Perspective

The Deeper Meaning of Hiroshima

By John D. Montgomery

Throughout the world, Hiroshima symbolizes the horror of its destruction more than the heroism that enabled its rebirth. But both the horror and the heroism convey messages of hope: the horror, because of the restraint it has imposed on governments, and the heroism, because of what Hiroshima has made of itself today.

There is still in all our minds, of course, the memory of the rubble-strewn surface of the earth as it was in mid-August 1945. I recall vividly the little springs of water bubbling out of the ground, all that remained of the homes that once stood there. But for me the stronger image now is the courage I encountered in the midst of despair, the willingness to think of a distant future that would be brighter and richer than the militarist past. It is this second memory that suggests the stronger theme as we enter the 21st century: the emergence of Hiroshima as an authoritative voice in a discourse exploring new conceptions of human possibilities in a world beyond the Cold War and its bristling military alliances.

What are to be the wellsprings of that discourse? First, that the citizens of Hiroshima need not be seen as merely victims or a static part of history. Second, that the nature of war itself is changing, and therefore the structure of the peace that avoids it must also change. Third, that new actors have joined states and alliances as principal players. And finally, that a new understanding of peace needs to draw on observation of trends toward war and proposals of ways to address them.


Heroic Efforts

I must start with my own experience. I was only 25 when I came to Hiroshima as an officer in the U.S. Army. At that time, no one lived in Hiroshima, but refugees came back to wander the streets, stepping carefully over the thresholds of their former dwellings in order not to crush underfoot anything that was not already broken. The people of Hiroshima asked for special support, based on their unique claim as victims of the most horrible single weapon in human history. I was their emissary in conveying these requests to the American and Japanese authorities in Tokyo. To the shame of those authorities, that help was not to come; to them, Hiroshima was like any of a dozen cities that had been destroyed from so high above that they seemed only coordinates on the map. I knew that before I appealed to Tokyo, from where the flow of sympathy was stopped before it started. But even in that instance there was a lesson as Hiroshima began to fend for itself. And there was a rebirth--ambition built on the austere heroism of individual citizens who could conceive of a nobler cause than that they had served in the past.

In those days, I was working with many Japanese officials whose responsibilities went beyond the requirements of their daily tasks, because they were overwhelmed by human imperatives and the unexpected needs of relentless crises. For my colleagues in Hiroshima, city planning and indeed all government functions had to be constantly renewed, to go beyond survival and touch the highest aspirations of the people. In Hiroshima, there were more planners in more places, and more doers everywhere, than we could have dared to hope. Hiroshima’s contribution to peace rises far above victimhood.


The Changing Nature of War

Making peace is more than avoiding war. For war is changing, and we can no longer rely on simple solutions based on the assumption of unambiguously "good" nations and "bad" nations. Those times have not entirely vanished--there are still very guilty nations and less guilty nations, though I doubt if there are any innocent nations. The real innocents are the people who had no voice in initiating or even supporting war but suffer its harms nevertheless. We know from Hiroshima that wars do not always reflect the dominance of a valid national interest or that of the people, but more often the whims of those in power. It seems to me that today that discrepancy has only increased.

Today we see nuances of the Hiroshima moment that escaped us 50 years ago when on both sides we were responding assiduously to instructions to hate each other. Now we see good citizens on both sides, citizens as victims of the crude nationalism of the Pacific War. Now we can see the shallowness of expecting one nation to wear the badge of shame while the other could strut and pose and even make a claim of political wisdom. Now we can recognize that on both sides there was enough honor and heroism to go around, and enough pomposity, too. But these reflections should stop at the historical moment. For today and tomorrow we have to find ways of distinguishing between nations and their people so that we can free the current generation from burdens it never sought and does not deserve to bear, and so that they can deal with a world that has changed.

One truth from that war still prevails, however: a nation that starts wars is guilty. Its leaders deserve to be repudiated, even if its people do not. In the wake of the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals, international law is only beginning to come to grips with that problem.


New Actors, Old Villains

In today’s world, the danger of mass destruction has not receded but only metastasized. Several countries and separatist movements--those angry fragments of distressed populations--possess the capacity to destroy cities and their inhabitants. Old-style despots are familiar enough to assign the problems they create to balance-of-power and deterrence processes. The new ones are not so easily managed.

The most threatening of the new actors are the belligerent leaders who convert ethnic differences into militant divisions. They degrade genuine pride by turning it to hatred while they discredit political solutions to their insistent demands. These self-styled leaders cower behind their own nation’s borders, depriving the human rights community of jurisdiction on the grounds that internal affairs are exempt from conventional international law.

These new actors pose challenges and opportunities that only independent groups can observe, monitor and predict. I propose that proactive peace institutes should undertake this task of monitoring and warning. The international community is constantly surprised by the eruption of disorders and gratified by the resolution of differences. Crisis monitoring and appraising the categories of risk can help us contain and control the causes of war. Most observers believe that the crises that the UN has so desperately faced in recent years could have been averted if their causes had been authoritatively identified and vigorously publicized.


The Lasting Legacy

Finally, let us pause to consider the lasting legacy of the Hiroshima experience. As an outcome of that experience, history has decreed that no government may use atomic weapons. For over 50 years none has done so even though several possessed the capacity. During this time, one can think of at least 13 occasions when military tacticians would have urged the use of nuclear bombs, even as "mere" tactical weapons.

Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima

Perhaps it is true that sometimes wars are inevitable. Sometimes the cost of letting the old-style villains loose can be too great to give us the luxury of inaction. But the task of this generation is to enlarge the unspoken determination of nations to undertake the moral burden of not harming nonbelligerents, people not at war. At the same time, whatever actions we take must recognize an important reality: a new world order that is challenging the search for stability that had characterized the old. The hatreds of World War II were symbols of the nation-state converted into the unreasonable hatreds of whole peoples. The new subnational threats are primordial resurrections of old hatreds. The world must respond to them without the restrictions of obsolescent notions of the absolute sovereignty of the nation-state.

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