and economic leaders had urgent reasons for maintaining a presence on the old continent.) The other big victorious powers, Britain and the Soviet Union, also looked to pursue their interests. It was clear that it would be impossible for one of the three to “have it all”, that compromises would have to be reached. From the American point of view, the British expectations did not present much of a problem, but Soviet aspirations were a concern. What, then, were the war aims of the Soviet Union?

As the country that had made the biggest contribution by far to the common victory over Nazi Germany and suffered enormous casualties in the process, the Soviet Union had two major objectives. First, hefty reparation payments from Germany as compensation for the huge destruction wrought by Nazi aggression, a demand similar to the French and Belgian demands for reparations payments from the Reich after World War I. Second, security against potential future threats emanating from Germany. These security concerns also involved Eastern Europe, especially Poland, a potential springboard for German aggression against the USSR. Moscow wanted to ensure that in Germany, Poland, and other Eastern European countries, no regimes hostile to the Soviet Union would ever come to power again. The Soviets also expected the Western allies to certify their recuperation of territories lost by revolutionary Russia during the Revolution and the Civil War, such as “Eastern Poland”, and to recognize the metamorphosis of the three Baltic states from independent countries to autonomous republics within the Soviet Union.  Finally, now that the nightmare of the war was over, the Soviets expected that they would be able to go back to work on the construction of a socialist society. It is well known that the Soviet supremo, Stalin, was a firm believer in the idea that it was possible and even necessary to create “socialism in one country”, hence the hostility between him and Trotsky, an apostle of worldwide revolution. Less well known is the fact that, as the war came to an end, Stalin did not plan to install communist regimes in Germany or in any of the Eastern European countries liberated by the Red Army, and that he also discouraged communist parties in France, Italy, and elsewhere in Western Europe, liberated by the Americans and their allies, from trying to come to power. He had already formally stopped promoting worldwide revolution in 1943, when he dissolved the Comintern, the communist international organization created for that purpose by Lenin in 1919. This policy was resented by many communists outside of the Soviet Union, but it pleased Moscow’s Western allies, especially the US and Britain. Stalin was eager to maintain good relations with them, because he needed their goodwill and cooperation to achieve the objectives, described above, aimed at providing the Soviet Union with reparations, security, and the opportunity to resume work on the construction of a socialist society. His American and British partners had never indicated to Stalin that they found these expectations unreasonable. To the contrary, the legitimacy of these Soviet war aims had been recognized repeatedly, either explicitly or implicitly, in Tehran, Yalta, and elsewhere.

The Americans and their British, Canadian, and other partners had liberated most of Western Europe by the end of 1944. And they had made sure that in Italy, France, and elsewhere, regimes were established that were congenial to them, if not always to the population at large. This usually meant that the local communists were sidelined entirely; if that proved impossible, for example in France, they were denied a share of power commensurate with the important role they had played in the resistance or the considerable popular support they enjoyed. And even though the inter-allied agreements had stipulated that the “big three” would collaborate closely in the administration and reconstruction of liberated countries, the Americans and British prevented their Soviet ally from providing any input into the affairs of Italy, for example, the first country to be liberated, already in 1943. In that country, the Americans and British sidelined the communists, who were very popular because of their role in the resistance, in favour of former fascists such as Badoglio, without allowing the Soviets any input. This modus operandi was to set a fateful precedent. Stalin had no choice but to accept that arrangement, but, as US historian Gabriel Kolko has observed, “the Russians accepted the [Italian] ‘formula’ without much enthusiasm, but carefully noted the arrangement for future reference and as a precedent”.^[2] (The Soviets were unquestionably entitled to a voice in the affairs of Italy, since Italian troops had participated in Operation Barbarossa.)

In Western Europe, in 1943-1944, the American and British liberators had acted ad libitum, ignoring not only the wishes of a large part of the local population but also the interests of their Soviet ally, and Stalin had accepted that arrangement. In 1945, on the other hand, the shoe was on the other foot: the Soviets clearly enjoyed the advantage in an Eastern Europe liberated by the Red Army. Even so, the Western Allies could hope that they might be able to provide a measure of input into the reorganization of this part of Europe as well. Everything was still possible over there. The Soviets had obviously favoured the local communists but had not yet created any faits accomplis. And the Western Allies were well aware that Stalin craved their goodwill and cooperation and would therefore be willing to make concessions. The political and military leaders in Washington and London also expected that Stalin would be indulgent because, if not, he had reason to fear the consequences. The Soviet leader was keenly aware that it was already an enormous achievement fort his country to have emerged victoriously from a life-and-death struggle with the Nazi behemoth. But he also knew that many US and British leaders, exemplified by Patton and Churchill, hated the Soviet Union and were even considering waging war against it as soon as the common German enemy was defeated, preferably in a march on Moscow side-by-side with the remainder of the Nazi host; that plan called Operation Unthinkable, had been hatched by Churchill. Stalin had reason to try to avoid such a scenario.

The aspirations of the Soviets with respect to reparations and security, described above, were not unreasonable, and the US and British leaders had recognized their legitimacy, explicitly or implicitly, during a meeting of the Big Three in Yalta in February 1945. But Washington and London were far from enchanted by the prospect of seeing the Soviet Union receiving its due after having made such outstanding efforts and sacrifices on behalf of the common anti-Nazi cause. The Americans, in particular, had their own ideas with respect to postwar Germany and Eastern as well as Western Europe, to be examined in the next chapter. Reparations, for example, would enable the Soviets to resume work, possibly successfully, on the project of a communist society, a counter system to the international capitalist system of which the USA had become the great champion.

Essentially, in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, Uncle Sam wanted governments, democratic or not, that would pursue a liberal economic policy, involving an “open door” for American products and investment capital. Roosevelt had displayed a measure of empathy vis-à-vis the Soviets, but after his death on April 12, 1945, his successor, Harry Truman, had little or no sympathy or understanding for the Soviet point of view. He and his advisors loathed the idea that the Soviet Union might receive major reparations from Germany, since this was likely to disqualify Germany as a potentially lucrative market for American products and investment capital. And they also found it abominable that the Soviets were certain to use that German capital to build a socialist system, an undesirable form of competition for capitalism.

The Soviet aspirations were reasonable, and the Soviet leaders, including Stalin, who is usually wrongly depicted as making all the decisions by himself, were certainly willing to make major concessions. It was possible to talk with them, but such a dialogue also required patience and understanding of the Soviet viewpoint and had to be carried out in the knowledge that the Soviet Union was not prepared to leave the conference table empty-handed. Truman, however, had no desire to engage in such a dialogue. (That Stalin was interested in dialogue and could be most reasonable was to be reflected in his approach to the postwar arrangements regarding Finland and Austria; the Red Army would in due course pull out of these countries without leaving behind any communist regimes.)

Truman and his advisors hoped that it would prove possible to force the Soviets to abstain from German reparations and withdraw not only from the eastern reaches of German territory but also from Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe, so that the Americans and their British partners could operate there as they had already done in Western Europe. Truman even hoped that it might be possible to cause the Soviets to put an end to their communist experiment, which remained a source of inspiration for “reds” and other radicals and revolutionaries everywhere on earth, even in the United States itself.

In the early spring of 1945, Churchill had flogged the idea of having US and British troops march to Moscow together with the remaining Nazi forces. But that plan, called Operation Unthinkable, had to be abandoned. mainly because of the same stiff kind of opposition displayed by soldiers and civilians that had led to the aborting of the armed intervention in the Russian Civil War. Like Patton, who had looked forward to playing a major role in “Barbarossa Bis”, Truman must have been disappointed. But on April 25, 1945, only days before the German capitulation, the president received electrifying news. He was briefed about the top-secret Manhattan Project, or S-1, the code name for the construction of the atom bomb. That new and powerful weapon, on which the Americans had been working for years, was almost ready and, if tested successfully, would soon be available for use. Truman and his advisors thus fell under the spell of what the renowned American historian William Appleman Williams has called a “vision of omnipotence”. They convinced themselves that the new weapon would enable them to force their will on the Soviet Union. The atomic bomb was “a hammer”, as Truman himself put it, that he would wave over the heads of “those boys in the Kremlin”.^[3]

Thanks to the bomb, it would now be possible to force Moscow to withdraw the Red Army from Germany and to deny Stalin a say in its postwar affairs. It now also seemed a feasible proposition to install pro-Western and even anticommunist regimes in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, and to prevent Stalin from exerting any influence there. It even became thinkable that the Soviet Union itself might be opened up to American investment capital as well as American political and economic influence, and that this communist heretic might thus be returned to the bosom of the universal capitalist church. “There is evidence”, writes the German historian Jost Dülffer, that Truman believed that the monopoly of the nuclear bomb would be “a passepartout for the implementation of the United States’ ideas for a new world order”.^[4] Indeed, with the nuclear pistol on his hip, the American president did not feel that he had to treat “the boys in the Kremlin”, who did not have such a super-weapon, as his equals. “The American leaders waxed self-righteous and excoriated Russia”, writes Gabriel Kolko, “[and] they refused to negotiate in any serious way simply because as self-confident master of economic and military powers the United States felt it could ultimately define the world order”.^[5]

Possession of a mighty new weapon also opened up all sorts of possibilities with respect to the ongoing war in the Far East and the postwar arrangements to be made for that part of the world, of great importance to the leaders of the US, as we have seen when dealing with Pearl Harbor. Nevertheless, playing that powerful trump card would only be possible after the bomb had been successfully tested and was available to be used. Truman needed to bide his time. He therefore did not heed Churchill’s advice to discuss the fate of Germany and Eastern Europe with Stalin as soon as possible, “before the armies of democracy melted”, that is, before the American troops were to pull out of Europe. Eventually, Truman did agree to a summit meeting of the Big Three in Berlin, but not before the summer, when the bomb was supposed to be ready.

The meeting of the Big Three took place, not in bombed-out Berlin but in nearby Potsdam, from July 17 to August 2, 1945. It was there that Truman received the long-awaited message that the atomic bomb had been tested successfully on July 16 in New Mexico. The American president now felt strong enough to make his move. He no longer bothered to present proposals to Stalin but made all sorts of non-negotiable demands; at the same time, he rejected out of hand all proposals emanating from the Soviet side, for example proposals concerning German reparation payments. But Stalin did not capitulate, not even when Truman attempted to intimidate him by whispering into his ear that America had acquired an incredibly powerful new weapon. The Soviet leader, who had certainly been informed already about the Manhattan Project by his spies, listened in stony silence. Truman concluded that only an actual demonstration of the atomic bomb could persuade the Soviets to give way. Consequently, no general agreement on important issues could be achieved at Potsdam^.[6]

In the meantime, the Japanese battled on in the Far East, even though their situation was totally hopeless. They were in fact prepared to surrender, but not unconditionally as the Americans demanded. To the Japanese mind, an unconditional capitulation conjured up the supreme humiliation, namely, that Emperor Hirohito might be forced to step down and possibly be accused of war crimes. American leaders were aware of this, and some of them, for example Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, believed, as historian Gar Alperovitz writes, “that a statement reassuring the Japanese that unconditional surrender did not mean dethronement of the Emperor would probably bring an end to the war”.^[7]

The demand for an unconditional surrender was actually far from sacrosanct: in General Eisenhower’s HQ in Reims on May 7, a German condition had been accepted, namely their request for the cease-fire to be implemented only after a delay of no less than 45 hours, long enough to permit a large number of their troops to slip away from the eastern front in order to end up in not in Soviet but in American or British captivity; even at this late stage, many of these units would be kept ready – in uniform, armed, and under the command of their own officers – for possible use against the Red Army, as Churchill was to admit after the war.^[8] It was therefore quite possible to bring about a Japanese capitulation in spite of the demand for immunity for Hirohito. Furthermore, Tokyo’s condition was far from essential: after an unconditional surrender was finally wrested from the Japanese, the Americans never bothered to lay charges against Hirohito, and it was thanks to Washington that he was able to remain emperor for many more decades.

