Deterrence

[abhishek_sharma]

Continuing ...

6. Doubters

But even before Germany had surrendered, several of those involved with the Manhattan Project, convinced that the great evil of Naziism had been subdued and the danger of a German atomic bomb had passed, argued that the bomb ought not to be used against Japan. In other words, the target of the bomb should be understood as having been defeated, and the bomb’s aiming point not merely shifted to another nation. It must be said that there was not much sympathy for the Japanese themselves—while the Jewish refugee scientists especially regarded them as less malignant than the Nazis, most also remembered Pearl Harbor, read the news of the ferocious island-hopping campaign, and shared the view, held by most white Americans, that the Japanese were not quite human. Instead, the scientists’ major concern was that combat use of the bomb against Japan would set a bad precedent for the rest of the world and would in particular antagonize the Soviet Union, which would feel threatened by the US attack and would consider it necessary to race ahead with a bomb-building project of its own.27

Niels Bohr was an early advocate of informing the Soviet Union about the bomb project, thereby hastening a return to the republic of science and an ‘open world’ of information exchange. Bohr had traveled to Los Alamos in 1944 and had there advocated, in his elliptical way of speaking, the use of the bomb as a symbol of international hope and an opportunity for international cooperation. He did not, apparently, recommend specifically against using the bomb in Japan, but he stressed the singular evil of Hitler and told Oppenheimer confidently that ‘nothing like’ Naziism ‘would ever happen again’. Leo Szilard went further. Szilard had energetically promoted the bomb, and to him belongs a good deal of credit for harassing US authorities into taking the project seriously early in the European war. Gradually, however, Szilard’s gifts as a scientist became less relevant to the task of crafting the bomb itself. In early 1945, as Germany’s defeat loomed, Szilard decided to talk to Roosevelt about the urgent need for postwar control of nuclear weapons. He solicited a letter of introduction from Albert Einstein, gained permission to take his cause to the President from Arthur Compton, and secured, through Eleanor Roosevelt, an appointment at the White House—for 8 May 1945. When FDR died on 12 April, Szilard managed to reschedule with Truman. He got as far as the office of Truman’s appointment secretary Matthew Connelly, who assured Szilard that his boss took him seriously, then shunted him off to South Carolina for a meeting with James Byrnes, the man who was soon to be secretary of state, though Szilard did not know this.28

Szilard took Harold Urey and University of Chicago dean Walter Bartky along for support; the men arrived by train in Spartanburg on 28 May. Szilard presented Byrnes with Einstein’s letter and read a memo, which suggested that dropping a bomb on Japan would probably move the Soviets more quickly toward making a bomb of their own. Byrnes remonstrated. Groves, he said, had told him that there was no uranium in the Soviet Union. Having spent $2 billion on the bomb, not to use it against Japan would ultimately dismay Congress and make it difficult to get funding for nuclear research in the future. And, Byrnes implied, the Soviets, who seemed to him up to no good in the East European nations they had liberated from Germany, might be easier to deal with if the United States dropped an atomic bomb. At this point, Szilard remembered, ‘I began to doubt that there was any way for me to communicate with Byrnes in this matter.’ Szilard and his colleagues took their leave in a fog of depression.29

Szilard returned to the Met Lab and discovered he had, as he often had, generated controversy. The Army was angry that Szilard had been permitted to get to Connelly and especially Byrnes. Bartky was reprimanded by Groves and scolded for giving Szilard’s memo to Byrnes; Groves considered Szilard ‘an opportunist’ with ‘no moral standards of any kind’. Compton loyally backed his scientists, and, as the high-level Interim Committee began its deliberations, he deputed James Franck, the head of Met Lab’s chemistry section, to write a report examining the probable consequences of the bomb’s use. Franck had serious reservations about using the bomb, and had in fact exacted a promise from Compton, in 1942, that, if an American bomb was ready before Germany or another nation had one, Franck could object to its use at the highest level of government. Franck, who was fondly called ‘Pa’ by his co-workers and had a reputation for rectitude, rushed to his conclusions, and sent his thirteen-page report to Secretary of War Stimson on n June—though, as things turned out, it did not reach Stimson’s desk.30

Franck knew the reasons why many were promoting the use of the bomb, or he anticipated them with remarkable acuity. Some said that using bombs would end the war quickly and thus save American lives. Franck doubted that the first generation of nuclear weapons would be powerful enough to discourage the Japanese from continuing the fight. Moreover, even if the bombs did shorten the war and thus keep American soldiers alive, that benefit ‘may be outweighed by the ensuing loss of confidence and wave of horror and repulsion’ the world would feel if the bombs were dropped. The huge expense for the Manhattan Project, mentioned to Szilard by Byrnes, did not require the bombs’ use; the American public would understand ‘that a weapon can sometimes be made ready only for use in an extreme emergency’, and that nuclear weapons were in this category. The ‘compelling reason’ to build the weapon had been the scientists’ fear that Germany might be building one too, but that was no longer an issue. Above all, using the bomb against a Japanese city would so shock the world as to make future control of nuclear weapons unlikely. The bomb was ‘something entirely new in the order of magnitude of destructive power’. Given that, the way forward was to arrange a demonstration of the weapon in ‘the desert or [on] a barren island’, to which representatives from all nations, including of course Japan and the Soviet Union, would be invited. If the Japanese saw the awful power of the bomb, they might surrender. If the Russians and others saw that the Americans had the bomb but were too merciful to use it, they might be persuaded to place nuclear weapons work under international control.31

[Prem Kumar]

Continuing ...

Given that, the way forward was to arrange a demonstration of the weapon in ‘the desert or [on] a barren island’, to which representatives from all nations, including of course Japan and the Soviet Union, would be invited. If the Japanese saw the awful power of the bomb, they might surrender. If the Russians and others saw that the Americans had the bomb but were too merciful to use it, they might be persuaded to place nuclear weapons work under international control.31

I rest my case

[abhishek_sharma]

From the book cited above:

Military and government officials either remained unaware of the Franck Report or ignored it. Still, dissent continued. A gas diffusion engineer named O. C. Brewster got a letter through to Stimson on 24 May in which he insisted that, if the United States dropped the bomb, ‘we would be the most hated and feared nation on earth’. George Harrison, Stimson’s special assistant, wrote to his boss on 26 June of scientists’ concerns about the bombs’ use leading to a nuclear arms race. In July, Szilard tried again, circulating at the Met Lab a petition calling on the government to refrain, ‘on moral grounds’, from using the bomb against Japanese cities. He got fifty-three signatures at first, then toned down his language slightly and gained seventeen more. But he could not win over the Lab’s chemists, nor could he persuade Oppenheimer or Edward Teller, both at Los Alamos, to sign. (Oppie refused even to circulate the document.) The petition went through channels to Groves, who sat on it until i August, when he sent it to Stimson. President Truman, who had been in Potsdam and was then returning home aboard ship, never saw it.32

There were also several high-ranking doubters, men involved in atomicbomb decisionmaking, who shared, perhaps independently, the scientists’ concerns about dropping the bomb on Japanese cities, or who had different concerns that nevertheless brought them to some of the same, troubled conclusions. With Barton J. Bernstein, we can probably dismiss the postwar statement of wartime opposition to using the bomb made by Dwight Eisenhower. Bernstein casts similar doubt on post facto remarks criticizing the attacks by three of the four members of the 1945 Joint Chiefs of Staff: Admiral Ernest King, Army Air Force General Henry Arnold, and Admiral William Leahy, the chairman of the chiefs whose 1950 memoir, incongruously endorsed by Truman, described the use of the bomb as barbaric. The fourth member of the JCS, George Marshall, did privately urge Stimson, on 29 June, to confine use of the bomb to a genuinely military target. When the administration instead agreed to target Hiroshima and other cities, Marshall kept his counsel. Joseph Grew, the Undersecretary of State and former Ambassador to Japan, urged Truman in late May to signal the Japanese that even in surrender they could retain control of their political system, meaning that the office and the person of the Emperor would be preserved. Grew’s proposal came in the aftermath of the latest firebombing attack on Tokyo; the atomic bomb lurked only in shadow form behind his argument to the President. Truman sent Grew off to see Stimson and several military leaders, who objected that such a concession would signal weakness to the Japanese even as the battle continued for Okinawa. Most forceful among the dissenters was Ralph Bard, undersecretary of the navy and a member of the Interim Committee. Bard was convinced, as he wrote to George Harrison on 27 June, that the Japanese were looking for a way to capitulate. If perhaps Japan was warned about the bomb, even a few days before it was to be used, and if perhaps the President could make ‘assurances’ to Tokyo regarding the Emperor, the Japanese would surrender unconditionally. Bard saw nothing to lose by trying.33

7. The dismissal of doubt

...

Franklin Roosevelt, typically cautious and non-committal about nearly anything not requiring an immediate decision, did apparently wonder to Vannevar Bush, in September 1944, whether the bomb ‘should actually be used against the Japanese or whether it should be used only as a threat with full-scale experimentation in this country’. He was thinking aloud, advocating for the devil, trying something new on for Bush—for otherwise there is nothing in the record to suggest that Roosevelt would have hesitated to use the weapon he himself had authorized and had discussed without reservation many times with Bush, Stimson, Churchill, and others. The assumption that the bomb would be used also governed the deliberations of Truman’s Interim Committee. Established in late April at the behest of the President, the committee was broadly charged by Stimson to ‘study and report on the whole problem of temporary war controls and later publicity, and to survey and make recommendations on postwar research, development and controls, as well as legislation necessary to effectuate them’. Its members were Stimson, in the chair (George Harrison served as chair when Stimson could not be present), Bard, Bush, Conant, Karl Compton, and Undersecretary of State William Clayton. Attached to the committee was a Scientific Panel, including Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, Arthur Compton, and Enrico Fermi. James Byrnes was added as the personal representative of the President.34

...

Even more striking is the speed with which the first formal discussion of the committee, on 31 May 1945, went in the direction of the future of nuclear power and prospects for its international control. The membership talked for over three hours that morning hardly mentioning Japan, though just before lunch there was a conversation about how to handle the Russians. When at last the subject of Japan came up, number eight on an agenda with eleven substantive items, it was encapsulated in the title ‘Effect of the Bombing on the Japanese and their Will to Fight’. The subsequent discussion concerned similarities and differences between the atomic bombing and ongoing non-nuclear strikes, possible targets, and whether to drop just one bomb at a time or several at once. (Groves, who was present, and was ultimately invited to every Interim Committee meeting, urged use of a single bomb, in part because the effect of a multiple strike ‘would not be sufficiently distinct from our regular bombing program’.) No one at this point voiced reservations about using the bomb. In summarizing the deliberations, R. Gordon Arneson, who took notes at the meeting, recorded ‘general agreement’ with the conclusion that ‘we could not give the Japanese any warning’ that the bomb was coming.35

[abhishek_sharma]

Continuing ...

