A Dangerous State of Mind

Following is a brief excerpt from an article by Daniel Ellsberg, written to mark the 64th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima – a bombing that killed 70,000 men, women, and children outright, up to 140,000 within the year, and an estimated 200,000 by 1950.

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Most Americans ever since have seen the destruction of the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as necessary and effective — as constituting just means, in effect just terrorism, under the supposed circumstances — thus legitimating, in their eyes, the second and third largest single-day massacres in history. (The largest, also by the U.S. Army Air Corps, was the firebombing of Tokyo five months before on the night of March 9, which burned alive or suffocated 80,000 to 120,000 civilians. Most of the very few Americans who are aware of this event at all accept it, too, as appropriate in wartime.)

To regard those acts as definitely other than criminal and immoral — as most Americans do — is to believe that anything — anything — can be legitimate means: at worst, a necessary, lesser, evil. At least, if done by Americans, on the order of a president, during wartime. Indeed, we are the only country in the world that believes it won a war by bombing — specifically by bombing cities with weapons of mass destruction — and believes that it was fully rightful in doing so. It is a dangerous state of mind.

Even if the premises of these justifications had been realistic (after years of study I'm convinced, along with many scholars, that they were not; but I'm not addressing that here), the consequences of such beliefs for subsequent policymaking were bound to be fateful. They underlie the American government and public's ready acceptance ever since of basing our security on readiness to carry out threats of mass annihilation by nuclear weapons, and the belief by many officials and elites still today that abolition of these weapons is not only infeasible but undesirable.

To read Daniel Ellsberg’s article in its entirety, click here.


See also the previous Wild Reed post:
The Challenge of Peace