The Myth of Hiroshima

It is the 70^th anniversary of the first and only military use of the atomic bomb. The established story about the U.S. using the Atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that it was necessary to avoid a planned invasion of the Japanese mainland. The U.S. military had encountered fierce resistance and tens of thousands of casualties during the invasion of the island of Okinawa and were anticipating hundreds of thousands while attacking the mainland. As is often the case, the established story is false. Not long after the Japanese surrender, several high ranking military officers went public with their opinions.

"The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace before the atomic age was announced to the world with the destruction of Hiroshima and before the Russian entry into war. ... The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military standpoint, in the defeat of Japan." - Adm. Nimitz

"The Japanese were ready to surrender, and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing. … I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon." -Dwight D. Eisenhower

"It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons... My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make wars in that fashion, and that wars cannot be won by destroying women and children." - Admiral William Leahy

(With a hat-tip to Paul Bibeau at Goblinbooks for the quotations. Really, you should go read his stuff. He's brilliant, pointed, and funny.)

Perhaps you suspect these men of merely distancing themselves from an atrocity after the fact. Let me fill in the story from the perspective of a relatively unknown player in this story, one Ladislas Farago, an operative of the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence, Special Warfare Branch, also known as Op-16-W. Farago wrote a history of WW2 espionage titled “Burn After Reading.” It is an interesting survey of the operations of various intelligence and counterintelligence operations before and during that war. The last chapter is what interests me now. Titled “The Surrender of Japan”, it chronicles the efforts of Op-16-W to open a path to a negotiated surrender through diplomatic back channels and psychological warfare.

(Farago is better known as a military historian and author. He wrote “Patton: Ordeal and Triumph”, on which the Patton movie was based, and “The Broken Seal”, which was part of the basis of the movie “Tora! Tora! Tora!” about Pearl Harbor.)

Farago wrote the “Appeal to Japan” that President Harry Truman read on the radio on May 8, 1945, telling the Japanese that 1) Germany was defeated, 2) that Japan would get no relief from attack until it surrendered, and 3) that surrender did not mean extermination or enslavement. The appeal was based on intelligence gathered by Op-16-Z, the signals intelligence branch that worked alongside Op-16-W.

In December 1944 Op-16-W received a report originating from an asset code named “Shark”, a Turkish diplomat in Tokyo. The substance of the report was that the present Premier of Japan would resign in favor of a confidant of Emperor Hirohito, in order that a “peace party” would have the power to negotiate a surrender. Hirohito was only concerned that he would retain his own position as the symbolic and spiritual leader of the nation. With that concern addressed, he would put the entire weight of his authority behind peace negotiations.

On March 19, 1945, Op-16-W proposed a plan of psychological warfare aimed at high level Japanese officials “in order to accelerate and effect the unconditional surrender of Japan without the necessity of an opposed landing on the Japanese main islands.”

In the meantime, Japan was extending feelers through various channels. Jiri Taguchi, an agent who reported directly to Japanese Foreign Minister Togo, went to Berne, Switzerland and requested a secret meeting with the American diplomat Leland Harrison. The approach was dismissed. Hirohito himself approached the Cardinal of Tokyo to ask the Vatican to act as a go between, and this request was forwarded through the American representative to the Vatican to the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor to the CIA. The State Department waffled on this approach due to political considerations about the Vatican. American signals intelligence units picked up and decrypted communications between Togo and an ambassador, Sato, stationed in Moscow. Togo explicitly asked Sato to ask Stalin to be a go-between in surrender negotiations. Stalin rejected this, and the U.S. couldn’t use the intel because it would have revealed our ability to break Japanese diplomatic codes. Nevertheless, U.S. officials knew that Japan was desperate for a negotiated surrender months before the dropping of the atomic bomb.

In the spring of 1945 Op-16-W made propaganda transmissions that assured Japanese officials that unconditional military surrender did not ultimately mean loss of national sovereignty. The emperor’s position would be assured. There followed an odd conversation over the public airwaves and in the press between Japanese propagandists and American ones, with subtly coded references to negotiation. A Japanese government spokesman, Dr. Isamu Inouye, made a broadcast in April 1945 that included: “Japan would be ready to discuss peace terms provided there were certain changes in the unconditional surrender formula.” On July 24 he was more explicit: “Should the United States show any sincerity of putting into practice what she preaches, as for instance in the Atlantic Charter excepting its punitive clause, the Japanese nation, in fact the Japanese military, would automatically, if not willingly, follow in the stopping of the conflict.”