When a scientists’ Target Committee placed the city of Kyoto at the top of its list of objectives for an atomic-bomb crew, Stimson, who had twice visited it, demanded its removal: Kyoto was a cultural and religious center that would become, if destroyed, an example of American cruelty, and, if spared, a symbol of American decency and restraint. No amount of entreaty from Groves would persuade the secretary to put Kyoto in the cross hairs. Stimson also took it on faith that civilians should be spared, ‘as far as possible’, from the weapons of war.40

‘As far as possible’—there was a loophole that admitted morally dubious acts backlit by self-delusion. In gravitas, in the regard with which others held him, in his willingness to allow his decisions about the bomb at least occasionally to trouble him, he was the government’s counterpart to Robert Oppenheimer (who found Stimson impressive). The bomb, Stimson jotted in notes to himself before his first meeting with the Interim Committee, ‘may destroy or perfect International Civilization and ‘may [be] Frankenstein or means for World Peace’. But, if there was distress in these perceptions, so alien to the likes of Groves and Byrnes, there was also an unwillingness to allow them to prevent the bombs from being used. Stimson needed to discuss how and where the bomb(s) would be dropped, and he was genuinely concerned about the consequences of dropping the bombs on Japanese cities. He did not, however, question the need to drop them, never recognizing any ‘profound qualitative difference’ between them and non-nuclear weapons, as Martin Sherwin puts it. Stimson guided the Interim Committee to its decision that the bomb should be used as soon as it was ready, and it was he, along with Marshall, who formally authorized the 20th Air Force to ‘deliver’ the bombs to Japan. Perhaps he extinguished his doubts with his strenuous effort to keep Kyoto off the target list; having secured the safety of the Buddhist temples and shrines and the lives of the citizens of Kyoto, Stimson could tell himself that he had acted decently, even morally, or had gone as far as circumstances would allow. Perhaps instead, as Sherry argues, he deluded ‘himself that “precision” bombing remained American practice’ in 1945. In any event, to gain the surrender of Japan, Stimson wrote in 1947, it seemed necessary to administer a ‘tremendous shock which would carry convincing proof of our power to destroy’ Japan. That meant the bomb.41

Harry Truman relied on Stimson for guidance about the bomb, so it is no surprise that the President came to share his secretary’s self-delusion about its target. Overwhelmed by the job—on the first afternoon following Roosevelt’s death he told reporters that he ‘felt like the moon, the stars, and the planets had fallen’ on him—Truman exhibited on the atomic-bomb issue a combination of feigned indifference and zealous over-involvement characteristic of the insecure. There is little evidence that he saw the bomb as a moral matter, at least before the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki on 9 August. He nevertheless felt compelled to tell himself, like Stimson, that the atomic bombs whose use he authorized, or to whose use he acceded, were to be aimed at military targets. It was in a mid-May 1945 meeting with the President that Stimson declared that Air Force firebombings had targeted the Japanese military, and that ‘the same rule of sparing the civilian population should be applied as far as possible to the use of any new weapons’, like the atomic bomb. Two weeks later came the Interim Committee meeting that resolved, according to Stimson, that the ‘most desirable target’ of the bomb ‘would be a vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers’ houses’. Truman accepted this recommendation. After conferring with Stimson about the bomb again at Potsdam, on 25 July, Truman wrote in his diary:

I have told the Secretary] of War, Mr Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop this terrible bomb on the old capital [Kyoto] or the new [Tokyo]. He and I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one.

Anyone who knew, as Stimson and Truman did, what the firebombs had done to Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo, and what the test of the plutonium bomb in New Mexico had revealed nine days earlier, also knew that these weapons unleashed upon cities did not magically kill only their military inhabitants, or destroy factories and ‘workers’ houses’ while sparing tea shops, hospitals, and the homes of teachers. Here, again, was self-deception—undertaken at the highest level and on the most critical of issues. Probably, like Stimson, Truman told himself that sparing Kyoto (and, belatedly, Tokyo) absolved him of charges that he was targeting innocents. Having thus persuaded himself that he was merely engaged in the accepted strategic practice of war, Truman slept soundly on those midsummer nights.42

[abhishek_sharma]

Continuing ...

10. Why the bombs were dropped

How had it come to this? In the months and years after Hiroshima, historians and other commentators offered a variety of explanations for the US decision to use the atomic bomb against Japan. One of them, heard increasingly in recent years, is that white American racism caused, or at minimum enabled, the United States to use a devastating weapon on the Japanese, brown people whom they considered inferior to themselves, barbaric in their conduct of war, and finally subhuman—‘a beast’, as Truman put it. It is certainly true, as John Dower, Ronald Takaki, and others have demonstrated, that the Pacific War was fought with a savagery unfamiliar to those who had engaged each other in Europe, where enmities were bitter but vitiated by the fact that the adversaries were white. On the west coast of the United States, beginning in 1942, Japanese-Americans were rounded up and placed in internment camps. There was no means test given for loyalty: ‘a Jap is a Jap’, insisted General John L. DeWitt, head of the US Western Defense Command, and all ‘Japs’ were potentially treacherous. Or, as the Los Angeles Times had it: ‘A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched—so a Japanese-American, born of Japanese parents, grows up to be a Japanese not an American.’ Home front officials and publications depicted Japanese and Japanese-Americans as insects, vermin, rodents, and apes, and in this way inspired exterminationist fantasies, for who could object to the eradication of lice, spiders, or rats? Marshall Fields department stores in Chicago bought a two-page newspaper ad depicting a simian-like Japanese soldier cringing beneath the shadow of a bomber; the caption asked, ‘Little men, what now?’ The Elks Lodge in Harrisburg, Illinois, promised ‘to knock out Hirohito but it won’t be easy... Rats are dangerous to the last corner.’ Even more sophisticated publications erased the distinction between soldiers and civilians in Japan. According to the New Republic: ‘The natural enemy of every American man, woman and child is the Japanese man, woman and child.’ It was race that mattered, blood that told; no Japanese, anywhere, could or should be spared.54

The Americans who fought Japanese in the Pacific theater were, if anything, even more scathing in their characterizations of them. Admiral William F. (‘Bull’) Halsey commander of the US South Pacific Force, told reporters that ‘the only good Jap is a Jap who’s been dead six months’. Not to be outdone, Halsey’s Atlantic counterpart, Admiral Jonas H. Ingram, explained that, ‘if it is necessary to win the war, we shall leave no man, woman, or child alive in Japan and shall erase that country from the map’. ‘When you see the little stinking rats with buck teeth and bowlegs dead alongside an American, you wonder why we have to fight them and who started this war,’ said Lieutenant General Holland M. (‘Howlin’ Mad’) Smith. ‘The Japanese smell,’ he added. ‘They don’t even bleed when they die.’ Soldiers took their cues from their officers, whose views in any case reinforced their own about the kind of enemy they were fighting. Robert Scott Jr., author of the bestseller God Is My Co-Pilot, relished combat in Southeast Asia. ‘Personally’ he wrote, ‘every time I cut Japanese columns to pieces... strafed Japs swimming from boats we were sinking, or blew a Jap pilot to hell out of the sky, I just laughed in my heart and knew that I had stepped on another black-widow spider or scorpion.’ E. B. Sledge, island hopping with the marines in the South Pacific, marveled at the refusal of Japanese soldiers to surrender and noted many examples of’trophy-taking’ by his fellow marines—the result, he thought, of a ‘particular savagery that characterized the struggle between the Marines and the Japanese’. Marines prized enemy ears, fingers, hands, and, most often, gold teeth:

The Japanese’s mouth glowed with huge gold-crowned teeth, and his [American] captor wanted them. He put the point of his kabar on the base of a tooth and hit the handle with the palm of his hand. Because the Japanese was kicking his feet and thrashing about, the knife point glanced off the tooth and sank deeply into the victim’s mouth. The Marine cursed him and with a slash cut his cheeks open to each ear. He put his foot on the sufferer’s lower jaw and tried again. Blood poured out of the soldier’s mouth. He made a gurgling noise and thrashed wildly.

Compassion for Japanese was rare, Sledge noted, and scorned by most American soldiers as ‘going Asiatic’. 55

[sanjaykumar]

[sanjaykumar]

[darshhan]

An American girl with a Japanese skull sent by her Marine boyfriend in ww2. How cute.

[member_19686]

The Russo-Japanse War, at the beginning of this century, made the Russians fear that their Christian society was under a dual attack, from the heathen Japanese without and from the infidel Jews within. In 1905, following the humiliating defeats on land and sea that the Japanese had inflicted on the Russian empire, the great writer Leo Tolstoy offered an explanation for his country's setbacks. In a letter to a friend, he wrote:

This debacle is not only of the Russian army, the Russian fleet and the Russian state. . . . The disintegration began long ago, with the struggle for money and success in the so-called scientific and artistic pursuits, where the Jews got the edge on the Christians in every country and thereby earned the envy and hated of all. Today the Japanese have done the same thing in the military field, proving conclusively, by brute force, that there is a goal which Christians must not pursue, for in seeking it they will always fail, vanquished by non-Christians.8

In these few sentences Tolstoy, otherwise famous for his humanism and morality, expressed the old Christian fear of the flourishing infidel, whose outstanding representatives in his time were the Jews and the Japanese.

A British writer, T. W. H. Crosland, commenting on the Japanese victories on the Manchurian front in 1904, described as follows the physical features of the Japanese in order to illuminate their low morality:

A stunted, lymphatic, yellow-faced heathen, with a mouthful of teeth three sizes too big for him, bulging slits where his eyes ought to be, blacking-brush hair, a foolish giggle, a cruel heart, and the conceit of the devil-this, O bemused reader, is the authentic dearly-beloved "Little Jap" of commerce, the fire-eater out of the Far East, and the ally, if you please, of John Bull. . . . It is a grave question whether Japan, with her marvellous gifts of imitation, her extraordinary energy, her cunning rapidity, and her total want of conscience, is in the least likely to become "a world power" of the kind that Europe is likely to find useful or satisfactory. Indeed the only restraints that could be put upon her are the restraints of the Christian religion. Can she be brought to submit to them? Does she desire in her heart to submit to them? Will she ever be other than pagan and heathen and unconscionable under the surface? the answer is: No...