Why did the Japanese think that they could still afford the luxury of attaching a condition to their offer of surrender? The reason was that in China the main force of their army remained intact. They thought that they could use this army to defend Japan itself and thus exact a high price from the Americans for their admittedly inevitable final victory. This scheme would only work, however, if the Soviet Union did not get involved in the war in the Far East, thus pinning the Japanese forces down on the Chinese mainland. Soviet neutrality, in other words, allowed Tokyo a small measure of hope, not hope for a victory of course, but hope that Washington might accept the condition about their emperor. To a certain extent, the war with Japan dragged on because the USSR was not yet involved in it. But Stalin had already promised in 1943 to declare war on Japan within three months after the capitulation of Germany, and he had reiterated this commitment as recently as July 17, 1945, in Potsdam. Consequently, Washington counted on a Soviet attack on Japan in early August. The Americans thus knew only too well that the situation of the Japanese was hopeless. “Fini Japs when that comes about”, Truman wrote in his diary, referring to the expected Soviet intervention in the war in the Far East.^[9]

In addition, the American navy assured Washington that it was able to prevent the Japanese from transferring their army from China to defend the homeland against an American invasion. Finally, it was questionable whether an American invasion of Japan would be necessary at all, since the mighty US Navy could also simply blockade that island nation and thus confront it with a choice between capitulating or starving to death.

In order to finish the war against Japan without having to make more sacrifices, Truman thus had a range of attractive options. He could accept the trivial Japanese condition, immunity for their emperor; he could also wait until the Red Army attacked the Japanese in China, thus forcing Tokyo into accepting an unconditional surrender after all; and he could have instituted a naval blockade that would have forced Tokyo to sue for peace sooner or later. But Truman and his advisors chose none of these options. Instead, they decided to knock Japan out with the atomic bomb.

This fateful decision, which was to cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, mostly civilians, offered the Americans considerable advantages. First, the bomb might still force Tokyo to surrender before the Soviets got involved in the war in Asia. In this case it would not be necessary to allow Moscow a say in the coming decisions about postwar Japan, about the territories that had been occupied by Japan (such as Korea and Manchuria), and about the Far East and the Pacific region in general. The United States would then enjoy total hegemony over that part of the world, something that was Washington’s true, albeit unspoken, war aim in the conflict with Japan, as we have seen in the previous chapter. It is for this reason that the option of a blockade was also rejected: in this case, the Japanese would have capitulated only many months after the entry into the war of the Soviet Union.

A Soviet intervention in the war in the Far East threatened to achieve for the Soviets the same advantage that the Americans’ own relatively late intervention in the war in Europe had produced for themselves, namely, a place at the round table of the victors who would force their will on the defeated enemy, decide on borders, determine postwar socio-economic and political structures, and thereby achieve enormous benefits and prestige. Washington absolutely did not want the Soviet Union to enjoy this kind of input. The Americans had eliminated their great imperialist competitor in that part of the world and did not relish the idea of being saddled with a new potential rival, a rival, moreover, whose detested communist ideology was already becoming dangerously influential in many Asiatic countries, including China. By making use of the atom bomb, US leaders hoped to finish off the Japanese quickly and start to rearrange the Far East without a potentially pesky Soviet partner.

The atom bomb seemed to offer the American leaders an additional important advantage. Truman’s experience in Potsdam had persuaded him that only an actual demonstration of this new weapon would make Stalin pliable. Using the atom bomb to obliterate a Japanese city seemed to be the perfect stratagem to intimidate the Soviets and coerce them to make major concessions with respect to postwar arrangements in Germany, Poland, and elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe. Truman’s secretary of state, James F. Byrnes, reportedly declared later that the atom bomb had been used because such a demonstration of power was likely to make the Soviets more accommodating in Europe.

To make the desired terrifying impression on the Soviets – and the rest of the world -, the bomb obviously had to be dropped on a big city. It is probably for this reason that Truman turned down a proposal, made by some of the scientists involved in the Manhattan Project, to demonstrate the power of the bomb by dropping it on some uninhabited Pacific island: there would not have been sufficient death and destruction. It would also have been extremely embarrassing if the weapon had failed to work its deadly magic; but if the unannounced atomic bombing of a Japanese city backfired, no one would have known and no one would have been embarrassed. A big Japanese city had to be selected, but the capital, Tokyo, did not qualify, since it was already flattened by previous conventional bombing raids, so that additional damage was unlikely to loom sufficiently impressive. In fact, very few cities qualified as the required “virgin” target. Why? In early August 1945, only ten cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants remained relatively unscathed by bombing raids, and quite a few of those were beyond the range of the bombers which. (On account of inexistant Japanese air defences, the latter had already started to obliterate towns with a population of less than 30,000.) But Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unlucky enough to qualify.^[10]

The atom bomb was ready just in time to be put to use before the USSR had a chance to become involved in the Far East. Hiroshima was obliterated on August 6, 1945, but the Japanese leaders did not react immediately with an unconditional capitulation. The reason was that the damage was great, but not greater than that caused by earlier bombing raids on Tokyo, where an attack by thousands of bombers on March 9 and 10, 1945, had caused more destruction and killed more people than at the “virgin” target of Hiroshima. This ruined Truman’s delicate scenario, at least partly. Tokyo had not yet surrendered when on August 8, 1945 — exactly three months after the German capitulation in Berlin — the USSR declared war on Japan, and the next day the Red Army attacked the Japanese troops stationed in northern China. Truman and his advisors now wanted to end the war as quickly as possible in order to limit the “damage” (from their perspective) done by the Soviet intervention.

Already on August 10, 1945, just one day after the Soviet Union’s entry into the war in the Far East, a second bomb was dropped, this time on the city of Nagasaki. About this bombardment, in which many Japanese Catholics perished, a former American army chaplain later stated: “That’s one of the reasons I think they dropped the second bomb. To hurry it up. To make them surrender before Russians came”.^[11] (The chaplain may or may not have been aware that among the 75,000 human beings who were “instantaneously incinerated, carbonized and evaporated” in Nagasaki were many Japanese Catholics as well an unknown number of inmates of a camp for allied POWs, whose presence had been reported to the air command, to no avail.)^[12]

Japan capitulated not because of the atom bombs but because of the Soviet entry into the conflict. After the obliteration of most of the country’s big cities, the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no matter how horrible, made little or no difference from a strategic viewpoint. The Soviet declaration of war, on the other hand, was a fatal blow, because it eliminated Tokyo’s very last hope for attaching some minor conditions to the inevitable capitulation. Moreover, even after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese leaders knew that it would take many months before American troops might land in Japan, but the Red Army was making such rapid progress that it was estimated to cross into Japan’s own territory within ten days. Because of the Russian involvement, in other words, Tokyo ran out of time and of options other than unconditional surrender. Japan capitulated because of the Soviet declaration of war, not because of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even without the atomic bombs, the Soviet entry into the war would have triggered a surrender.^[13] But the Japanese leaders took their time. Their formal capitulation occurred on August 14, 1945.

To the great chagrin of Truman and his advisors, the Red Army was able to make considerable progress during those final days of the war. The Soviet even began to drive the Japanese out of their Korean colony, and did so in collaboration with a Korean liberation movement led by Kim Il-sung, which proved to be immensely popular and therefore poised to come to power after the liberation of the entire country from Japan’s nasty colonial yoke. But the prospect of an independent, socialist Korea did not fit into American plans for the postwar Far East. Washington therefore quickly send troops to occupy the south of the peninsula, and the Soviets agreed to a division of the country that was supposed to be only temporary but has lasted until the present.^[14]

It looked as if the Americans would be stuck with a Soviet partner in the Far East after all, but Truman made sure that this was not the case. He acted as if the earlier cooperation of the three great powers in Europe had not set a precedent by rejecting Stalin’s request for a Soviet occupation zone in the defeated Land of the Rising Sun on August 15, 1945. And when on September 2, 1945, General MacArthur officially accepted the Japanese surrender on the American battleship Missouri in the Bay of Tokyo, representatives of the Soviet Union, and of other allies in the Far East, including Great Britain and the Netherlands, were allowed to be present only as insignificant extras. Japan was not carved up into occupation zones, like Germany. America’s defeated rival was to be occupied in its entirety by the Americans only, and as American viceroy in Tokyo, General MacArthur would ensure that, regardless of contributions made to the common victory, no other power would have a say in the affairs of postwar Japan.

The American conquerors recreated the Land of the Rising Sun according to their ideas and to their advantage. In September 1951, a satisfied America would sign a peace treaty with Japan. The USSR, however, whose interests had never been taken into account, did not co-sign this treaty. The Soviets did pull out of the parts of China and Korea they had liberated, but they refused to evacuate Japanese territories such as Sakhalin and the Kurils, which had been occupied by the Red Army during the last days of the war. They would be mercilessly criticized for this in the United States afterwards, as if the attitude of the American government itself had nothing to do with this issue.

American leaders believed that after the Japanese rape of China and its humiliation of traditional colonial powers such as Great Britain, France, and the Netherlands, and after their own victory over Japan, only the elimination of the USSR from the Far East — seemingly a mere formality — was required in order to realize their dream of absolute hegemony in that part of the world. Their disappointment and chagrin were all the greater when, after the war, China was “lost” to Mao’s Communists. To make things worse, the northern half of Korea, a former Japanese colony the US had hoped to reduce to vassalage together with Japan itself, opted for an idiosyncratic path to socialism, and in Vietnam a popular independence movement under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh likewise turned out to have plans that proved to be incompatible with the grand Asian ambitions of the United States. No wonder, then, that it would come to war in Korea and Vietnam, and almost to an armed conflict with “Red China”.

To force Japan to its knees, it was not necessary to use the atom bomb. As a thorough American study of the war in the air, the US Strategic Bombing Survey, was to acknowledge categorically, “Japan would certainly have surrendered prior to 31 December 1945, even if the atom bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated”.^[15] Several American military leaders have publicly acknowledged this, including Henry “Hap ” Arnold, Chester Nimitz, William “Bull ” Halsey, Curtis LeMay, and a future president, Dwight Eisenhower. Truman, however, wanted to use the bomb for a number of reasons, and not just to get the Japanese to surrender. He expected that dropping the atom bomb would keep the Soviets out of the Far East and terrorize that country’s leaders, so that Washington could impose its will on the Kremlin with respect to European affairs. And so, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were pulverized.  Many American historians realize this only too well. Sean Dennis Cashman writes:

With the passing of time, many historians have concluded that the bomb was used as much for political reasons… Vannevar Bush [the head of the US Office of Scientific Research and Development] stated that the bomb “was also delivered on time, so that there was no necessity for any concessions to Russia at the end of the war”. Secretary of State James F. Byrnes [Truman’s secretary of state] never denied a statement attributed to him that the bomb had been used to demonstrate American power to the Soviet Union in order to make [the Soviets] more manageable in Europe.^[16]

Truman himself, however, hypocritically declared at the time that the purpose of the two nuclear bombardments had been “to bring the boys home”, that is, to quickly finish the war without any further major loss of life on the American side. This explanation was uncritically broadcast in the American media and thus was born a myth eagerly propagated by them and by mainstream historians in the US and in the Western World in general, and of course by Hollywood.

The myth that two Japanese cities were nuked to force Tokyo to surrender, thus shortening the war and saving lives, was “made in USA”, but it was to be eagerly espoused in Japan, whose post-war leaders, vassals of the US, found it extremely useful for a number of reasons, as War Wilson has pointed out in his excellent article on the Bomb. First, the emperor and his ministers, who were in many ways responsible for a war that had caused so much misery for the Japanese people, found it extremely convenient to blame their defeat, as Wilson puts it, on “an amazing scientific breakthrough that no one could have predicted”. The blinding light of the atomic blasts made it impossible, so to speak, to see their “mistakes and misjudgments”. The Japanese people had been lied to about how bad the situation really was, and how the misery had dragged on so long just to save the emperor, but the Bomb provided

the perfect excuse for having lost the war. No need to apportion blame; no court of enquiry need be held. Japan’s leaders were able to claim they had done their best. So, at the most general level the Bomb served to deflect blame from Japan’s leaders.

Second, the Bomb earned Japan international sympathy. Like Germany, Japan had waged a war of aggression and committed all sorts of war crimes. Both countries looked for ways to improve their image, seeking to exchange the mantle of perpetrator. for that of victim. In that context, post-war (West-)Germany invented the myth of the Red Army, depicted as a latter-day horde of racially inferior Mongols, storming towards Berlin, raping blond Frauleins and pillaging peaceful gingerbread towns en route to Berlin. Hiroshima and Nagasaki similarly permitted Japan to pose as “a victimized nation, one that had been unfairly bombed with a cruel and horrifying instrument of war”.

