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The psyche of Harry Truman, too, contributed in large part to the atrocities. A letter from Truman to his wife, Bess, reveals his innately racist tendencies:
…the Lord made a white man of dust, a nigger from mud, then threw up what was left and it came down a Chinaman. He does hate Chinese and Japs. So do I. It is race prejudice I guess. But I am strongly of the opinion that negroes ought to be in Africa, yellow men in Asia, and white men in Europe and America.(63)
Growing up, Truman was considered “effeminate” and weak.(64) As a young child and as a teenager, he was often teased by the other boys, who regarded him as feminine and “sissy” because, having poor eyesight, thick glasses, and no athletic ability, he spent his time reading and writing.(65) Describing himself as a young person, Truman related his “inferiority complex” that resulted from his identity as a “sissy”, and how he had resolved to overcome it by emanating a “determined masculinity”.(66) As a commander in World War I and as a politician, he carried with him his assumed bravado of masculinity; he extended it to diplomacy, displaying what some historians categorize as the “Diplomacy of Masculinity”. His presidency was a culmination of his lifelong efforts at manliness; he asserted a firm dominance of authority and firmness in resolution in every decision he made: “…It takes men to make history…if I have read American history right, it isn’t the strong men that have caused us most of the trouble, it’s the ones who were weak.”(67) So in his policy toward the Russians, Truman fulfilled the epitome of masculine diplomacy, ordering the Russians to do what his administration wanted, being “tough” with them when they were hesitant. Truman and his policymakers thought of international negotiations in terms of what it meant to act like men, in large part because of their conditioning and their abidance in a culture that dictated firm versions of the male and female mystiques.(68) The atomic bomb was the ultimate fortification, the exemplary symbol of virility.
The utilization of the atomic bomb was, perhaps subliminally, an imperative statement of masculine identity and pugilist tendencies. “In war, as in a boxing match,” Stimson wrote, “it is seldom sound for the stronger combatant to moderate his blows whenever his opponent shows signs of weakening”.(69) References to masculine identities and activities, such as baseball and poker, littered the notes and conversations of the “atomic diplomats”: The first atomic bomb, test-blasted over New Mexico, was named “Big Brother”, and the second one, released over Hiroshima, was called “Little Boy”.(70) As Stimson wrote, the U.S. needed to “find some way of persuading Russia to play ball” and “We had two cards to assist us in such an effort [to persuade Japan to surrender before Russia entered the war]: …”.(71) One was the respect of the Japanese for their emperor, and thus his power over his troops.(72) The second was the “atomic bomb”—to Stimson, the bomb was the crucial card: “it seems a terrible thing to gamble with such big stakes in diplomacy withough having your master card in your hand.”(73) With such references, and the inherent tendencies instilled in them by cultural conditioning, the atomic diplomats rushed inevitably toward Hiroshima.
General Leslie Groves described Truman as a man on a toboggan, the momentum too great to stop it.(74) British scientist P.M.S. Blackett suggested that the United States was anxious to drop the bomb before the Soviet Union entered the war.(75) I think that the truth is a melding of both suggestions; the United States seriously feared the Soviet Union’s expansionism, and viewed the bomb as a trenchant impediment. Also involved, however, were the factors propelling the Truman administration toward the decision: the idea of masculinity in diplomacy, the goad of revenge for Pearl Harbor, the impetus to strike against such an inhuman, intensely hated, inferior enemy, and the cost and labors involved in constructing the Manhattan Project. All of those factors contributed in propelling America towards a momentous decision that galvanized global culture, and heaved the world into an armaments race that gave rise to the cold war and the nuclear age.
The formulation and propagation of this myth tell us of the American goal of supremacy; of the American drive to be dominant in international affairs, to establish a hard power leadership that rests unrivalled in terms of its ability to convince and incite. It reeks of the motive, in existence since the country’s inception, to establish a façade of indomitable strength that will provide a leverage in foreign affairs. Indeed, in large part the decision did contribute to the effective creation of that aura of hegemony, but at no small cost to those who happened to be opposing the juggernaut of American global domination. The cost in casualties to the Japanese in the two bombings—close to 200,000 lives—far exceeds the amount of U.S. casualties in any battle. And all that when surrender could have been obtained with the change of the trifling, propagandic provision of “unconditional surrender”! Revenge seems to be the name of the game in American foreign affairs, then and now, which also lends a thread to the masculine motif of American foreign policy dealings: historically, America responds to small attacks with a great show of force, in order to dissuade further opposition completely. This myth exists in the first place as a ramification of American masculinist policy: in order to insure America’s heightened might as a result of the possession of the first true atomic weaponry, and to secure their much hoped-for position of dictatorship of atomic cooperation terms, the atomic diplomats needed to stop the steady flow of criticism issuing forth from their own countrymen, in order to keep the public united against the fall of American imperialist domination. At least, that was the justification offered by the creators of the truth, in all its virile iniquity. Perhaps something else was at play too—the reluctance to welcome public disrepute and the need, sprung about by society’s mental constructions, to never appear less than perfect in the realm of mass consciousness.
The debunking of this myth, and the understanding of the true reasons for justification of the bombings on Japan, can help us realize that atomic warfare has very few positive connotations. The United States’s utilization of the bomb did not achieve any of the goals it hoped it would. First of all, the usage of the atomic bomb did not spur any type of international cooperation, or help American relations with Russia; it simply contributed to the cold war and accelerated the arms race that accompanied the advent of the nuclear age. Also, it shows how the juggernaut of bureaucracy can wipe out reason and logic by creating a propagandic, capitalistic elitist group that will never fail to have its intentions redeemed. In this case, the fear that spurred the Manhattan Project—the fear of American atomic ineptitude—created a bureaucratic network of committees and project teams that built, with an enormous expenditure of money and resources, a weapon that was bound to be used because of the inevitable sequence of events, and the power of the bureaucratic network to convince the people in power of its usage. Being that the weapon led to the deaths of two entire, thriving cities, the architecture of an enormous, imperialistic myth, and contributed to the cold war and the advent of the nuclear age, creating such hierarchical systems can hardly be a good thing. |
