What about Nuclear Energy?

Tomorrow, August 6, is the 77^th anniversary of the first time a nuclear weapon was used in warfare. That morning at approximately 8:15 a.m. (local time), a U.S. Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

As I have made several posts regarding the bombings of Hiroshima and then Nagasaki three days later (see here, for example), this article is mostly about the later use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. 

President Eisenhower made a significant “Atoms for Peace” address to the United Nations in December 1953, eight years after the nuclear destruction of the two Japanese cities. That began a period of high hope that nuclear energy could be used for the great benefit of the human race.**

From the beginning, however, the U.S. President’s proposal was partly propaganda and an excuse for building additional nuclear weapons for national security. That led to the Cold War era, and during Eisenhower’s time in office, the number of U.S. nuclear weapons rose from 1,005 to 20,000.

But Eisenhower’s seminal speech also led to the establishment of the International Atomic Energy Agency in 1957, which was set up as the world’s “Atoms for Peace” organization within the United Nations—and as their website shows, it is still quite active.

There have been three major reasons for widespread opposition to the development of nuclear energy.

1) The fear of nuclear weapons being used again in warfare, perhaps by a rogue nation or by terrorists. This was long my main reason for opposing the further development of nuclear energy. I wrote an anti-nuclear article 30~40 years ago for a local publication in Japan.

2) The possibility of accidents. Indeed, there have been three major nuclear accidents: Three Mile Island (Penn.) in March 1979, Chernobyl (Ukraine) in April 1986 (the world’s biggest nuclear accident), and Fukushima (Japan) in March 2011.

The first of those caused a dramatic shift in the enthusiasm for the development of nuclear power in the U.S. Large anti-nuclear demonstrations were held in Washington, D.C., in May 1979, and then in New York City that December.

This is an issue that must be carefully considered, and, indeed, in Atoms and Ashes: A Global History of Nuclear Disasters (2022), Serhii Plokhy, a Ukrainian historian at Harvard,

holds that the inevitability of accidents is one of several reasons to encourage nuclear power to drift into disuse, rather than give it a new role in the fight against climate change (from the June 25 issue of The Economist).

3) The high cost of building nuclear reactors and disposing of waste materials. According to this website, “the minimum cost per megawatt hour to build a new nuclear plant is $112, compared to $46 for utility-scale solar . . . and $30 for wind.”

And then, disposal of nuclear waste is a major challenge, both in terms of methods and cost.

So, what about now? In recent years, because of increased awareness of the seriousness of global warming, there has again been a growing movement favoring the use of nuclear energy.

The Russian war on Ukraine this year has also once again increased the appeal of the development and use of nuclear power, especially in Europe. Countries that were phasing out nuclear reactors are now postponing those plans.

In Japan, twenty-one nuclear reactors were decommissioned after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, but now ten of those reactors have been restarted and plans are in place for more restarts in the years ahead.

It seems to me that in spite of the risks (and the cost), the industrial countries of the world must make plans immediately for the increased construction of nuclear reactors for the energy needs of the world.

True, destructive nuclear accidents are possible, but more widespread destruction of the world as we know it is quite certain if global warming is not controlled. Nuclear energy is one of our best hopes for significantly slowing the crisis of global warming.

What do you think?

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** “How The Atom Changed The World” is an informative 55-minute video (available here on YouTube) regarding the use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes; it begins with Eisenhower’s emphasis on Atoms for Peace and deals with the pros and cons of nuclear energy up through 2021.

++ Some of you may be interested in exploring this link to “Nuclear Prayer Day” tomorrow (Aug. 6); it is especially to pray for a world free of nuclear weapons. 

Once Again: Were the A-Bombs Necessary?

Largely because of the response received to my May article about Harry Truman (see here), I decided to consider once again the question repeatedly raised since the first atomic bombs were dropped: were they necessary for ending the war with Japan?

The Majority Opinion

Undoubtedly, most USAmericans since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and August 9, 1945, have firmly believed that they were justified.

Moreover, most people in the U.S. seem to think that the bombs were not only necessary but that they also were “good” because of the lives saved.

Thinking Friend Tom Lamkin in North Carolina wrote: “A member of one of my churches had a father on the troop ships on the way to Japan for the invasion when the bombs were dropped. They were called back when news came Japan had surrendered. That was one family glad to see the bombs fall.”

Similarly, local Thinking Friend Joe Barbour said, “I dislike war but we live in a world where anything goes it seems. So as I think of the loss of life that those bombings of the Japanese at home experienced, they saved far more lives than were lost. It had to be a hard decision but [Truman] made it and ended a terrible war.”