Demonizing the Other: Antisemitism, Racism and Xenophobia edited by Robert S. Wistrich

http://books.google.ca/books?id=G-19lB3 ... ty&f=false

In Washington's "eyes, the worst Japanese war crime was the attempt to cripple the white man's prestige by sowing the seeds of racial pride under the banner of Pan-Asianism." The "International Military Tribunal for the Far East. . . . accused Japan of, among other things, racial arrogance' in challenging the stability of the status quo that existed under Western rule.


When Japanese racial atrocities targeting Europeans and Euro-Americans were revealed, London noticed that "generally speaking . . . there has been a relative lack of Chinese interest in the British and American disclosures" ; worse it was noted forlornly, "it is also possible that the Chinese appreciate-and secretly sympathize with-the fact that one Japanese aim in perpetrating these atrocities was the humiliation of the white man, as part of the plan for his expulsion from East Asia."14 In a "secret" memorandum from India, a British official cautioned that "publicity" about the "specific question of ill treatment of white captives should not be undertaken for the present, though a statement in general terms might be issued without reference to race of prisoners." Hence, it was decided that "the point is to emphasise by every means Japanese barbarity towards other Asiatics, but not to bolster up [the] Japanese self-proclaimed role as defender of Asiatics by putting out stories of their barbarous treatment of Europeans."15

Thus, in the heat of war the shoots of postwar racial policy and the forced retreat from white supremacy were already evident: a compelled assertion of equality between European and non-European peoples, and further, an assertion of "nonracialism", denying even the relevance of a characteristic that heretofore had been proclaimed from on high.


J. P. S. Devereux, a proud Marine major, "would never willingly have lowered himself to talk to a yellow man on equal terms. Now he had to learn to speak lower than low, in the voice of unconditional surrender." He was not alone, as "the yellow man returned the white man's hate and contempt" in spades. In the early days of captivity a Japanese officer was holding a handkerchief to his nose. A POW sergeant asked him if he had a cold. "Baka! Stupid! said the Japanese. You smell bad, you smell very bad." Later the captor said his prisoner did not smell so terribly. "Now you smell O.K. You no eat meat since you become pu-ri-so-na. This story could be read another way: The Japanese liked their white prisoners to be starving." And it can be read yet another way: treacherous tropes of insult traditionally used by Europeans and Euro-Americans - such as suggesting that some groups emit foul odors - against Africans particularly, were now being turned back against the perpetrators by Asians.

Race War: White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire By Gerald Horne

http://books.google.ca/books?id=q_DVIIL ... navlinks_s

. . . Orientals must be kept in their native East till the fall of the white race. Sooner or later a great Japanese war will take place, during which I think the virtual destruction of Japan will have to be effected in the interests of European safety. The more numerous Chinese are a menace of the still more distant future. They will probably be the exterminators of Caucasian civilisation, for their numbers are amazing. But that is all too far ahead for consideration today.

- H. P. Lovecraft, Sept. 30, 1919

[sanjaykumar]

Thanks muchly for that google book Race War.

And Lovecraft was amazingly prescient, too bad he was as much of a racist as any c.f. At the Mountains of MAddness perhaps the finest work in its genre.

[ramana]

Folks try to find cartoons relevant to India. Eg Paki cartoons about stereotypes.

[abhishek_sharma]

Continuing ...

The men who made the decision to drop atomic bombs and decided where to drop them shared the sharply racialized sentiments of their officers and fighting men. ‘Killing Japanese didn’t bother me very much at that time,’ recalled Curtis LeMay. ‘So I wasn’t worried particularly about how many people we killed in getting the job done.’ The South Carolinian Byrnes routinely referred to ‘niggers’ and ‘Japs’. Discussing the Hiroshima bombing with Leslie Groves on the day after it had happened, Chief of Staff George Marshall cautioned against ‘too much gratification’ because the attack ‘undoubtedly involved a large number of Japanese casualties’. Groves replied that he was not thinking about the Japanese but about those Americans who had suffered on the Bataan ‘Death March’. Truman himself was a casual user of racial epithets for African Americans, Jews, and Asians. The Japanese, in his lexicon, were ‘beasts’, ‘savages, ruthless, merciless, and fanatic’.56

While there is no question that white Americans, at least, exhibited anti-Japanese racism, it is unlikely that racism explains why the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, though perhaps it helped policymakers justify the decision to themselves after it had been made. The coarsening of ethical standards concerning who got bombed and how was virtually universal by 1945. Americans hated Japanese more than they hated Germans, but that did not prevent them from attacking Hamburg and Dresden with firebombs, targeting the citizens of these cities just as surely and coldly as those in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were targeted—or, for that matter, the citizens of London and Shanghai. There is no evidence to suggest that the Americans would have foregone use of the atomic bomb on Germany had the weapon been ready before V-E Day. If Berlin or Bonn or Stuttgart had been the a-bomb’s target, Groves could not have satisfied himself afterwards that Bataan had been avenged, but he might instead have mentioned Rotterdam, the Battle of the Bulge, or even Auschwitz, as he put aside all possible remorse. Or he and the others could have said that the atomic bomb had ended the European war more quickly and thus saved lives, American and enemy, as they would say about the atomic bombings of Japan. The war on both fronts had by 1945 reached a level of savagery that matched even the poison of anti-Asian racism.

A rather stronger case can be made for the American use of atomic bombs as a way of compelling the Soviets to behave more cooperatively in negotiations concerning especially Eastern and Central Europe, and as a way of ending the war quickly and thus foreclosing a major role for the Soviets in the occupation of Japan. The argument for ‘atomic diplomacy’, as this is called, has been made most forcefully down the years by Gar Alperovitz, though others have put forward their own versions of it. The case made by these ‘revisionists’ relies on establishing that Japan was militarily defeated by the summer of 1945, that the ‘peace faction’ of the Japanese government was assertively pursuing terms of surrender by then—chiefly a guarantee of the emperor—and that US policymakers knew that Japan was beaten and that the peace faction’s exploration of terms had imperial backing, were specific and sincere, and thus worthy of taking seriously. (This explains the revisionists’ use of the 1963 Eisenhower quotation: ‘It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.’) The Americans also knew that a Soviet invasion of Manchuria and north China, promised by Stalin for August, would destroy what remained of Japan’s will to fight on and in this way allow the Soviets to help shape the postwar Japanese political economy. Rather than permit this, and in the hopes of making the Russians more agreeable in negotiations elsewhere, the Americans dropped the atomic bombs, needlessly and perforce cruelly, on a prostrate nation.57

There is plenty of evidence that key US decisionmakers linked the bomb to their effort to intimidate the Soviet Union. Stimson, like Truman and Byrnes, thought of diplomacy as a poker game, in which the atomic bomb would prove part of’a royal straight flush’ or the ‘master card’, and in mid-May Stimson told Truman, regarding the proposed (and delayed) summit at Potsdam, that, when it finally convened, ‘we shall probably hold more cards in our hands... than now’, meaning a successfully tested bomb. Byrnes was troubled at the thought of the Russians ‘get[ting] in so much on the kill’, as he put it. He told Navy Secretary James Forrestal that he ‘was most anxious to get the Japanese affair over with before the Russians got in, with particular reference to Dairen and Port Arthur. Once in there, he felt, it would not be easy to get them out.’ Byrnes later recalled wanting ‘to get through with the Japanese phase of the war before the Russians came in’. He also assured Special Ambassador Joseph Davies at Potsdam ‘that the atomic bomb assured ultimate success in negotiations’ with the Russians, over German reparations and presumably other things. And Truman’s sense of heightened confidence on learning of the Alamogordo test, his new assertiveness with Stalin, and his desire to rethink the matter of Soviet involvement in the war against Japan, all indicate the extent to which the bomb made an impression on the President and planted it firmly in the diplomatic realm.58

[RKumar]

Directly from China's SIIS Global review ... copying in full to preserve the article... Sorry if it is already posted

China-Pakistan Nuclear Relations after the Cold War and Its International Implications

Author : ZHANG Jiegen
Research associate, Pakistan Study Centre, Institute of International Studies, Fudan University.

Introduction

Though China-Pakistan relations have been viewed by both countries as ‘all-weather, time-tested’ strategic cooperative partner all along, there are comparatively few studies relating to this bilateral relations in the Chinese community of international studies. Considering the extraordinary importance of Pakistan in the integral structure of China’s foreign relations, this kind of phenomenon in China’s academic circle is quite abnormal. The year 2011 marked the sixtieth anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Pakistan. There are a series of papers relating to China-Pakistan relations published for celebration. However, these papers are mainly macro-level studies and focused on the strategic aspects of the bilateral relations, lacking in in-depth studies on detailed aspects and specific issues in China-Pakistan relations.

Context
In retrospect of China-Pakistan relations in the past sixty years, it is not difficult to conclude that security relations is the most important aspect in the bilateral relations, which can be viewed as the key pillar of the whole China-Pakistan relations. Generally speaking, China-Pakistan nuclear cooperation is an unavoidable subject when it comes to talks about security relations between them. Nevertheless, due to the sensitivity of this topic in China, very few scholars have been doing some research relating to China-Pakistan nuclear relations by far. Consequently, there is a serious lack of special research on this important issue from Chinese perspective. Unfortunately for China, with the constant development of Chin-Pakistan nuclear relations, overseas media often exaggerates the facts and suspects the real intention of China following each step of China-Pakistan nuclear cooperation. At the same time, quite a few scholars from India and Western countries have published many papers and articles in academic journals or newspapers. However, being subject to the discriminatory standpoints, the media and academic circles from India and the Western countries often misunderstand the China-Pakistan nuclear relations. Moreover, some scholars even criticize the ordinary nuclear cooperation between China and Pakistan intentionally. This paper aims at arguing against these misperceptions. To do so, it starts with the review of the history of China-Pakistan nuclear cooperation and then tries to study the main factors influencing China-Pakistan nuclear relations objectively. After that, the paper probes into the future of China-Pakistan relations and puts forward the author’s thinking about its international implications.

I. The External Perspectives on China-Pakistan Nuclear Relations

Both the structure of the international system and the geopolitical situation of South Asia have changed greatly after the Cold War, but the traditional friendly security relation between China and Pakistan still preserves its original status. Undoubtedly, the friendly cooperation on nuclear issue plays a pivotal role in the process of boosting mutual confidence and stabilizing strategic cooperation between China and Pakistan. To China and Pakistan, as far as the nuclear cooperation is concerned, it not only results from given history background, but also is rooted in the objective review of each other’s strategic interests by the two countries. Ignoring the history background and being short of understanding the strategic needs of China and Pakistan, scholars from India and Western countries often evaluate China-Pakistan nuclear relations from external factors or still understand this relationship with the Cold-War mentality. As a result, it’s inevitable for them to misunderstand the friendly cooperation between China and Pakistan in the nuclear field with the discriminatory vision.