Third, echoing the American notion that the Bomb had ended the war was certain to please Japan’s post-war American overlords. The latter would protect Japan’s upper class against the demands for radical societal change emanating from radical elements, including communists, whose gospel “resonated among Japan’s poor, threatening plutocratic rule”.^[17] But for quite some time, the elite worried hat the Americans might abolish the institution of the emperor and put many top government officials, bankers, and industrialists on trial for war crimes. It was therefore deemed useful to please the Americans and, as a Japanese historian has put, “if they wanted to believe that the Bomb won the war, why disappoint them?” Japanese acceptance of their Hiroshima myth gratified the Americans because it served to spread the word in Japan, elsewhere in Asia, and around the world, that the US was militarily all-powerful yet peace-loving, and willing to use its monopoly of the atom bomb only when absolutely necessary. Ward Wilson continues and concludes as follows:

If, on the other hand, the Soviet entry into the war was what caused Japan to surrender, then the Soviets could claim that they were able to do in four days what the United States was unable to do in four years, and the perception of Soviet military power and Soviet diplomatic influence would be enhanced. And once the Cold War was underway, asserting that the Soviet entry had been the decisive factor would have been tantamount to giving aid and comfort to the enemy.^[18]

Over the years, the myth that the “nuking” of two Japanese cities was justified, has lost much of its appeal on both sides of the Pacific. In 1945, an overwhelming 85% of Americans saw it that way, but that share declined to 63% in 1991 and 29% 2015; of the Japanese population, only 29% approved in 2015, and in 2015 merely 14%.^[19] The myth obviously needed a boost, and it was duly provided by one of Truman’s successors, President Barack Obama.

Obama visited Hiroshima in May 2016. In a public address he coolly described the pulverization of the city by means of the atom bomb in 1945 as “death falling from the sky”, as if it had been a hailstorm or some other natural phenomenon his country had nothing to do with, and he neglected to utter a single word of regret, let alone an apology, on behalf of Uncle Sam. In an enthusiastic report about this presidential performance, the New York Times, one of America’s leading newspapers, wrote that “many historians believe the bombings on Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, which together took the lives of more than 200,000 people, saved lives on balance, since an invasion of the islands would have led to far greater bloodshed”.^[20] That numerous facts contradict this “belief”, and that numerous historians believe the exact opposite was not mentioned at all. This is how myths, even ailing myths, are kept alive.

SOURCES

Alperovitz, Gar. Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam. The Use of the Atomic Bomb and the American Confrontation with Soviet Power, new edition, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1985 (original edition 1965).

Cashman, Sean Dennis. Roosevelt, and World War II, New York and London, 1989.

Cummings, Bruce. The Korean War: A History, New York, 2011.

Dülffer, Jost. Jalta, 4. Februar 1945: Der Zweite Weltkrieg und die Entstehung der bipolaren Welt, Munich, 1998.

Gowans, Stephen. Patriots, Traitors and Empires: The Story of Korea’s Struggle for Freedom, Montreal, 2018.

Harris, Gardiner. “At Hiroshima Memorial, Obama Says Nuclear Arms Require ‘Moral Revolution’”, The New York Times, May 27, 2016

Hasegawa, Tsuyoshi. Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan, Cambridge, MA, 2005.

Kohls, Gary G. “Whitewashing Hiroshima: The Uncritical Glorification of American Militarism,” http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig5/kohls1.html

Kolko, Gabriel. The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943-1945, New York, 1968.

Kolko, Gabriel. Main Currents in Modern American History, New York, 1976.

Pauwels, Jacques R. The Myth of the Good War: America in the Second World War, revised edition, Toronto, 2015.

Stokes, Bruce. “70 years after Hiroshima, opinions have shifted on use of atomic bomb”, Factank, August 4, 2015, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/08/04/70-years-after-hiroshima-opinions-have-shifted-on-use-of-atomic-bomb.

Terkel, Studs. “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War Two, New York, 1984.

Williams, William Appleman. The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, revised edition, New York, 1962.

Wilson, Ward. “The Bomb Didn’t Beat Japan … Stalin Did. Have 70 years of nuclear policy been based on a lie?”, F[oreign]P[olicy], May 30, 2013, https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-japan-stalin-did.

Notes

[1] France was to join this trio later, thus making it the Big Four.
[2] Kolko (1968), pp. 50-51.
[3] Williams, p. 250.
[4] Dülffer, p. 155.
[5] Kolko (1976), p. 355.
[6] Alperovitz, p. 223.
[7] Alperovitz, p.156.
[8] Pauwels, pp. 178-79.
[9] Quoted in Alperovitz, p. 24.
[10] Wilson.
[11] Quoted in Terkel, p. 535.
[12] Kohls.
[13] Hasegawa, pp. 185-86, 295-97; Wilson.
[14] For a myth-free history of the tragedy if the division of Korea, see the books by Cummings and by Gowans.
[15] Quotation in Horowitz, p. 53.
[16] Cashman, p. 369.
[17] American historian Sarah C. Paine as quoted in Gowans, p. 106.
[18] Wilson
[19] Stokes.
[20] Harris.

counterpunch.org

On Monday August 6, 1945, the United States unleashed an atomic bomb on Hiroshima killing 140,000 people instantly. 70% of the city was destroyed.  A few days later on August 9th, another atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki killing an estimated 70,000 people.[2] The Japanese government stated that the death toll was much higher than the American estimates, indicating that it was close to a half million.  Many died not only because of lack of medical help, but also from radioactive rain. In the immediate aftermath, the incineration of mostly innocent civilians was buried in official government pronouncements about the victory of the bombings of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Violence rendered in military abstractions and patriotic platitudes is itself an act of violence. The visceral effect of violence brings to the surface what can only be considered intolerable, unthinkable, and never unknowable. Maybe such horror can only be possible in the language of journalism.

Within a short time after the dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, John Hersey wrote a devastating description of the misery and suffering caused by the bomb. Removing the bomb from abstract arguments endorsing matters of technique, efficiency, and national honor, Hersey first published in The New Yorker and later in a widely read book an exhausting and terrifying description of the bombs effects on the people of Hiroshima, portraying in detail the horror of the suffering caused by the bomb.  There is one haunting passage that not only illustrates the horror of the pain and suffering, but also offers a powerful metaphor for the blindness that overtook both the victims and the perpetrators. He writes:

On his way back with the water, [Father Kleinsorge] got lost on a detour around a fallen tree, and as he looked for his way through the woods, he heard a voice ask from the underbrush, ‘Have you anything to drink?’ He saw a uniform. Thinking there was just one soldier, he approached with the water.  When he had penetrated the bushes, he saw there were about twenty men, they were all in exactly the same nightmarish state: their faces were wholly burned, their eye sockets were hollow, the fluid from their melted eyes had run down their cheeks. Their mouths were mere swollen, pus-covered wounds, which they could not bear to stretch enough to admit the spout of the teapot.[3]

The nightmarish image of fallen soldiers staring with hollow sockets, eyes liquidated on cheeks and mouths swollen and pus-filled stands as a warning to those who would refuse blindly the moral witnessing necessary to keep alive for future generations the memory of the horror of nuclear weapons and the need to eliminate them. Hersey’s literal depiction of mass violence against civilians serves as a kind of mirrored doubling, referring at one level to nations blindly driven by militarism and hyper-nationalism and at another level the need to exorcise history which now functions as a curse.

The atomic bomb was celebrated by those who argued that its use was responsible for concluding the war with Japan. Also applauded was the power of the bomb and the wonder of science in creating it, especially “the atmosphere of technological fanaticism” in which scientists worked to create the most powerful weapon of destruction then known to the world. [4] Conventional justification for dropping the atomic bombs held that “it was the most expedient measure to securing Japan’s surrender [and] that the bomb was used to shorten the agony of war and to save American lives.”[5] Left out of that succinct legitimating narrative were the growing objections to the use of atomic weaponry put forth by a number of top military leaders and politicians, including General Dwight Eisenhower, who was then the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, former President Herbert Hoover, and General Douglas MacArthur, all of whom argued it was not necessary to end the war. [6] A position later proven to be correct.

For a brief time, the Atom Bomb was celebrated as a kind of magic talisman entwining salvation and scientific inventiveness and in doing so functioned to “simultaneously domesticate the unimaginable while charging the mundane surroundings of our everyday lives with a weight and sense of importance unmatched in modern times.”[7] In spite of the initial celebration of the effects of the bomb and the orthodox defense that accompanied it, whatever positive value the bomb may have had among the American public, intellectuals, and popular media began to dissipate as more and more people became aware of the massive deaths along with suffering and misery it caused.[8]

Kenzaburo Oe, the Nobel Prize winner for Literature, noted that in spite of attempts to justify the bombing  “from the instant the atomic bomb exploded, it [soon] became the symbol of human evil, [embodying] the absolute evil of war.”[9] What particularly troubled Oe was the scientific and intellectual complicity in the creation of and in the lobbying for its use, with acute awareness that it would turn Hiroshima into a “vast ugly death chamber.” [10]  More pointedly, it revealed a new stage in the merging of military actions and scientific methods, indeed a new era in which the technology of destruction could destroy the earth in roughly the time it takes to boil an egg. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki forecasted a new industrially enabled kind of violence and warfare in which the distinction between soldiers and civilians disappeared and the indiscriminate bombing of civilians was normalized. But more than this, the American government exhibited a ‘total embrace of the atom bomb,” that signalled support for the first time of a “notion of unbounded annihilation [and] “the totality of destruction.”[11]

Hiroshima and Nagasaki designated the beginning of the nuclear era in which as Oh Jung points out “Combatants were engaged on a path toward total war in which technological advances, coupled with the increasing effectiveness of an air strategy, began to undermine the ethical view that civilians should not be targeted… This pattern of wholesale destruction blurred the distinction between military and civilian casualties.”[12]  The destructive power of the bomb and its use on civilians also marked a turning point in American self-identity in which the United States began to think of itself as a superpower, which as Robert Jay. Lifton points out refers to “a national mindset–put forward strongly by a tight-knit leadership group–that takes on a sense of omnipotence, of unique standing in the world that grants it the right to hold sway over all other nations.”[13]  The power of the scientific imagination and its murderous deployment gave birth simultaneously to the American disimagination machine with its capacity to rewrite history in order to render it an irrelevant relic best forgotten.

What remains particularly ghastly about the rationale for dropping two atomic bombs was the attempt on the part of its defenders to construct a redemptive narrative through a perversion of humanistic commitment, of mass slaughter justified in the name of saving lives and winning the war.[14]  This was a humanism under siege, transformed into its terrifying opposite and placed on the side of what Edmund Wilson called the Faustian possibility of a grotesque “plague and annihilation.”[15] In part, Hiroshima and Nagasaki represented the achieved transcendence of military metaphysics now a defining feature of national identity, its more poisonous and powerful investment in the cult of scientism, instrumental rationality, and technological fanaticism—and the simultaneous marginalization of scientific evidence and intellectual rigour, even reason itself. That Hiroshima, in particular, was used to redefine America’s “national mission and its utopian possibilities”[16] was nothing short of what the late historian Howard Zinn called a “devastating commentary on our moral culture.”[17] More pointedly it serves as a grim commentary on our national insanity, which became more exacerbated over time, reaching a culmination to a form of fascist politics under the Trump administration. In most of these cases, matters of morality and justice were dissolved into technical questions and reductive chauvinism relating matters of governmentally massaged efficiency, scientific “expertise”, and American exceptionalism.  As Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell stated, the atom bomb was symbolic of the power of post-war America rather than a “ruthless weapon of indiscriminate destruction” which conveniently put to rest painful questions concerning justice, morality, and ethical responsibility.[18]

This narrative of redemption was soon challenged by a number of historians who argued that the dropping of the atom bomb had less to do with winning the war than with an attempt to put pressure on the Soviet Union to not expand their empire into territory deemed essential to American interests.[19] Protecting America’s superiority in a potential Soviet-American conflict was a decisive factor in dropping the bomb. In addition, the Truman administration needed to provide legitimation to Congress for the staggering sums of money spent on the Manhattan Project in developing the atomic weapons program and for procuring future funding necessary to continue military appropriations for ongoing research long after the war ended.[20] The late Howard Zinn went even further asserting that the government’s weak defense for the bombing of Hiroshima was not only false but was complicitous with an act of terrorism. Refusing to relinquish his role as a public intellectual willing to hold power accountable, he writes “Can we … comprehend the killing of 200,000 people to make a point about American power?”[21] Other historians also attempted to deflate this official defense of Hiroshima by providing counter-evidence that the Japanese were ready to surrender as a result of a number of factors including the nonstop bombing of 26 cities before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the success of the naval and military blockade of Japan, and the Soviet’s entrance into the war on August 9th.[22]

Employing a weapon of mad violence against the Japanese people, the US government imagined Japan as the ultimate enemy, and then pursued tactics that blinded the American public to its own humanity and in doing so became its own worst enemy by turning against its most cherished democratic principles. In a sense, this self-imposed sightlessness functioned as part of what Jacques Derrida once called a societal autoimmune response, one in which the body’s immune system attacked its own bodily defenses.[23] Fortunately, this state of political and moral blindness did not extend to a number of critics for the next fifty years who railed aggressively against the dropping of the atomic bombs and the beginning of the nuclear age.

