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HIROSHIMA STILL CONTROVERSIAL
By Sean Henahan, Access Excellence
CHAMPAIGN, IL Fifty years after the dropping of the
atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the decision making process that led to the event
remains controversial and raises questions about political decision making
today, say a collection of scientists and scholars, some of who participated
in the original Manhattan project.
Albert Wattenberg, emeritus professor in the University of Illinois department
of physics, has a special connection with the bomb. During the war, as a
young graduate student working on the Manhattan Project at the University
of Chicago, he assisted Enrico Fermi in building and operating the first
controlled nuclear chain reaction. In an essay in the current issue of "Swords
and Ploughshares" Wattenberg explores the tensions between and sentiments
shared by the 67 scientists doing nuclear research at Chicago, including
Leo Szilard "an
unusually imaginative physicist" who invented the nuclear chain reaction
and patented it in 1935, and who joined Fermi's forces in 1939.
According to Wattenberg, Szilard was provoked to develop nuclear bombs
by H.G. Wells' science-fiction novel, "The World Set Free." Like
Wells, Szilard saw nuclear bombs as a vehicle for ending war.
"During the war," Wattenberg writes, "most of the project's
scientists, like myself, were driven by the fear that the Nazis would develop
the atomic bomb first. My young friends and I had prepared clothes and plans
for hiding away from cities in case the Nazis were successful." Many
of the scientists later signed Szilard's petition, asking President Truman
not to use the bomb against Japan without warning.
In the same issue, University of Illinois political scientist Stephen
Cohen observes that national and generational perspectives continue to profoundly
shape views on Hiroshima, and that the controversy over the meaning of Hiroshima
"reflects a deep division within our country about the legitimacy of
the use of force." In addition, the Hiroshima experience reveals "a
vulnerability in the American decision making system, a vulnerability that
remains to this day."
When Truman assumed the presidency, the United States made a series of
crucial decisions about nuclear weapons "on an ad hoc basis,"
Cohen writes, "and our own situation is not that different."
"With an increasingly inward-looking America, presidential candidates
have less need to demonstrate competence in foreign affairs. When this decline
in interest is coupled with the structural inadequacies of the American
foreign policy systema weak civil and foreign service, armed forces more
skilled in technology and logistics than in strategy, and a perpetual tug
of war between legislative and executive [branches] over the control of
the fast-diminishing instruments of foreign policywe and foreign governments
have reason to be alarmed. Our approach to the grave issues of war and peace
remains dangerously amateurish."
A series of essays appear in the latest issue of Swords and Ploughshares:
The Bulletin of the Program in Arms Control, Disarmament and International
Security, published by the University of Illinois.
Related information on the Internet
Swords
and Ploughshares
Nagasaki Photo
Exhibit
Hi
roshima Today
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