Fiftieth anniversaries of momentous event are always contentious because they are the last opportunity for participants to collectively influence the judgment of history. The essays in this special issue of Swords and Ploughshares are intended to serve as a modest guide to the forthcoming fiftieth anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. That event has already stimulated great controversy in both America and Japan.
That is all to the good. Every society needs to rethink and examine its past, to search for a better approximation of the truth. By its nature, a university cannot afford to either repeat past "truths" or uncritically reject them: our task is to examine and test, challenge and adjust, to come up with what we hope will be at least a better understanding of great events while retaining a sense of caution that even after fifty years there may be surprises.
When the Program in Arms Control, Disarmament, and International Security decided to hold a retrospective survey of "Hiroshima," it was conceived of as a very special "city tour"we sought to take our participants (who in some instances spilled out of the ACDIS conference room into the hallways of Davenport Hall) on a journey into that most foreign of countries, the past. By design, our guides were drawn from a variety of perspectives, a multiplicity of disciplines, and we encouraged participation by the youngest as well as the most senior scholars on campus.
Our "tour" began with two presentations by the pre-eminent student of the effects of the A-bombing on Hiroshima, Robert Jay Lifton, whose Death in Life is a modern classic. The essays included in this issue represent about half of those presented during the semester (in most cases, summaries of longer presentations). Lifton's work is widely available, and not included here. Our contributors speak for themselves, but I would add a few summary observations about our retrospective tour of Hiroshima.

National Differences
Perhaps the most striking conclusion I draw from our retrospective is how deeply "national" perspectives still shape our view of Hiroshima. Two countries are profoundlyno, obsessivelyconcerned with Hiroshima: Japan and the United States. Japanese and Americans disagree with each other and among themselves as to who was victim and who was perpetrator at Hiroshima, but just about all Japanese and Americans who have thought about it concur that the bombing was of central strategic and, even more importantly, moral importance. Indeed, Professor William Widenor notes his reluctance, as a professional historian, to deal with the question "Was the bombing necessary?" because of the overwhelming importance of moral judgment that any answer must contain. However, the presentations on the Soviet, Chinese, and Korean perspectives (unfortunately, we can include only the latter here) made it evident that neither the strategic nor the moral implications of the bomb were seen in the same light from Taipei, Beijing, Seoul, or Moscow. The Chinese and Koreans, who suffered terribly under imperial Japanese rule, tend to agree with the position of many American veterans that not only did the bomb bring the war to an end, but that it was brought to an end in an appropriate way.

Generational Differences
Second, the quite heated discussions that accompanied the delivery of some of the papers in this retrospective show important generational differences among Americans concerning the meaning of Hiroshima. For the wartime generation, epitomized in the eloquent and thoughtful contribution of Professor Albert Wattenbergthen a young graduate student working on the Manhattan Project and subsequently a distinguished scientist who remained active and concerned about the uses of nuclear weaponsthe bomb was necessary, if not desirable. This was the view of most scientists working in Chicago on the Manhattan Project alongside Professor Wattenberg: only 2 percent did not want to see it used; the rest favored its use either on a target or in a demonstration strike. The notion of an atomic bomb was widely accepted in the context of the horrors being perpetrated by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
My own generation, not quite represented in these essays, came to adulthood in the quiet Eisenhower years, under the shadow of nuclear war. We saw Hiroshima as the warning shot, an example of what might yet occur. We were less concerned about the decision to use the bomb then than the decision to use the bomb now.
We are being supplanted by a somewhat larger group whose political views and views on foreign policy were more strongly shaped by the Vietnam war. This was not a nuclear conflict, nor was there much chance of its becoming one, but some in this group look back to Hiroshima for evidence (confirming or damning) about longer trends in U.S. foreign policy. My view is that the debate over the representation of Hiroshima by the Smithsonian Institution's Enola Gay exhibit is as much about Pleiku and Tonkin Gulf as it is about what went on in President Harry Truman's mind or whether an invasion would kill one million, two million, or five million people.
However, there is a still-younger generation with its own views about Hiroshima and nuclear weapons. Several recent campus polls of students at the University of Illinois make it clear that nuclear war, past, present, or even future, was not very high on their agenda, or even on their list of fears. AIDS, crime, and the economy led the list; nuclear war was a distant twelfth or thirteenth. But "proliferation" ranked quite highfifth or sixthperhaps because it has been characterized by the Clinton administration as the most important single foreign policy problem facing the United States, or perhaps because the twenty-fifth anniversary of the signing of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) occurred this year. Three University of Illinois courses dealing with proliferation were offered in the 1995 spring semester, and we invited several of our undergraduate students to share their thoughts. Two of the papers are presented here: Jason Zych's careful study of the Iraqi nuclear program and John Wedge's evaluation of the prospects for containing nuclear proliferation.