In the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima, there was a major debate not just about how the emergence of the atomic age and the moral, economic, scientific, military, and political forced that gave rise to it but also the ways in which the embrace of the atomic age altered the emerging nature of state power, gave rise to new forms of militarism, put American lives at risk, created environmental hazards, produced an emergent surveillance state, furthered the politics of state secrecy, and put into play a series of deadly diplomatic crisis, reinforced by the logic of brinkmanship and a belief in the totality of war.[24]

Hiroshima not only unleashed immense misery, unimaginable suffering, and wanton death on Japanese civilians, it also gave rise to anti-democratic tendencies in the United States government that put the health, safety, and liberty of the American people at risk. Shrouded in secrecy, the government machinery of death that produced the bomb did everything possible to cover up the most grotesque effects of the bomb on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but also the dangerous hazards it posed to the American people. Lifton and Mitchell argue convincingly that if the development of the bomb and its immediate effects were shrouded in concealment by the government that before long concealment developed into a cover up marked by government lies and the falsification of information.[25] With respect to the horrors visited upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki, films taken by Japanese and American photographers were hidden for years from the American public for fear that they would create both a moral panic and a backlash against the funding for nuclear weapons. [26] For example, the Atomic Energy Commission lied about the extent and danger of radiation fallout going so far as to mount a campaign claiming that “fallout does not constitute a serious hazard to any living thing outside the test site.”[27] This act of falsification took place in spite of the fact that thousands of military personal were exposed to high levels of radiation within and outside of the test sites.

In addition, the Atomic Energy Commission in conjunction with the Departments of Defense, Department of Veterans’ Affairs, the Central Intelligence Agency, and other government departments engaged in a series of medical experiments designed to test the effects of different levels radiation exposure on military personal, medical patients, prisoners, and others in various sites.  According to Lifton and Mitchell, these experiments took the shape of exposing people intentionally to “radiation releases or by placing military personnel at or near ground zero of bomb tests.”[28] It gets worse. They also note that “from 1945 through 1947, bomb-grade plutonium injections were given to thirty-one patients [in a variety of hospitals and medical centers] and that all of these “experiments were shrouded in secrecy and, when deemed necessary, in lies….the experiments were intended to show what type or amount of exposure would cause damage to normal, healthy people in a nuclear war.”[29] Some of the long lasting legacies of the birth of the atomic bomb also included the rise of plutonium dumps, environmental and health risks, the cult of expertise, and the subordination of the peaceful development technology to a large scale interest in using technology for the organized production of violence. Another notable development raised by many critics in the years following the launch of the atomic age was the rise of a government mired in secrecy, the repression of dissent, and the legitimation for a type of civic illiteracy in which Americans were told to leave “the gravest problems, military and social, completely in the hands of experts and political leaders who claimed to have them under control.”[30]

All of these anti-democratic tendencies unleashed by the atomic age came under scrutiny during the latter half of the twentieth century. The terror of a nuclear holocaust, an intense sense of alienation from the commanding institutions of power, and deep anxiety about the demise of the future spawned growing unrest, ideological dissent, and massive outbursts of resistance among students and intellectuals all over the globe from the sixties until the beginning of the twenty-first century calling for the outlawing of militarism, nuclear production and stockpiling, and the nuclear propaganda machine. Literary writers extending from James Agee to Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. condemned the death-saturated machinery launched by the atomic age. Moreover, public intellectuals from Dwight Macdonald and Bertrand Russell to Helen Caldicott, Ronald Takaki, Noam Chomsky, and Howard Zinn, fanned the flames of resistance to both the nuclear arms race and weapons as well as the development of nuclear technologies.

In the United States, the mushroom cloud connected to Hiroshima is now connected to much larger forces of destruction, including a turn to instrumental reason over moral considerations, the normalization of violence in America, the militarization of local police forces, an attack on civil liberties, the rise of the surveillance state, a dangerous turn towards authoritarianism, embodied in the fascist politics unleashed by Trump and his supine, dangerous allies.  Rather than stand in opposition to preventing a nuclear mishap or the expansion of the arms industry, the United States places high up on the list of those nations that could trigger what Amy Goodman calls that “horrible moment when hubris, accident or inhumanity triggers the next nuclear attack.” [31] Given the history of lies, deceptions, falsifications, and retreat into secrecy that characterizes the American government’s strangulating hold by the military-industrial-surveillance complex, it would be naïve to assume that the U.S. government can be trusted to act with good intentions when it comes to matters of domestic and foreign policy. Of course, matters of trust, decency, and a respect for democracy evaporated under the former Trump administration.  State terrorism and an embrace of violence as a national ideal has increasingly become the DNA of American governance and politics and is evident in government cover ups, corruption, and numerous acts of bad faith. Secrecy, lies, and deception have a long history in the United States and the issue is not merely to uncover such instances of state deception but to connect the dots over time and to map the connections, for instance, between the actions of the NSA in the early aftermath of the attempts to cover up the inhumane destruction unleashed by the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the role the NSA and other intelligence agencies play today in distorting the truth about government policies while embracing an all-compassing notion of surveillance and squelching of civil liberties, privacy, and freedom.  Militarism now pervades every aspect of society, language has become weaponized, state racism has been turned into a tool of political opportunism, and the Republican Party amounts to a criminal organization inflicting lies, conspiracy theories, voter suppression laws, and a denial of science and public health in the midst of a crisis, amounting to untold numbers of death.

Hiroshima symbolized and continues to remind us of the fact that the United States commits unspeakable acts of violence making it easier to refuse to rely on politicians, academics, and alleged experts who refuse to support a politics of transparency and serve mostly to legitimate anti-democratic, if not totalitarian policies.  Questioning a monstrous war machine whose roots lie in Hiroshima and the gangster capitalism that benefits from it is the first step in declaring nuclear weapons unacceptable ethically and politically.   This suggests a further mode of inquiry that focuses on how the rise of the military-industrial complex contributes to the escalation of nuclear weapons and what can we learn by tracing it roots to the development and use of the atom bomb. Moreover, it raises questions about the role played by intellectuals both in an out of the academy in conspiring to build the bomb and hide its effects from the American people? These are only some of the questions that need to be made visible, interrogated, and pursued in a variety of sites and public forums.

One crucial issue today is what role might intellectuals, cultural critics, journalists, and others who trade in lifting ideas into the public realm play in making clear the educative nature of politics? How might reviving the public imagination function as part of a sustained pedagogical effort to resurrect the memory of Hiroshima as both a warning and a signpost for rethinking the nature of collective struggle, reclaiming the ideals and promises a radical democracy, and producing a sustained politics and act of collective resistance aimed at abolishing nuclear weapons forever?  One issue would be to revisit the conditions that made Hiroshima and Nagasaki possible, to explore how militarism and a kind of technological fanaticism merged under the star of scientific rationality. Another step forward would be to make clear what the effects of such weapons are, to disclose the manufactured lie that such weapons make us safe. Indeed, this suggests the need for intellectuals, artists, and other cultural workers to use their skills, resources, and connections to develop massive educational campaigns that make clear both the danger of nuclear war a society armed to the teeth.

Such campaigns not only make education, consciousness, and collective struggle the center of politics, but also systemically work to both inform the public about the history of such weapons, the misery and suffering they have caused, and how they benefit the financial, government, and corporate elite who make huge amounts of money off the arms race and the promotion of nuclear deterrence and the need for a permanent warfare state. Intellectuals today appear numbed by ever developing disasters, statistics of suffering and death, the Hollywood disimagination machine with its investment in celluloid Apocalypses for which only superheroes can respond, and a consumer culture that thrives on self-interests and deplores collective political and ethical responsibility. In an age when violence turns into a spectacle, mass shootings become normalized, and violence becomes the primary language of politics, it becomes all the more difficult and yet necessary to remember the horror and legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

There are no rationales or escapes from the responsibility of preventing mass destruction due to nuclear annihilation; the appeal to military necessity is no excuse for the indiscriminate bombing of civilians whether in Hiroshima or Yemen.  The sense of horror, fear, doubt, anxiety, and powerless that followed Hiroshima and Nagasaki up until the beginning of the 21^st century seems to have faded in light of the rise of a form of gangster capitalism that embraces white nationalism, white supremacy, the Hollywood apocalypse machine, the mindlessness of consumer cultures, the growing spectacles of violence, and a militarism that is now celebrated as one of the highest ideals of American life. In a society governed by militarism, consumerism, and neoliberal savagery, it has become more difficult to assume moral, social, and political responsibility, to believe that democracy matters and is worth fighting for, to imagine a future in which responding to the suffering of others is a central element of democratic life. When historical memory fades and people turn inward, remove themselves from politics, and embrace cynicism over educated hope, a culture of evil, suffering, and existential despair. Americans now life amid a culture of indifference sustained by an endless series of manufactured catastrophes that offer a source of entertainment, sensation, and instant pleasure.

We live in an age in which violence becomes a form of entertainment rather than a source of alarm, individuals increasingly are too numb to question society, and become incapable of translating private troubles into larger public considerations. In the age following the use of the atom bomb on civilians, talk about evil, militarism, and the end of the world once stirred public debate and diverse resistance movements, now it promotes a culture of fear, moral panics, and a retreat into the black hole of the disimagination machine. In the midst of the economic crisis of 2008 and the failure of gangster capitalism to address the COVID-19 crisis, it is clear that gangster capitalism cannot provide a vision to sustain radical democratic society and works largely to destroy it.

The horror Hiroshima and Nagasaki speak to what James Baldwin once called the “tension between hope and terror.” Hope in the absence of moral witnessing and a culture of immediacy that hawks support for conditions-environmental, economic, social, and cultural-that embrace rather than reject the incessant drive toward the apocalypse appears meaningless. Gangster capitalism has become a metaphor for the recurring atomic blast, a social, political, and moral embodiment of global destruction that needs to be stopped before it is too late.  Returning to the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is not only necessary to break out of the moral cocoon that puts reason and memory to sleep but also to rediscover both our imaginative capacities for civic literacy on behalf of the public good, especially if such action demands that we remember as Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell remark “Every small act of violence, then, has some connection with, if not sanction from, the violence of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” [32]

Manufactured catastrophes and historical amnesia—and with them a generalized sense of manufactured helplessness—now reign supreme in the new interregnum of late modernity, a kind of liminal space that serves to neutralize action, derail the challenges posed by real social and political problems such as the threat of nuclear annihilation, and substitute the escape into fantasy for any attempt to challenge the terrifying conditions that often accompany a serious crisis. Such retreats from reality blunt civic courage, dull the radical imagination, and dilute any sense of moral responsibility, plunging historical acts of violence such as Hiroshima into the abyss of political indifference, ethical insensitivity, and depoliticization.  Catastrophe, as Brad Evans has observed, speaks to an era of late modernity marked by “a closing of the political.” [33]  Resignation and acceptance of catastrophe has taken root in the ground prepared by the neoliberal notion that “nothing can be done.”

