All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got Brett Wilkins, and he is a regular writer at Counterpunch, Common Dreams, Antiwar.com, and the new Collective 20, and the piece today we're going to be talking about is at Antiwar.com, Nuclear War or Invasion, the False Dichotomy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Welcome back to the show.
Brett, how are you doing, sir?
Hi, Scott.
Thank you.
It's always a pleasure to be here.
Great, man.
Great to talk to you.
So tell me real quick before we get into the history here about Collective 20.
What's that?
It's a new collective of writers and activists.
I believe it was started by Michael Albert of Zenet.
I was invited by Medea Benjamin to join.
That's one of the leaders of Code Pink there, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
One of the founders of Code Pink.
And Noam Chomsky is in it, and Bill Fletcher, Jr., Jamala Rogers, just an international group of activist writers, mostly socialist.
Just trying to change the world one word at a time.
That's cool.
And you mentioned to me before that it was your articles at Antiwar.com that they noticed, huh?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because I simultaneously submit to Antiwar.com and Dreams sometimes, and they definitely noticed the articles that I was writing.
That's cool.
So thanks to Antiwar.com for that opportunity.
Well, listen, I mean, you've made yourself one of the greats.
Absolutely indispensable work on a constant basis here.
I don't know what we'd do without you.
So how do you like that?
Appreciate it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And this is no exception.
This is, in fact, a prime example of what I'm talking about here.
Right to the actual point, instead of what everybody else is talking about, the false dichotomy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
We had to kill a couple hundred thousand women and children, and men, and we had to do that because otherwise a million American GIs would have died.
And at that point, Harry Truman had no choice but to do the right thing and pull the trigger as all American patriots agreed at the time and to this day.
Right or not?
It's a false narrative, clearly, based on the statements of seven out of eight of the five-star U.S. generals who opposed it, based on one of them, including future President Dwight Eisenhower, many of the scientists who worked on the atomic bomb, historians, and many Japanese themselves, who if there's one thing that the Japanese feared more than an occupation by American capitalists, it was an occupation by Soviet communists.
So it was the entry of the Soviet Union, which happened on August 8th, the declaration of war by the Soviet Union against Japan, who knew that they would lose not only Manchuria and Korea, which they occupied, but also Hokkaido, their northernmost islands as well, and maybe even be under a communist occupation.
And so while the emperor said in his radio address to the people that the terrible new weapon had something to do with it, they were losing cities at an average of two to three a week by conventional bombing at that point.
So the loss of another two cities in a week was no banner or news in Japan.
So while the atomic bombings played some role, it was the entry of the Soviet Union.
The Soviets, their entry into the war didn't play so much of a factor in defeating the Japanese as they did in defeating the Germans, but it was a factor in forcing the Japanese to actually accept the fact that they would have to surrender unconditionally, which is interesting as well, because the United States, for all its conditions, included the unconditional surrender of the emperor to Japan.
And one of the first things that Douglas MacArthur did when he was in charge of Japan was to allow Emperor Hirohito to remain on the Chrysanthemum Throne.
So unconditional surrender, yeah, right, you know, right.
That was the thing of it too.
And they'd been offering for months to negotiate based on an almost unconditional surrender with the just one condition that they could hang on to the emperor.
They were already beaten and they had been putting feelers out.
I just learned this one the other day.
Did you know that it was Alan Dulles of the OSS who had gotten word, I believe through the Russians, that the Japanese wanted to talk and only had the one condition, otherwise we're willing to surrender entirely on everything except the emperor.
Yeah, I did know that it was the Soviet Union through which they were trying to have as an intermediary.
I did not know about Alan Dulles, of course, the efforts to- Greg Mitchell.
That's where I learned that, was from Greg Mitchell's new book.
So the feelers through Moscow, obviously, were ended once the Soviet Union entered the war.
But yeah, they tried through the Swiss, I believe, and I believe they definitely tried through the Russians.
And we knew that because the United States knew it because they had been intercepting their cables and through the magic program were able to not only intercept them but decode them.
So they were fully aware of this.
Going back, I believe, early in 19, maybe even late 1944, but certainly by early 1945.
All right, now, so here's the thing, and I really should have done this at the beginning because I really think this is such an important issue that minds can be changed on and essentially it goes like this, that mostly, not just right-wingers, but just regular Americans have been, whoever, whatever kind of description, people with not too much politics, they just absolutely take it as a given that if this wasn't necessary, they wouldn't have done it.
And the guy's name is True Man, for God's sake.
How can you question that?
Everybody loves it and everybody knows it.
And I've seen, obviously, right-wingers especially sometimes will throw an absolute temper tantrum over this issue.
But then, and I've seen this done, I've done it myself, and I've heard stories where this has happened to other people and they have been responsible for shedding light, and that is that you just hit them with the gigantic list of admirals that you mentioned at the beginning here, all the admirals and the generals, two five-star generals, and almost everyone running the World War II effort opposed the nuking of Japan, including people like MacArthur, who was obviously, you know, as Taft's running mate, was two or maybe three clicks to the right of Ike Eisenhower, who also agreed that we did not have to and should not have done that.
So I was just wondering if you could talk more about that, Eisenhower and MacArthur and Nimitz and the rest of these guys and what their position was, because I think that can be really enlightening to people that the consensus we were taught in school was nothing like a consensus at the time at all.
Yeah, it's very interesting you'd bring that up because it's not just the right-wingers that you mentioned.
I have a liberal attorney friend named Drew here, shout out Drew.
He says, I've been reading up on the Pacific Theater because I know your annual Apologia tour is coming up.
And he made an interesting point.
Yeah, all those admirals and generals did oppose it.
And he goes, well, in the United States of America, we have we have civilians who run the military, and that's a good thing because you don't want generals and admirals running the show.
And I was like, well, we're not advising restraint.
I love that.
That is just perfect for 21st century America.
Yeah.
We just don't hear a lot about I didn't even know myself and I've studied this for years.
I didn't know that seven out of the eight.
I knew the quotes from LeMay.
I knew the quote from Eisenhower.
We didn't have to hit them with that awful thing.
I knew the quote from Admiral Leahy, but I had no idea how overwhelming that support was.
