Robert Jacobs (Professor)
＊この記事は『広島平和研究』９号に掲載されたものです。
When the United States conducted two nuclear attacks against civilian targets and primarily civilian populations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 the world was collectively shocked. While the scale of the destruction was not new, tens and even a hundred thousand civilians had been killed in single air raids early in World War Two, the new weapon used to conduct the attacks was still shocking. Single bombs that could kill tens of thousands of people indiscriminately in a second and set cities instantly ablaze was horrifying. As the world learned about the nature of the weapons, and the use of radiation as a military tool for killing, horror at the attacks grew. This revulsion was supposedly true even for the US President Harry Truman, who had ordered the nuclear attacks. According to the diary of Henry Wallace, Truman’s Commerce Secretary, Truman told a cabinet meeting on 10 August 1945 that he had halted a third nuclear attack on Japan because “the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible. He didn’t like the idea of killing ‘all those kids.’
I have described how there was a primary narrative about nuclear weapons that emerged in the West during the first weeks and months of the Atomic Age: nuclear weapons were so destructive that humankind was now faced with a choice between eliminating major wars, or destroying civilization with nuclear weapons. This fundamental “fork in the road” narrative was advanced in 1945 by American religious, military, political and social leaders. “Mankind stands at a crossroads of destiny,” wrote former Major George Fielding Eliot in the New York Herald Tribune just a few weeks after the attacks, “The decisions which now confront the mind of man are the most important in his history. Upon these decisions hangs his continued existence on this planet.” Human beings in many countries were anxious about what nuclear weapons might portend for the future of human civilization. People at that time had seen two world wars and a global depression in their own lifetimes. It was natural to image yet another world war̶World War Three, that would be fought with nuclear weapons̶looming just ahead.
Into this anxious world came news that the United States would be detonating more nuclear weapons in the summer of 1946. Three nuclear tests were to be conducted at the US Trust Territory of the Marshall Islands. These tests, the first of over 2,000 nuclear tests that would follow the two nuclear attacks of 1945, would set a course for nuclear weaponry, and for preparations for nuclear war that would define the coming Cold War era. Rather than learn the lessons that filled people worldwide with anxiety about nuclear explosions, the United States would now embrace them as fundamental to American security, domination and identity. Standing after Hiroshima at that fork in the road, the United States charted a dedicated path towards further destruction.
The two nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands in 1946 were named Operation Crossroads and were carried out by a cross-service military command named Joint Task Force One. These tests have been analyzed primarily for their role establishing protocols for postwar nuclear weapon testing in terms of colonial or postcolonial test siting, the
relationship between the nuclear weapon laboratories and the military, and their legacy in Marshallese society. This article will examine the degree to which we can understand Operation Crossroads as an extension of the military actions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki rather than in their role as foundational events in the history of Cold War nuclear weapon testing.
全文はこちらから。