Nuclear Proliferation and the Geocultural Divide: The March of Folly1

Abstract

When US President Harry Truman dispatched the Enola Gay from the Pacific island of Eniwetok on August 6, 1945 with “Little Boy” in its bomb bay, little did he and his advisors realize that it was far from the opening shot in what came to be known as the “North–South” divide: the cleavage between the geographically “North” or culturally Western and those who exist outside that sphere. Their energies were focused on the more immediate challenge of bringing World War II to a rapid and victorious conclusion. Not that the decision to target Hiroshima with the first available—and barely tested—atomic bomb was a simple and obvious one. Aside from the uncertainty of the weapon's reliability and effectiveness, there was the internal debate as to whether its use was militarily necessary. The allied consensus was that Japan was far from defeated and that a long and bloody campaign would be needed to take the Pacific islands surrounding Honshu before the final assault. Equally salient to many of the principals was, of course, the desirability of an atomic “message to Moscow.” The prospect of an accelerated Soviet-American rivalry was never far below the surface during the war and there were those who relished a monopoly of quite a few years to develop and put into place the strategies for addressing the Russian challenge. In any event, the momentum of battle and the investment in the Manhattan Project were more than sufficient to carry the day. In terms of our discussion here, one of the arguments against the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was all too prescient: would this be seen as a racially motivated decision? Although the Allies by no means went easier on the Germans than the Japanese—casualties from the attacks on Cologne, Dresden, and other cities were comparable to the …