Looking Ahead
What of the future? The ACDIS Hiroshima retrospective suggests to me three alarming and two positive conclusions.
First, national differences toward the use of nuclear weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki persist. While many Japanese and Americans have come to conclude that nuclear warin the words of Ronald Reagancannot be fought, or if fought, cannot be won, nuclear weapons remain powerful symbols of national power. In addition, because of the widespread fear of their proliferation, nuclear weapons have proven to be quite useful for some states in extracting benefits from other states. Thus North Korea has successfully exploited a nuclear weapons program that it had pledged, under the NPT, not to develop. It has obtained aid, recognition, and even (according to John Lie) grudging respect from its neighbors for its accomplishment. And of course China, Russia, France, Britain, and a number of other states associate the possession of nuclear weapons with national greatness. Those who would abolish nuclear weapons on the ground that they are only useful to deter other nuclear weapons, and hence are theoretically disposable, need to understand the secondary and tertiary political uses of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. Proclaiming their awful characteristics may reinforce their disutility as weapons, but enhances their value in other ways.
Second, the controversy over the meaning of Hiroshima among Americans, understandable though it may be, also reflects a deep division within our country about the legitimacy of the use of force. A whole generation of Americans, seared by the Vietnam experience, have come to the conclusion that the United States is unable to use force without evil results. Liberal isolationists want to restrict American engagement abroad for fear that the United States will damage innocents elsewhere. In retrospect, they see the bombing of Hiroshima as a particularly egregious abuse of American power.
While disagreeing on the wisdom of using the bomb, some of the assumptions of liberal isolationists are reverse-mirrored in those of an older conservative isolationist tradition: that the United States is innocent, but the rest of the world is evil, and intervention abroad can only be contaminating for Americans. Conservative isolationists now praise the use of the atomic bomb as showing the way America should fight wars in the future: with massive force, virtually no loss of life, a crushed (and pliable) enemy, and a triumphant victory parade.
Third, the Hiroshima experience reveals a vulnerability in the American decision-making system, a vulnerability that remains to this day. When Truman took office, he was totally unprepared to carry out the foreign policy responsibilities of the presidency. Because Roosevelt had consolidated decision making in his own hands, no team was in place to provide adequate support for Truman, who himself had not been adequately briefed before assuming the presidency. The United States, by then a great power, made a series of crucial decisions about nuclear weapons on an ad hoc basisit was not until several years later that Truman assembled a distinguished foreign policy team to shape American policy for the Cold War.
Our own situation is not that different. With an increasingly inward-looking America, presidential candidates have less need to demonstrate competence in foreign affairs. When this decline in interest is coupled to the structural inadequacies of the American foreign policy system (a weak civil and foreign service, armed forces more skilled in technology and logistics than in strategy, and a perpetual tug of war between legislative and executive over the control of the fast-diminishing instruments of foreign policy), weand foreign governmentshave reason to be alarmed. Wars are "atrocity-producing situations," in the words of Robert Jay Lifton, and given that the United States remains the most powerful state in the world, with complex and global interests, our approach to the grave issues of war and peace, once the platitudes are uttered by the right and the left, remains dangerously amateurish. There is no saving grace in the fact that most other nations are now groping for a doctrine and strategythey will continue to look to the United States for leadership and for example.
To balance these concerns, two aspects of Hiroshima should be welcomed. First, after Nagasaki, there were no more nuclear wars. While the American stockpile of nuclear weapons grew to fantastic excess, the political leadership saw nuclear weapons as militarily unusable although they retained their symbolic importance. This view spread to Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and, hopefully in the future, to China. Others have gone further: South Africa, Brazil, Kazakhstan, Argentina, and Ukraine see no need for nuclear weapons and have terminated their programs. In each case, individual national calculations were central, but it may have been that the images of Hiro-shima encouraged those who argued for restraint.
Second, the nature of warfare is such that "Hiroshimas" are increasingly irrelevant to the settlement of disputes between most nations in the world. Atomic bombs were quintessentially the product of heavy industrialized societies: they were developed by massive civilian and military bureaucracies and dropped on massed industrialized populations. This kind of war remains relevant for some states, but for the United States and most of the post-industrial world, weapons of mass destruction may be unnecessary. Ironically, Japanese industry and technology contributed significantly to the current information-driven military revolution. The greatest threat to many people around the world now stems from low-tech internal Hiroshimas: pogroms and genocide carried out against "surplus" or "enemy" ethnic, religious, or political minorities.
More than 180 million people have been killed violently in this century, but less than 1 percent were by atomic bombs. New Hiroshimas remain a possibilityabout six or eight countries are still actively seeking nuclear weapons, and two or three of them may be tempted to use themso we should not lessen our interest in nuclear and missile proliferation. But neither should we allow the Hiroshimas of the past to distract us from the existence of other forms of mass deathother kinds of atrocity-producing situations.



Stephen Philip Cohen is professor of history and political science and director of the Program in Arms Control, Disarmament, and International Security at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of The Indian Army (1990) and The Pakistan Army (1984), editor of Nuclear Proliferation in South Asia: The Prospects for Arms Control, and coeditor (with Kanti Bajpai) of South Asia After the Cold War (1993), among other books. During 1993-94 he was scholar-in-residence with the Ford Foundation in New Delhi, India.



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