The first and most popular argument about China-Pakistan relations is to understand the nuclear ties between them from the traditional realistic point of view. “Balance of power” is the core concept for these scholars to analyze it. T.V. Paul, James McGill Professor from McGill University of Canada, is a typical supporter for this argument. In his words, “China has continued to interpret its nonproliferation commitments narrowly with regard to supplying nuclear and missile-related materials to its key allies in the developing world, especially Pakistan”. He argues that “Beijing’s motivations in transferring materials and technology to Pakistan derive largely from Chinese concerns about the regional balance of power and are part of a Chinese effort to pursue a strategy of containment in its enduring rivalry with India”. He adds that “if acute conflict and an intense arms race between India and Pakistan persist, India would continue to be bracketed with its smaller regional rival Pakistan and not with China”.[1] His viewpoint seems logical and often is cited by some other analysts working on China’s non-proliferation policy. However, he overlooked two key important facts which have been going along from the end of the Cold War till now. One is that China has made great progress in participating in international non-proliferation regime. Another fact is that Sino-Indian relations have continued to be reconciled and improved in the post-Cold War era.

The second misperception on China-Pakistan nuclear cooperation is to overstate the nuclear cooperative depth between China and Pakistan, which views the nuclear relation between China and Pakistan as ‘nuclear alliance’. In a paper titled “China-Pakistan Nuclear Alliance”, Siddharth Ramana, a research officer from the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies based in India, points out that there exits a security alliance between China and Pakistan. He says that “this alliance was to take the form of nuclear cooperation, especially in the aftermath of the Indian nuclear test of 1974”. In his perspective, China makes use of this alliance to “achieve twin strategic objectives of encirclement of India, and a proliferation buffer, wherein Pakistan in turn further proliferate Chinese nuclear technology, giving China leeway in investigations”. He argues that China does not extend its nuclear umbrella to Pakistan but uses Pakistan as an “extended deterrence proxy” towards India.[2] This perception exaggerates China’s strategic objectives on the one hand, and on the other, neglects not only the equal essence of the China-Pakistan nuclear cooperation but also Pakistan’s strategic independence in the nuclear area.

A more discriminatory argument comes from Ashley J. Tellis, a Washington D.C.-based influential scholar. As a steadfast supporter of U.S.-India Civil Nuclear Agreement, he employed a totally different criterion to criticize China-Pakistan civil nuclear cooperation. From his view, the differences between the two are significant because “unlike the U.S.-India civilian nuclear initiative, whose terms were publicly debated, the Sino-Pakistani agreement is a secret covenant, secretly concluded” and “whereas the United States respected the international nonproliferation regime by requesting a special NSG waiver to permit nuclear trade with India, China seeks to short-circuit the NSG rather than appeal to its judgment”. So he argues that “it’s time for the United States to raise its voice” to “convey to China its strong concern about the planned reactor sale to Pakistan”.[3] From the Chinese perspective, his arguments not only exhibit a hegemonic logic but also show the western intention to infringe on the independent right to develop relations with its strategic partner.

Contrasting with the three arguments mentioned above, the view of Mark Hibbs looks much softer. He mainly argues that China’s nuclear deal with Pakistan reflects “the growing confidence and assertiveness of China’s nuclear energy program”. In his opinion, “China’s increasingly ambitious nuclear energy program is becoming more autonomous” and “China will likely become the world’s second-biggest nuclear power generator after the United States by 2020”. In this context, he concludes that China’s nuclear export to Pakistan is a part of China’s nuclear export strategy and the political function of the nuclear trade between China and Pakistan can’t be exaggerated. [4] To some extent, I partly agree with him. But I argue that the whole China-Pakistan nuclear relations should be considered comprehensively.

II. A Brief Historical Review of China-Pakistan Nuclear Relations

One important reason that some foreign scholars misread the China-Pakistan nuclear relations is that they do not take into account the historical background of the development of China-Pakistan nuclear cooperation, and therefore, with the time going on, do not see the actual changes of China-Pakistan nuclear cooperation. In this case, it is not difficult to understand that as mentioned earlier, some scholars believe that China has been engaged in nuclear proliferation in South Asia even today. Frankly speaking, this phenomenon is related to the opaque nuclear cooperation conducted by China and Pakistan. However, this ambiguity just mainly existed in the era of the Cold War. In this special historical context, it is unfair to evaluate China-Pakistan nuclear relations of that period with today’s nuclear non-proliferation requirements when it comes to such sensitive areas as nuclear cooperation. After the Cold War, it is extremely unscientific to look at the China-Pakistan nuclear relations at post-Cold War era, especially in the new century with the China-Pakistan cooperation model in the Cold War. Overall, divided by the two historic events, the end of the Cold War and South Asia Nuclear Test, the development of China-Pakistan nuclear relationship has gone through three historical periods.

The first period is from the mid-1970s to the end of the Cold War. As early as in 1950, Pakistan formally recognized the People's Republic of China, being the first third-world country in the world and also the first Islamic country to establish formal diplomatic relations with China. However, a close political relationship between China and Pakistan began only after the Sino-Indian War in 1962; it is a premise for the China-Pakistan nuclear cooperation later on. Pakistan's nuclear program started much later than that of India. Indeed, it can be traced back to the early 1970s. Fundamentally speaking, Pakistan develops its nuclear program to safeguard its own security, as its conventional military power is weaker than India and India has been secretly developing nuclear weapons. Seeking cooperation with the outside power is an important way to develop its nuclear weapons. Due to the increasingly close China-Pakistan political relations, Pakistan opens the door of the China-Pakistan nuclear cooperation at the beginning of its nuclear program, and China is also willing to carry out cooperation with Pakistan in the nuclear area. It is obviously inconsistent with historical facts that western scholars tend to ignore Pakistan’s inherent drive to seek nuclear cooperation with China, while blaming China for engaging in nuclear proliferation in South Asia through nuclear cooperation with Pakistan. It is a difficult thing to confirm the specific starting point of nuclear cooperation between China and Pakistan, but the last will and testament of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto reveals that the China-Pakistan nuclear cooperation began in 1976 and he has made 11 years of efforts to work it out prior to this.[5] The conversation between Bhutto and Henry Kissinger, the former U.S. Secretary of State, reveals that during this period, China-Pakistan nuclear cooperation was mainly focused on the nuclear reprocessing technology, instead of uranium enrichment technology.[6] What pushed further nuclear relationship between China and Pakistan was an official China-Pakistan nuclear cooperation agreement signed in 1986; it was the agreement that forms the close relationship of nuclear technology transfer between China and Pakistan.[7] China and Pakistan has never officially made this agreement public and disclose the specific transfer content of the nuclear technology. Western scholars draw the conclusion that China helped Pakistan develop nuclear weapons during this period mainly based on the information from intelligence agencies of the United States as well as the media report, which might be suspected and exaggerated.

The end of the Cold War witnessed the beginning of the second historical period of China-Pakistan nuclear cooperation. Compared to the Cold War era, the external environment faced by the China-Pakistani nuclear relationship has changed a lot. There are two major changes: First, along with the accelerated process of world arms control and nuclear disarmament, China has gradually integrated into the international nuclear non-proliferation regime, which results in more and more constraints on its nuclear cooperation with Pakistan; Second, the United States has taken more stringent measures on arms control, and has imposed a series of sanctions on Pakistan and China because of the nuclear-related sensitive products transfer between them. Before an open nuclear test by Pakistan in 1998, the nuclear cooperation between China and Pakistan had been questioned by the western countries, whose intelligence was mainly from the United States. Such accusations included not only transferring the complete nuclear device design model, developing its uranium enrichment program and nuclear weapons-related materials, such as ring magnets, but also gradually focused on criticizing China transferred missiles technology to Pakistan. China formally joined the NPT in 1992, followed by joining the IAEA a year later; therefore, the nuclear cooperation between China and Pakistan has been increasingly under international supervision. China increasingly focuses on its international responsibilities and obligations when developing the traditional friendly nuclear relationship with Pakistan. Therefore, despite the skepticism of the China-Pakistan nuclear relationship, the U.S. government only mentioned in public that China has been helping Pakistan develop nuclear weapons before 1992.[8]

The third historical period of the China-Pakistan nuclear cooperation starts from South Asian open nuclear test in 1998. The nuclear tests in South Asia marked the open nuclear weaponization for India and Pakistan. Despite the provisions of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, only the countries with an open nuclear test before 1967 can be called nuclear weapon states, the fact can not be denied that India and Pakistan have became the two de facto nuclear weapon countries. By then, China-Pakistani nuclear relations had evolved into a relations between a nuclear state recognized by the international nuclear regime and a de facto nuclear state drifting away from the international nuclear regime. After the nuclear tests in India and Pakistan, the international community led by the U.S., implemented nuclear embargo. It encountered difficulties in developing nuclear relationship with the two countries, by the rules or in practice. In addition, China joined the NSG in 2004, which further compressed the space of China-Pakistan nuclear cooperation. Therefore, the China-Pakistan nuclear relationship was inevitably be affected, because this impact was caused by external factors, the nature of the China-Pakistan friendship and cooperation in the nuclear field was not interrupted. On the contrary, with the tremendous progress of Pakistan's nuclear technology and the rapid development of civilian nuclear technology in China, there was a broader space in the field of civilian nuclear energy cooperation between the two countries. In this context, the two countries significantly speeded up civilian nuclear energy cooperation in recent years. In 2005, China began to provide Pakistan with a second nuclear power station, 14 years after the first. Since 2010, China has agreed to continue to construct another two 650 MW nuclear power reactors in Chashma, a place in central Pakistan’s Punjab province, and decided to supply the fifth nuclear reactor to Pakistan. At this point, the nuclear cooperation between China and Pakistan had been no longer in the area of security mainly, but in energy and commercial fields, which was fully under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Although still questioned by the West and India, the cooperation process is now irreversible, and will play a positive role in promoting China-Pakistan relations in the new era.

III. The Main Factors Affecting the Development of China-Pakistan Nuclear Relations

China-Pakistan nuclear relationship is an important part of the overall China-Pakistan relations. The perceptions of its importance relating to their respective diplomatic strategy are critical. It is the internal and the most important factor to think about the development and trend of China-Pakistan nuclear relationship in the post-Cold War era. At the same time, every step of the progress of China-Pakistan nuclear relationship affects the nerves of countries in South Asia and related countries outside this region. The international community pays high attention to it, and therefore it can not be free from constraints of external factors.

