The 75th anniversary of the first military use of nuclear weapons at Hiroshima has been the prompt for London’s Imperial War Museum to commission a a special example of reflective art. Es Devlin and Machiko Weston were preparing an exhibition, but have now produced a remarkable video called ‘I saw the world end’, so we can access their work online instead. This video is well worth watching and reflecting on, so I will embed it below, and it will be followed by some further reflections from me. Is Hiroshima to be a prompt to further conflict, or for learning? Much depends on finding the Middle Way in relation to it. You can see more about the context of the video on the Imperial War Museum site.
One of the things I find most helpful about the video is the way that it combines two perspectives, above and below the line. These can be seen as Western and Japanese, bomber and victim, but they are much more than that. For the most part they use very different sorts of language. Those above the line are scientific and universal: they think in terms of abstract generalities, either in terms of the science that produced the bomb or the justifications that launched it. Below it, however, there is only immediate overwhelmed experience and emotional response: the response of the right hemisphere of the brain that is desperately trying to respond to new experience, rather than the left hemisphere that marks the language above the line. Above the line, too, the language is often passive (rather like academic language, avoiding personalisation), but below the line, the bomb happens to real people in a real situation.
I have been reflecting on the ways that the helpfulness of our response to Hiroshima depends very much on whether we are prepared to straddle that line. A common response for anyone with a degree of sensitivity and compassion today is just to be enormously shocked by what happened, and to immediately feel the bombing to be a monstrous and inhumane action that must never be repeated. As long as we remain with that human experience of what happened and have sympathy with the immense suffering that occurred, we are likely to go on feeling like this. However, if we instead enter the world of the people above the line, we find a very different experience: one of abstract reasoning in which technologies are developed for what are sincerely believed in as humane ends, for the purposes of resisting Fascist regimes that were capable of even greater calculated cruelty than any that might have contributed to Hiroshima. We are in the world of utilitarian reasoning, in which the end justifies the means, and the lesser evil averts the greater one.
The challenge of practising the Middle Way in relation to this topic, as I see it, is to extend our awareness both above and below the line, not prematurely rejecting one tendency above the other, but rather putting them both into as large a context as we can manage. As a former ethics teacher, I have organised debates about the justification of Hiroshima between students, and am aware from this how quickly the whole issue can become over-abstract, as it becomes merely a matter of proving a moral theory, rather than maintaining our sense of what extreme human suffering is actually like. At times it can seem like an insult to the sufferers to debate their fate in the abstract – yet we necessarily do this all the time, whenever we give a specific situation the wider context of its relationship to other situations. At the point of judgement on medical resources, for instance, the suffering of a patient requiring an enormously expensive treatment can no longer be the only thing we consider. We start having to weigh it up against the further suffering that may result by not spending that money on other needful causes. Getting caught up completely below the line can be just as limiting as being caught entirely above it. We have to try to be amphibious, however difficult that may seem.
The utilitarian reasoning for Hiroshima ran along the lines that greater suffering might well result if the Allies continued to fight the war against Japan by conventional means. Japan was deemed unlikely to surrender before the end of the huge bloodbath that a conventional invasion of Japan would have required. The use of nuclear weapons, however, was intended to force a rapid Japanese surrender without this. Of course, such reasoning depends on the accuracy of our assessment of our actions and their likely effects, but in wartime it is very difficult to avoid such reasoning. Similar thinking had already been employed in the war against the Germans when the decision was taken to conceal the fact that the Enigma Code used by German communications had been cracked. Many Allied lives were thus lost in the short term that could have been saved, but in the cause of an ultimate victory. Remarkably, this strategy worked.
So, in my view, we cannot simply dismiss utilitarian reasoning. Utilitarian reasoning is capable of saving the world, and may have already done so. At the same time, we cannot rely on it exclusively, without constantly renewing our wider experience of both the practical and the emotional impact of our actions. However, helpful utilitarian reasoning depends on honest and accurate assessments of the effects of our actions of a kind that are all too rare in practice, taking into account even unknown unknowns as far as we can. Utilitarian reasoning can also be held responsible for much of our past treatment of the environment, and the insufficiently foreseen rebounding effects this is now having on us. There are no single abstract moral theories that can give us all the right answers in any situation, only a toolbox of different responses, and the potential to cultivate the kind of awareness and provisionality we need to use that toolbox wisely. I do not think that we should now try to answer the question of whether Harry Truman’s judgement was right or wrong, because it is our own judgements now that we need to take responsibility for, not his. However, the practice of trying to understand both sides of the question offers valuable resources to us even today.
You seem to want to try to shoe-hone the differing sides of the argument into your right-brain/left-brain dichotomy and I am not at all sure it fits! For a start both “above and below” the line are different types of ideology and the main point that you miss out is that the film itself was made by the Imperial War Museum – a crucial part of our educative establishment – and hence the particular juxtaposition of perpetrator and victim in such a way and their combination into one package, is itself yet another form of ideology – third ideology; and indeed the ideological agenda of the Imperial War Museum itself! Any a critique of ideology as a whole is nowhere to be found in your analysis – let alone any attempt at overcoming ideology altogether!
