From Hiroshima to Ukraine, are nuclear weapons more fear than fact?

Niall McCrae

We’ve all seen the images of Hiroshima flattened after the atom bomb. Look closer, though, and several buildings remain standing. The railway station, hospital, a church built by the Jesuits, and nineteen of the city’s twenty bridges are intact. Steel rafters are twisted by heat, but concrete and stone walls are incombustible. Damage to outer areas stops where the flames stopped. There is no crater, as the bomb exploded a thousand feet above, but no bald spot from vaporisation either.  

In fact, the scene is remarkably similar to Tokyo, which was subjected to the deadliest bombing ever. In Operation Meetinghouse, one hundred thousand were killed on the night of 9th-10th March 1945, more than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Almost entirely built of wood, Japanese homes and shops were rapidly destroyed by incendiary attack. But the Tokyo carnage lacks the historical significance of the ‘nuked’ cities.  

Fear of nuclear war has resurfaced due to the NATO proxy war against Russia. In my childhood in the 1970s, when the big scare was Armageddon, I gazed over the River Clyde at comings and goings at a US nuclear submarine base, a likely target of the USSR. But was the risk real? A few sceptics believe that nuclear weapons do not exist, but are used to keep people in awe, to maintain balance of power and to feed the military-industrial complex. 

Anders Björkman, who has spent decades researching this, has family connections to the development of the atom bomb. His grandfather, while at Lund University in Sweden, was a friend of Niels Bohr, hosting the leading physicist after Denmark was occupied by German forces in 1940. Allegedly, when Bohr disappeared for a while in 1942, he was secretly brought to Los Alamos to advise on the American project to build uranium and plutonium bombs. 

For Björkman (heiwaco.com), the truth is very different from the official narrative, which is perpetuated by unwritten agreement between major powers. Björkman traces back to the discoveries of nuclear physics in the early twentieth century, leading to hypothetical military use. In 1938 the Germans performed nuclear fission, but Adolf Hitler did not pursue a weapon, perhaps dissuaded on the impracticality by renowned physicist Werner Heisenberg. Most other nuclear scientists, being Jewish, had fled the Third Reich for the USA or USSR.  

In June 1942 FD Roosevelt asked war secretary Henry Lewis Stimson to create an atomic bomb within three years. Stimson was assisted by scientist Arthur Holly Compton, whose metallurgical laboratory was incorporated in the Manhattan Project. Compton gave fellow physicist Robert Oppenheimer responsibility for bomb design. In May 1945 Compton told Stimson that a nuclear device would take years to complete, if at all. Harry Truman, who had succeeded FDR in April, decided to bluff. 

From 17th July to 2nd August, after the German surrender, the ‘Big Three’ of Truman, Josef Stalin and Winston Churchill met at Potsdam to decide on the spoils of war. The British were privy to the secret bomb, and were informed of the successful test (the crater in the Jornado del Muertos desert in New Mexico was reported as 130 feet deep and quarter of a mile wide, although no photograph was taken). However, Churchill lost a general election during the conference and was replaced by Clement Attlee. Meanwhile Stalin and Truman held their really important meetings in private. The Soviet leader won exceptionally good terms at Potsdam, Björkman implying a deal on the nuclear hoax. 

The atom bomb was portrayed as the lesser of two evils. Potentially millions of American soldiers would die in overcoming a desperate defence of the Japanese mainland. But Björkman speculates that surrender was already agreed with the Emperor, for whom a horrific weapon would result in an unavoidable and less humiliating defeat. Since the Second World War, Japan has been such a loyal ally of the USA to be regarded by critics as the 51st state. The Trilateral Commission, founded by David Rockefeller in 1972, honoured Japanese support for US-led globalism. 

Under supreme command of General MacArthur, Japan made a new constitution in 1946. For the occupying Americans a priority was to establish the atom bombing as uncontested fact. Media were instructed to report the event consistently. Bogus eye witnesses were presented, while adjudged war criminals, who could have spoken out, were executed. For decades the story has been reinforced by museums at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and annual memorials. After the war, while crops grew normally, any human deaths were attributed to radiation. 