First, the long-term nuclear cooperation between China and Pakistan is the product of comprehensive and friendly China-Pakistan relations. As mentioned earlier, the cooperation between China and Pakistan on the nuclear issue began in the mid-1970s, and it has been more than 40 years of history by now. During this period, though the international situation has undergone dramatic changes and the international pressure from various sides has never stopped, the friendly relations of the China-Pakistan nuclear cooperation has never been interrupted, and will continue to develop further more. To Pakistan, India is the first prevention object for its national security; however, because of the gap of its national power as well as conventional military power with India, it is a natural choice to develop strategic nuclear power to balance India with outside help. Among the major powers, the United States is certainly important for Pakistan, but the history of the development of US-Pakistan relationship indicates that the United States has never became Pakistan’s trusted ally, while China is completely different. The attitudes towards Pakistan's nuclear issue, which is a vital security interest for Pakistan, reflect the difference. The United States has generally been suppressing the nuclear program of Pakistan, and deregulation happens only when it needs Pakistan's cooperation on regional issues; China has always been respecting Pakistan's security concerns and support Pakistan in maximum with its own resources, within the extent permitted by international rules. As far as China is concerned, Pakistan has an important strategic position in its neighboring environment and diplomacy.[9] But in the relations between China and Pakistan, there have been problems of uneven structure, that is, economic cooperation, personnel exchanges and cultural exchange (‘low politics’), and the political and military cooperation (‘high politics’) has a big gap between the two countries.[10] Because the serious structural imbalance problem exists, it is especially important for long-term friendship cooperation of key areas such as nuclear issue to maintain "all weather" cooperative relationship between the two countries.

Second, South Asian geopolitical situation is the most direct factor that affects China-Pakistan nuclear relationship. Western scholars tend to interpret China-Pakistan relations in this perspective, putting geopolitical considerations as the dominant factor of China-Pakistan nuclear cooperation. While exaggerated, South Asian geopolitical factors really can not be ignored. In South Asia, a basic geopolitical fact is the enduring confrontation between India and Pakistan. After the open nuclear tests of South Asia in 1998, it has evolved into a nuclear confrontation between the two de facto nuclear-weapon states. Because both India and Pakistan are in the process of pursuing a credible nuclear deterrence, strategic stability in South Asia is facing severe challenges.[11] Correspondingly, another geopolitical reality that can not be ignored is the gradually reconciled India-Pakistan relations in recent years. The traditional view is that, as long as the Kashmir issue is not resolved between India and Pakistan, the hostility between the two countries will not come to an end. However, with the rise of India and its changing regional policy, as well as Pakistan's economic difficulties and its desire to change its undeveloped status to narrow the disparity in power with India, the motivation for cooperation is increasingly enhanced in terms of reconciling the hostile relations between the two countries in the security field and the development of cooperation in other areas. In addition, the terrorism situation is getting worse after the Cold War, the terrorists’ seeking to possess mass destruction weapons shadowed this region, which affects not only the China-Pakistan nuclear relationship, but the triangle nuclear relationship among China, India and Pakistan. In facing of the common enemy of terrorism, the non-state actors, China, India and Pakistan also need to find a breakthrough point for cooperation on the nuclear issue.

Third, the international nuclear nonproliferation regime and the trend of nuclear proliferation are important external factors affecting China-Pakistan nuclear relationship. Existing international nuclear non-proliferation regime is based on NPT. According to the NPT definition of the nuclear-weapon state, India and Pakistan, though tested their nuclear weapons openly in 1998, are clearly illegal. Therefore, to develop nuclear relations with these two countries is subject to the constraints of the international nuclear non-proliferation regime. In the period of Cold War, because China did not participate in this regime, while the leading country of the regime, the United States, implemented double standards of the nuclear non-proliferation policy with obvious benefit-oriented policy, China and Pakistan nuclear relations has not been severely constrained by international nuclear non-proliferation regime because of Pakistan’s importance to the United States during that time and the large triangle relationship among China, the United States and the Soviet Union. But after the Cold War, with China's accelerated process of integration into the international nuclear non-proliferation, joining the NPT, CTBT (Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty), China’s transfer of nuclear technology to Pakistan is necessarily under the comprehensive protection of International Atomic Energy Agency. At the same time, the incident of Abdul Qadeer Khan, "the father of nuclear bomb” of Pakistan, allegedly engaged in nuclear proliferation at the beginning of this century, made China-Pakistan nuclear relationship further constrained by the international non-proliferation regime. Since the end of the Cold War, the international non-proliferation regime is more and more accepted by international community, but the momentum of nuclear proliferation in Asia is not optimistic. So far, the countries with more serious nuclear proliferation problems are basically in the surrounding areas of China. This can not fail to affect the development of China's foreign nuclear relationship, including the nuclear cooperation with the friendly and long-term strategic partnership, Pakistan.

Finally, China-Pakistan nuclear relationship has obviously been affected by major power factors, mainly the United States and India. India factor obviously plays a more important role in the early stages of the development of China-Pakistan nuclear relationship. In addition to the obvious geopolitical factors, it is also closely related to India's nuclear weapons development program. India's nuclear weaponization resulted not only in the strategic imbalance in South Asia, but also in China-Indian confrontation in the nuclear area because the main objective of India’s nuclear development is China. The close China-Pakistan nuclear cooperation in the Cold War focused on security is closely related with this. However, with the deepening of the process of nuclear weaponization in India and Pakistan, especially after open nuclear tests of the two states, India’s impact is not as obvious as before in China-Pakistan nuclear relationship. Accordingly, the Unite State’s impact increased significantly in China-Pakistan nuclear relationship. On one hand, the strategic position of Pakistan declines in diplomatic strategy of the United States after the Cold War. On the other hand, the friction between China and the United States in the field of nuclear non-proliferation increased. Between 2000 and 2004, the United States imposed sanctions on Chinese companies up to 50 times in the name of preventing non-proliferation.[12] This nominal friction generated by the nuclear issue, in fact, reflects the United States’ contention of the right to speak as a hegemony with the rapid rise of emerging powers in the international system. Based on the psychology of such precautions, the United States stepped up the cooperation with India in the military field, especially in the nuclear field. In addition to the impact of the China-Pakistan nuclear relationship individually, cooperation between the United States and India becomes important motivation to strengthen nuclear relations between China and Pakistan. The evolution of US-India civil nuclear agreement and the United States positively helping India look for special NSG waiver to permit nuclear trade with India lead to the discrimination of international nuclear regime towards Pakistan. As a key friend of Pakistan, China can not fail to take into account Pakistan’s nuclear cooperation requirements.

IV. Conclusion: Prospect and International Implications

Summing up from the above analysis, although the China-Pakistan nuclear relationship has changed greatly in the post-Cold War era, comparing with that relations in the Cold War era, the suspicion about the persistent China-Pakistan relations has never stopped. Due to the overall configuration of China-Pakistan relations, the respective needs in terms of strategic security and commercial interests for China and Pakistan, and the geopolitical factor, China-Pakistan nuclear relations does not change its characteristics of friendly cooperation in essential. But with the evolution of international nonproliferation regime, China’s nonproliferation policy adjusting by itself, and the changing geopolitical configuration of South Asia, China-Pakistan nuclear relation should also keep up with the times. For China and Pakistan, to further the cooperative relations more closely in nuclear area, some kinds of policy adjustments are necessary and imperative on the premise of keeping the traditional friendly cooperation.

Firstly, both China and Pakistan should not avoid making response to the international pressure straightforward despite that the nuclear cooperation between them is not recognized legally by international nonproliferation regime. On the contrary, if they strive to integrate into the international nuclear cooperative regime positively in the long run, the China-Pakistan nuclear relations may gain wider space to develop in the future. It’s true for China and Pakistan to achieve this goal because of Pakistan’s proliferation record in the past and the limited diplomatic capability of China in the international nonproliferation field. However, China should also help Pakistan look for special NSG waiver to permit nuclear trade with it just as what the U.S. has done for India. Though the possibility of success on this achievement is very slim, the positive meaning of it can’t be denied because of two important reasons. One is that it can keep the mutual communication between China-Pakistan nuclear cooperation and international nuclear regime. Relating to this, another reason is that it can help the international community understand Pakistan’s need to get cooperation from outside and stop criticizing Pakistan blindly with complete bias.

Secondly, the nuclear cooperation between China and Pakistan itself also needs to be institutionalized. So far, the agreement for the China-Pakistan nuclear cooperation still needs to be traced back to the Cold War era, namely 1986 bilateral nuclear cooperation agreement. But now the times of the nuclear cooperation background is changing greatly, the content of the agreement also need to be adjusted. At the same time, the form of agreement should not be in a secretive way, because opaque deal for the nuclear cooperation can only lead to more suspicion from the international community. Corresponding to the US-India nuclear deal, a clear and integral civilian nuclear cooperative agreement, in spite of the difficulty to be recognized by the international community, can reduce the international anxiety for China-Pakistan nuclear cooperation at least.

Thirdly, the goal orientation of the nuclear cooperation should also need to be adjusted. Different from the traditional way that both China and Pakistan pay too much attention to the strategic value, the bilateral nuclear cooperation now should emphasize on commercial value as much as its strategic value, and pay more attention to realize the business value in actual operation. Therefore, the focus of China-Pakistan nuclear cooperation will inevitably be transferred from the traditional security domain to the commercial trade domain.

Looking into the future, as long as the orientation of bilateral nuclear relations between China and Pakistan is clearly made, the nuclear cooperation between them will advance irreversibly due to the traditional basis of friendly bilateral cooperation and the constant practical cooperation in specific areas. With China's overall integration into the international nuclear nonproliferation regime, China’s foreign nuclear cooperation will also be accepted by the international community more and more. At the same time, after Pakistan became the de facto nuclear country, its nonproliferation policy have continued to be changed in a meaningful way and its image of proliferation will also slowly change for better. Therefore, the external environment for China-Pakistan nuclear cooperation will be improved. The benign interaction between China Pakistan nuclear relations and international nonproliferation regime will not only be in favor of enhancing the bilateral nuclear relations, but also produce an active and far-reaching influence on the integral nuclear relations of the whole Asian region.

