Atomic bomb

The atomic bomb was the name used in the 1950s for the first of what are now called nuclear weapons. It was originally developed out of fear that the Germans were also working on such a weapon (as in fact they were, although they did not get very far with their project.) This development represented the peak of technology in World War II.

The secret wartime project that developed the bomb was called by the code name the Manhattan project. It had nothing to do with Manhattan. Much the development took place at Los Alamos, New Mexico. The town, laboratories, production and test facilities built there for the Manhattan Project became what is today the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The United States dropped two atomic bombs named Little Boy and Fat Man on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bringing the war between the US and Japan to a swift and decisive end. The morality of the use of the bombs is debated because of a fear of atomic technology, and because of the huge loss of civilian life (140,000 at Hiroshima, 70,000 at Nagasaki). U. S. officials have said that the entire cities were proper military targets, and that because the bombings ended the war so quickly, fewer Japanese civilians were killed than if the bombs had not been used. The US dropped warning leaflets on the cities urging the Japanese to evacuate, but they did not. Since the US used both of these nuclear weapons in 1945 no other country has used the atomic bomb in war. The bombs and subsequent surrender also prevented the annexation of Japan's northern islands by the Soviet Union . The atomic bombs used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were fission weapons, which detonate with a massive explosion due to the release of the binding energy in within the nucleus of the atom. Specifically, neutrons in a rapid chain reaction split the nuclei of a heavy chemical element, such as plutonium or uranium, to cause the massive release of energy.

After World War II, nuclear weapon research continued with the development of the fusion or thermonuclear weapon. Many tests of these weapons were conducted during the Cold War, but most of these tests took place on remote Pacific islands that were US territories or in the upper atmosphere. These weapons massively exceeded the power of the fission bombs dropped on Japan. Simultaneously, and as a civilian spinoff from the military program, there were developments in the production of clean and efficient nuclear energy for civilian electrical generation. The threat of the use nuclear bombs was a major issue in the Cold War. Today, the thirty-year threat of the use of nuclear weapons to prevent international aggression have been credited by many with helping avoid another world war.

Atomic Bombings as Instances of State Terrorism

Some legal scholars, historians, other governments, and human rights organizations have characterized the United States' World War II nuclear attacks against the Empire of Japan as state terrorism. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain the only time a state has used nuclear weapons against concentrated civilian populated areas. Some commentators hold that it represents the single greatest act of state terrorism in the 20th century.

The role of the bombings in Japan's surrender and the United States' justification for them has been the subject of scholarly and popular debate for decades. J. Samuel Walker writes in an April 2005 overview of recent historiography on the issue, "the controversy over the use of the bomb seems certain to continue." Most interpretations of the atomic attacks as "state terrorism" center around the alleged targeting of innocents to achieve a political goal. Some allege that the Target Committee, on May 10–11, 1945, rejected the use of the weapons against a strictly military objective, instead choosing a large civilian population to create a psychological effect that would be felt around the world. The attacks in this context were thus seen as both militarily unnecessary and as transgressing moral barriers.

The sociologist Kai Erikson has alleged that the attacks "...were not 'combat' in any of the ways that word is normally used. Nor were they primarily attempts to destroy military targets, for the two cities had been chosen not despite but because they had a high density of civilian housing...the attacks were to be a show, a display, a demonstration. The question is: What kind of mood does a fundamentally decent people have to be in, what kind of moral arrangements must it make, before it is willing to annihilate as many as a quarter of a million human beings for the sake of making a point?"

Historian Howard Zinn writes: "if 'terrorism' has a useful meaning (and I believe it does, because it marks off an act as intolerable, since it involves the indiscriminate use of violence against human beings for some political purpose), then it applies exactly to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

Michael Walzer wrote of it as an example of "...war terrorism: the effort to kill civilians in such large numbers that their government is forced to surrender. Hiroshima seems to me the classic case."

Professor C.A.J. (Tony) Coady is head of the Australian Research Council Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE) and studies political violence, Just War Theory, Terrorism, and Humanitarian intervention. He writes in Terrorism and Justice: Moral Argument in a Threatened World: "Several of the contributors consider the issue of state terrorism and there is a general agreement that states not only can sponsor terrorism by non state groups but that states can, and do, directly engage in terrorism. Coady instances the terror bombings of World War II, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as acts of terrorism."

Mark Selden, professor of sociology and history at Binghamton University and author of War and State Terrorism: The United States, Japan, and the Asia-Pacific in the Long Twentieth Century, writes, "This deployment of air power against civilians would become the centerpiece of all subsequent U.S. wars, a practice in direct contravention of the Geneva principles, and cumulatively the single most important example of the use of terror in twentieth century warfare."

Richard A. Falk, professor Emeritus of International Law and Practice at Princeton University has written in some detail about Hiroshima and Nagasaki as instances of state terrorism. He writes "The graveyards of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the number-one exhibits of state terrorism... Consider the hypocrisy of an Administration that portrays Qaddafi as barbaric while preparing to inflict terrorism on a far grander scale... Any counter terrorism policy worth the name must include a convincing indictment of the First World variety.". He also writes:

“Undoubtedly the most extreme and permanently traumatizing instance of state terrorism, perhaps in the history of warfare, involved the use of atomic bombs against the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in military settings in which the explicit function of the attacks was to terrorize the population through mass slaughter and to confront its leaders with the prospect of national annihilation....the idea that massive death can be deliberately inflicted on a helpless civilian population as a tactic of war certainly qualifies as state terror of unprecedented magnitude, particularly as the United States stood on the edge of victory, which might well have been consummated by diplomacy.”

~ Richard Falk on War and State Terrorism

While paying tribute to the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hugo Chavez - President of Venezuela - referred to the bombings as "the greatest act of terrorism in recorded history."

Burleigh Taylor Wilkins states in Terrorism and Collective Responsibility that "any definition which allowed the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to count as instances of terrorism would be too broad." He goes on to explain "The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while obviously intended by the American government to alter the policies of the Japanese government, seem for all the terror they involved, more an act of war than of terrorism."