These views are in agreement with what ethicist Joseph Fletcher propounds in his book Situation Ethics (1966). He writes about the “agapeic calculus,” which seeks “the greatest amount of neighbor welfare for the largest number of neighbors possible.” (p. 95).
While it is only a “test case” with no solution explicitly given, Fletcher ends his book with a brief summary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—with the suggestion, I think, that the agapeic calculus means that the dropping of the atomic bombs should be considered right or “good.”

While making no reference to Fletcher, historian Michael Bess agrees with what I call the majority opinion. Chapter Ten in Bess’s excellent book Choices Under Fire: Moral Dimensions of World War II (2006) is “The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb.”

Bess asserts that “it is a fair conclusion that the bomb’s use probably saved an enormous number of lives—far more Japanese than Allied” (pp. 230-1). 

An Opposing View

One of many places where an opposing view can be found is in the television mini-series “The Untold History of the United States” (2012) and the accompanying book by that title written by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick.

The fourth chapter of Stone & Kuznick’s book is titled “The Bomb: The Tragedy of a Small Man.” They are probably much too critical of Truman, but they may be right in their clear implication that the bombs were most likely not necessary—especially if better decisions had been made earlier.

For example, in all probability the bombs would not have been necessary if Truman had taken Herbert Hoover’s advice. In Chapter 76 of Freedom Betrayed, the 2011 book that contains Hoover’s writings about WWII and afterward, Hoover tells how in May 1945 he advised Truman to drop the demand for unconditional surrender and to assure Japan that the Emperor could remain as the spiritual head of the nation.

If Truman had taken Hoover’s suggestion soon thereafter, Japan would most likely have surrendered much before August 6, 1945.

What about Now?

The historical events of 1945 cannot be changed, of course. But we humans should be able to learn from history.

One essential thing that we need to learn the most is that there is always a better alternative than war—and certainly there is always a better alternative than using nuclear weapons.

Honoring Harry

The Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum in Independence, Missouri, is a major tourist attraction in the Kansas City metropolitan area. This article was spawned partly because of June’s and my visit there on Monday, May 8.

REMEMBERING HARRY

Harry S. Truman was born on May 8 (in 1884), and that date is now celebrated as Truman Day, a state holiday. On Monday morning that special Missouri holiday was celebrated with ceremonies in the courtyard of the Truman Library where both Harry and his wife Bess are buried.

Truman Library Institute photo taken on 5/8/17 (June and I are next to the last people on the right.)

Harry was born in Lamar, Mo., and although he lived there for less than a year, the house in which he was born is still maintained as the Harry S Truman Birthplace State Historic Site. It is a modest house, indicative of the middle-class roots of the man who became the 33^rd POTUS.

The small town of Lamar is a little over 100 miles due south of Grandview (on the south side of Kansas City), the town nearest to where the Truman family moved in 1887 and where Harry lived from 1906 to 1917.

Harry was baptized in the Little Blue River in Kansas City in 1902 and in 1916 he joined the Grandview Baptist Church (as it was known then) and remained a member there the rest of his life—although for most of his life he attended very infrequently.

Truman helped finance a new building for the Grandview church, and he spoke at its dedication service in 1950. One Sunday morning many years ago, coincidentally on Pearl Harbor Day, I had the privilege of preaching in that church. Truman’s Bible, which he regularly read in the Oval Office, was on display in the foyer.

MIXED FEELINGS ABOUT HARRY

While I can understand the pressure Truman felt to use the atomic bombs he first learned about only after he became President in April 1945, and while I realize it is much easier to second-guess hard decisions in retrospect than to make those decisions looking forward, still I have serious doubts about the morality of his authorizing the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan. The bombing of Nagasaki only three days after Hiroshima was bombed on August 6 is especially problematic.

Still, Truman is to be commended for firing General MacArthur and for refusing to escalate the Korean conflict even to the use of atomic weapons there. Truman did threaten to use atomic bombs in Korea, but he didn’t use them as MacArthur possibly would have.

Of many other things that might be said about Truman’s presidency, two are worthy of special note.

In November 1945, Truman proposed a national health insurance plan. Although it was never enacted, it did lead to Medicare. When President Johnson signed the Medicare bill into law at the Truman Library in July 1965, he said that it “all started really with the man from Independence.”

Truman also significantly furthered greater racial equality in the U.S. by issuing an executive order in July 1948 that desegregated the armed forces.

APPRECIATING HARRY

There is an enormous difference between Harry Truman and the current POTUS. While the latter campaigned as a populist candidate, it was Truman who was truly a “man of the people,” to use the title of the lengthy 1995 tome on Truman by Alonzo L. Hamby.