In the latter half of July 1945 the Office of Naval Intelligence had plans for direct meetings with the Japanese. They were flying the recently captured Japanese ambassador to Germany to the Pacific in preparation for secret meetings. They expected the Japanese surrender by September 1^st.

Of course, on August 6, 1945, the bomb dropped. There has been much speculation by historians as to why the U.S. government chose that action over a week of negotiations. Some say that Truman, negotiating with the Soviets in Potsdam, saw it as a move to keep the Soviets cautious. Some argue that U.S. politicians had backed themselves into a corner of unconditional surrender and feared that negotiations would make them look weak. There is a thread of opinion that the U.S. military saw atomic weapons as a determinant of future U.S. power and required a real world test.

Whatever the matrix of motivations, the historical record reveals the standard myth as just that. U.S. military decision makers were not faced with a choice between an invasion and a mushroom cloud.

We should remember this when the politicians of our time present us with a military option that they deem inevitable.

A Sense of Scale

The recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan is shocking beyond its numbers. There are thousands dead and hundreds of thousands homeless. The economic damage is immense. Well beyond that is its impact on our sense of scale, our sense of the human place in the world. Here is a video clip that had me transfixed in horror:

One could look at that scene and conclude that nature is cruel. That would be wrong. It's worse than that; nature just is. Cruelty is a human trait and has a human scale. We can negotiate with cruelty. We can fight it. We can arrest it, try it, convict and imprison it. We can reeducate it, or wait it out. Nature is there forever, and it is unconscious and without intent.

I'm sharing this video clip with you not to shock you, but to remind you of our scale. It's not a kind thing to do, and I apologize. A friend of mine once said that a certain amount of delusion was necessary to stay sane, and I suppose I'm threatening that. However, a regular reminder of our place in the world is a mental tonic; not good tasting, but it clears the mind.

There is an area around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant that will be off limits for human habitation for, what, decades? Centuries? With luck, the area around the Fukushima nuclear plant won’t be contaminated and people will be able to move back – if they actually want to. With a little less luck Japan could lose some land area essentially forever. Is this a level of risk we should be taking, especially given that there are alternatives? I say no. Don’t juggle hand grenades if tennis balls are available.

The Fukushima disaster hits close because here in Vermont we have a nuclear power plant that is the same age and design as the Fukishima reactors. It is the outdated and unsafe GE Mark 1 design, and it is coming up on its 40^th birthday. It has been leaking tritium and perhaps other things for some months. Its owner, Entergy, has been lying to state regulators and coping with drunken employees. 75 miles east-southeast lies the greater Boston metropolitan area, with a population of 4.5 million. It’s the unimaginable waiting to happen. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, in a move that surprised nobody, just re-upped its operating license for another 20 years.

As Japanese workers valiantly attempt to cool down those leaking reactors that were wrecked by the earthquake and tsunami, we should rethink risk and our ability to manage risk. We are, as a species, a glass cannon. That is an expression from the world of fiction meaning a character that can inflict terrible damage but can’t take a punch. We can be incredibly destructive en masse, but as individuals and as communities we are vulnerable to what nature can dish out. Likewise our complex structures, both social and technological.

Engineers regularly design mechanical systems to endure natural disasters. The point is to predict the worst things that could happen and build in enough redundancy so that in the worst case scenario the system still has one level of safety left. As we have seen, nature can defy our predictions and wipe away that last level of protection. Taking it as a given that our systems will sometimes be overwhelmed by events, we have to start thinking about the consequences of absolute failure.

If a wind turbine has an absolute failure and falls over, I suppose it could land on someone. The same goes for a rack of solar panels. However, the fall zone would not be rendered uninhabitable for centuries. Cancer deaths would not spike downwind. An entire wind farm could go over all at once and the nearest city would not have to be evacuated.

