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Ramifications of Hiroshima bombing linger

ASBURY PARK, N.J. — Former Army Air Forces Capt. Irving Bauman wondered if the photograph was of some new species of vegetation. Then he wondered why his colonel was so hush-hush about it.

“I developed the picture, and I see a mushroom,” said Bauman, 92, who lives in Wall. “I couldn’t possibly imagine why he wanted that kind of top secret classification on that negative.”

But Bauman, an aerial photo officer in charge of the photo laboratory for the 73rd Bomb Wing at Saipan, soon realized that the negative he had developed was no new form of fungus.

The photo, shot from the B-29 bomber Enola Gay on Aug. 6, 1945, was the first Army picture taken of the explosion of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

On the 65th anniversary of that nuclear detonation that eventually killed an estimated 166,000 Japanese, among the consequences which still reverberate are how it changed the geopolitical landscape in the way that countries plan for and conduct war, and how atomic power is harnessed and used.

Many military experts and historians generally agree that President Truman’s decision to drop the first bomb on Hiroshima, and a second bomb on Nagasaki three days later, was the right decision.

“These bombs hastened the end to this terrible war,” Bauman said. “Without these bombs, we would have had another D-Day-like landing on the coast of Japan. It would have resulted in thousands of men’s deaths from both Japan and America.”

“From a military historian’s point of the view, the dropping of the bomb was necessary,” said Paul Zigo, assistant professor of history at Brookdale Community College in Lincroft and director of the school’s Center for World War II Studies and Conflict Resolution.

“Japanese resistance during 1944 was so devastating and American soldiers were sustaining large casualties,” Zigo added. “The biggest fear of President Truman was that the war could continue into 1945, 1946 and end possibly not until mid-1947.”

Double-edged sword

Some historians note, though, that while the A-bomb proved to be its own deterrent against use, especially during the Cold War, it’s also a double-edged sword.

“A lot of people will credit the elimination of general war against great states to the deterrence of nuclear weapons,” said Christopher DeRosa, associate professor of history at Monmouth University who teaches courses about World War II and the Cold War.

“To the extent that our avoidance of general war has been because of nuclear deterrence, it’s been a limited legacy because every nation has the incentive to obtain that weapon which the big powers have,” DeRosa said.

He said that the ever-present desire to belong to the nuclear club could lead to less than responsible members.

“In the hands of potentially less predictable actors outside of a small nuclear club of great powers, that could pose more danger than security,” DeRosa said.

And experts say there’s no iron-clad guarantee that atomic weapons could someday find their way into the hands of “non-state nations” like al-Qaida.

“It’s these other leaders that I fear more,” Zigo said. “Will they exhibit the same rational thought as leaders of established states not to employ them?”

Not a fluke

That it was the United States that built the atom bomb was not by chance, DeRosa said.

“This was not a scientific discovery that was stumbled upon,” DeRosa said. “You had theoretical knowledge that splitting the atom was doable, but you also had to put the power of the richest and most industrially advanced state behind it. It really took the United States to make it happen in 1945.”

Bauman’s unfamiliarity with an atom bomb mushroom cloud underlined the secrecy surrounding the Manhattan Project, the code name given by the military to the development of the weapon.

Military personnel stationed on Saipan, an island roughly 1,500 miles from mainland Japan, learned about the bomb only later that night on a radio station broadcast, Bauman said.

“The security of the atom bomb was very tightly controlled,” recalled Bauman. “Only the bomb crew of the Enola Gay knew that they were carrying the bomb.”

The Hiroshima blast — and the subsequent development of the more potent hydrogen bomb — still symbolize the potential destructive clout of nuclear weapons that has yet to be eclipsed.

“The type of weapon we invented in the ’40s and the ’50s make everything else pale in comparison,” DeRosa said. “None of those other things chemical or biological weapons belong in the same category as a thermonuclear device.”

And while fear of atomic war that reached a fever pitch during the Cold War has subsided in the last 20 years, it hasn’t entirely gone away.

In Chimayo, N.M., an estimated 150 young Americans from around the country are meeting for a “Disarmament Summer Encampment,” a 10-day conference held to promote a nuclear-free world.

Sponsored by Think Beyond the Bomb, a youth-led network seeking nuclear abolition, participants will convene Thursday at Los Alamos, N.M., site of the Manhattan Project, to observe the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and of Nagasaki on Aug. 9.