More details

[1] T. V. Paul, “Chinese-Pakistani Nuclear/Missile Ties and the Balance of Power,” The Nonproliferation Review, Summer, 2003.
[2] Siddharth Ramana, “China-Pakistan Nuclear Alliance: An Analysis,” IPCS Special Report, Vol. 109, August 2011.
[3] Ashley J. Tellis, “The China-Pakistan Nuclear ‘Deal’: Separating Fact from Fiction,” http://carnegieendowment.org/2010/07/16 ... ction/39ow.
[4] See Mark Hibbs, “Pakistan Deal Signals China's Growing Nuclear Assertiveness,” http://www.carnegieendowment.org/2010/0 ... veness/4su.
[5] Yogesh Kumar Gupta, “Common Nuclear Doctrine for India Pakistan and China,” Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, 20 June 2004, http://www.ipcs.org/article/india/common-nuclear- doctrine-for-india-pakistan-and-china-1413.html.
[6] William Burr, “The China-Pakistan Nuclear Connection Revealed,” The National Security Archive, November 18, 2009, http://nsarchive.wordpress.com/2009/11/ ... -pakistan- nuclear-connection-revealed/.
[7] See Siddharth Ramana, “China-Pakistan Nuclear Alliance: An Analysis,” IPCS Special Report, Vol. 109, August 2011.
[8] Archived material, “China's Nuclear Exports and Assistance to Pakistan,” http://cns.miis.edu/ archive/country_india/china/npakpos.htm.
[9] See ZHANG Guihong, “Pakistan’s Strategic Position and the Future of Sino-Pakistan Relations,” South Asian Studies Quarterly, No. 2, 2011.
[10] YE Hailin, “The Problems of Structure Imbalance and its Implications on China-Pakistan Relations in the New Era,” Contemporary Asia Pacific, No. 10, 2006.
[11] Relating to the instability of South Asian nuclear stability, see S. Paul Kapur, Dangerous deterrent: nuclear weapons proliferation and conflict in South Asia, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007.
[12] Daniel A. Pinkston, “Testimony before: U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission Hearing on China’s Proliferation Practices and Its Role in the North Korea Nuclear Crisis,” US Congress, March 10, 2005, http://www.uscc.gov/hearings/2005hearings/written_ testimonies/05_03_10wrtr/pinkston_daniel_wrts.php.

[abhishek_sharma]

Continuing ...

When they thought about the bomb, then, Truman and his advisers thought about what it might suggest for relations with the Soviets. But that does not mean that policymakers used the bombs primarily because they wished to manipulate the Russians. They did not know for certain that the Japanese were close to surrender before 6 August, that the addition to the battle of Soviet divisions, the withering American firebombings coupled with the strangling naval blockade, or even the threat of American invasion of the Japanese home islands, would bring speedy capitulation. They did want to end the Pacific War at the soonest possible moment, and one of the reasons they wished to do so was to keep Russian soldiers out of China and Soviet officials out of Japan once the war was over. All this was, however, best described, as Barton Bernstein has put it, as a ‘bonus’ added to the central reason why the Americans dropped the bombs. ‘It seems likely’, writes Michael Sherry, ‘that even had Russian entry been greeted with open arms, rather than accepted as a painful aid and inevitability, the bomb would have been used on the same timetable.’ As much as it mattered to US decisionmakers that the Russians be impressed and even cowed by the use of atomic bombs against cities, that the Russians become more tractable in negotiations, something else mattered more.59

What mattered more was the assumption, inherited by Truman from Roosevelt and never fundamentally questioned after 1942, that the atomic bomb was a weapon of war, built, at considerable expense, to be used against a fanatical Axis enemy. This was ‘a foregone conclusion’, as Leon Sigal has put it, ‘unanimous’ among those most intimately involved in wartime decisionmaking. ‘As far as I was concerned,’ wrote Groves, Truman’s ‘decision was one of non-interference—basically, a decision not to upset the existing plans.’ Groves would subsequently liken Truman’s role to that of ‘a surgeon who comes in after the patient has been all opened up and the appendix is exposed and half cut off and he says, “yes I think he ought to have out the appendix—that’s my decision”.’ A kind of bureaucratic momentum impelled the bomb forward, from imagining to designing to building and then to using. It would have taken a president far more confident, far less in awe of his office and his predecessor, to reflect on the matter of whether the atomic bomb should be used. Even then, it is difficult to picture how the momentum toward dropping the bomb would have been stopped. Truman and his advisers saw no reason not to drop the bomb.60

That they did not had to do with their self-deception—the bomb would be used only on a military target, Stimson and Truman assured themselves—and much to do with the belief, by now hardened into assumption, that non-combatants were unfortunate but nevertheless legitimate targets of bombs. From the first decision by an Italian pilot to aim recklessly at a Turkish camp in Africa, through the clumsy zeppelin bombings and British retaliation for them in the First World War, the ‘air policing’ of British colonies during the 1920s, and the ever more deadly and indiscriminate attacks by the Germans, Japanese, British, and Americans, ethical erosion had long collapsed the once-narrow ledge that had prevented men from plunging into the abyss of heinous conduct during war. Civilians could and would be killed by bombs. To shift the analogy slightly, and, as Richard Frank has written: ‘The men who unanimously concurred with the description of the [atomic bombs’] target experienced no sensation that their choice vaulted over a great divide.’ Indeed, their ‘choice’ was only which Japanese cities should be struck, not whether any of them should be. Once heralded as ‘knights of the air’, American pilots and their crews were now more often regarded as ‘hooligans’, or worse. Still, they were doing their nation’s bidding: three days after Pearl Harbor, two-thirds of Americans polled said they supported the indiscriminate bombing of cities in Japan, a sentiment sustained throughout the war. There was equally little compunction about civilians in Germany, where estimates showed that by 1945 Allied bombers had killed between 300,000 and nearly twice that many. Psychologically, yes, there was something horribly different about the atomic bomb, a single bomb, with what Oppenheimer called its ‘brilliant luminescence’ and its capacity to create such destruction by itself. Functionally, it was merely another step on a continuum of increasingly awful weapons delivered by airplanes.61

[Christopher Sidor]

In the end by the time the nuclear explosive was weaponized, WWII was practically over. The Soviet invasion of Manchuria showed how weakened the IJA and IJN had become. It took the Soviets only one week to run over a country the size of Western Europe with the complete annihilation of the famed Kwantung Army. This begs to question, why was the bomb eventually used and especially on Japan?

CS,

The Soviet conquest came the day *after* the bombing of Hiroshima.

Also, the IJA in China was weak because resources had been shifted to the defence of the home islands.

For some sense of what it would have taken to subdue the Japanese on their own home turf, consider the battle for tiny islands like Iwo Jima or Okinawa.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Okinawa

This was far more intense than the resistance the Germans put up even on their soil.

Certainly the Allies had no problems killing huge numbers of Germans if it was necessary to secure total victory - the fire bombings of Dresden and Hamburg horrifically illustrate that.

Except for the scientific community which was beginning to grasp the long term effects, the senior politicians, bureaucrats and brass regarded atomic weapons as an extension of the existing doctrines of total war and strategic bombing. They saw the atomic bomb as a more efficient way to deliver the same, massive amounts of death and destruction already being rained on German and Japanese cities.

It is only after the Allied occupation of Japan and the extensive nuclear testing of the 40s and 50s that views really began to change. The PTBT banning atmospheric testing was only signed in 1963 after 4 years of negotiation - a sign that the dangers of radioactive fallout were finally starting to be internalised by nuclear powers.

There is a reason why Japan surrendered after the August strom and not after the nuclear bombings and that can be summarized in one word Manchuria. Japan went to Manchuria and what Manchuria had become to Japan is the lost story of the war in Asia. It was Japanese invasion of Manchuria and the hostility that it invoked in the liberal circles of USA that led to the war in Pacific. Japan's oil was imported from USA, something in excess of 75% of its total consumption, army+navy+civilian. America did not cut off the oil. No that step was deemed too extreme. What Americans did was it froze all of Japanese assets in America. Without any assets to pay for its oil Japan found itself suddenly cut from the very oil that it needed the most. Hence the need to go south, to the Dutch East Indes which along with Iran, USA and Soviet Caucasus was one of the few regions which produced copious amount of oil in 1930s and 1940s.

Just as the Soviets had shifted most of their heavy industries west of Urals mountains to spare it from the tender mercies of Nazis, Japan did something similar. It moved most of its important industries like Synthetic oil producing factories and others out of USAAF bomber ranges into Manchuria. Manchuria is also the place where significant amount of the Japanese agriculture was grown. Inspite of bombing Japanese to stone ages Japan still fought on and a large part of that can be attributed to what Manchuria provided to Imperial Japan. It was truly strategic depth by definition.

The myth that Japanese fought with more ferocity than the Germans fought does not tally with the figures of loss which the Germans had to undergo in 1941,in 1942 and especially in 1943 after the Kursk Fiasco. The Kursk debacle was in many ways greater in scale as compared to Stalingard in 1942 or Moscow in 1941. By the time the soviets and americans got to the germany's core the Nazis were already defeated.

But without Manchuria to back its fighting spirit, there was nothing that Japan could do. Practically its entire shipping fleet had been sunk by USN submarines. Only Manchuria, safe from the American bomber range offered it the capacity to continue the war. Once that was lost Japanese rulers saw the writing on the wall and did what was necessary. Ironic I would say. The land which Japanese invaded and occupied, i.e. Manchuria, which led to the WWII not only in Asia but also in Europe was also the place which ended the WWII.

[ramana]

A few comments in no particular order:

Imperial Japan and the Axis powers also came late in the Colonial game. With the Industrial Revolution they needed captive markets also. Yes this is a Marxist take on the origins of the WWII but that does not make it incorrect.

The use of the Bomb came after a long series of atrocities:fire bombing of European cities, Pearl harbor attack with delayed declaration of war by Japan due to teleprinter slowness, Nazi death camps, the massive killings in Soveit Russia by Nazis, Japanese labor camps etc. Then we need to consider the effect of the Biblical narrative of Noah's curse on Semetic, Japhetic and Hamatic peoples. The US was and has a strong Bible reading population.

[abhishek_sharma]

continuing ...