I thought, to be honest, that was just cherry picking from the ones that supported my point of view or a lot of critics will say, oh, it's easy in hindsight because Eisenhower wrote in his memoirs in 1963 that we didn't have to hit them with that awful thing.
But I didn't know what he actually opposed it in 1945 as well.
So these, you know, and also the demonstration theory that I, you know, there's I think it was I can't pronounce his name, but one of the atomic one of the Manhattan Project scientists says still says Larder.
He had an idea.
Actually it was Nietzsche from the Strategic Command who had the idea to demonstrate an atomic bomb on an uninhabited island for the Japanese.
And I always thought that that was a great idea.
But, you know, the pro atom bomb people are saying, well, again, like I said, two or three Japanese cities are getting destroyed a week.
Even if you gave them a demonstration, they would say, well, you know, you're bombing two or three of our cities a week off the earth with conventional incendiary weapons.
So what's what's the difference going to be?
And actually, more people died in the February 1945 firebombing of Tokyo than died in either one of the initial nuclear attacks on, you know, Japan.
There are more people died from radiation later.
But right.
So you're asking about, yeah, you know, the truth that we hold self-evident in this country, the whole save a million lives by needing to invade.
And yes, that, you know, the Japanese would have resisted and they were sharpening sticks to hand out to children.
But I think it's a bit of a moot point, because what are the odds it would have taken probably about November 1st would have been the invasion, right?
Was it an operation?
I forget the name, but it would have taken till about November.
And by then, with the Soviet Union in the war, there wouldn't have been a need for that invasion by then.
It would have been over.
It would have been over.
You know, I believe the quote was the Japanese are anxious to terminate Harry Truman in his diary after Potsdam wrote, and please excuse the racist slur.
His words, not mine.
He said, Soviet Union about to enter war.
When that happens, Phinney Japs, that was, you know, so he knew this and Potsdam was why it wasn't it was in July or June.
So, you know, it's a narrative that's been handed down over time with the help of Hollywood.
With that, there was an article, I wish I would have read it fully before I came on, but I just saw it about an hour ago.
It was how Hollywood helped, you know, craft the narrative about the atomic bomb, just like they did in Korea.
They crafted a narrative.
And so it's and in the history books, you don't read about alternatives.
You know, you and then you hear things like, oh, the Germans would have gotten it or, you know, eventually.
And so we had to develop it.
We had to do it.
And, you know, that's a reflection on our species, if anything.
Yeah, I agree.
Whenever I talk about what could have been, what might have been, I never imagine a world without nuclear weapons because we would have developed them one way or another.
The interesting thing is, over the years that there were efforts and offers made by the Soviet Union, and of course, not altruistically, they were behind, despite the so-called missile and bomber gaps, which, you know, were basically for the military industrial complex to build more bombers and missiles.
But the Soviet Union did make several genuine offers of disarmament right up to the 1962 crisis.
The United States rejected.
So and then now we see what the President Trump and it just didn't start with Trump actually.
You know, the tearing up of agreements like some of the anti-proliferation agreements with Russia are being torn up.
And so it just seems like we have a love affair with the bomb and isn't that the subtitle of Dr. Strangelove, How I Learned to Love the Bomb.
We seem to have a love affair with these weapons.
And I believe who one of the it was Secretary of War Stimson who said in 1945 that we wanted to carry it ostentatiously on our hip to browbeat the Russians with.
We're probably going to get to that later in this conversation about, you know, why we really dropped the bomb.
But it just seems like we have a love affair with this weapon and right down to the theory of mutually assured destruction that, you know, we've lived and nearly died by during the entire Cold War.
And then you have people defending that saying, well, we never had the nuclear war, did we?
It must have worked.
So it just seems like we have an irrational love affair with this weapon.
Yeah.
Well, and on mad.
Yeah, it worked for the last blink of an eye.
So that's going to be our strategy for maintaining the peace between the major powers from now until the end of history, which will last another few thousand years is we'll all just have H-bombs pointed at each other's head.
It'll be a big Mexican standoff.
No offense to the Hispanics out there.
But then no one will hurt each other and it'll be great.
And we're going to hold this status quo from now on.
And that is the argument.
And of course, it is mad.
You might think that it was a coincidence that that's the acronym.
I'm not sure.
But hey, also, it's worth pointing out that an H-bomb would have killed every last person in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not almost all of them.
They would have been completely annihilated.
And the megaton weapons and even the high kilotons, you know, high tens of kilotons and weapons that they have now are what they call strategic weapons.
Absolutely make these pale in comparison.
What they dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are now called tactical nuclear weapons that you would use on a battlefield.
You want to kill a city, yet drill a hole all the way to China, even if you're starting in China.
One of these things going off at 10 megatons or what have you.
And so, yeah, that's worth pointing out, too.
For people who really don't know, look up nukes and then look up thermonukes and go, oh, I see the difference then when it's fission versus fusion there.
That's pretty ugly.
That's the super, they called it when they made it, that they're messing with.
So I'm sorry, I wanted to go back real quick to the officers there, because when you mentioned Paul Nitze, who I'm sorry, I forget exactly what he was like, assistant secretary of the Navy at the time or something.
And he was, of course, a major Cold War hawk, where George Kennan said, we need to contain the Soviet Union.
He said, nuts to that.
Let's roll them back.
He was the guy that wrote NSC 68 that said America has to have a world empire or else our standard of living will plummet to the Stone Ages, which is a ridiculous lie.
But anyway, this is no dove.
There was a reason that this guy was helping run the Navy is he specialized in killing people for the USA.
And he looked at this and said, oh, we should not have done that.
And as he said, opposed it then.
And then when you bombs away LeMay, how could Curtis LeMay ever oppose dropping anything on anybody?
Because his whole thing was killing people with bombs dropped from the air.
And this was the one circumstance where, you know, MacArthur, too, he wanted to lace the entire border between North Korea and China with extra radioactive cobalt nukes so that it would be an absolute no man's land and keep the Chinese out forever.
They wouldn't dare cross it.
That was the guy who said that we shouldn't have done what we did to Hiroshima.
It's amazing.
It really goes to show that they weren't under any illusions at all.
I guess that's the real argument, right?