We seem to have reached a scavenging age in the pursuit of non-renewable energy. We have decades-old power plants and decades-old oil fields starting to fail. We are exploring for oil at extreme ocean depths with the associated extreme risks. We are strip mining and processing tar sands that nobody in the business would have bothered with a few decades ago. We are blasting the tops off of mountains for coal and engaging in the dangerous re-mining of old deposits. As we start to scramble, the risks per ton, per barrel, per gallon, per kilowatt-hour are going up.

We can’t keep reassuring ourselves that we’ve got it all under control and that the worst will never happen. It’s time to look with an unflinching gaze at worst case scenarios and ask ourselves, “Are we willing to accept this level of destruction as the cost of temporarily keeping the status quo?” The answer, in many cases, will be no. We’ll have to face up to fundamental changes in the way we live. We’ll have to balance present convenience against future consequences. There are no easy answers, but pretending that everything will be ok is no answer either.

Japanese Nuclear Problems

Here’s an overview of the nuclear power crisis in Japan. History will probably overtake this post within a day, but I thought people might like a general picture of the problems.

The worst hit plant is Fukushima Dai-ichi, located about 180 miles north of Tokyo on the east coast of Japan’s main island of Honshu. It is a set of six boiling water reactors, meaning that the water heated by the nuclear reaction is not pressurized, so it boils. This is an important point, which I will get to later.

Three of the six reactors were operating at the time the earthquake hit. They all immediately shut down. That means that a number of rods were dropped into each reactor core, these rods absorbing radiation and stopping the reaction. The problem is that the cores of these reactors don’t immediately cool down, so the cooling water needs to circulate through them for another week. During a normal shutdown the cooling water pumps run on electricity from the utility grid. This being absent, the pumps are powered by diesel generators on site. In this case, the generators were swamped by the tsunami, so the pumps fell back on batteries, the problem being that the batteries can only power the pumps for 8 hours.

Adding to the problem, each reactor has a pool of water holding used fuel rods. These pools need to have water circulated through them to keep the spent rods cool, although to a lesser extent than the reactor cores. Some of these pools lack circulating water due to the multiple failures and are starting to boil off their water. The danger is that if the spent rods are exposed they could catch fire and spew radioactive particles into the air.

Already there have been releases of radiation. Units 1, 2, and 3 are all at risk, with the cores of all three having been exposed several times and partially melted. The pool on Unit #4 is at risk of exposure. Local residents have been evacuated, and even outside the evacuation zone people have been ordered to stay indoors.

Those explosions you may have seen on television were from hydrogen produced when steam reacted with the superheated casings of the nuclear fuel rods. The hydrogen vented out of the steel and concrete containment vessel and into the building around it. Usually any gas that gets vented into this building gets run through filters to remove radioactive particles and is then blown off, but the venting system was overwhelmed and the hydrogen built up and detonated. Now any radioactive gas that gets vented from those primary containment vessels goes directly into the atmosphere.

Japanese utility workers have been flooding the cores of reactors 1-3 with seawater in an attempt to keep the cores cool. Apparently they have also been mixing some boron containing compound into the water as well. Boron absorbs the neutrons that maintain a nuclear reaction, so this gives double duty, cooling and slowing the reaction at the same time.

There is presently a problem in the #2 reactor, in that the operators can't open the pressure relief valves. The pressure has built up to the point where they are unable to pump water into the core. Unless the valves open on their own, this can't end well.

Key concept: Flooding a boiling water reactor with seawater and boron is a permanent shut down. The Japanese authorities decided that the situation was bad enough to write off these reactors forever.

Second key concept: A small percentage of the fuel rods in reactor #3 are mixed oxide, or MOX, meaning that they contain plutonium as well as the usual uranium. This raises the probability of containment failure, because the plutonium helps to keep the reaction going and because it tends to create more gas when the core gets uncovered. It also poses a higher cancer risk than pure uranium.

Third key concept: These reactors are 40 years old, of a type called the General Electric Mark 1. There have always been questions about the probability of catastrophic failure with this design. This is, by the way, the same age and design as our own Entergy/Vermont Yankee plant in Vernon, as well as 22 other plants in the U.S.

A good site for ongoing information about the Fukushima plant, with excellent explanations of the technology, is at the Union of Concerned Scientists website.