And after watching the HBO movie “Truman” (1995) on Sunday evening, I was also struck by the marked contrast between the honesty and integrity of the man from Missouri compared to the current POTUS.

It was an honor to be among the people who gathered on Monday to honor Harry on Truman Day.

In Memory of Dr. Nagai

Some of you readers of this blog know Kathy Laffoon, my oldest daughter. Kathy and her family moved to Liberty in 2008 when she took a job as a gifted education teacher in the Liberty Public School. In the last few years she has been working with many of her middle school students doing National History Day (NHD) projects—and in recent years I have been a resource person or a mentor for some of those students.

This year two of Kathy’s students teamed up to do a NHD project on Dr. Takashi Nagai, who died 65 years ago on May 1, 1951.

I enjoyed meeting with those two boys a few times in connection with their project, and I was impressed to see how interested they were in learning about Nagai. They made a webpage (link to it here) in order to introduce him to other people.

Some of you may remember my mentioning Dr. Nagai in articles I posted on this blog last August. (See here and here.) He was a doctor who was teaching at the medical college in Nagasaki, Japan, at the time the atomic bomb was dropped on that city on August 9, 1945.

Nagai’s research specialty was radiology, and he had already contracted leukemia from his exposure to radiation. And then he was seriously injured by the bomb.

In spite of his illness and injuries, though, Nagai worked tirelessly to give medical assistance to many who were injured by the explosion and also to those who suffered long term health problems because of what came to be known as “radiation sickness.”

From July 1946 until his death, Nagai was confined to bed. He spent much of his time writing, and his best known and most powerful book is Bells of Nagasaki. He finished writing that book in 1946 but did not get permission from the American Occupation officials to publish it until 1949.

The English translation of Nagai’s book was published in 1994. It was done by William Johnston, an Irish-born Catholic missionary who arrived in Japan just in time to attend Nagai’s funeral in 1951.

The title of Nagai’s book refers to the bells of Urakami Cathedral, which at the time was the largest Christian church in Asia. Nagai was a member of that church, and, of course, grieved greatly at its destruction. It was very near the epicenter of the atomic explosion, and some of its remains can still be seen in the Nagasaki Peace Park.

In 1947, local Catholics built a simple two-tatami (about 36 sq. ft.) teahouse-like structure for Nagai. He named it Nyokodo (literally “As-Yourself Hall,” after Jesus’ words, “Love your neighbor as yourself”).

While bed-fast there in what he considered his hermitage, Nagai was visited many notable people, such as Helen Keller in 1948. The following year he was also visited there by Emperor Hirohito and by Cardinal Gilroy, as the emissary of Pope Pius XII.

Dr. Nagai with his children in Nyokodo

Many years ago I went with some of my Seinan Gakuin University students to visit Nyokodo, which with the addition of a library had become the Nagasaki City Nagai Takashi Memorial Museum in 1952. My visit there was before the English translation of Nagai’s book was published, and I hadn’t taken the time to read it in Japanese. Consequently, I didn’t appreciate it as much then as I would now.

If you would like to read more about Dr. Nagai, I recommend Paul Glynn’s fine book A Song for Nagasaki (1988), which Kathy’s students found to be very helpful in preparing their National History Day project.

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INTERVIEW WITH DR. NAGAI

Here is the link to a 5-minute radio interview with Dr. Nagai that was broadcast nationwide in Japan on Aug. 9, 1950. The interview is in Japanese, of course, but there is a brief English explanation worth reading. And those of you who can’t understand Japanese might still enjoy hearing his voice.

The Drama of Los Alamos

Great Books KC is a group that meets monthly in the Plaza Branch of the Kansas City Public Library. June and I sometimes attend those meetings, but we were in Arizona and missed the October gathering.

 Those present at that meeting discussed the Bhagavad Gita, one of the main Hindu Scriptures. That same week I was reading a book which told about the test explosion of the first atomic bomb, which was 70 years ago on July 16, 1945.

 The brilliant scientist who led in the creation of the first atomic bomb was Robert Oppenheimer. When he witnessed that first atomic explosion in the central New Mexico desert, Oppenheimer quoted these words from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

 On the second day of our car trip to Arizona in late September, June and I visited Los Alamos, which is about 35 miles northwest of Santa Fe. It was a short, but interesting, visit.

 Following our visit to Los Alamos, I read Jennet Conant’s 2005 book 109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos. Everyone going to Los Alamos in those critical years of 1943 to 1945 had to pass through the office located at 109 East Palace Avenue, about a half mile north of the Capitol building in Santa Fe.   

