Flying to Japan like Annalena Baerbock – and working from Nagasaki for a world free of nuclear weapons is as green as it is cheap. And unhistorical. It’s the wrong message at the wrong time.
Yes, “Little Boy” and “Fatman”, the two atomic bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, caused incredible suffering. The number of fatalities is still a matter of debate, it is a political issue, but it may have been 400,000.
But these two bombs didn’t just fall out of the sky. They fell on an imperialist great power that had established a totalitarian system and was striving for supremacy in Asia as brutally as possible. The Japanese had attacked the Americans at Pearl Harbor and they were at war with China.
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The American atomic bombs were the reaction to a Japanese campaign of conquest. On the one hand. And on the other hand, a reaction to the refusal of the Japanese imperial family to capitulate in the face of American military superiority. Japan’s Emperor wanted to remain Japan’s Emperor, completely unperturbed by the war crimes the Japanese had committed.
The US was faced with the question of conquering Japan’s main island with troops – or just throwing atomic bombs. With this in mind, then-President Truman decided to protect tens of thousands – it was estimated that there were more than 100,000 – GIs at the expense of the Japanese civilian population. The truth is that high-ranking Americans warned against dropping the bombs, such as the later US President Eisenhower.
One can understand Annalena Baerbock’s sympathy for the civilian victims of the US bombs in view of the unbelievable suffering. On the other hand, it is unhistorical to ignore this painful history for the Japanese – and leads to the pacifist error that atomic bombs should be rejected per se.
Because even if the Greens go to the roof, because freedom from nuclear weapons is one of their founding myths: The Germans have not had the worst experience with the existence of nuclear weapons.
The balance of terror was not so terrible: for three quarters of a century it prevented a major war between the West and the Soviet and later Russian East. The Germans and the Europeans were spared a conventional war of the kind that is now being terribly waged in the Ukraine.
The terrible thing about nuclear weapons is that they are terrible for those who do NOT have them. Also an experience that Ukraine is currently making. Would Putin have attacked if Ukraine hadn’t surrendered its nuclear arsenal 30 years ago? Even today, Putin’s nuclear threat is preventing NATO from providing crucial assistance to Ukraine. Germany’s chancellor says so in interviews.
More and more Germans understand this – admittedly – perverse logic of creating peace by threatening mutual destruction. In the meantime, in polls, a majority of the population is in favor of American nuclear weapons remaining in Germany.
And the traffic light coalition thinks so too. No one advocates the withdrawal of US nuclear weapons from Germany – not even the Greens. On the contrary: the traffic light cleared the way for modernizing the arsenal.
The governing coalition also knows that if aggressive Russians have nuclear weapons but peace-loving Europeans don’t, that doesn’t make their freedom more secure, it makes it more insecure. That is why Europe’s nuclear defense capability is one of the central questions arising from Putin’s Ukraine war.
To put it bluntly: freedom from nuclear weapons in Europe is not an option at all right now. Rather, it is a question of how the US arsenals stationed in Great Britain and Germany can be combined with those of the French. And the question is how the West will react appropriately when the Russians station nuclear weapons not only in Königsberg (Kaliningrad) but also in Belarus.
Therefore: Lamenting the “madness of nuclear war” in Nagasaki is green folklore. It’s not even a question of value-based foreign policy – because that has led to the Greens throwing off their traditional pacifism like old dungarees in Ukraine.
It’s also kind of strangely disingenuous: those who owe their freedom to American nuclear weapons should perhaps think a little before lamenting their existence.
Back to the historical set of 1945. The bombs that fell on Japan in August were originally intended for the Germans. Albert Einstein had warned Americans that Hitler was working on this terrible weapon.
Under the impact of this news, Truman’s predecessor, Roosevelt, launched his nuclear weapons program. The first US test took place a few weeks after Germany’s surrender. The Roosevelt administration had already picked out the targets of the US atomic bombs: Berlin as the capital and the Mannheim/Heidelberg area as the industrial heart of Nazi Germany.
Finally, in August 1945, the Americans not only targeted the Japanese, but also the Soviets. Because they had long since begun to replace the Nazi regime of terror in Eastern Europe with a Communist regime of terror.
Truman (and Winston Churchill, whose role in this is often forgotten) wanted to prevent the Russians from expanding their sphere of influence into Poland, Romania and (East) Germany. The US bombing of the two Japanese cities was a demonstration and an attempt to deter Stalin. Which, as is well known, did not work. The Soviet ruler simply refused to be impressed.
Because, firstly, Stalin knew about the American nuclear weapons plans (through treason since 1941) and, secondly, he knew that he would soon have these weapons himself – in 1949 the time had come. And even then Stalin had no illusions about the nature of these weapons. He attached them less to military details. Rather, for him, they were the perfect instrument for psychological terror.
Stalin 1945: “The atomic bombs are designed to intimidate people with weak nerves.” A wisdom that Stalin student Putin has internalized deeply.
