The Most Important News Story Ever Printed
John Hersey's 1946 dispatch from Hiroshima helped create a taboo on using nuclear weapons that even Vladimir Putin hesitates to break.
Vladimir Putin has mentioned nuclear weapons directly or obliquely at least five times since right before he invaded Ukraine. “This is not a bluff,” he said in September.
That’s what bluffers say. But he is losing the war. Ukraine and the West have humiliated him. His generals have talked privately about using nukes. The horror value of launching a tactical nuclear bomb, even more than the military value, might be what he thinks he needs.
“He deals with misfortune by doubling down and redirecting energy into even more sensational initiatives,” former CIA officer Douglas London, who has studied Putin for years, wrote last month on Just Security.
But the horror value has also stopped Putin. Some taboos are too taboo even for psychopaths and war criminals. Since 1945 the species that created slavery, Auschwitz and cluster bombs has somehow flinched at attacking itself again with nuclear explosives.
For that we should gratefully thank John Hersey, whose on-site reporting revealed the enormity of Hiroshima and helped set a prohibition against nuclear war stronger than any biblical commandment.
Hersey’s 30,000-word report, published in the Aug. 31, 1946, issue of The New Yorker, is the single most important journalistic dispatch ever filed. It blew open a government coverup of the bomb’s effects, prompted worldwide recognition of the dangers and somehow, nearly miraculously, helped prevent the worst.
To win wars armed forces have always used the most terrible weapons at hand, without scruple. No one in 1945 believed the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be the last.
After World War II, 80% of Americans favored the use of atomic weapons. US leaders viewed the bomb “as legitimate as any other of the deadly explosive weapons of modern war,” Henry Stimson, the former war secretary, wrote in 1947.1
“If the United States were to lose a war because of a failure to use the atomic bomb for humanitarian reasons, we should be guilty of the greatest disservice to civilization in the history of mankind,” Stuart Symington, secretary of the Air Force, wrote during the Berlin crisis in 1948.2
But Hersey’s reporting had already begun to change minds.
“I wept as I read John Hersey’s New Yorker account” wrote a Manhattan Project scientist to a friend a week after the article was published.3
Hersey was 32 in 1946, the son of missionaries and known for a prizewinning war novel and the first account, in The New Yorker, of the sinking of PT 109, John F. Kennedy’s torpedo boat.
He and his editors knew the stories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had barely begun to be told. Occupation authorities had locked down both cities. The reporting that emerged was mostly hand-fed, censored and focused on the bomb’s power against buildings, not people.
A group of journalists from the The New York Times, Life and other outlets being led around Nagasaki by military minders “looked like yacht passengers who have stopped to buy basketry on an island,” recalled George Weller, a Chicago Daily News correspondent.4
Weller snuck into Nagasaki on his own and wrote a 10,000-word piece on survivors’ radiation sickness. American censors spiked it.
By May 1946, when Hersey sought permission from occupation flacks to visit Hiroshima, everybody thought it was last year’s story. He had written a couple pro-military pieces, including the Kennedy article. The Navy had commended him for evacuating wounded Marines in Guadalcanal. What harm could he do?
The New Yorker gave an entire issue to the piece, “in the conviction that few of us have yet comprehended the all but incredible destructive power of this weapon, and that everyone might well take time to consider the terrible implications of its use,” editors said in a note to readers.
There were no illustrations except a map. “The imagery instead would come from Hersey’s words,” writes Lesley M.M. Blume, whose 2020 book, Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World, gives the full, gripping story of Hersey’s accomplishment.
Hour by hour, Hersey takes us through the day and its aftermath through the eyes of six people on the ground. Most journalism till then had come from interviews with bombers and aerial pictures of building shells.
Hersey went “below the clouds,” Blume writes, showing the almost inconceivable terror, death, misery and lingering disease caused by one airplane and one bomb.
The lede is immortal. “At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department at the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk.”
The issue sold out. Secondhand copies went for a premium. Newspapers raced to report on Hersey’s reporting. Albert Einstein ordered 1,000 copies. A book version sold millions of copies in many languages.
“We know what atomic apocalypse would look like because John Hersey showed us,” Blume writes. “Since the release of ‘Hiroshima’ no leader or party could threaten nuclear action without an absolute knowledge of the horrific effects of such an attack.”5
The best-known explanations for the nuclear silence since 1945 are deterrence and mutual assured destruction. When everybody believes a first strike will prompt hellish retaliation in kind, nobody pushes the button.
Game theorist Thomas Schelling co-won the 2005 economics Nobel in part for giving intellectual support to the idea that huge nuclear arsenals lead not to war but to peace.
But the theory leaves a lot unexplained. If the risk of a nuclear counterattack is the main reason not to use the bomb, why has nobody nuked a non-nuclear enemy?
Something more powerful is at work, and Hersey is part of the explanation. The public revulsion prompted by his reporting hardened over time into a moral proscription.
Immediately after the article’s publication US hawks started complaining about rising sentiment and “propaganda” against nuclear weapons. World peace needed “the American people [to] stay tough with regard to the use of the bomb,” wrote James Conant, president of Harvard University and a key White House adviser.6
“Somehow or other we must manage to remove the taboo from the use of these weapons,” a frustrated Secretary of State John Foster Dulles said in 1953, during the Korean War.7
Nobody ever did. Not after Symington said not using the bomb could harm civilization. Not after Gen. Douglas MacArthur said he had wanted to to drop “between 30 and 50 atomic bombs” across the Chinese border with North Korea border after China entered the war.
Every time the nuclear brink was skirted but not crossed, the taboo grew stronger.
“In Vietnam, the United States chose to lose a humiliating and destructive war against a small, nonnuclear adversary while all its nuclear weapons remained on the shelf,” writes Brown University’s Nina Tannenwald.8 Her The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons Since 1945 is the definitive study on why game theory isn’t enough to explain the stillness of the silos.
The Soviet Union made an almost identical choice in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Military logic cannot say why.
For all his bluster Putin himself has repeatedly invoked the taboo, criticizing the attacks at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and suggesting that even the “tyrant” Stalin would have stopped at using terrible nukes, Tannenwald and Stanford’s David Holloway noted last month.9
We take for granted that there aren’t dozens of cities in Eurasia and North America made uninhabitable by long-ago nuclear attacks. But history isn’t scripted. It unfolds according to a thousand contingencies, including what leaders know and don’t know about the past.
By bearing witness to the human facts of Hiroshima, Hersey triggered a psychological chain reaction that had more than a little to do with what Schelling used to describe as “the most spectacular event of the past half century” -- the nuclear apocalypse that never happened.
Nina Tannenwald, “The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Normative Basis of Nuclear Non-Use, International Organization, Summer 1999.
Nina Tannenwald, The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons Since 1945, 2007, p. 73.
Lesley M.M. Blume, Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed it to the World, 2020, p. 149.
Blume, p. 6.
Tannenwald, The Nuclear Taboo, 2007, pp. 93-4.
Memorandum of Discussion at the 165th Meeting of the National Security Council, Wednesday, October 7, 1953, FOREIGN RELATIONS OF THE UNITED STATES, 1952–1954, NATIONAL SECURITY AFFAIRS, VOLUME II, PART 1.
Tannenwald, The Nuclear Taboo, 2007, p. 204.
Nina Tannenwald, David Holloway, “The precedent the world—and Russia—has rejected,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Oct. 14, 2022
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