11. Alternatives to the atomic bombs, and moral objections to attacking civilians

None of this is to say that there were not, in some metahistorical sense, possible alternatives to using the atomic bombs. Barton Bernstein has laid them out and assessed their likely efficacy There was the ‘noncombat demonstration’ of the bomb, endorsed in the Franck Report of June 1945 (unlikely, in Bernstein’s view, to have achieved Japan’s surrender). Alternative II was to modify or redefine the demand for unconditional surrender, as Grew and Stimson wanted to do, by guaranteeing the position of the emperor (‘quite unlikely—but not impossible . . . [to] have produced a Japanese surrender before 1 November on terms acceptable to the United States’). Another possibility was to follow up the Japanese ‘peace feelers’, extended by some Japanese officials through intermediaries in Switzerland that summer, and apparently indicating that peace might come about if (again) the United States offered to preserve the imperial system (only a ‘slim hope’ of success, in Bernstein’s view). Alternative IV was to rely on Soviet intervention to push Tokyo to its breaking point—but no American decisionmaker believed Soviet entry alone would quickly finish the job, and none in any case desired it. A final option was to continue the bombing of Japan’s cities and the naval blockade of the home islands. Bernstein thinks this alternative the most likely to have produced surrender by 1 November, the chances of success being ‘maybe 25-30 percent’. Bernstein does say that some combination of these alternatives might ‘very likely’ have done the job. And yet, as Bernstein recognizes, his analysis is doubly counterfactual: one cannot know what the divided Japanese war cabinet would have done had the Americans pursued one or several of these courses instead of dropping the bombs, and, more significantly, it is difficult to imagine the Truman administration deciding to depart from the course established by Franklin Roosevelt’s creation of the Manhattan Project in the first place. Why not drop the atomic bombs?63

There were a few men and women, at the time, who remonstrated against what was, after the Nazi genocide, the crucial moral enormity of the war: bombing civilians. The French philosopher Jacques Maritain made the utilitarian argument that attacking cities from the air increased popular anger and resistance and thus, immorally, prolonged the conflict. In March 1944 an obscure American religious magazine called Fellowship ran an article by the English pacifist Vera Brittain condemning urban bombing. Pacifists A. J. Muste and Mohandas Gandhi criticized the atomic bomb as the worst excess of a war they had opposed more generally. But the vast majority, of officials and citizens, military men and civilians, in the United States and everywhere else, had by 1945 undergone a profound eclipse of conscience. They knew that the atomic bombing was by itself unprecedentedly powerful, yet even after the Trinity test they could not imagine destruction and horror beyond what they had already witnessed, and perpetrated. Most did not accept Maritain’s argument that mass bombing would prolong the war; instead they felt, as the air theorists had felt during the 1920s, that by increasing the horror they were shortening the war and therefore finally saving lives. Harry Truman was interested in saving American lives, and believed that by using the bomb he had done so. ‘It was a terrible decision,’ he wrote to his sister Mary. ‘But I made it. And I made it to save 250,000 boys from the United States and I’d make it again under similar circumstances. It stopped the Jap war.’ Six years after the bombing, Truman recalled for an interviewer that he had been told that the population of Hiroshima in 1945 was 60,000—an underestimate of some 200,000—and that he thought it ‘far better to kill 60,000 Japanese than to have 250,000 Americans killed’. ‘No one at the time regarded the bomb’s use as an open question,’ according to Michael Sherry. The atomic bomb may have been ‘a transcendent form of power’, but it would be ‘conceived and used in the familiar ways’. Nor were the Americans alone in imagining without compunction the use of the weapon. ‘Indeed,’ writes Bernstein, ‘it is difficult to believe that any major World War II nation that had the bomb would have chosen not to use it in 1945 against the enemy’ This is surely true. Had the British, Germans, Russians, or Japanese developed the bomb first—and that they did not had nothing to do with any ethical impediment to doing so—they would have dropped it on civilians with no more hesitation than the Americans showed.64

Like his boss, Truman aide George Elsey was interviewed years after the bombs had fallen and the war ended. Elsey understood that Truman had inherited the bomb from Roosevelt, and that the bomb had developed a logic and momentum of its own. ‘Truman made no decision because there was no decision to be made,’ Elsey said. ‘He could no more have stopped it than a train moving down a track. It’s all well and good to come along later and say the bomb was a horrible thing. The whole goddamn war was a horrible thing.’65

[Christopher Sidor]

On a related note to the nuclear bombs being dropped over Imperial Japan, when the soviets over ran the Japanese army in Manchuria they handed over a significant amount of weaponry and other items from Manchuria to CPC and the PLA. This and the latter help provided to PLA would prove decisive in capture of power by CPC. Of Course no matter who would have won in the Chinese civil war after WWII, both of the antagonists would end up doing the same thing, i.e. invade and occupy Tibet. And it would have made no difference to India. We would have faced a war in 1962 or some other year with China then also.

This is a OT but it is important to put it in a historical perspective.

[abhishek_sharma]

Continuing ...

12. The threshold of horror: Poison gas

There remains one (at least) theoretical and historical problem to confront with respect to Elsey’s argument that use of the bomb was foreordained, that it formed not a break but a continuum with the recent past practice of killing civilians from the air. In his June 1945 plea to arrange a non-combat demonstration of the bomb on a deserted island, James Franck pointed out that the American public, apparently, believed there was a threshold of horror beyond which certain weapons ought to be prohibited for use, even against an enemy widely regarded as subhuman. The American people, Franck insisted, drew the line at using poison gas in East Asia. This was true, ‘even though gas warfare is in no way more “inhuman” than the war of bombs and bullets.’ A few military officials and those in charge of the government’s Chemical Warfare Services in fact urged that gas or other chemical or biological agents be used to rout the Japanese from their Pacific island strongholds or against the home islands. Following Iwo Jima, the CWS proposed to the Joint Chiefs the use of chemical weapons on Okinawa, but the matter ended there. The subsequent struggle made several of the generals reconsider. General Joseph W. Stilwell, who had fought the Japanese in China, wanted George Marshall to permit the use of chemicals should it come to an invasion of Japan, and General Douglas MacArthur and Brigadier General William A. Borden both offered qualified support for deploying poison gas. Marshall himself, a decent man who, it may be recalled, had private doubts about dropping atomic bombs, raised the subject on 29 May 1945, with Stimson and Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy. Shaken by the tenacity of Japanese units on Okinawa, the Chief of Staff suggested developing ‘new weapons and tactics’ to overcome the ‘last ditch defense tactics of the Japanese’. Marshall proposed the use of mustard gas, the specter of Ypres in 1917. McCloy was willing to study the proposal, with an eye toward a public growing daily more alarmed at rising American casualties. Stimson could not stomach it. Neither could William Leahy, chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Truman adviser, who pointed out that Roosevelt had made public statements against the use of chemicals that were ‘beyond the probability of change’. There is no evidence that Truman sympathized with one side or the other in this debate; in the event, the United States used no chemical or biological weapons against the Japanese.66

Why not? Why atomic bombs but no mustard gas? There are several reasons. First, the military branches regarded the use of chemical agents as unprofessional, even unsporting, in a way that dropping bombs or firing explosive shells was not. The Navy and Army Air Force especially also believed they might find themselves starved of their preferred weapons and resources should chemicals be authorized for use in island warfare. Institutional rivalry thus to some extent trumped a willingness to fight with absolutely no restraint. Second, and unlike atomic weapons, gas had a history of use in combat, and fairly or not a particularly ugly reputation among both military and civilian constituencies. The world had recoiled in revulsion when gas was used in the First World War; not only was American public opinion unreconciled to its use in 1945 but so was the international community, several of its European members having experienced the release of chemical agents first hand. If not absolute, prohibitions nevertheless existed on the use of gas, while no treaty or arrangements yet governed nuclear weapons. Finally, and most important, the resistance to using gas had much to do with the way in which gas killed. As noted earlier, death from explosion and fragment and fire—from outside in, as it were—was more readily countenanced than death by an insidious agent that might enter the body undetected and then kill from the inside out. Death by gas was a violation of the body, unfair in a way that bombing (bizarrely) was not. The difference was even partly aesthetic, with trauma by explosion held more bearable than an end brought on by slow suffocation. Small comfort, perhaps, but the general abdication of conscience undergone by the world’s citizenry had not altogether eradicated its scruples concerning chemical and biological weapons.67

An odd coda: just after Harry Truman’s final speech to the nation as president in mid-January 1953, Atomic Energy Commissioner Thomas Murray wrote seeking reassurance that Truman did not regard the use of atomic weapons as ‘immoral’. Truman responded: I rather think you have put a wrong construction on my approach to the use of the Atomic bomb. It is far worse than gas and biological warfare because it affects the civilian population and murders them by the wholesale.’68

Carried by an aging and ill-fated cruiser called the Indianapolis, the carefully cosseted core of the world’s first combat atomic bomb had arrived on Tinian on 26 July, the day of the Potsdam Declaration. It was joined to the rest of the bomb assembly on 1 August in an air-conditioned hut. When finished, Little Boy looked like... a bomb. It was 10.5 feet long, 28 inches in diameter, and it weighed approximately 8,900 pounds. Its proximity fuse, set for an altitude of about 1,800 feet, was designed to touch off a small explosion at the rear of the bomb, which would send a uranium bullet hurtling toward the bomb’s nose. There it would collide with a ‘cap’ of fraternal U-235. If all went as planned, that would ignite an atomic explosion that would destroy the center of Hiroshima and transform the world.69

[Pratyush]

Armageddon 2

US-Russian, plan to protect the earth from Asteroid strikes.



A nube questions to any Physics gurus, who know about nuke explosions. Is it possible to build a nuke shaped charge. For civil engineering works. I am thinking non weaponised PNE.

[abhishek_sharma]

Continuing ...