If, as the late Zygmunt Bauman argued, crisis speaks to the need to address what exactly needs to be done, then what has been lost in the age of catastrophe and historical amnesia and its overwhelming sense of precarity and uncertainty is a properly political response in the face of a pending or existing disaster. In the age of Trump, history has become a curse, and dissent is now viewed as dangerous, reminders of the horrors of injustice, the collapse of conscience, and willingness of too many to look away. The future will look much brighter and new forms of collective resistance will emerge, in part, with the recognition that the legacy of violence, death and cruelty that extends from Hiroshima to the current tsunami of violence being waged on immigrants, people of color, and peaceful protesters makes clear that no one can be a bystander if democracy is to survive.

Notes.

[1] I have drawn in this essay upon some some previous ideas of mine published on the seventieth anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I revisit them in the hope of reviving historical memory in the service of the search for justice and the need to remember that which the dead can no longer speak of.
[2] Jennifer Rosenberg, “Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Part 2),” About.com –20th Century History (March 28, 201). Online: http://history1900s.about.com/od/worldwarii/a/hiroshima_2.htm. A more powerful atom bomb was dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, and by the end of the year an estimated 70,000 had been killed. For the history of the making of the bomb, see the monumental: Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012.
[3] John Hersey, Hiroshima (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946), p. 68.
[4] The term “technological fanaticism” comes from Michael Sherry who suggested that it produced an increased form of brutality. Cited in Howard Zinn, The Bomb. (New York. N.Y.: City Lights, 2010), pp. 54-55.
[5] Oh Jung, “Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Decision to Drop the Bomb,” Michigan Journal of History Vol 1. No. 2 (Winter 2002). Online: http://michiganjournalhistory.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/oh_jung.pdf
[6]  See, in particular, Ronald Takaki, Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb, (Boston: Back Bay Books, 1996).
[7] Peter Bacon Hales, Outside the Gates of Eden: The Dream Of America From Hiroshima To Now. (Chicago. IL.: University of Chicago Press, 2014), p. 17.
[8] Paul Ham, Hiroshima Nagasaki: The Real Story of the Atomic Bombings and Their Aftermath (New York: Doubleday, 2011).
[9] Kensaburo Oe, Hiroshima Notes (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 114.
[10] Ibid., Oe, Hiroshima Notes, p. 117.
[11] Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima in America, (New York, N.Y.: Avon Books, 1995). p. 314-315. 328.
[12] Ibid., Oh Jung, “Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Decision to Drop the Bomb.”
[13] Robert Jay Lifton, “American Apocalypse,” The Nation (December 22, 2003), p. 12.
[14] For an interesting analysis of how the bomb was defended by the New York Times and a number of high ranking politicians, especially after John Hersey’s Hiroshima appeared in The New Yorker, see Steve Rothman, “The Publication of “Hiroshima” in The New Yorker,”Herseyheroshima.cpom, (January 8, 1997). Online: http://www.herseyhiroshima.com/hiro.php
[15]  Wilson cited in Lifton and Mitchell, Hiroshima In America, p. 309.
[16] Ibid., Peter Bacon Hales, Outside The Gates of Eden: The Dream Of America From Hiroshima To Now, p. 8.
[17] Ibid., Zinn, The Bomb, p. 26.
[18] Ibid., Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima In America.
[19] See Ward Wilson, Five Myths About Nuclear Weapons (new York: Mariner Books, 2013).
[20] Ronald Takaki, Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb, (Boston: Back Bay Books, 1996), p. 39
[21] Ibid, Zinn, The Bomb, p. 45.
[22] See, for example, Gar Alperowitz’s, Atomic Diplomacy Hiroshima and Potsdam: The Use of the Atomic Bomb and the American Confrontation with Soviet Power (London: Pluto Press, 1994) and also Gar Alperowitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (New York: Vintage, 1996). Ibid., Ham. 
[23] Giovanna Borradori, ed, “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides–a dialogue with Jacques Derrida,” in Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 85-136.
[24] For an informative analysis of the deep state and a politics driven by corporate power, see Bill Blunden, “The Zero-Sum Game of Perpetual War,” Counterpunch (September 2, 2014). Online: http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/09/02/the-zero-sum-game-of-perpetual-war/
[25] The following section relies on the work of both Lifton and Mitchell, Howard Zinn, and M. Susan Lindee.
[26] Greg Mitchell, “The Great Hiroshima Cover-up,” The Nation, (August 3, 2011). Online: http://www.thenation.com/blog/162543/great-hiroshima-cover#. Also see, Greg Mitchell, “Part 1: Atomic Devastation Hidden For Decades,” WhoWhatWhy (March 26, 2014). Online: http://whowhatwhy.com/2014/03/26/atomic-devastation-hidden-decades; Greg Mitchell, “Part 2: How They Hid the Worst Horrors of Hiroshima,” WhoWhatWhy, (March 28, 2014). Online: http://whowhatwhy.com/2014/03/28/part-2-how-they-hid-the-worst-horrors-of-hiroshima/; Greg Mitchell, “Part 3: Death and Suffering, in Living Color,” WhoWhatWhy (March 31, 2014). Online: http://whowhatwhy.com/2014/03/31/death-suffering-living-color/
[27] Ibid., Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima In America, p. 321.
[28] Ibid., Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima In America, p. 322.
[29] Ibid. Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima In America, p. 322-323.
[30] Ibid. Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima In America, p. 336.
[31] Amy Goodman, “Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 69 Year Later,” TruthDig (August 6, 2014).  Online: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/hiroshima_and_nagasaki_69_years_later_20140806
[32] Ibid.,  Lifton and Mitchell, p. 345.
[33] Brad Evans, “The Promise of Violence in the Age of Catastrophe,” Truthout (January 5, 2014). Online: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/20977-the-promise-of-violence-in-the-age-of-catastrophe

counterpunch.org

By Ann WRIGHT

Each week the Pacific is getting even more crowded with military ships, submarines and aircraft from countries in the region and from outside.  NATO countries — United Kingdom, France, Germany and the Netherlands — are sending military vessels and aircraft.

The Russian navy conducted military maneuvers off Hawai’i.

The U.S. is on the verge of creating a permanent Pacific naval task force as a part of its aggressive response to China’s naval presence in the Pacific.  The largest land exercise in Asia and the Pacific is taking place in Australia with 17,000 U.S. and Australian military.

In March, President Joe Biden directed the Pentagon to establish a China Task Force to examine China-related policies and processes and give its recommendations to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. The creation of a Pacific Naval Task Force would allow the secretary of defense to provide more of the Pentagon’s budget for challenging China’s presence in the Pacific.  The Pacific task force would also include NATO allies such as Britain and France, that have already sent their warships into the Pacific, as well as Japan and Australia.

At the recent NATO meeting in Brussels, most leaders agreed with Biden’s confrontational stance with China, declaring that Beijing is undermining global order and is  a security challenge.  A similar NATO naval task force, the Standing Naval Forces Atlantic,  composed of six-to-10 ships, destroyers, frigates and support vessels from multiple NATO nations, has operated for decades in Atlantic waters.

NATO ministers in Brussels in March. (Estonian Foreign Ministry, Flickr, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Russian War Practice Near Hawaii

It’s not only China that is causing the U.S. concerns in the Pacific. A U.S. missile defense test was delayed at the missile test facility on the Hawaiian island of Kauai in May due to the presence of a Russian surveillance ship 13 miles off the island, at the edge of U.S. territorial waters.

The Kareliya, a Russian Navy Vishnya-class auxiliary general intelligence, or AGI, ship is based in the Russian Pacific port of Vladivostok and is one of seven AGIs specializing in signals intelligence. For several weeks it sailed off the coast of Kauai, 100 miles from the massive U.S. naval facility at Pearl Harbor on the island of Oahu.

The Missile Defense Agency (MDA), in cooperation with the U.S. Navy, conducted on Kauai what it called Flight Test Aegis Weapon System 31 to demonstrate the capability of a ballistic missile defense (BMD)-configured Aegis ship to detect, track, engage and intercept a medium-range ballistic missile target with a salvo of two Standard Missile-6 Dual II (BMD-initialized) missiles.

To the chagrin of the MDA, with the Russian signals ship as a witness, the May 29 missile test eventually was carried out with ship-fired missiles but they failed to intercept a medium-range ballistic missile target.

The U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor made this statement at the time, saying it was

“aware of the Russian vessel operating in international waters in the vicinity of Hawai’i, and will continue to track it through the duration of its time here. Through maritime patrol aircraft, surface ships and joint capabilities, we can closely monitor all vessels in the Indo-Pacific area of operations.”

A few days later, U.S. Air Force F-22 jets made two sudden flights out of Hawai’i with the Indo-Pacific Command eventually acknowledging that “several Russian ships and aircraft” were 200 miles to the west of the Hawaiian Islands and the F-22s had been sent out to keep watch on them.

The “several ships and aircraft” turned out to be the largest Russian naval maneuvers in the Pacific since the end of the Cold War. As reported by the Honolulu Star Advertiser on June 23, prior to the meeting of the Russian President Vladimir Putin and President Joe Biden in Geneva on June 16, the Russian Ministry of Defense publicized the Russian naval maneuvers off Hawai’i as a naval and air exercise that practiced “destroying the aircraft carrier strike group of the mock enemy” and delivering a simulated strike with cruise missiles against “critically important” military infrastructure. The Russian press release described the military exercise as two detachments of ships, operating about 2,500 miles southeast of the Kuril Islands, that detected, countered and delivered missile strikes against an aircraft carrier strike group.

The missile strike practice was conducted by the flagship of the Pacific Fleet, the missile cruiser Varyag, the frigate Marshal Shaposhnikov and multiple corvettes.  Twenty surface warships, including a submarine and support vessels, were involved in the exercise with 20 aircraft, including long-range antisubmarine aircraft Tu-142M3, anti-submarine aircraft Il-38, high-altitude fighter-interceptors MiG31BM, deck anti-submarine and search-and-rescue helicopters Ka-27.

Russian missile cruiser Varyag in 2016. (Vadim Savitsky/Russian Defense Ministry’s Press Office/TASS)

The deployment of Russian “Bear” bombers as part of the exercise twice resulted in missile-armed Hawaii Air National Guard F-22 fighters scrambling to possibly intercept the turboprop planes — which headed in the direction of Hawaii but never came close, according to U.S. officials. No U.S. intercepts of the Russian aircraft were made.

The two long-range Tu-142MZ anti-submarine aircraft that provided support to the exercise had flown from Kamchatka Peninsula, spending more than 14 hours in the air and covering about 10,000 kilometers during the exercise, according to the news report.

Rounding out the air component of the Russian exercise were six Il-38 and Il-38N anti-submarine aircraft that searched for and tracked submarines of the “mock enemy.” The anti-submarine aircraft were escorted by MiG-31BM high-altitude interceptor fighters of the Pacific Fleet with refueling capability provided by II-78 aircraft of the Russian Aerospace Forces.

An open-source satellite view of the Russian flotilla was taken on June 19 when it was 35 nautical miles (40 statute miles) south of Honolulu and was being escorted by three U.S. Navy destroyers and a Coast Guard cutter.

A spokesman for U.S. Indo-Pacific Command at Camp H.M. Smith in Honolulu said on June 21 that the Russian vessels operated in international waters throughout the exercise and at the closest point, some Russian ships operated approximately 20 to 30 nautical miles (23 to 34 statute miles) off the coast of Hawaii and that they were tracked very closely by U.S. forces.

US & Russian Vessels Around Hawaii

Making for a crowded area around Hawai’i, the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier strike group based in San Diego was operating off the east side of the Hawaiian Islands at the same time the Russian fleet was off the west side of the islands.  The Carl Vinson, the flagship of the carrier strike group, conducted exercises with Carrier Air Wing 2, Destroyer Squadron 1, the guided-missile destroyers USS O’Kane, USS Howard, USS Chafee, USS Dewey and USS Michael Murphy. The Chafee and Michael Murphy are based at Pearl Harbor.