Was if Paul Nitze and MacArthur and all of these guys, if they said this, then they had to have been right to say it, right?
That this was all unnecessary and we shouldn't have done it.
Because if it was anything approaching necessary, they would have been in agreement, of course.
So for them all, this laundry list of people, and you do cover it in this piece, you go through the list of these guys, it's just, that's the definitive case.
That's all you need to know.
MacArthur opposed it and Ike opposed it.
Shrug.
Anyway, so now I love this.
You got this great quote from this recent webinar.
Would you talk a little bit about this webinar and where people can watch it if we still can?
And this wonderful quote from McGeorge Bundy, who people might know as the butcher of Vietnam.
But in this case, he was in, I'm not exactly sure what his role was in the Truman government there.
Can you fill us in?
Yeah, so he was, did he say something like that?
He said that when he was asked by Kai Bird, who was one of the four historians of this webinar, Gar Alperovitz, there was also, you put me on the spot now, but I can look it up and talk of it.
It's on this list.
But anyway, Kai Bird pressed him on this.
He said that, quote, quote, this figure was never given to Truman or bandied about Stimson.
I asked McGeorge Bundy about it and he sheepishly admitted that he chose one million because it was a nice round figure.
He pulled it out of thin air, unquote.
So yeah, that was an interesting mission.
But I think these four historians, it wasn't an organization, so I can't point to any organization at the webinar, but they were basically giving a seminar, a webinar for journalists on how to report more accurately on the decision to drop the bombs, which we discussed earlier.
It's the narrative that needs to be changed in this country.
And it's interesting you mentioned education before too, because I mean, there's lesser educated people, but they were reared on the traditional narrative who were telling me, we never waged nuclear war against Japan.
We dropped atomic bombs on them.
And I'm like, well, you were talking about the difference between megaton bombs and the smaller kiloton bombs.
Well, there's people out there that don't even know that we waged nuclear war because they think that atomic bombs aren't nuclear weapons.
So it's a really uphill battle that we're dealing with here.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I have no idea.
Which by the way, for your liberal lawyer friend, I was thinking maybe me and him could collaborate and write a book called torture is just fine when the army Marines do it at Guantanamo in Iraq and in Afghanistan, because George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld were wearing three piece suits when they ordered it to be done.
No, no, no.
I don't want to make him sound bad.
He actually believes that he says everything you say about the United States empire is true, he says, but he is one of those who falls into the category and he may or may not be right on this.
He says that if any other country, if China was in charge right now, extended the United States, it would be a lot worse than invaded anyone since 1984.
It sounds like it sounds like he would also agree that if the army and the Navy and the Air Force said, we want to just come home, that he would side with the civilian imperialists against them and say, no, bow down to the will of the civilian arms suppliers and their agents and continue to conquer the world against what you think is America's best interest there.
You're kind of right.
He did.
I think he did object to the pulling in the troops out of Germany.
I think that's how this conversation might have even.
Yeah.
So sorry, Drew, didn't mean to talk about you, but he's probably going to hear this.
Hey, you know what?
It's the most trusted institution in America, the U.S. military.
How can you question them?
And I love it that they have such trust to run everything at set when they say they don't want to do something.
And now all of a sudden, oh man, good thing the civilians are in charge to keep them working hard.
Yeah.
I mean, he does make a generally good point about the separation of power between military and civilians.
But on that once in a million occasion, when you got seven out of eight of your five star, you know, five star officers telling you, this ain't a good idea, you know, and I don't understand.
Truman wasn't a particularly bloodthirsty type.
I mean, as far as U.S. presidents go.
I mean, he did, you know, preside over the death of a few million North Koreans and all that.
But he wasn't, you know, well, I just didn't give a damn is what it is.
Maybe that's it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But yeah, anyway, we it's funny, though, because you do see situations where ironically, the standing army is the break.
Dick Cheney says to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, look, I want to hit Iran.
And they tell him, no, we don't want to do it.
And you'd have to fire us.
Actually, they implied you'd have to fire us because this is beginning in 2007.
We're not going to Iran, Mr. President.
So in that case, you know, yeah, it's ironical and kind of crazy that our civilians are such madmen and the military guys who have the most immediate vested interest in finding things to do are sometimes, you know, trying to be the break.
Same thing with the war in Libya, where the Defense Department was like, man, don't make us do this.
We don't want to do this.
Think of all the consequences of this and all the things we're already in the middle of destroying elsewhere and all these things.
And then civilians, the hawks push it, right?
Is the national security advisor, the U.N. ambassador, the secretary of state that pushed that war over the will of the goddamn Pentagon?
Sorry for cussing.
I don't know.
It's people who are closest to it sometimes have, you know, I in Collective 20, we have Vincent Emanuel, who I'm sure you're familiar with, Iraq veterans, I believe Iraq veterans against the war.
He was in he gave the winner one of the winter soldier testimonies.
Oh, OK.
You know, you can go back to Smedley Butler.
You know, sometimes those who are not sometimes often those who are closest to war are the ones who know how messed up it is and will do anything to, you know, try to avoid it.
You know, Smedley Butler was wrote a book and gave a speaking tour on the war is a racket.
You know, he's like, I spent my career, you know, as a muscle man for, you know, big, big capital.
He said Al Capone.
He ran his district.
He ran two districts.
You know, the United States government and military could teach him a thing or two about running a racket.
In 2020, we have an entire generation of war on terrorism veterans who have their own anti-war movement right now from bring our troops home to us on the right to all the Iraq veterans against the war and all the different writers and groups, libertarians and left and right and all over the place, Ron Paul Ian's who think about how many millions of guys have gone to these the major two of America's wars with, you know, large numbers of U.S. ground troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And think of how many of those guys have come back and and then and also can see Iraq and Afghanistan from here and how it's turned out since they gave everything they had over there, you know, and how they must feel about it.
So no surprise.
It was unpredictable, wasn't it?
I mean, we could have told him this is how it's going to end up in 2003.
You could have told him that.
Sure.
Absolutely.
And did.
And did you know what?
So a guy emailed me and said, you got to promise not to show anyone at all, but I'll show you.
And I says, all right.
And it was two major, like really high quality panoramas of Hiroshima that were taken by his grandfather in 1945.