Dorothy McKibbin, a close friend and confidante of Oppenheimer, became indispensable as the “Gatekeeper” at 109 East Palace. Conant’s book is partly McKibbin’s story as well as Oppenheimer’s. It is also about the author’s grandfather, James H. Conant.

The dedication page of the book says, simply, “For Grandpa.”

President of Harvard University from 1933 to 1953, Grandpa Conant was also a member of the important National Defense Research Committee in the early 1940s. As such, he was directly involved in the Manhattan Project, the official name for the research and development project that produced the first atomic bombs.

Beginning in the fall of 1942, the Manhattan Project was under the direction of Major General Leslie Groves of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. In October of that year, Groves selected Oppenheimer to be the director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Commissioned to design and produce atomic bombs, it formally opened on April 15, 1943. Exactly one week later Oppenheimer celebrated his 40^th birthday.

From the beginning of the Manhattan Project, there was considerable drama at Los Alamos because they knew that Germany was also working on atomic bomb. Much the drama was because of the strong perception that the side succeeding in developing the bomb first would win the war.

The production itself was very difficult, and the whole thing had to be done with complete secrecy. There was also considerable tension between the military men and the scientists at Los Alamos.

By the time the first bomb was ready, Germany had already surrendered. But many thought that all of the time and effort and expense shouldn’t go to waste, so plans were made to drop the two different types of bombs produced on Japan—and they were, of course.

Seventy years ago this month, in November 1945, Oppenheimer left Los Alamos, where he had been at the center of great drama for more than 30 months.

He left, though, with a troubled conscience because of the devastation caused by the atomic bombs, and he was determined to do what he could to keep them from ever being used again.

And, certainly, we can be most grateful that atomic weapons have not been used again in these 70 years since 1945.

Hiroshima / Nagasaki

This week is the 70^th anniversary of the atomic bombing of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Many of you will see/hear mention made of this noteworthy anniversary in the public media, but please consider with me some of the facts and interpretations of those tragic events.

The first ever atomic bomb dropped in warfare was at 8:15 (local time) on the morning of August 6, 1945. Although not nearly as many people were killed that day as in the firebombing of Tokyo on March 9-10, the use of the atomic bomb ushered in a terrible new age of warfare. The firebombing of Tokyo was carried out by 279 airplanes, but in Hiroshima one bomb dropped from one airplane instantly killed from 70,000 to 80,000 people. And unlike the bombs up until this time, the atomic bombs caused “radiation sickness” that resulted in the death of more people than were killed instantly.

Just three days later, on August 9, shortly after 11:00 a.m. the second atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki. About 40,000 people died there that day. The combined death toll from the two bombs, however, was considerably over 200,000 by the end of 1945.

After all these years, the debate about the use of those two atomic bombs continues. Last month I heard a talk by American historian Richard Frank at the Truman Library in Independence. Frank, author of Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire (1999), was emphatic in his insistence that both atomic bombs were completely necessary for ending the Pacific War.

By contrast, Australian historian Paul Ham concludes his book Hiroshima, Nagasaki: The Real Story of the Atomic Bombings and Their Aftermath (2011) with these words:

At the time of war, people will applaud any story their government feeds them. Americans continue to swear blind [sic] that the bombs alone ended the war; that they were America’s ‘least abhorrent’ choice. These are plainly false propositions, salves to uneasy consciences over what was actually done on 6 and 9 August 1945 when, under a summer sky without warning, hundreds of thousands of civilian men, women and children felt the sun fall on their heads (p. 510).

Takashi Nagai (1908-1951)

One of the most intriguing personal accounts of a survivor of the bombings is that left by Takashi Nagai, a medical doctor and professor at the Nagasaki Medical College near the epicenter of the atomic explosion. His first-hand account is found in The Bells of Nagasaki (Japanese, 1949; English, 1984).

Paul Glynn’s Song for Nagasaki (1989) is an excellent biography about Dr. Nagai. Reading the experiences of this devout Christian doctor gives a much different perspective of the atomic bomb from what is usually heard in this country.

Fortunately, no nuclear device has been used in military action since 1945, and for that we can be most grateful. But vigilance is required by the peoples of the world. Perhaps the most frightening realization is that both India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons—and most probably Israel as well.

And a large number of nukes still remain in Russia--and in the arsenal of Pres. Putin. The Federation of American Scientists reports that Russia now has a stockpile of approximately 4,500 nuclear warheads, including nearly 1,800 strategic warheads deployed on missiles and at bomber bases. And the U.S., the only country to drop atomic bombs in warfare, has about 4,760 with 2,080 deployed.

So, as we think back to the horrors of 1945, let’s continue to cry out with people of conscience around the world, No More Hiroshimas, No More Nagasakis!