WE have been hearing a lot about the 70th anniversary of the first use of a nuclear weapon on human beings, in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. The more important anniversary, however, is August 9, when the last nuclear weapon was used in war, on the city of Nagasaki.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
It was predictable atomic bombs would be used as soon as they were developed in 1945. It was the sixth year of the Second World War, and more than 60 million people had been killed already. But nobody would have believed then that nuclear weapons would not be used again in future wars.
We cannot be sure they never will be used in war again, of course, but 70 years is already an impressive accomplishment. How did we manage that? One way to answer that question is to consider the behaviour of US President Harry S Truman, who was the man who decided to drop the first atomic bombs in 1945 – and the first man to decide NOT to drop them, in 1951.
Truman’s decision to drop the bombs in 1945 probably didn’t seem as momentous to him at the time as it looks now. The fact Japanese cities could now be destroyed by a single plane carrying a single bomb might well shock the Japanese government into surrendering. That would spare the lives of all the American soldiers (an estimated 46,000) who would die if Japan had to be invaded.
But five and a half years later, when US forces in Korea were fleeing south after Chinese troops intervened in the war there, Truman behaved quite differently.
It may or may not be true that US General Douglas MacArthur, who commanded the United Nations troops in Korea, wanted to drop atomic bombs on China’s Manchurian provinces to cut the supply lines of the Chinese troops in Korea. It is certainly true that Truman fired MacArthur, and that he did not use nuclear weapons even though thousands of American troops were being killed or captured.
By late 1950, the United States had between 50 and 100 nuclear weapons – but the Soviet Union had tested its first atomic bomb in the previous year, and by then it already had at least half a dozen of the things. The era of mutual deterrence had arrived.
Truman didn’t know for certain that the Soviet Union would go to war if the US dropped nuclear weapons on China. He would have been fairly certain the Russians didn’t yet have the ability to drop even one on the United States, although they could definitely hit America’s allies in Western Europe. But it didn’t matter: once both sides have nuclear weapons, they get a great deal more cautious.
It is also true that no great power has fought any other great power directly for 70 years, which is certainly a first in world history. Is this because the two world wars had been so destructive that they created institutions like the UN Security Council to avoid another, or because they knew that great-power wars would probably be nuclear wars? Probably both, but at any rate we’re making progress.