French Air Force Arrives

On Sunday, June 27, in their first visit to Hawai’i, the French government sent 170 Air and Space Force personnel, three Rafale fighter aircraft, two A330 Phenix refueling tankers and two A400M Atlas transports to Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Honolulu for training with Hawai’i-based U.S. F-22 fighters, C-17 cargo aircraft and KC-135 refuelers. The French squadron will depart Hawai’i on July 5 for Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada for more training with U.S. military units.  U.S. Pacific Air Force command emailed that “It is imperative that the U.S. accelerates change in synchronization with allies like France to ensure we are ready for the next fight.”

The British Are Coming Too

HMS Queen Elizabeth, left, with two escort vessels, off the coast of Scotland in 2017. (Ministry of Defence)

Besides the French military aircraft arriving in the Pacific, the new British  65,000-ton aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth and its carrier group is heading for the Pacific in what is called the “most important peacetime deployment in a generation” for the United Kingdom.

British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said on April 26 that “even as the Pacific’s importance to our future economy continues to rise — so the challenges to the freedom of navigation in that region continue to grow. Our trade with Asia depends on the shipping that sails through a range of Indo-Pacific choke points, yet they are increasingly at risk.”

HMS Queen Elizabeth, the centerpiece of Britain’s Royal Navy, departed the U.K. in May for a world voyage including stops in 40 nations and steaming through the South China Sea.  Defense Minister Wallace said that while China is “increasingly assertive, we are not going to the other side of the world to be provocative. We will sail through the South China Sea. We will be confident, but not confrontational.”

Adding to the numbers of naval vessels in the crowded South China Sea will be the nine escort vessels of  HMS Queen Elizabeth: destroyers HMS Defender and HMS Diamond, anti-submarine frigates HMS Kent and HMS Richmond, the Royal Fleet Auxiliary’s RFA Fort Victoria and RFA Tidespring, Dutch frigate HNLMS Evertsen and U.S. Navy destroyer USS The Sullivans.

US & the ‘International Rules-Based Order’

The State Department said the United States, which has maintained what it calls the “international rules-based order” in the Pacific since the end of World War II, is “committed to upholding a free and open Indo-Pacific in which all nations, large and small, are secure in their sovereignty and able to pursue economic growth consistent with international law and principles of fair competition.”  In 2019, the U.S. Department of Defense wrote in its strategy document that the Indo- Pacific region is the single most consequential region for America’s future.

Indo-Pacific biogeographic region. (Wikimedia Commons)

Admiral Phil Davidson said on April 30 when he relinquished leadership of the massive U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, “Make no mistake, the Communist Party of China seeks to supplant the idea of a free and open international order with a new order — one with Chinese characteristics — where Chinese national power is more important than international law.”

Davidson added that strategic competition in the Indo-Pacific “is not between two nations, it is a contest between liberty — the fundamental idea behind a free and open Indo-Pacific — and authoritarianism, the absence of liberty.”

China Responds

On May 27, at a China Ministry of National Defense press conference, Senior Colonel Tan Kefei said America keeps “stepping up military deployments in the Asian Pacific region, frequently conducts close-in reconnaissance against China, and even deliberately initiates dangerous circumstances between Chinese and U.S. military aircraft and vessels.”

He added that a strategy emphasizing military presence and military competition “will only heighten regional tensions and undermine world peace and stability.  No strategy should instigate countries to establish selective and exclusive military alliances, or to create a ‘New Cold War’ of confrontational blocs.” In relation to Taiwan, Tan said, “there is only one China in the world, and Taiwan is an integral part of China,” and that currently China-Australia relations “face serious difficulties.”

G7 & Quad Support Status Quo on Taiwan 

The Group of Seven, or G7 —made up of leaders from Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and United States —said on June 13 that, “We underscore the importance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait,” adding that “we remain seriously concerned about the situation in the East and South China Seas and strongly oppose any unilateral attempts to change the status quo and increase tensions.”

Three months earlier, on March 12, the first leaders’ meeting of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or “Quad” — the United States, Japan, Australia and India — issued a statement saying they are:

“united in a shared vision for the free and open Indo-Pacific…We support the rule of law, freedom of navigation and overflight, peaceful resolution of disputes, democratic values and territorial integrity.”

Largest Land-War Maneuvers in Region

The largest land war practice in the region, the U.S.-Australian war maneuvers Talisman Sabre 2021 began in June in Australia.  Scaled down from 30,000 due to Covid, over 17,000 military personnel from the U.S., Canada, Japan, Republic of Korea, New Zealand and the U.K. will conduct war maneuvers including combined Special Forces operations, parachute drops, amphibious (marine) landings, land-force maneuvers, urban and air operations and the coordinated firing of live ammunition from late June until mid-August.  France, India and Indonesia will participate as observer nations. The U.S.-Australian hypersonic  weapon, capable of flying at speeds greater than five times the speed of sound (Mach 5), may be tested during Talisman Sabre 2021 at the Australian rocket range near the town of Woomer, South Australia.

In one month alone, this June, the U.S. IndoPacific Command military forces participated in over 35 war maneuvers with other countries.  Read more about the war preparations with these countries here.

consortiumnews.com

On April 29 Tom Engelhardt, a respected commentator on world affairs, published a piece examining America’s everlasting wars and concluded “The question that Americans seldom even think to ask is this: What if the U.S. were to begin to dismantle its empire of bases, repurpose so many of those militarized taxpayer dollars to our domestic needs, abandon this country’s focus on permanent war, and forsake the Pentagon as our holy church? What if, even briefly, the wars, conflicts, plots, killings, drone assassinations, all of it stopped? What would our world actually be like if you simply declared peace and came home?”

As he well knows, the answer is that the world would be a better, safer and much more attractive place in which to live. But, as he laments, there seems to be little chance of that happening, because there will be no change of mind or policy on the part of the Military-Industrial Complex that spreads its wings from Washington to the furthest part of the United States, the country that could lead the world in pursuit of peace.

We are all concerned about climate change because it is having such an adverse impact on people in so many countries and is likely to continue to be the greatest threat to global stability — apart from the other change that is firmly under control of the movers and shakers in Washington’s corridors of power.

The ultimate threat to our very existence is that of nuclear war, and instead of trying to bend their undoubtedly gifted minds to devising means to reduce that menace, the Pentagon’s planners and pushers, aided to the hilt by politicians and others with financial interests in weapons’ production, are intent on extending America’s nuclear clout around the world and into space.

The U.S. military’s Strategic Command (STRATCOM) describes itself as a “global warfighting combatant command” which “delivers a dominant strategic force and innovative team to maintain our Nation’s enduring strength, prevent and prevail in great power conflict, and grow the intellectual capital to forge 21st century strategic deterrence.” Given this Mission, STRATCOM considers itself to be the “ultimate guarantor of national and allied security” and is ready at a moment’s notice to deliver a “decisive response” which means it is ready to destroy the world with nuclear weapons.

The head of this organisation, Admiral Charles Richard, addressed the Senate Armed Forces Committee on April 20 and among other things declared that “While China’s nuclear stockpile is currently smaller (but undergoing an unprecedented expansion) than those fielded by Russia and the United States, the size of a nation’s weapons stockpile is a crude measure of its overall strategic capability.” No doubt this caused as much mirth in Beijing as in many other world capitals, but the fact remains that he did not publicly state the quantities of weapons held by China and the U.S. — most likely because the disparity is so palpable as to be ludicrous.

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (whose information can be trusted) the U.S. has a total of 5,800 nuclear weapons, of which 1,750 are deployed. These are, therefore, ready for instant use, at a moment’s notice. (The others are “stored or reserve warheads and retired warheads awaiting dismantlement.”)

On the other hand, China has 320 nuclear weapons and, as SIPRI notes, “is in the middle of a significant modernization of its nuclear arsenal. It is developing a so-called nuclear triad for the first time, made up of new land- and sea-based missiles and nuclear-capable aircraft.”

Admiral Richard, the director of Washington’s long-existing nuclear triad, considers China’s development of a nuclear force to be unwarranted and deplorable. He announced to the Committee that “China is rapidly improving its strategic nuclear capability and capacity, with rapid growth in road mobile production, doubling the numbers of launchers in some ICBM brigades, deployment of solid fuel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) silos on a potentially large-scale, an added air leg, and are well ahead of the pace necessary to double their nuclear stockpile by the end of the decade.” [Emphasis added.]

If its nuclear holding is doubled in the next ten years this will mean that China may then have one third as many nuclear weapons as the United States. Furthermore, Admiral Richard protested, all this is taking place “behind a complete lack of transparency” which is regarded as reprehensible and indeed unacceptable. It doesn’t matter that the United States, as stated by SIPRI, has “ended the practice of publicly disclosing the size of the U.S. stockpile”, but it is expected that all other nations should be absolutely transparent about their nuclear programmes. (Like Israel, perhaps?)

There is, however, one aspect of nuclear policy on which Washington is transparent, and this was made clear when President Biden met with Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga in the White House on April 16. Their joint statement was titled U.S.-Japan Global Partnership for a New Era and is to date the most significant indication that Biden has decisively endorsed Washington’s long-standing readiness to engage in nuclear war. This chilling document gives no indication that there can ever be possibility of compromise with China on any matter and is confrontational to the ultimate degree concerning what both Biden and Suga know very well is a cornerstone of China’s international policy : its assertion of sovereignty over islands in the South China Sea.

The position of the U.S. in regard to the South China Sea is repeatedly stated by Washington to be based on international law, and the Biden-Suga pronouncement of confrontation with China emphasises agreement to “promote shared norms in the maritime domain, including freedom of navigation and overflight, as enshrined in the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS)” This might be worth heeding were it not for the fact that the United States of America has refused to ratify UNCLOS, along with such states as Iran, Israel, Syria, North Korea and Libya. Biden is ordering other nations to conduct their maritime affairs in accordance with an important international accord that Washington has rejected.

It would be an absurd and laughable situation were it not for the fact that Biden has stated he will commit the U.S. to war in support of Japan, and that by definition, UNCLOS could be used as justification for that war. Biden declared his “ironclad support for U.S./Japanese Alliance, and for our shared security” and specifically that Washington and Tokyo are “committed to working together to take on the challenges from China and issues like the East China Sea, the South China Sea, as well as North Korea.” The crunch came in the joint statement’s notification of Washington’s “unwavering support for Japan’s defence under the U.S.-Japan Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security, using its full range of capabilities, including nuclear.” The throwaway words are “including nuclear.”

The ultimate sword has been brandished. On April 16 the U.S. president issued a plain unveiled threat to use nuclear weapons against China and four days later the head of Strategic Command insisted to the Senate that it must approve the 95 billion dollar expenditure on the new “Ground Based Strategic Deterrent” to replace the hundreds of Minuteman Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles that are on permanent alert to destroy cities in Russia and China.

It was not surprising to read a (semi-official) editorial in China’s Global Times observing that Washington and Tokyo “are attempting to make confrontation the main theme of the entire region.” This certainly seems to be the policy, and Washington’s emphasis on nuclear weapons has heated up the confrontation climate. We have been moved yet another step closer to planetary destruction.

(Click on the image to enlarge)

In 1998, the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group (IWG), at the behest of Congress, launched what became the largest congressionally mandated, single-subject declassification effort in history. As a result, more than 8.5 million pages of records have been opened to the public under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act (P.L. 105-246) and the Japanese Imperial Government Disclosure Act (P.L. 106-567). These records include operational files of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the CIA, the FBI and Army intelligence. IWG issued three reports to Congress between 1999 and 2007.

This information sheds important light and confirms one of the biggest-kept secrets of the Cold War – the CIA’s use of an extensive Nazi spy network to wage a secret campaign against the Soviet Union.

This campaign against the Soviet Union, which began while WWII was still raging, has been at the crux of Washington’s tolerance towards civil rights abuses and other criminal acts in the name of anti-communism, as seen with McCarthyism and COINTELPRO activities. With that fateful decision, the CIA was not only given free reign for the execution of anti-democratic interventions around the world, but anti-democratic interventions at home, which continues to this day.

With the shady origin of the Cold War coming to the fore, it begs the questions; ‘Who is running American foreign policy and intelligence today? Can such an opposition be justified? And in whose interest did the creation of the Cold War serve and continues to serve?’ This paper is part one of a three-part series which will address these questions.

