Hiroshima and cognitive dissonance

Sixty three years ago this week, the United States dropped two atomic bombs on civilian populations.

It’s one of those rare facts of the human record that provokes a fight or flight response in many of us. The knowledge of the instantaneous death of over 100,000 innocent civilians incites a bit of a short circuit in our collective conscious. We can acknowledge that killing innocent civilians is wrong, but how do we reconcile that with what is generally perceived as historical wisdom; that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is what needed to be done to end World War II and in turn save the free world.

As children we are ingrained with the notion that the world exists of moral absolutes. It is wrong to steal, it is wrong to curse, it is wrong to willfully hurt someone, etc. Yet in history class as a child, with the first inquisitive probings of a youthful mind, I recall the pummeling realization that our world is adrift in a sea of ethical ambiguity. My teacher could categorically state that killing was wrong, but could not state that the dropping of the bombs over Japan was wrong. It was as if my questioning brought up issues within her that she could not face.  She stated that the bombings were needed to bring the war to an end and quickly moved on, visually relieved to be distanced from the subject.

This discomfort is what is referred to in psychology as cognitive dissonance. It is a stress reaction caused by contradictory ideas and is usually relieved by a rationalization, however faulty, in order to alleviate the internal tension.

The precedent set by our nation’s actions against Japan reverberates in cognitive dissonance throughout the world to this day. Those that most strongly condone the bombings often cite the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Bataan Death March as well as a number of other Japanese War Crimes as validating the U.S. use of nuclear arms in an effort to stop the spread of violence. Those arguments discount our ability to look at the historical impact of nuclear arms proliferation as a deterrent.  It fails to examine the punishing use of force on an enemy nation and make a coherent assessment of its usefulness for safety. It disregards a country's dutiful foresight of the implications that mass violence may have on its own citizens in the future.  And of course, there’s the spiritual conundrum whereas most people that believe the bombings were necessary would identify themselves as Christians.

It is this cognitive dissonance which allowed our own government to give refuge to Nazi scientists after World War II instead of sending them to be tried for war crimes. The rationale for this is that if we didn’t get them somebody else would.  The notion of justice and accountability for the millions of people that were slaughtered never entered into the equation. It is this same cognitive dissonance that divided our nation during the Vietnam War and that is currently dividing us with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Killing civilians is wrong yet we must come up with a rationalization, for it is what is needed to put us at rest.

The 1972 documentary Winter Soldier consists of testimonials by U.S. soldiers relaying the war atrocities that they had taken part in. There’s a telling moment in the film when a reporter asks one of the soldiers, “Don’t you think that morally you shouldn’t carry out some of these orders?” To which a young Scott Camil replies: “I felt that whatever was in the best interest of my country was best and that’s how I was raised to believe… the killings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki showed that it was alright to kill civilians if it is in the best interest of the nation and at that time I thought it was in the best interest of the nation.”

And so it's gone throughout the last century. A “God is on our side” rationale enables us to maintain the pursuit of nuclear domination and the use of mass violence to ensure safety and peace. Thus instilling in the citizenry’s minds that we (the U.S. and its allies) alone are morally capable to handle that power when our own history has shown otherwise.

It is what enables policy makers, the media and the general populace to focus on jobs when mining for uranium as opposed to what that mining entails; the building of weapons of mass destruction. It is what enables Albuquerque to house the largest cache of nuclear arms in the world and yet never mention this fact in the local press. It is what fueled the cold war and what allowed my parents' generation to believe that if you “duck and cover,” you can be safe from a nuclear blast.

And so we stand today on the cusp of more nuclear proliferation with our rationalizations at hand, for they are what is needed to put us at rest.

At a memorial on Wednesday that marked the day “little boy” exploded over Hiroshima, the Japanese city’s mayor stated:

We who seek the abolition of nuclear weapons are the majority. United Cities and Local Governments, which represents the majority of the Earth’s population, has endorsed the Mayors for Peace campaign. One hundred and ninety states have ratified the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. One hundred and thirteen countries and regions have signed nuclear-weapon-free zone treaties. Last year, 170 countries voted in favor of Japan’s UN resolution calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons. Only three countries, the U.S. among them, opposed this resolution. We can only hope that the president of the United States elected this November will listen conscientiously to the majority, for whom the top priority is human survival.

Throughout much of the last decade many of us have clamored to identify as Americans and patriots in the face of outside threats. If we are to truly embrace that label, “American”, then we must take on our country’s historical rights as well as its wrongs and evaluate them with the complexity they deserve. Cognitive dissonance can be relieved either by rationalization or by the change of behavior.  The collective rationalizing away of mass violence has brought the world to its current chaotic state. It’s of dire urgency that we as citizens, members of the press, and most importantly policy makers, fight through the discomfort of this cognitive dissonance and truly examine the record of mass violence and its usefulness in acquiring safety.

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