The USSR produced its first atom bomb in 1949. But highly publicised tests, Björkman believes, were faked. Massive supplies of dynamite were offloaded for a US nuclear test in the Pacific, officially for comparative purpose. The distinctive mushroom cloud does not need nuclear force: a huge explosion in the port of Beirut in 2020 (probably of ammonium nitrate) produced such visual effect. The immediate result of an atomic burst is a tremendous flash, but images may be theatrical, such as dubious French footage at Mururoa. At Hiroshima, residents who dived into the river to escape from flames denied seeing this phenomenon. 

So what really happened in Japan in 1945? The answer is naphthene and palmitate, shortened to ‘napalm’. Soon after the USA entered the Second World War, Harvard chemistry professor Louis Fieser, an expert on poisonous gases, produced a  jellylike incendiary substance that could be fired under pressure, sticking to every object or subject. Although most known for its use in the Vietnam War, where 388000 tons were dropped from 1963 to 1973, Fieser’s product was used in carpet bombing raids towards the end of the Second World War, including the notorious British killing of 30000 civilians in Dresden.

The Americans destroyed 64 of Japan’s 67 cities with napalm. USAAF general Curtis LeMay boasted that ‘we scorched and boiled and baked to death more people that night of March 9-10 than went up in vapour at Hiroshima and Nagasaki’. Napalm killed a fifth of the population of North Korean cities in the Korean War. Vietnam War protestors targeted Dow Chemicals, a company that produced this horrendous weapon under government contract (also supplying the Agent Orange defoliant). .

It may be true that solitary Boeing B-29 bombers ‘Enola Gay’ and ‘Bock’s Car’ dropped their special cargo over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but according to Björkman the damage was caused by the same bombs used elsewhere. USAAF records show that nearby targets were bombed on the preceding night, with apparently excessive numbers of B-29s – did they hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki instead?  

Björkman argues that highly controlled conditions necessary for civil nuclear power stations cannot be replicated in a bomb. Current nuclear sabre-rattling over the conflict in Ukraine is mere posturing by both sides. Vladimir Putin, as a KGB officer in Dresden in the 1980s, kept tight security at the plant of AG Wismut, which produced uranium for the USSR. For cognitively impaired Joe Biden, the ‘nuclear button’ has no wires; the deep state is in control . Only the top of political and military and hierarchies would know the pretence, under sworn secrecy. Any whistle-blower would endanger not only himself but his family. 

Intrigued by Björkman’s thesis, I consulted Professor Mike Rainsborough of the War Studies Department at King’s College London. While welcoming this contribution to debate, he perceived a ‘far-fetched’ series of assertions, Björkman claiming ‘a form of Gnostic insight somehow denied to ordinary mortals’. Governments may manipulate the truth, and intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads remain unproven, but a global hoax is too much conspiracy theory for Rainsborough 

Yet Covid-19 shows how governments and chosen experts can persuade people of a serious threat that may be exaggerated or completely contrived. Almost all doctors followed the pandemic consensus on detection of SARS-CoV-2 virus by PCR test and vaccine efficacy, deriding the minority of critical thinkers in their profession. Nuclear weapons, like Covid-19 and climate change, are believed on authority rather than robust evidence. Fear facilitates control. With advancing technology, viable weapons may now exist. But the official story of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is crucial to public perception. As George Orwell wrote, ‘he who controls the past, controls the future’.   

In Hiroshima, a Catholic church merely eight blocks from ‘Ground Zero’ withstood the blast. The eight missionary priests inside lived into old age; they were tested 200 times and never showed any radiation. In Nagasaki, known as the Rome of Japan for its large Catholic population, a Francescan convent was untouched.  Of course, the inhabitants attributed this to divine mercy. But it could simply have been the difference between wood and stone. And between fact and fiction.