And I think I don't want to quote it wrong, but I'm pretty sure just in the weeks after the attack and there, you know, how some JPEGs, you can click on them and really zoom in.
There to the high quality, it's still crisp.
This is extremely these things.
And he's working on the copyright and whatever, make sure people don't run off with them and what have you.
I don't know.
But hopefully those will be available at some point.
But I've seen a million pictures of Hiroshima before and everything.
And yet this is still just absolutely shocking, Brett.
You should see it, man.
It's just, you know, you always see it's always too narrow a frame as Robert Gates would say war through a soda straw, but nah, this panorama from all the way over there to all the way over there and everything in between of this entire city, just absolutely level.
As this article, we ran antiwar.com was quoting someone the other day saying, if you dig two feet down, you'll find bones.
And that's anywhere in the city, you know, they're just, they're still everywhere.
It's just, it's absolutely unbelievable.
It's just unbelievable.
There's two of them.
I really hope that someday we can post those for people to see, because, you know, talk about the ultimate government program, this thing, holy crap.
And again, that's a tactical nuke.
That's a little 16 kilotons, right?
It's yeah, yeah.
One mile, one mile total destruction radius.
I mean, yeah, it's nothing compared to the ones that they have now.
Yeah.
By the way, you should check out this book by Greg Mitchell, which is called the beginning or the end, which was this phony docudrama that they made back then.
That's so full of ridiculous propaganda.
It's the most shameful thing because they can't tell the story of the nuking without having to lie all the time.
Otherwise it just seems too crazy.
You know what I mean?
Like as they're producing the movie, they're like, man, we really need to add in another justification at this part.
I think, you know, as they're making it, they don't know how else to put the thing together.
What's the title again?
It's called the beginning or the end.
And so it's the story of one, the making of the bomb, and then in parallel, the people who produced the movies, the propaganda movies.
And one of the side stories is funny because it's Ayn Rand had a contract to write screenplays for Paramount.
So they hired her to write about this ultimate government program of mass murder.
And so she decided to try to spin it as this great libertarian achievement for free market scientists or something somehow.
And it has some really funny quotes in it and things like that.
But yeah, it's really funny, man.
It's got a lot.
I mean, funny in a horrible, ironical way kind of thing.
The way that they told the story and the blatantness with which they lie because they had to, you know, right, man, we better put some flack out the window.
You know, that's just like the easiest example.
You know, there was no flack.
They didn't have a single anti aircraft gun left anywhere in Japan by the time we knew that city.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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And now, so talk more about the unconditional surrender and the cult of the emperor and you know how this could have been approached in terms of, because I guess I didn't really realize maybe until I read this, that the actual unconditional surrender mandate didn't come until July of 45.
So that had been what, like kind of the de facto stance, but they hadn't officially declared that until July.
Is that correct?
I believe it was Potsdam, right?
So that would have been about right, you know.
But what if the United States had clarified the unconditional surrender stance to ensure that Hirohito wouldn't be hanged?
Because I mean, they didn't know at that point that we were going to end up not only pardoning a lot of the worst war criminals, but actually hiring them to work for the United States.
Whether that be in Germany or Japan, like the leaders of Unit 731.
You could keep your emperor if we can have your germ scientists.
Deal?
Yeah.
They had no way of knowing at the time how lenient we were actually going to be.
And actually some of our leniency in the occupation is what endeared us to the Japanese.
So what if the United States had clarified its stance to assure that Hirohito would not have been hanged or announced that he would be allowed to remain in a ceremonial position, which ultimately he was?
And Stimson wrote in his memoir, he wrote, quote, it's possible that an earlier exposition of American willingness to retain the emperor could have produced an earlier ending to the war.
And Sherman, one of the historians that was at the webinar said that, quote, unconditional surrender would have been qualified earlier if the atomic bomb wasn't being developed and tested for use.
And there's another thing about it, you know, all the money and treasure and sweat that had been put into building that thing, you know, they, they were, they were going to use it.
So, right.
As Mr. Burns on The Simpsons says, wasting money on these do nothing nuclear missiles.
It would be better if we would use them.
We might support the funding then, but right now they just sit around kind of ceremonial killing machines, like a sword on the wall, you know, it's kind of boring and wasteful.
We talk about race in here and I think it's important.
I was asked by a young kid a few years back about, yeah, but how could you nuke a city full of human beings?
I'm a young kid and I just don't understand that.
I'm paraphrasing roughly.
And my only answer was, well, you ever kick over an ant pile and not worry too much about it?
Because this is about the same thing of that in terms of the point of view.
But then of course that only raises the next question then, you know, or maybe it does actually beg it.
Where the hell did Americans get the idea that Japanese human beings were ants whose pile you could kick over in a way that just, if, well, if it was the other way around, they were firebombing all of our cities to the ground, nuking our cities, they would of course be the worst barbarians in world history, right?
That would have made them 10 times less human than they already were.
But then that becomes the excuse for us to do it to them, that it actually is just fine.
You don't have to worry about it all.
In fact, we're going to whoop it up.
We're going to drink some beers and have a barbecue later because they got what they deserve.
Yeah.
There's definitely the racial element.
And it was a weird kind of racism too, because I'll never forget, I remember looking at my, in my grandfather's basement, there was like old life magazines from the war.
And one of them was like, how to tell the difference between the Japanese and the Chinese.
The Chinese is a noble, hardworking, diligent, he's your, he's our friend.
The shape of his nose and face.
And then there was like, then there's the dirty evil Jap and la la la.
So it was like, it was a nationalized racism as well.
But I really doubt we, you know, that we would have done this to, well, we did some really bad things to German cities as well.
As George Carlin said, that's only because they were trying to cut in on our action, which is bombing everybody browner than them.
Right, right.
We didn't put the Germans in concentration camps during World War II and we didn't, you know, so yeah, there was definitely a racial element to it.
Of course.
I don't think the United States has actually waged war on any white people.
Oh, sorry.
There was a 1999 bombing of Serbia.
But other than that, since World War II, I don't think we've actually waged any war against any white people.
I'm not saying that's, you know, the reason why.
The Serbs who heroically fought the Nazis in World War II, by the way.
Yeah, absolutely.
