On the eightieth anniversary year of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is interesting to reflect a third “bomb” that specifically rendered the Japanese surrender.
In the August edition of the Australian Book Review, the lead essay, Without Undue Suffering, historian Clinton Fernandes delivers a gripping reassessment of the world’s only use of atomic bombs against civilians and exposes the ‘super-weapon alibi’ that enabled a politically convenient end to World War II for both the United States and Japan.
Between the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6 and the detonation of the nuclear device on Nagasaki on August 9, a bombshell of shifting alliance significantly ruptured the Japanese war machine.
At midnight on August 8 the Soviet Union declared war on Japan, brushing aside their 1941 neutrality pact. It invaded Japanese-occupied Manchuria and conducted amphibious landings in Japan’s Northern Territories, the four islands of Habomai, Shikotan, Kunashiri, and Etorofu. An attack on Hokkaido,
the northernmost of Japan’s home islands, was to follow in less
than two weeks.
Fernandes draws on Japanese archives referring to the atomic bombs as ‘heaven sent’ and ‘gifts from the gods’, as well as US government reports that they were dropped ‘without undue suffering’.
With belligerent states like China, Israel, Russia and North Korea now nuclear capable, Fernandes’ article brings into focus the continuing threat of proliferation and concludes with the sobering quote from Geoffrey Blainey’s Causes of War: ‘The breakdown of diplomacy reflects the belief of each nation that it will gain more by fighting than by negotiating.’ If this sounds
ominous and alarming, it should be, as we mark the eightieth anniversary of the day man turned the earth into the sun.
Also in the August edition of the ABR, Marilyn Lake reviews After America by Emma Shortis and Hard New World, a Quarterly Essay by Hugh White, arguing that ‘Australia has signed up to an ‘America First’ policy even as Australia’s history, interests, perspectives, and values diverge dramatically from those of the United States.’
Elsewhere, Geordie Williamson reviews a history of wool and war, Zora Simic reviews Jacinda Ardern’s memoir, Caroline de Costa recalls her involvement in Bertrand Russell’s Tribunal on War Crimes in Vietnam in the late 1960s, Bain Attwood reviews a book about ignorance and bliss, and Jennifer Harrison reviews a controversial new book by Joan Didion.