Allen Dulles, the Double Agent who Created America’s Intelligence Empire

Allen Dulles was born on April 7^th, 1893 in Watertown, New York. He graduated from Princeton with a master’s degree in politics in 1916 and entered into diplomatic service the same year. Dulles was transferred to Bern, Switzerland along with the rest of the embassy personnel shortly before the U.S. entered the First World War. From 1922 to 1926, he served five years as chief of the Near East division of the State Department.

In 1926, he earned a law degree from George Washington University Law School and took a job at Sullivan & Cromwell, the most powerful corporate law firm in the nation, where his older brother (five years his senior) John Foster Dulles was a partner. Interestingly, Allen did not pass the bar until 1928, two years after joining the law firm, however, that apparently did not prevent him in 1927 from spending six months in Geneva as “legal adviser” to the Naval Armament Conference.

In 1927 he became Director of the Council on Foreign Relations (whose membership of prominent businessmen and policy makers played a key role in shaping the emerging Cold War consensus), the first new director since the Council’s founding in 1921. He became quick friends with fellow Princetonian Hamilton Fish Armstrong, the editor of the Council’s journal, Foreign Affairs. Together they authored two books: Can We Be Neutral? (1936) and Can America Stay Neutral? (1939). Allen served as secretary of the CFR from 1933-1944, and as its president from 1946-1950.

It should be noted that the Council on Foreign Relations is the American branch of the Royal Institute for International Affairs (aka: Chatham House) based in London, England. It should also be noted that Chatham House itself was created by the Round Table Movement as part of the Treaty of Versailles program in 1919.

By 1935, Allen Dulles made partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, the center of an intricate international network of banks, investment firms, and industrial conglomerates that helped rebuild Germany after WWI.

After Hitler took control in the 1930s, John Foster Dulles continued to represent German cartels like IG Farben, despite their integration into the Nazi’s growing war machine and aided them in securing access to key war materials. (1)

Although the Berlin office of Sullivan & Cromwell, (whose attorneys were forced to sign their correspondence with “Heil Hitler”) was shut down by 1935, the brothers continued to do business with the Nazi financial and industrial network; such as Allen Dulles joining the board of J. Henry Schroder Bank, the U.S. subsidiary of the London bank that Time magazine in 1939 would call “an economic booster of the Rome-Berlin Axis.” (2)

The Dulles brothers’, especially Allen, worked very closely with Thomas McKittrick, an old Wall Street friend who was president of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). Five of its directors would later be charged with war crimes, including Hermann Schmitz, one of the many Dulleses’ law clients involved with BIS. Schmitz was the CEO of IG Farben the chemical conglomerate that became notorious for its production of Zyklon B, the gas used in Hitler’s death camps, and for its extensive use of slave labour during the war. (3)

David Talbot writes in his “The Devil’s Chessboard”:

“The secretive BIS became a crucial financial partner for the Nazis. Emil Puhl – vice president of Hitler’s Reichsbank and a close associate of McKittrick – once called BIS the Reichsbank’s only ‘foreign branch.’ BIS laundered hundreds of millions of dollars in Nazi gold looted from the treasuries of occupied countries.”

The Bank for International Settlements is based in Switzerland, the very region that Allen Dulles would work throughout both WWI and WWII.

The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was formed on June 13, 1942 as a wartime intelligence agency during WWII. This was a decision made by President Franklin Roosevelt. William J. Donovan was chosen by Roosevelt to build the agency ground up and was created specifically for addressing the secret communication, decoding and espionage needs that were required for wartime strategy; to intercept enemy intelligence and identify those coordinating with Nazi Germany and Japan.

The OSS was the first of its kind, nothing like it had existed before in the U.S., it was understood by Roosevelt that such an agency held immense power for abuse in the wrong hands and it could never be allowed to continue once the war against fascism was won.

Allen Dulles was recruited into the OSS at the very beginning. And on Nov. 12^th, 1942 was quickly moved to Bern, Switzerland where he lived at Herrengasse 23 for the duration of WWII. Knowing the shady role Switzerland played throughout WWII with its close support for the Nazi cause and Allen Dulles’ close involvement in all of this, one should rightfully be asking at this point, what the hell were Donovan and Roosevelt thinking?

Well, Dulles was not the only master chess player involved in this high stakes game. “He was a dangle,” said John Loftus, a former Nazi war crimes investigator for the U.S. Justice Department. They “wanted Dulles in clear contact with his Nazi clients so they could be easily identified.” (4) In other words, Dulles was sent to Switzerland as an American spy, with the full knowledge that he was in fact a double agent, the mission was to gain intel on the American, British and French networks, among others, who were secretly supporting the Nazi cause.

One problem with this plan was that the British MI6 spy William Stephenson known as the “Man Called Intrepid” was supposedly picked to keep tabs on Dulles (5); little did Roosevelt know at the time, how deep the rabbit hole really went.

However, as Elliott would write in his book “As He Saw It”, Roosevelt was very aware that British foreign policy was not on the same page with his views on a post-war world:

“You know, any number of times the men in the State Department have tried to conceal messages to me, delay them, hold them up somehow, just because some of those career diplomats over there aren’t in accord with what they know I think. They should be working for Winston. As a matter of fact, a lot of the time, they are [working for Churchill]. Stop to think of ’em: any number of ’em are convinced that the way for America to conduct its foreign policy is to find out what the British are doing and then copy that!” I was told… six years ago, to clean out that State Department. It’s like the British Foreign Office….”

As the true allegiance of BIS and Wall Street finance became clear during the war, Roosevelt attempted to block BIS funds in the United States. It was none other than Foster Dulles who was hired as McKittrick’s legal counsel, and who successfully intervened on the bank’s behalf. (6)

It should also be noted that Bank of England Governor Montague Norman allowed for the direct transfer of money to Hitler, however, not with England’s own money but rather 5.6 million pounds worth of gold owned by the National Bank of Czechoslovakia.

With the end of the war approaching, Project Safehaven, an American intelligence operation thought up by Roosevelt, was created to track down and confiscate Nazi assets that were stashed in neutral countries. It was rightfully a concern that if members of the Nazi German elite were successful in hiding large troves of their wealth, they could bide their time and attempt to regain power in the not so distant future.

It was Allen Dulles who successfully stalled and sabotaged the Roosevelt operation, explaining in a December 1944 memo to his OSS superiors that his Bern office lacked “adequate personnel to do [an] effective job in this field and meet other demands.” (7)

And while Foster worked hard to hide the U.S. assets of major German cartels like IG Farben and Merck KGaA, and protect these subsidiaries from being confiscated by the federal government as alien property, Allen had his brother’s back and was well placed to destroy incriminating evidence and to block any investigations that threatened the two brothers and their law firm.

“Shredding of captured Nazi records was the favourite tactic of Dulles and his [associates] who stayed behind to help run the occupation of postwar Germany,” stated John Loftus, former Nazi war crimes investigator for the U.S. Justice Department (8)

It is without a doubt that Roosevelt was intending to prosecute the Dulles brothers along with many others who were complicit in supporting the Nazi cause after the war was won. Roosevelt was aware that the Dulles brothers and Wall Street had worked hard against his election, he was aware that much of Wall Street was supporting the Germans over the Russians in the war, he was aware that they were upset over his handling of the Great Depression by going after the big bankers, such as J.P. Morgan via the Pecora Commission, and they hated him for it, but most of all they disagreed with Roosevelt’s views of a post war world. In fact, they were violently opposed to it, as seen by his attempted assassination a few days after he won the election, and with General Smedley Butler’s exposure, which was broadcasted on television, of how a group of American Legion officials paid by J.P. Morgan’s men (9) approached Butler the summer of 1933 to lead a coup d’état against President Roosevelt, an attempted fascist takeover of the United States in broad daylight.

Roosevelt was only inaugurated March 4, 1933, thus it was clear, Wall Street did not have to wait and see what the President was going to do, they already had a pretty good idea that Roosevelt intended to upset the balance of imperial control, with Wall Street and the City of London as its financial centers. It was clear Wall Street’s days would be marked under Roosevelt.

However, Roosevelt did not live past the war, and his death allowed for the swift entry of a soft coup, contained within the halls of government and its agencies, and anyone who had been closely associated with FDR’s vision was pushed to the sidelines.

David Talbot writes in his “The Devil’s Chessboard”:

“Dulles was more instep with many Nazi leaders than he was with President Roosevelt. Dulles not only enjoyed a professional and social familiarity with many members of the Third Reich’s elite that predated the war; he shared many of these men’s postwar goals.”

The True Origin Story of the Cold War

In L. Fletcher Prouty’s book “The CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy,” he describes how in Sept 1944, while serving as a captain in the United States Army Air Forces and stationed in Cairo, he was asked to fly what he was told to be 750 U.S. Air crewmen POWs who had been shot down in the Balkans during air raids on the Ploesti oil fields. This intel was based off of his meeting with British Intelligence officers who had been informed by their Secret Intelligence Service and by the OSS.

Prouty writes:

“We flew to Syria, met the freight train from Bucharest, loaded the POWS onto our aircraft, and began the flight back to Cairo. Among the 750 American POWs there were perhaps a hundred Nazi intelligence agents, along with scores of Nazi sympathetic Balkan agents. They had hidden in this shipment by the OSS to get them out of the way of the Soviet army that had marched into Romania on September 1.

This September 1944 operation was the first major pro-German, anti-Soviet activity of its kind of the Cold War. With OSS assistance, many followed in quick succession, including the escape and carefully planned flight of General Reinhart Gehlen, the German army’s chief intelligence officer, to Washington on September 20, 1945.”

In Prouty’s book, he discusses how even before the surrender of Germany and Japan, the first mumblings of the Cold War could be heard, and that these mumblings came particularly from Frank Wisner in Bucharest and Allen W. Dulles in Zurich, who were both strong proponents of the idea that the time had come to rejoin selected Nazi power centers in order to split the Western alliance from the Soviet Union.

Prouty writes:

“It was this covert faction within the OSS, coordinated with a similar British intelligence faction, and its policies that encouraged chosen Nazis to conceive of the divisive “Iron Curtain” concept to drive a wedge in the alliance with the Soviet Union as early as 1944—to save their own necks, to salvage certain power centers and their wealth, and to stir up resentment against the Russians, even at the time of their greatest military triumph.”

The “official history” version has marked down the British as the first to recognise the “communist threat” in Eastern Europe, and that it was Winston Churchill who coined the phrase “Iron Curtain” in referring to actions of the communist-bloc countries of Eastern Europe and that he did this after the end of WWII.

However, Churchill was neither the originator of the phrase nor the idea of the Iron Curtain.

Just before the close of WWII in Europe, the German Foreign Minister Count Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk made a speech in Berlin, reported in the London Times on May 3, 1945, in which he used the Nazi-coined propaganda phrase “Iron Curtain,” which was to be used in precisely the same context by Churchill less than one year later.

Following this German speech, only three days after the German surrender, Churchill wrote a letter to Truman, to express his concern about the future of Europe and to say that an “Iron Curtain” had come down. (10)

On March 4 and 5, 1946, Truman and Churchill traveled from Washington to Missouri, where, at Westminster College in Fulton, Churchill delivered those historic lines: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent.”

The implications of this are enormous. It not only showcases the true origin of the source that trumpeted the supposed Cold War threat coming from Eastern Europe, the very Nazi enemy of the Allies while WWII was still being waged, but also brings light to the fact that not even one month after Roosevelt’s death, the Grand Strategy had been overtaken. There would no longer be a balance of the four powers (U.S., Russia, Britain and China) planned in a post war world, but rather there would be an Iron Curtain, with more than half of the world covered in shadow.

The partners in this new global power structure were to be the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, and Japan, three of the WWII victors and two of the vanquished. It did not matter that Russia and China fought and died on the side of the Allies just moments prior.

With Ho Chi Minh’s Declaration of Independence on Sept. 2^nd, 1945, the French would enter Vietnam within weeks of WWII ending with the United States joining them a few months after Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech. And thus, in little over a year after one of the bloodiest wars in history, the French and the Americans set off what would be a several decades long Indochinese war, all in the name of “freedom” against a supposed communist threat.