And you know, there's the old theory that we don't bomb countries with McDonald's.
And that was another war that kind of put that one in.
But anyway, yeah, it was definitely, it was definitely racist and we don't have to go over any of the slurs and the names.
We've seen the, you know, the propaganda posters and all.
There's always demonization of the enemy during wartime, of course, but it took it up to another notch.
I remember when I was a kid in the late 70s, early 80s, you could still see on the cartoons, the Looney Tunes cartoons.
I was just going to say that, man.
You're stealing the words right out of my mouth.
Sorry.
They would still occasionally play also with the Tom and Jerry, where the black housekeeper was, you know, they would still play the racist cartoons when I was a kid.
So you could see the way they portrayed the Japanese and the Germans were, you know, they caricatured them too, but it was nowhere near as a subhuman kind of depiction.
The buck teeth and the big round near-sighted glasses with the giant eyes behind them, right?
Exactly.
Yeah.
And I remember- And I remember that from Bugs Bunny too.
And still, I mean, even for years after, they still had, you'd be out in the middle of the desert with the Road Runner and Coyote and there'd be a big billboard that says, Buy War Bonds.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
Oh man.
Oh man.
Anyways.
Yeah.
No, it's, and look, it's somewhat understandable.
I mean, on a rational basis, not a normative one that, you know, people who are that far away are fairly easy to lie about.
I mean, hell, for most of us, California is pretty far away.
If you're in California, then you know that the rest of America is kind of way over there on the other side of the Rocky Mountains.
It's a, yeah, it's a big country.
And having a bunch of Japanese on the West Coast rounded up, I bet there are a lot of people East of the Mississippi who didn't even know that that had occurred, you know?
Probably.
But you know, if you talk to the soldiers, another thing, if you talk to soldiers, veterans from the war, you will not hear any of that racist talk.
They'll tell you.
And the same thing goes for Korea.
The same thing goes for, especially Vietnam, like, man, you can say what you want, but those, they fought, they were brave.
They fought tremendously.
They, you know, it was hard, they were the hardest enemy and I have nothing but respect for them as fighting men.
So that racism, interestingly, of course, they had the names, the slurs and all, but you don't really hear that being put forth a lot by veterans who actually had to fight face to face with them.
They have a great deal of respect, it seems, even though there were some of them, you know, there were POWs, American POWs that died at Hiroshima.
There were American POWs, George Bush narrowly escaped being dinner.
Some of them were actually eaten by, you know, by the Japanese.
And despite all that, it seems like if you talk to the veterans, they had nothing but the utmost respect for them as a fighting people.
And for the way that you mentioned earlier, that despite the terrific hammering that they took, that they still kept up that fighting spirit.
And it wasn't really based on fear of what would happen if they turned against, no, it was based on a reverence of the godlike emperor.
So they got props.
Well, and also, you know, even when your government, you're familiar with this, even when your government picks the fight, it's easy to believe that you're on the defensive.
And here the Americans are coming with this overwhelming power and it's our government calls it so cynically, the rally around the flag effect, which they just love to try to reproduce.
It's, you know, the economics of failing upwards as a government department, you know, if only a real crisis breaks out, we'll do better instead of getting fired for letting it happen on our watch, for example.
I want to go back to what you're talking about with the cold war as it developed after that.
You know, I was interviewed not too long ago by a millennial aged person, not a zoomer, but a generation, whichever they're in about the new cold war with Russia.
And the first question was, what was the old cold war with Russia?
Because here we are living, you know, far into the future.
You and I both, I think late seventies, early eighties kids, as you were saying there we remember an entire different era that a lot of people have really no idea of and their government school didn't teach them history as a subject at all.
Maybe a little bit of social studies so-called, but no real history.
So they don't even know anything about even say, for example, the brinksmanship of the Reagan era, which was from just, you know, when they were very young, you know, younger than us, but alive.
And so, and I was talking with this guy, Kingston Reef earlier from the arms control association about how, you know, at the height of the cold war where America and Russia had something like 40,000 nukes each and the level of tension that that got to.
You mentioned the missile gap, but they did catch up there after a while, or at least I don't know how many missiles they had.
They sure had a hell of a lot of warheads.
So maybe you can take us through a little bit of that.
And even, you know, as you were kind of hinting at there a bit about how unnecessary it all was really and how they could have ended the cold war long before 1988 and 89.
You mentioned that the, you know, the younger generations don't know, but like, you know, the older generations would tell us that, you know, you don't know what it was like in 62, but let me tell you, I remember very clearly I was nine or 10 years old.
It was about 1983 and things were getting really hot in 83.
It was like you had the Russians that shot down that Korean airliner with a bunch of Americans on it.
You had like the U.S. and NATO doing these military exercises, Able Archer, that the Russians thought was like a pre, you know, preparation for an invasion.
You had that movie.
It was an ABC afterschool movie or ABC evening special movie that my mom wouldn't let me watch, but I snuck and watched it anyway called The Day After.
And man, I still, it's still seared in my brain to this day.
So yeah, the last gasp of the cold war was pretty damn hot and I remember it clearly.
As far as Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I don't, you know, they were, they were about the last battles of World War II, but they were also pretty much the first battles or the opening salvo of the cold war.
American leaders knew it.
They knew that the Soviet Union was going to feature prominently in the cold war order and they wanted to maximize their own position as the dominant nuclear power.
And of course, what do you expect is going to happen within five years, four years, actually the Russians had their own bomb and yeah, there was a missile and bomber gap in the early days, but yeah, they definitely caught up and then some.
And so Stimson himself acknowledged that, you know, US officials saw nuclear weapons as a diplomatic weapon.
And I think I used the quote before, he said that some of the men in charge of foreign policy were eager to carry the bomb as their ace in the hole to browbeat the Russians with the bomb held ostentatiously on the hip and Truman himself said, I'll have a hammer on those boys.
He was referring to the Russians about it.
And so, you know, they knew what was going to happen.
They knew the arms race that was going to, that was going to ensue after that.
And I mean, Albert Einstein and other scientists who worked on it, you know, they came out about it.
But by that time it was too late.
You know, the genie was out of the bottle and you had other countries working on it.
