The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
Nuclear option too costly
The use of atomic bombs on Japan was successful in ending the war within days as the degree of devastation of the two cities was finally understood by the Japanese war cabinet
Ifirst saw The War Game in the late 60s at a Youth Fellowship meeting as a boy in Linlithgow.
This dramatic film, set in the aftermath of a nuclear strike, was deemed as too graphic to be seen on the BBC and therefore it gained its audience in 8mm film versions shown around local CND and church groups.
Peter Watkins, who made The War Game, knew his business. The year before he had made the memorable drama cum documentary Culloden, which portrayed the tragic end of the Jacobite rebellion in the form of contemporary news reporting. Indeed it was the critical acclaim which greeted Culloden which resulted in the commissioning of The War Game.
Watkins did his job well. The War Game powerfully explained the consequences for an ordinary community in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear exchange.
The Medway town portrayed in the film went from normality to Armageddon as civil society collapsed.
The film was deemed unshowable on network television not because it was frightening but because it exposed the Government’s position that a nuclear conflict could be survived. These civil defence fantasies later termed Protect and Survive were predicated on the notion that the structure of the country could somehow be maintained when most of the people were dead or dying. One single viewing of The War Game exposed that official line as simply absurd.
It took 20 years for the BBC to pluck up the courage to show The War Game. It was finally broadcast in 1985 on the 40th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as part of a special season of programming entitled After the Bomb.
We are now at the 70th anniversary of these bombs which brought the Second World War to a close and ushered in the nuclear age. In the 1960s there was still a view that a nuclear war was likely and indeed that it was winnable. The USA and the Soviet Union were vying for supremacy and The War Game was made but three years after the world was brought to the edge of the precipice in the Cuban missile crisis.
Now there is much more public confidence that a nuclear war can be avoided but a general realisation that such a conflict would be the final one for any semblance of society as we know it.
The use of atomic bombs on Japan was successful in ending the war within days as the degree of devastation of the two cities was finally understood by the Japanese war cabinet. In the run up to the bombing the Allies were keen to emphasise the destructive power of the atomic devices. Indeed the evidence is that the US administration, led by President Truman, were desperate to bring the conflict to an end and anxious to facilitate the Japanese surrender.
Truman’s own personal papers show that his primary motivation in sanctioning nuclear war was an overwhelming anxiety to save the millions of lives that a ground invasion of the Japanese homeland would have almost certainly have cost. He was also concerned not to drop the devices on the old Japanese capital, Kyoto, or on Tokyo itself.
The main scepticism of Allied motives lies around the decision to drop “Fat Man”, the second implosion-type plutonium bomb, on August 9, a mere three days after the Hiroshima explosion and therefore before the full extent of the horror and devastation had impacted on the obdurate Japanese Government.
It has been argued that the US military were anxious to test the different technology of the second plutonium based device and that the political message of the Nagasaki bomb was aimed not just at the Japanese but at the Soviet Union who had newly entered the war against Japan.
However, after the Japanese surrender the propaganda effort soon went into sharp reverse. As a member of the US Strategic Bombing Survey , Lieutenant Daniel McGovern used a film crew to document the results in early 1946. The film crew’s work resulted in a three-hour documentary entitled The Effects of the Atomic Bombs Against Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The documentary included images from hospitals showing the human effects of the bomb it showed burned out buildings and cars, and rows of skulls and bones on the ground. As a result of its graphic images It was classified “secret” for the next 22 years.
Modern bombs can be up to 100 times more powerful than the two war time bombs. And even after 25 years of nuclear agreements and disarmament there are still more than 10,000 of these warheads around in the world’s nine nuclear states.
However, well over 90% of these warheads are still held in the arsenals of Russia and the USA. In the next year or so the UK Parliament will be asked to approve the “Main Gate” decision on the next generation of Trident nuclear submarines. I do not think that approval should be granted.
Firstly, because Trident makes no difference to the nuclear balance between America and Russia. It could never be used outwith the Nato alliance. Meanwhile key defence requirements such as effective air reconnaissance of the Atlantic and the North Sea have been sacrificed on the Trident altar.
Secondly because the submarines based weapon were designed to penetrate the sophisticated defences around Moscow in the years of cold war. It is not a weapon suitable for use against “rogue states”. For obvious reasons nuclear weapons are of no use whatsoever against stateless international terrorism.
Thirdly, it is projected to cost an estimated £100 billion over its lifetime. In a period of continuing austerity it simply cannot be afforded. A country with foodbanks should not be stockpiling nuclear weapons.
The Japanese Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, marked the bombing of Nagasaki yesterday by renewing his commitment to a nuclear weapons free Japan, following criticism for not making the same pledge on the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing last week.
There would be no better way to respect the anniversary of the devastation than for this country to similarly join the world’s 190 non-nuclear armed countries to reject as an obscenity the very idea that we should be lumbered for the next half century with our very own weapons of mass destruction on the River Clyde.