To me your analysis boils down to this – there is an objective rational instrumental/utilitarian analysis on the one side that everyone agrees on; and then for the complete picture we need to throw in the subjective experience of the horror for those on the receiving end, just to give it a balanced view!
But what if we dispute the rational narrative in the first place? (alright – for those that can’t do anything until we have specified the physio-psychology – it proceeds from the front of the brain: the cerebra cortex!) Why assume that the standard American rational military analysis was correct?
At that point in the war Japan had lost all of its capital ships, it had hardly any airforce left and great chunks of its army was scattered around several territories on the Asian mainland and not in any position to make a heroic defence of the homeland. The Americans completely surrounded Japan at sea and could enforce their blockade with impunity and the Japanese High Command had the full knowledge that the Russians were just on the point of declaring war on Japan (in obligation of the Potsdam Agreement) and invade from Siberia.
But the most crucial and significant point of all is that Japan had no natural sources of oil of its own – hence all is oil had to be imported. And no modern army can fight at all without oil! So the situation for Japan was absolutely hopeless! Add to this that the Americans had already destroyed many of Japan’s major cities by a combination of “conventional” explosive bombs and incendiaries. (The fire-bombing of Tokyo itself had killed more than the Hiroshima bomb, because of all the historic wooden buildings catching alight so easily). And finally, as was known through third parties, Japan was already putting out the diplomatic feelers to sue for peace and find some way out of what they saw by than as a hopeless war!
Is it true that the Japanese always fight to the death? The answer is no – indeed there was the experience of the bitter fights to re-capture the Pacific Islands – but at that stage it was still perhaps theoretically possible that Japan could turn the war around and win. And therefore from the soldiers perspective laying down his life would still have been worth while. But when the Emperor (Hirohito) finally gave the announcement the Japanese surrendered en mass with little fuss! (Compare this to the northern pocket at Stalingrad completely kettled in by the Russians, where the Germans knew that at that stage Field Marshal Von Paulas had already been captured – and yet they still refused to surrender and carried on fighting to the last man sacrificing about 20,000 troops!) So perhaps we have to re-frame this well worn myth in terms of the Western colonialist view of the fear of the barbarian!
No, the hidden narrative is a little more simple – they had tried the first bomb out at Los Alamos and so they knew that it worked, and therefore they needed to try it out for real in actual warfare conditions. Why do you think they dropped both types of bomb – a uranium bomb and a plutonium bomb if it was not to see if which one did better?
And that is the real dirty underside to the atomic bombing of Japan – and if you are a peace lover that is the argument that we need to be continually pushing now the generation that experienced those dark days are nearly all gone!
Hi Padmadipa,
Despite its name (which is probably due for revision a la Colston Hall), I don’t regard the Imperial War Museum as a particularly biased source, and in any case it was not acting directly but merely commissioning two artists. I agree with you that many other perspectives on Hiroshima are possible apart from the two given: however, that doesn’t prevent the result of their juxtaposition being quite a striking work of art that can stimulate reflection.
I’m not assuming that the US military analysis was correct – though neither am I interpreting it as uncharitably as you are. You seem to be very certain about various aspects of it that we are not in a position to be certain about. I am merely saying that it represents a kind of reasoning that should not be dismissed out of hand because it is sometimes necessary, so any attempt to apply the Middle Way needs to take it seriously as a way of seeing things. Any assessment of the rights and wrongs in utilitarian terms depends on an interpretation of complex information that we are very likely to view with hindsight through an ideological filter, so yes, I am in one sense trying to avoid ideology here. My conclusion was that we are not in a position to judge that specific judgement fairly at this point, and this should not be read either as a specific defence of Truman’s judgement, nor as advocating any avoidance of political responsibility in any future comparable circumstances. We have to make judgements in the heat of the situation with limited information, that’s what utilitarian judgement is for, and there’s something to be said for that kind of judgement in certain circumstances: that’s what I was saying.
For more on the ‘above the line’ account read The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes (first published in 1986). And for more on the ‘below the line’ account read Hiroshima by John Hersey (first published in book form in 1946).
The book by Rhodes is significantly longer than the book by Hersey (886 pages versus 160).
I think that is a remarkable piece of art and worthy of reflection in the way you mention Robert. I would ask too that Padmadipa (Paul Simmons) view it in that light – if he hasn’t done so again. To prejudge it as a work of predictable Western bias is to make an unfair assumptions about the artists and even the Imperial War Museum (who didn’t make the film but commissioned it).
I edited a video for a commemorative installation – in Bristol – at around the time of the 50th Hiroshima centenary. I’ll try and dig it out and possibly upload it here.
Mark Felton has an outstanding YouTube channel presenting his well researched war stories … this one caught my eye recently (link). It is about the potential use of a third atomic bomb but more significantly goes into the complicated and belligerent infighting among the Japanese generals, the emperor and the looming threat of a Russian invasion in the North that finally swung the surrender. The complexities are an education!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I34pxr23Nhw