And within 10 or 15 years you had, you know, you had the British, the French, the Soviets, the Chinese by the early sixties and then the Indians and Pakistanis and Israelis, although they denied it.
And then even South Africa, which interestingly, the only country ever to give up their nuclear arsenal and they didn't do it post apartheid, they did it during apartheid.
So I never thought I'd give props to the apartheid government for something.
But for that, yes.
Well, no, it was because they saw the incoming and they didn't want to turn them over to the black majorities.
Exactly.
Oh, no.
Wait, they didn't want black, black people have a nuclear weapons.
That's what it was.
That was exactly what it was.
I can't believe it.
That's crazy.
That makes perfect sense.
And, you know, I just gave, I gave a speech yesterday with a campaign to stop killer robots and Minds Action Canada, in which I, I listed the nine countries that had nuclear war and eight of those nine nuclear weapons and eight of those nine countries are actively involved in either wars or military conflicts today.
And the only one that wasn't is, interestingly enough, in North Korea.
So and, you know, we talked about Matt earlier and, you know, I'm not defending that, but at least during those period, at least during that period, you kind of knew like there was a there were built in, there were mechanisms built in to kind of ensure that it didn't really happen.
But now, you know, and that's probably why the Bulletin of Atomic, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientist Doomsday Clock is set closer to the midnight.
It's a 100 seconds to midnight than it was at even the highest, highest, highest height of the Cold War.
So it's a more dangerous world now because of this.
And, you know, and it's not, you know, people who are born, like you said, the younger generations, they have no idea what it's like to live.
I was free.
I was afraid every day.
And it wasn't maybe it was some propaganda.
But if you talk to Russians, they were they were convinced and it's more likely, I think, because of our first strike doctrine, you mentioned NSC 68, which I believe established first strike doctrine.
All these, you know, we were and we've had them surrounded with weapons.
And, you know, even in 62, we took them out of Turkey, but they were already obsolete.
We're surrounded them already.
They believe that we were, you know, ready to launch a nuclear weapons at them.
So the generations that were born, you know, after the Cold War, they have no idea.
Like you said, they have no idea what it's like to live with that fear.
But the possibility of that kind of nuclear Armageddon may be more now than it has ever been.
Yeah.
And, you know, it's funny because that might sound hyperbolic to people, but you have real experts talking that way.
And I think a big part of it is because even though if you're realistic about this, the Russians have no near term intention of absorbing Ukraine or the Baltics or any of that.
But America has moved the line from the Elbe River halfway across Germany, as Pat Buchanan has pointed out, which used to be the dividing line between East and West Germany.
And they've moved that line twelve hundred miles to the east all the way right to Russia's borders.
And even as Trump is pulling troops out of Germany, he's putting them in Poland.
And he's had increased numbers of troops in the Baltics, where at one point they were doing a military parade, just something like 100 yards of football fields length from the Russian border.
And so here we don't have anything like the ideological clash of empires like we have between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.
You have a Russia that doesn't even really have pretensions to anything other than holding on to Crimea still kind of a thing.
And yet then the real experts say that, no, this is just as dangerous as back then, because you know, there was a reason Stalin kept Eastern Europe as a cushion from attack.
And so they have no natural defensive borders, you know, just a line on a map to keep people out.
And they've been invaded 10 million times, it's the most paranoid country in the world probably and for good reason.
This is the position that the USA has put them in.
It's basically as simple as that.
They pretended that this NATO expansion was all just benign and the Russians don't won't mind because we don't mean them any harm.
It's just fine.
But that's just not right.
And here you have a situation where you could have.
Can you imagine getting into a war with Russia over Latvia or Estonia?
Most Americans probably nine hundred and ninety nine out of a thousand couldn't find a single one of them on the map, you know.
And it's really interesting you bring that up, because so so, yeah, I have no love for I have no love for George H.W. Bush, but he promised the Soviets that, you know, if they you know, did what they did backing down, dissolving the Warsaw Pact and, you know, that he would not that the United States would not expand NATO into Russia's backyard.
And not only did they do that, you mentioned how far is St. Petersburg, their second largest city, their most important cultural city, is within like not even like it's very close to the border of one of those Baltic countries that you mentioned.
Or maybe it's Finland.
You know, having NATO NATO forces right on your border like that.
And of course, you know, Crimea, people know about the history of Crimea is that it was a gift from, I believe, Stalin to maybe Khrushchev, a gift to Ukraine, which was under their domination at the time.
It was a pretty much meaningless.
It was a gesture.
And so, you know, Russia does what they do and they're near abroad, just like any great.
I'm not just not excusing it, but they do with any great power would do.
And they've been very, very restrained.
And the countries that gave up their nuclear weapons that had Soviet nuclear weapons.
That's, you know, another South Africa is not the only country that actually gave up nuclear weapons.
Are they?
Because I believe that Belarus and and Ukraine also, yes, that's true.
That's right.
They had some and they gave them to the Russians when the Cold War.
I'm not sure if it was while they were still part of the USSR, because they were the last countries that were still part of the USSR, their independent states or something like that at the time.
Maybe Kazakhstan, too.
Yeah.
Kazakhstan as well.
Yes, that's true.
And so, you know, the aggression that we're showing and now, you know, you look at the map and, you know, it's and Russia's not what it used to be, but we're still we still got it surrounded.
We still got it surrounded by hostile, you know, nations or by weapons.
And so, you know, I don't I don't know.
Like you said, they're not going to try to to get to get to make any major moves any time soon.
But they they're opportunistic and they make their moves when they can.
And all it takes is one misstep or misunderstanding.
There was a Norwegian rocket launch in 1995 that was mistaken by early warning.
So Russian early warning systems as an imminent incoming nuclear NATO threat.
And the nuclear briefcase, nuclear football, whatever the Russian equivalent of it is, was actually put it placed into Boris Yeltsin's hands.
So along with Vasily Arkhipov, who in 1962 refused his commander's office to office order to fire a nuclear torpedo at U.S. warships.
We owe a debt of gratitude to Boris Yeltsin because he's in that split second decision.
He said, no, this is not this is not a threat to.
And you know, you mentioned Abel Archer, where they were convinced that it was cover.
This massive exercise in Europe was cover for a real invasion.
