Are Nuclear Weapons Useless? I
Given the timeliness of the question above, we will be postponing the account of President Eisenhower’s predicaments for the next several entries.
Are nuclear weapons useless?
General Colin Powell said they were.
Powell’s actual words were “these [nuclear] weapons are useless, they cannot be used.” That’s clear enough, isn’t it? He said this in the Prologue to an important video documentary released in 2010 called Nuclear Tipping Point. (The Prologue is 4 1/2 minutes long, the documentary is 55 minutes long.)
General Powell was someone you’d think would know, if anyone did. In the 1980’s, he had been President Reagan’s National Security Advisor. During the administration of President George H. W. Bush, who followed Reagan, General Powell had been Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon. This was when the nuclear stockpiles of both the United States and the Soviet Union were the biggest they would ever be--70,000 nuclear weapons, when you added them together. Even if you didn’t add them together, enough nuclear weapons to destroy life on earth many times over.
Nuclear weapons certainly could have been used for that—to destroy life on earth. Some of us who grew up during the Cold War believed they might well be used for that. During Powell’s years in George H.W. Bush’s administration, the Soviet Union came apart and we who had lived through the Cold War finally could begin to believe nuclear weapons would not be used for that.
Okay. But come on. How could nuclear weapons be useless? We’d used them, hadn’t we, against Japan? And they’d been useful, hadn’t they? They’d ended the war with Japan and with it World War II.
Actually, there was some serious doubt about that. We did, for sure, use two atomic bombs on Japan, and a week after we dropped the second one, the Japanese emperor had for sure surrendered. But was it our use of the atomic bombs that caused the surrender? The fact that the surrender happened after the atomic bombs were used doesn’t mean it happened because they were used. The sun didn’t come up today because you woke up and had your coffee before it did.
Among those who have questioned whether the two atomic bombs should be taken to have caused the surrender are two important World War II generals. Curtis LeMay was the army air force general who, starting in March 1945, had firebombed and destroyed all or part of over 60 cities in Japan. These firebombings destroyed many more structures and killed many times more people than the two atomic bombs did. If you take a look at the photographs now available to us of cities that were firebombed, you could be forgiven for thinking you were looking at the aftermath in Hiroshima.
In his memoir, LeMay wrote, “I think [the use of the atomic bombs] was anticlimactic…. [T]he verdict was already rendered.” LeMay reports that General Nathan F. Twining, who was in charge of the Twentieth Air Force at the time the bombs were dropped, said, “I am convinced that the surrender would have occurred within a short time period even if the atomic bomb had never been used.” 1
And what happened after the dropping of the atomic bombs? After Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima, LeMay’s bombers had conducted more firebombing raids. He had “burned up,” he said, 21 percent of Yawata and 73.3 percent of Fukuyama. On August 14, five days after Fat Man was dropped on Nagasaki but the day before the surrender, LeMay’s forces had burned up 45 percent of Kumugaya and 17 percent of Isezaki, cities 66 and 67 to be firebombed by his B-29s.
Maybe it was those final firebombing attacks that did the trick. How would we know?
Of course we were proud of having devised this amazing new weapon, the atomic bomb. And we had spent a lot of money doing it. You can see how we might have wanted to claim more for it than was warranted.
General Powell knew that nuclear weapons could be used. Of course he knew that. But he said they were useless. What did he mean by that?
Is there anyone else especially worth listening to who has said nuclear weapons are useless? Yes, someone else you’d think would know, if anyone would. Maybe what he said could help us understand what General Powell meant.
Next: Are Nuclear Weapons Useless? II-Who Else Has Said So?
Curtis LeMay (with MacKinlay Kantor), Mission with Lemay: My Story, Doubleday, 1965, 388