Prouty writes:

“As soon as the island of Okinawa became available as the launching site for [the planned American invasion of Japan], supplies and equipment for an invasion force of at least half a million men began to be stacked up, fifteen to twenty feet high, all over the island. Then, with the early surrender of Japan, this massive invasion did not occur, and the use of this enormous stockpile of military equipment was not necessary. Almost immediately, U.S. Navy transport vessels began to show up in Naha Harbor, Okinawa. This vast load of war materiel was reloaded onto those ships. I was on Okinawa at that time, and during some business in the harbor area I asked the harbormaster if all that new materiel was being returned to the States.

His response was direct and surprising: ‘Hell, no! They ain t never goin’ to see it again. One-half of this stuff, enough to equip and support at least a hundred and fifty thousand men, is going to Korea, and the other half is going to Indochina. ‘ “

The Godfather of the CIA

“And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free”.

– The inscription chosen by Allen Dulles for the Lobby of CIA Headquarters from John 8:31-32

On Sept. 20^th, 1945, President Truman disbanded the OSS a few weeks after the official end of WWII. This was the right thing to do, considering the OSS was never intended to exist outside of wartime and President Roosevelt would have done the same thing had he not passed away on April 12^th, 1945. However, Truman was highly naïve in thinking that a piece of paper was all that was required. Truman also had no understanding of the factional fight between the Roosevelt patriots who truly wanted to defeat fascism versus those who believed that it was always about war with the Soviet Union, and would even be open to working with “former” fascists in achieving such a goal.

Truman thought of the OSS as a homogenous blob. He had no comprehension of the intense in-fighting that was occurring within the United States government and intelligence community for the future of the country. That there was the OSS of Roosevelt, and that there was the underground OSS of Allen Dulles.

Soon thereafter, on Sept. 18^th, 1945, the CIA was founded, and was to be lamented by Truman as the biggest regret of his presidency. Truman had no idea of the type of back channels that were running behind the scenes, little did he know at the time but would come to partially discover, the disbanding of the OSS which took control away from William J. Donovan as head of American intelligence opened the door to the piranhas. The FDR patriots were purged, including William J. Donovan himself, who was denied by Truman the Directorship of the CIA. Instead Truman foolishly assigned him the task of heading a committee studying the country’s fire departments.

In April 1947, Allen Dulles was asked by the Senate Armed Services Committee to present his ideas for a strong, centralized intelligence agency. His memo would help frame the legislation that gave birth to the CIA later that year.

Dulles, unsatisfied with the “timidity” of the new CIA, organised the Dulles-Jackson-Correa Committee report, over which Dulles of course quickly assumed control, which concluded its sharply critical assessment of the CIA by demanding that the agency be willing to essentially start a war with the Soviet Union. The CIA, it declared “has the duty to act.” The agency “has been given, by law, wide authority.” It was time to take full advantage of this generous power, the committee, that is Dulles, insisted.

Dulles, impatient with the slow pace of the CIA in unleashing chaos on the world, created a new intelligence outpost called the Office of Policy Coordination in 1949. Frank Wisner (who worked as a Wall Street lawyer for the law firm Carter, Ledyard & Milburn and was former OSS, obviously from the Dulles branch) was brought in as OPC chief, and quickly brought the unit into the black arts of espionage, including sabotage, subversion, and assassination (11). By 1952, the OPC was running forty-seven overseas stations, and its staff had nearly three thousand employees, with another three thousand independent contractors in the field.

Dulles and Wisner were essentially operating their own private spy agency.

The OPC was run with little government oversight and few moral restrictions. Many of the agency’s recruits were “ex” Nazis. (12) Dulles and Wisner were engaged in a no-holds-barred war with the Soviet bloc with essentially no government supervision.

As Prouty mentioned, the shady evacuation of Nazis stashed amongst POWs was to be the first of many, including the evacuation of General Reinhart Gehlen, the German army’s chief intelligence officer, to Washington on September 20, 1945.

Most of the intelligence gathered by Gehlen’s men was extracted from the enormous population of Soviet prisoners of war – which eventually totaled four million – that fell under Nazi control. Gehlen’s exalted reputation as an intelligence wizard derived from his organization’s widespread use of torture. (13)

Gehlen understood that the U.S.-Soviet alliance would inevitably break apart (with sufficient sabotage), providing an opportunity for at least some elements of the Nazi hierarchy to survive by joining forces with the West against Moscow.

He managed to convince the Americans that his intelligence on the Soviet Union was indispensable, that if the Americans wanted to win a war against the Russians that they would need to work with him and keep him safe. Therefore, instead of being handed over to the Soviets as war criminals, as Moscow demanded, Gehlen and his top deputies were put on a troop ship back to Germany! (14)

Unbelievably, Gehlen’ spy team was installed by U.S. military authorities in a compound in the village of Pullach, near Munich, with no supervision and where he was allowed to live out his dream of reconstituting Hitler’s military intelligence structure within the U.S. national security system. With the generous support of the American government, the Gehlen Organization –as it came to be known – thrived in Pullach, becoming West Germany’s principal intelligence agency. (15) And it should have been no surprise to anyone that “former” SS and Gestapo officials were brought in, including the likes of Dr. Franz Six. Later, Six would be arrested by the U.S. Army counterintelligence agents. Convicted of war crimes, Six served a mere four years in prison and within weeks of his release went back at work in Gehlen’s Pullach headquarters! (16)

For those who were able to believe during the war that the Russians were their true enemies (while they died for the same cause as the Americans by the millions in battle) this was not a hard pill to swallow, however, there was pushback.

Many in the CIA vehemently opposed any association with “former” Nazis, including Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, the CIA’s first director, who in 1947 strongly urged President Truman to “liquidate” Gehlen’s operation. It is not clear what stood in the way of this happening, but to suffice to say, Gehlen had some very powerful support in Washington, including within the national security establishment with primary backing from the Dulles faction. (17)

Walter Bedell-Smith, who succeeded Hillenkoetter as CIA Director, despite bringing Allen Dulles in and making him deputy, had a strong dislike for the man. As Smith was getting ready to step down, a few weeks after Eisenhower’s inauguration, Smith advised Eisenhower that it would be unwise to give Allen the directorship of the agency. (18) Eisenhower would come to deeply regret that he did not heed this sound advice.

With the Eisenhower Nixon victory, the culmination of years of political strategizing by Wall Street Republican power brokers, the new heads of the State Department and the CIA were selected as none other than Foster and Allen Dulles respectively; and they would go on to direct the global operations of the most powerful nation in the world.

It is for this reason that the 1952 presidential election has gone down in history as the triumph of “the power elite.” (19)

Soon to follow in this series ‘The Fascist Roots of the CIA’: Part 2 Cold War Lessons from Vietnam and Part 3 Dulles vs Kennedy: The Last Stand

The author can be reached at cynthiachung@tutanota.com

Notes

(1) David Talbot Devil’s Chessboard, pg 21
(2) Ibid., pg 22
(3) Ibid., pg 27
(4) Ibid, pg 26
(5) Ibid, pg 23
(6) Ibid., pg 28
(7) Ibid., pg28
(8) Ibid., pg 29
(9) Ibid., pg 26
(10) L. Fletcher Prouty “The CIA, Vietname and the Plot to Assasinate John F. Kennedy”, pg 51
(11) David Talbot “The Devil’s Chessboard”, pg 128
(12) Ibid., pg 128
(13) Ibid., pg 228
(14) Ibid., pg 228
(15) Ibid., 228
(16) Ibid., pg 229
(17) Ibid., pg 229
(18) Ibid., pg 174
(19) C. Wright Mills “The Power Elite”

NATO’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told Politico he considers that growing challenges are being posed by China and that in consequence “To protect Europe, we need the transatlantic bond, we need North America, the U.S. and Canada… we all realize that the global balance of power is changing in a fundamental way. The rise of China is really changing the security environment we face.” He warned that the Chinese government was “investing heavily in new capabilities, including nuclear weapons, missiles, new technologies.”

The absurdity of his warning about nuclear weapons, alone, is enough to destroy his entire argument, which is based solely on finding reasons to try to justify the posture and even expansion of the U.S.-NATO military grouping which, although for the past years has focused on trying to intimidate Russia, is now seeking fresh fields to justify its continuing existence. Stoltenberg obviously doesn’t know that the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute 1920 Yearbook records the U.S. as having 1750 deployed nuclear warheads, and in 2019 “ended the practice of publicly disclosing the size of the U.S. stockpile” which is estimated at some 4,050. In contrast, as SIPRI recently noted, “China maintains an estimated total stockpile of about 260 nuclear warheads, a number which has remained relatively stable but is slowly increasing.”

But Stoltenberg refuses to acknowledge that in the somewhat unlikely event of major conflict the U.S. could reduce China to a sizzling radioactive desert, and rhapsodised that “If anything, the size of China — the military size, the economic size, their achievements in technology — all of that makes NATO even more important. No single ally, not even the United States, can address this alone.” He ignores the stark fact, as pointed out by Jeffrey St Clair in Counterpunch on December 11, that the United States spends more on its military forces than China, India, Russia, Saudi Arabia, France, Germany, United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, and Brazil combined.

He wants to expand NATO’s influence around the globe by “reaching out” to other countries to challenge China and specifically mentions Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. He proposes creation of “a community of like-minded democracies” opposed to the Chinese Communist government. He’s not quite a latter day Senator McCarthy, he of the fanatical anti-Communist campaign in the 1950s, but has joined with such as U.S. Secretary of State Pompeo who declared in August, while on a tour of countries around Russia, that “What’s happening now isn’t Cold War 2.0. The challenge of resisting the Chinese Communist Party threat is in some ways worse.”

On December 4 the BBC noted the assertion of the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, that China is “the greatest threat to democracy and freedom” since World War Two, and his use of that time frame is intriguing because, as reported by the China Global Television Network on 4 September 2020, “The Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression that lasted from 1931 to 1945 forever changed China and China-Japan relations.”

The stage is being set for further confrontation with China, and Stoltenberg wants NATO to gear up to join the anti-China band whose membership, inevitably, includes Japan.

Western countries ignore the fact that the Second World War had enormously wide and long-lasting effects on China and that for the Chinese people it began when Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931. Full-scale war broke out in 1937 and lasted until the Allied victory in 1945, during which time China suffered an estimated 14-20 million dead. It is not surprising that China remains wary of Japanese intentions, and the alliance of Tokyo with what Stoltenberg calls “a community of like-minded democracies” to confront China, is far from reassuring to Beijing.

The U.S.-sponsored Japanese Constitution of 1947 states flatly that “the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained.” Although most laudable, this state of affairs could not last, and as noted by the BBC “after the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, the United States, fearing Communist expansion in Asia, pushed Tokyo to rearm. To fight off “Red China”, the U.S. established the Japan Self-Defence Forces, [in 1954] a military that to this day has not fired a single shot in anger.” But now it is evident that the U.S.-NATO alliance wants Japan, along with other Asia-Pacific nations, to band together against China and be prepared to fire shots in anger as part of a sort of super-NATO which is eager to use the threat of force as means of settling international disputes.

Once the ludicrous and regrettably pathetic post election pantomime in Washington has played out, the incoming Biden Administration will be able to get down to serious planning for the future, in which policy concerning Russia and China will be the most important international factor. Biden has chosen Antony Blinken as the new secretary of state, and while it is unlikely he’ll be as arrogantly war-drum-beating as his predecessor, Pompeo, who has devoted much time and money to jetting round the world on a total of 47 trips involving countless countries but of course omitting Russia and China, it appears that Blinken may continue a tough line, albeit short of full-frontal confrontation. In July he declared that “we need to rally our allies and partners, instead of alienating them, to deal with some of the challenges that China poses,” but it is possible that he and Biden will seek opportunities for cooperation rather than promoting the Stoltenberg project to create a mammoth anti-China military alliance.

It may be too much to hope that NATO may wither and die if it can’t expand eastwards, but at least the dangerous aspirations of Secretary General Stoltenberg are likely to be discouraged by the Biden administration. In spite of that, however, the Pentagon will probably continue its provocative electronic warfare flights and ludicrous “freedom of navigation” fandangos in the South China Sea, and we can expect gathering against China to continue.