And it was only because of one was they had a traitor inside the so pardon me, the British MI6, who was telling them, I swear to God, it's just an exercise.
You got to believe me.
And he was a guy that they really trusted.
And then the other one was, oh, man, I swear my brain is turning into Joe Biden Swiss cheese here.
I just learned this anecdote recently was, oh, it was OK, I'm 90 percent sure of this.
Somebody Google me, double check me, that it was Chas Freeman who I think maybe even talked about this on the show.
It was Chas Freeman who was inside the government at the time and insisted that Vice President H.W. Bush not participate in the exercise because the fact that he was participating at that high of a level was one of the things that was driving the Soviets nuts.
And Freeman intuited that and said, no, no, no, we'll get a lower guy to play the president in the exercise.
And that will help give them some reassurance.
And those are the though.
I mean, what if Chas Freeman was sick that day?
Do we would have all been dead?
And by all I mean, human civilization would have been set back a thousand years and, you know, with billions killed.
Mistaken flocks of birds for incoming and there's all kinds of crazy.
It's interesting you mentioned Biden, too, because people like, oh, we need to get back to some kind of normalcy.
Well, people forget that it was the Obama administration that citing, you know, the threat of Russia that spent, I believe it was that a trillion dollars is a trillion dollars.
Well, that yeah, it's one point seven now.
It'll be four by the time they're done.
But yeah.
So I mean, don't think that I don't think that Joe Biden is the answer either.
That's to completely revamp the entire American nuclear arsenal, all the factories and the government labs, Lawrence Livermore in Sandia.
And I always forget the third one.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Thanks for reminding me.
But thanks for reminding me that in my own backyard, we've got one of those over there in Livermore.
Yeah.
Oh, and, you know, we're joking about this on the show with with Kingston Reef there from the arms control thing about how the reason Obama made that deal with the Congress to give him the trillion dollars for this program to revamp the nukes, that was his compromise to get them to pass the New START treaty.
So now Trump is in power and he's letting New START die.
But he's keeping the revamp the nukes program and in fact, doubling it.
So that's the way business is done.
He's asking questions, asking questions like I don't know.
He's asking some Montgomery Burns kind of type of questions.
Right.
If we have all these weapons, why can't we use them?
Right.
Especially the ones, you know, instead of getting rid of them and saving the money, let's find something to blow up.
Hey, let's give Trump let's just do this real quick, get it out of the way.
In my lifetime, there have only been two presidents in my 46 years on this earth.
There's only two presidents that haven't started a new war.
One of them is Jimmy Carter.
And so far, the other one is Donald J. Trump.
So I don't know, although, you know, with Carter, he gave Saddam Hussein the green light to attack Iran, gave the CIA the green light to start back in the Mujahideen in Afghanistan.
So without him kicking all this off for Reagan and Bush and Clinton and Bush, it would have never been like this at all.
And then and we don't begin to know the consequences of Trump's heinous policies all across the Middle East.
But you're right.
Could have been worse.
He backed down when they were trying to push him into conflict with Iran.
He did a little bit when he could have done a lot.
And that Soleimani thing was reckless as hell.
I don't want to defend it.
But then he let the Ayatollah get the last word, right?
The Ayatollah fired some missiles and Trump goes, eh, they missed.
What do I care?
And let that slide.
Didn't insist on getting the last strike in.
So that's pretty good.
I'm grading on a curve, Brett, but I'm agreeing with you here, man, that, yeah, it sure could have been worse.
A low bar.
Yeah.
Very low bar.
Yeah.
That's what we're dealing with.
Not just him, but the whole group of them.
The ones he's replacing, too, as you're saying, the ones trying to replace him.
Last thing here is just I wanted to ask you if you'd ever read Ellsberg's book, Doomsday Machine.
No, I know, Daniel, but I have not read that.
Oh, yeah.
So you got to because it turns out that when he liberated all the Pentagon papers, he also liberated all the nuke papers.
But then he decided, well, one thing at a time, we got to do Vietnam first because that's what's going on now.
And then he says, I don't know if this is true, but I like the guy and trust him.
I've known him for years and I love the guy.
I believe him.
He I have no reason not to.
He says he gave all the papers to his brother who hid them under a pot bellied stove or a cast iron stove in a garbage dump.
But then a hurricane came and blew the whole garbage dump down and lost forever.
But fortunately, he's Daniel Ellsberg, his IQ is probably one hundred and seventy something or something.
And so he just decided to remember it all instead.
So he did and wrote a book about it.
And there it all is, including word for word conversations with all of these goons as he lived his career as to a great degree as a nuclear war planner was much of what he did in his time in government there.
And the kind of stuff that he talks about in that book is just absolutely you'll love it because I know you like being horrified by this stuff the same way I do that.
I promise you'll get a kick out of it, man.
It's really something else.
Yeah.
You need to know it.
It's interesting because you see people point at Mao Zedong who made that famous infamous quote was like, oh, you US and Russia could go at it and they could lose 90 percent of their population.
But that would still leave one hundred million Chinese.
And those are the kind of calculations that Daniel, I think he was talking about in the in his.
I think I've heard of this.
Yeah.
And the Americans are no different.
They think just like Mao that like, yeah, we'd lose some cities, but we would also not lose some.
Yeah.
Oh, OK.
But someone was just saying the other day that there was a quote from a Reagan administration official saying, well, with enough shovels, we could dig ourselves out and rebuild.
Oh, good.
That's what we'll do instead of all of us producing goods and services for each other in the division of labor in the market.
Instead, we'll all just have a shovel and dig in the rubble and then we'll eat again maybe someday, I guess.
OK.
Yeah.
Sounds great.
If when if we're not like Steve Guttenberg, all irradiated in our face, falling off all green, dying.
There was a British movie that came out around the same time as day after, I think it was called Threads.
It was actually produced, I think it was produced by the BBC to like get get the British ready because they had the they had the same stupid duck and cover kind of videos, a little more chilling ones that they had.
But it was it was exactly that it was the focus mostly on their efforts to rebuild and good luck with that, basically.
Yeah.
Good luck getting crops to grow during a nuclear winter.
You know, good luck getting services, medical or infrastructure or anything.
It just wouldn't have happened.
You know, it would have been you would have wished you were at the center.
You would have wished you were at ground zero in a case like that, I think, because that would have been a better fate than what would have come after for the survivors.
Yeah.
And by the way, you know that that movie the day after that you mentioned there, which I also saw when I was in elementary school at the time when it came out, that was the Steve Guttenberg reference there that that movie that Reagan saw it and it really meant a lot to him.
And that that was the beginning of the turn from Cold War hawk to maybe I can work with this new guy Gorbachev and figure out a new way to move forward here because I just can't have Missouri nuked this way because it showed this is what it would look like if the Russians nuked Missouri.
And man, it ain't cool at all.
Yep.
It's ugly as hell.
And people can watch you can just watch the opening sequence of that movie on YouTube and you watch the whole thing.
But that opening sequence, it's still powerful.
You know, the special effects are good enough to be realistic, you know, to show it.
Yeah.
His diary had some interesting entries after that.
You know, there's one thing about him.
That really did change him.
And he really, you know, it's it's almost it's it's interesting that before that he wasn't aware of how bad it was going to be.
I mean, he's the president of the United States, but he did have a new and change of heart.
Yeah.
And, you know, at Reykjavik, some people know the story, but they don't usually give it too much attention that they had a deal on the table to get rid of all the nukes, the American and Soviet nukes.
And then, of course, the idea would be we would lean on the rest of our allies to get rid of theirs, too, and that the outstanding issue and guess who is Richard Burrell inside the government.
They're pushing hard to say, no, no, no, we absolutely cannot trade away the right to missile defense.
But look, if we're getting rid of all the nukes and what do we need missile defense for?
And this is when missile defense is 10 trillion dollars and 30 years in the future and, you know, mostly a red herring anyway.
And that was the sticking point that killed the deal.
But Reagan really wanted to do it.
In fact, I saw this really crazy report about it where they talked about how Reagan was walking on the stairs, getting into the limo.
And Gorbachev comes after him and says, Mr. President, one more chance, please.
Let's go back in there and sit down and talk about this some more.
And Reagan says, sorry, Charlie, that's it.
And oh, man, they almost had it.
And Reagan wanted to do it.
Reagan wanted to do it.
In fact, because, you know, he was a goofy old man at that point.
And they the way that they framed it to him was that, Mr. President, on your honor, you promised the American people that you would never sacrifice missile defense to protect them.
And so then he went, oh, geez, no, you're right.
I can't do that, you know.
So and it was just so dishonest.
Think about Richard Perle actually meaning something like that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, you had the you said it was, would you say it was largely ineffective?
But I think the didn't didn't under the ABM didn't didn't the city of Moscow have a very effective anti-missile?
But anti-missile is really an offensive weapon.
I mean, come on.
Anti-missile means I could I could I could do whatever I want to you and I got a force field around me that you can't do anything that I mean, it depends on the situation.
But yeah.
No, I would not.
I mean, look, I actually met a guy one time who is a real credentialed scientist in this, but didn't have really a political bone to pick.
And he was saying that essentially you can shoot down incoming missiles for a price, but it's really difficult and it costs a lot of money and it does come down to how much money are you willing to throw at each anti-missile missile to make it good enough to be worth deploying and that it's, you know, the idea that the Russians had a very effective one for for ICBMs coming in hot from space at whatever, you know, times I forget which mock they'd have been at, you know, Mach four or five or something like that coming in.
I don't think that they could do anything about it.
I think they have anti-aircraft surface to air, you know, the kind of thing that can shoot down even very high flying jets.
But that's still a far different matter than a ballistic missile, you know.
Yeah.
And of course, then you just build more.
You just build more to send if you know that your enemy has a shield, you just build ten times as many multiple re-entry, what do they call it, MIRVs?
Yeah.
And that's what Putin said.
Look, Putin, when he did his big speech where he explained here are all the new weapons that we have, he says this is all because George Bush got out of the anti-ballistic missiles treaty.
And once he got out of the ABM treaty, then it's just like you just said, that it's not really a defensive missile, it's like wearing armor to a fistfight.
So now what am I going to do?
And that was what Putin said.
He goes, listen, we told you not to do this.
We told you we would have no choice but to react, obviously.
And you didn't listen then, but I bet you can hear me now because check out my new hypersonics and check out my new heavy MIRV that'll go around the South Pole and hit, and they show in the graphic, they show it hitting South Florida where Mar-a-Lago is.
And he goes, I bet you're paying attention now to what we've been doing over here, which is he is 100% right, it's all George Bush's fault.
You know, what is he supposed to do?
I mean, I hate to take the guy's side, but what is he supposed to do?
Let him go ahead and expand NATO all the way up until everywhere.
Let their NGOs finance all the dissidents in the country and let them develop the ability to shoot down our nuclear deterrent at will and not do anything at all.
You know, in fact, Oliver Stone, I'm just rambling, sorry, Oliver Stone says to Putin, he goes, look, man, you know that this is just a welfare program for American arms industry and that they don't really want to fight you or anything like that.
They wouldn't dare that.
They just are selling planes and missiles and stuff and buying them and selling them again.
And you know how it goes.
And Putin says, yeah, no, I understand that.
But at the same time, Oliver, what am I supposed to do, man?
Just let them encircle my country with anti-missile missiles and do nothing to try to counter it?
I got to do what I got to do, because that's the position that you're putting me in.
And it's like, you know what?
There's no simpler explanation than that for what they've done.
And it makes perfect sense, doesn't it, because everything else in the world is George W.
Bush's fault.
Why wouldn't this be too?
When you put anti-missile missiles in Poland within, like, I don't know how many miles of the Russian border, and claim they're to deter Iran, which doesn't even have any capability, then you know they're full of it.
All right.
Well, listen, I'm sorry, I'm just keeping you all afternoon here, and it's Friday, and you got to go.
But I've had a great time talking to you.
I really appreciate your articles, and I really like this, and I hope people will take a look.
It's nuclear war or invasion.
Oh, remember that?
We were talking about Japan.
Nuclear war or invasion, the false dichotomy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Brett Wilkins.
Thanks again, sir.
Thank you for having me on your show.
It's always a pleasure, Scott.
The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