At least equally crucial in determining Tokyo’s position toward Allied surrender terms was the attitude of Emperor Hirohito. In the years following the end of the Pacific War, Americans and Japanese together promoted the useful fiction that Hirohito had never been more than a figurehead, a symbol of transcendent greatness to which the Japanese people might rally, but someone detached from the messy and controversial details of day-to-day decisionmaking. The fiction of imperial detachment was useful to Hirohito himself and to his advisers, who naturally wished to keep the Emperor free of stain from the failed war and preserve his reputation and influence once the conflict had ended. It was useful as well to General Douglas MacArthur and other architects of the American occupation of Japan, because the Emperor offered a stable (and conservative) touchstone for Japanese society, and not incidentally a powerful, anti-communist presence in Japanese politics after 1945. The historian Herbert Bix has in recent years forcefully corrected the impression of Hirohito as a passive monarch. In fact, argues Bix, the Emperor was energetically engaged in wartime policymaking. Hirohito ‘gradually became a real war leader,’ writes Bix, ‘influencing the planning, strategy, and conduct of operations in China and participating in the appointment and promotion of the highest generals and admirals.’ He was aware of the situation on the battlefield and, guided by his leading adviser, Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal Marquis Koichi Kido, made vital interventions in policy decisions at the top level, including those involving the termination of the war. Hirohito was neither prime minister nor commander-in-chief. But he did make the decision to go to war with the United States by attacking Pearl Harbor in later 1941, and on the day itself Hirohito dressed in his naval uniform and, according to Bix, ‘seemed to be in a splendid mood’.7

Even after touring his ravaged capital following the American incendiary attack of 9-10 March 1945, Hirohito seems to have believed that his people’s morale was holding up and that a final battle for the homeland was a reasonable prospect. His falling-out with Prime Minster Koiso and his choice of Suzuki to replace him reflected a desire to fight on; as he took office, Suzuki told an interviewer that he remained confident of victory. But by June the tide had shifted. Defeat on Okinawa, no matter how costly to the Americans, was a devastating blow to the leadership. Even before its magnitude became clear, the unconditional surrender of Japan’s German ally had dampened spirits considerably. Along with leaving Japan to face the United States alone, it also raised the distressing possibility that the Soviet Union would abrogate its April 1941 Neutrality Pact with Japan, even though it had another year to run. Several Japanese leaders suspected that the Soviets had agreed, at Yalta in February, to enter the war against Japan in exchange for Asian territorial concessions made by Roosevelt and Churchill. (They were right.) On 5 April the Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, called in the Japanese ambassador to Moscow, Naotake Sato, and informed him that the Soviet Union was renouncing the Neutrality Pact. The situation had changed since 1941, Molotov declared: Russia was now allied with the United States and Britain, against whom the Japanese were fighting. Sato remonstrated, to the extent of getting Molotov to agree, with great reluctance, that the Pact would remain in force through the end of its term in 1946. This concession would require what Stalin called ‘strategic deception’, since the Soviets were already mobilizing to attack Japanese forces in China.8

The Soviet decision to abandon the Neutrality Pact, in a year’s time or immediately, came as a blow to the Japanese leadership’s wishful thinkers, who had previously imagined that their nation could, by concentrating solely on defending the home islands against the Americans, wear the enemy down and win improved surrender terms. Soviet involvement against them meant disaster. The new situation encouraged the quickening of’peace feelers’ undertaken by an assortment of Japanese officials in a variety of European capitals. (Since the Americans had cracked Japanese codes and the Japanese knew it, ‘secret’ discussions with European diplomats were intended for American ears.) Foreign Minister Togo directed Ambassador Sato to try to persuade the Russians to stay out of the war, then went behind Sato’s back to instigate private discussions between the Soviet ambassador in Tokyo Iakov Malik and former prime minister Koki Hirota, with an eye toward possible Soviet mediation. Japanese representatives in Stockholm, Bern, and at the Vatican attempted to pursue with diplomatic counterparts the definition of unconditional surrender. None of these efforts bore fruit. Stalin was by now bent on war with Japan as soon as his armies were ready and satisfactory arrangements made with the Chinese. The multi-splendored peace feelers spread throughout Western Europe were never authorized by the cabinet or the Emperor and were renounced when discovered.9

The ‘peace faction’ did assert itself more and more as summer arrived. Talks with the Russians grew frantic; even as Stalin, through Molotov, put Sato off, the Emperor himself decided that Soviet mediation was essential and dispatched to Moscow Fumimaro Konoe, the respected former prime minister whose advisers and friends had been drafting position papers calling for significant Japanese concessions. By late June, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa has written, Japan had reached ‘the crucial moment when Hirohito became actively involved in the effort to terminate the war’. The Emperor was deeply worried about the preservation of the ‘national polity’, or kokutai, meaning largely his own position in postwar Japan. The nation experienced a flurry of acts of Ièse majesté, ongoing since the beginning of the war but increasingly troubling to the authorities by 1945. A Home Ministry report noted then that ‘antiwar thoughts and feelings finally have come to the point where they even curse and bear resentment against His Majesty’. Hirohito was derided, in letters, comments, and graffiti, as a ‘fool’ (baka), ‘stupid fool’ (bakayaro), and ‘big stupid fool’ (daibakayaro), or even ‘Little Emperor’. When Hirohito toured Tokyo following the first great B-29 raid in March, he claimed to find no diminution of popular morale. But an aide had noticed that the vacant expressions of those picking through the rubble ‘became reproachful as the imperial motorcade went by. . . Were they resentful of the emperor because they had lost their relatives, their houses and their belongings?’ That he felt compelled to ask the question was itself significant.10

And yet, despite a certain degree of realism about Japan’s situation, a growing understanding that the Soviets were no friends and the Americans unyielding in their demand for unconditional surrender, the cabinet, as a group, would not let go its insistence on negotiating terms for the nation’s capitulation. While Hirohito (in mid-June), his advisers, and key members of the cabinet sought Soviet help to bring the war to an end, they were not prepared during June and July to accept the American conditions for doing so. From Moscow, Sato, ever the realist, implored his superiors ‘to make the great decision’ to surrender unconditionally. ‘If the Japanese Empire is really faced with the necessity of terminating the war,’ he wrote to Togo on 12 July, ‘we must first of all make up our own minds to terminate the war.’ I send this telegram,’ Sato finished, ‘in the belief that [it] is my first responsibility to prevent the harboring of illusions which are at variance with reality.’ Togo replied five days later. After reminding Sato that the Emperor himself sought Soviet mediation, he added: ‘Please bear particularly in mind, however, that we are not seeking the Russians’ mediation for anything like an unconditional surrender,’ which remained unacceptable. Indeed, not even the ‘peace faction’ could agree on what concessions to make. Sato wrote back on the 19th, charging that officials in Tokyo were ‘out of touch with the atmosphere prevailing here’. Nevertheless, Togo responded on the 21st: ‘With regard to unconditional surrender we are unable to consent to it under any circumstances whatever. Even if the war drags on and it becomes clear that it will take much more than bloodshed, the whole country as one man will pit itself against the enemy in accordance with the Imperial Will.’ The Americans read these exchanges. President Truman, meanwhile, was now at Potsdam, and he had learned on 16 July that the atomic bomb had been successfully tested.11

[Vayutuvan]

A nube questions to any Physics gurus, who know about nuke explosions. Is it possible to build a nuke
shaped charge. For civil engineering works. I am thinking non weaponised PNE.

Not a fizzicyst - so I have yet another more basic question. Assuming that PNEs can be used for Civil Engineering, what would one do with the radiation poisoning and such? If the answer is "not much - one has to live (or rather die) with it" then PNEs are DOA.

[Pratyush]

Hmm...

I had not thought of this aspect. When I asking this question. Let's modify the question, can a Nuke shaped charge be designed as a weapon?


Edited later, from wiki, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaped_cha ... ed_charges

A requirement for the Project Orion nuclear propulsion system, the design (and testing) of nuclear shaped charges is still unknown. However, there seems little doubt that nuclear shaped charges[54] have existed at least since the late 1950s and by 1961 bomb design[55] had reached the point where the yield could be collimated within a cone of 22.5 degrees.

[abhishek_sharma]

Continuing ...

3. Preparing to drop Little Boy

The nuclear element of the bomb came into the hands of the 393rd Bombardment Squadron, the business end of the 509th Composite Group, which included support personnel for the 393rd’s pilots. The 509th had been constituted the previous October at Wendover Field, Utah, on the edge of the great salt flats that had long discouraged travelers to the American west but now provided a practice range for the unit’s fliers. The group was commanded by Paul W. Tibbets, a 29-year-old lieutenant colonel who had extensive experience as a bomber pilot in Europe. When given his command, Tibbets had been told about the Manhattan Project, the offspring of which might win the war. He would be given the best pilots and crews, the new, state-of-the-art B-29 bomber (which would arrive in Utah that December), and access to whatever resources he needed to make his group work, though he was not to tell his men what kind of weapon they would be carrying. Tibbets would build the 509th to a strength of 1,800, 117 of whom were formed into thirteen B-29 crews and trained, unwittingly, to drop atomic bombs. They practiced over Utah, Nevada, and California through the winter of 1944-5. In clear daylight, they flew to 30,000 feet, took aim at circular targets inscribed for them on the desert floor or at a white raft in California’s Salton Sea, and released monstrously heavy bombs made of concrete and with high explosives lodged in their noses. These were painted orange and thus christened ‘pumpkins’. Tibbets instructed his men to turn sharply, at 155 degrees, just after they had released their pumpkins, and to fly away quickly once they had made their drops. In their off hours men blew off steam over the border in Nevada casinos, but they were closely monitored by security police. No one was to talk about what they were doing or the size or shape of the pumpkins. Transgressors were banished to a base in the Aleutian Islands for the rest of the war.17

Through the spring, as firebombs devastated Tokyo and officials chose other Japanese cities to be spared temporarily for subsequent atomic bombings, Tibbets continued to drill his fliers. He sent a group to Batista Field in Cuba, whence they practiced carrying heavy loads for distance over water, dropping 10,000-pound bombs accurately from high altitude, then returning to base with a limited supply of fuel. Tinian’s airbase, already home to B-29S flying missions over Japan, began receiving elements of the 509th late in the spring; Tibbets and his pilots and crews arrived on 15 June. There they practiced some more, dropping pumpkins on Japanese targets in the Marianas and Carolines through mid-July, then dropping the bombs on cities in Japan starting on the 19th. Curtis LeMay himself approved each mission; Tibbets was withheld from all of them. (The 393rd ultimately conducted thirteen pumpkin attacks on Japan, with the final mission numbered 14, reserving lucky 13 for Hiroshima.) Command hoped not only to prepare its crews for the a-bomb runs, but to lull the Japanese into thinking that attacks by single B-29S failed to amount to much and were hardly worth opposing. ‘The pumpkins were respectable bombs,’ recalled an engineer for the 509th, though not worth Japan’s trouble of sending up scarce fighter planes or even sounding citywide alarms. Apart from these raids, 509th crews appeared mostly to sit in their mysteriously well-guarded compound while men in other units took on duties far more frequently and at greater risk. The 509th huts were thus on the receiving end of rocks tossed resentfully over the barbed-wire perimeter. The men grinned and bore it and even named their well-used movie theater ‘The Pumpkin Playhouse’. They still did not know why they were there.18

They finished assembling Little Boy on the last day of July. Brigadier General Thomas Farrell, on Tinian as Groves’s deputy, wired his boss that the bomb could be dropped as early as the next day. But the weather looked bad, and there was a bit more to do. On 2 August, Tibbets, with his bombardier Thomas Ferebee, met LeMay at the general’s headquarters on Guam. LeMay confirmed what they had long discussed: Little Boy’s target was Hiroshima, a southern port city on Japan’s Inland Sea. LeMay had a recent reconnaissance map of the city, and he asked Ferebee to choose an aiming point. Ferebee quickly spotted the Aioi Bridge, a distinctive T-shaped structure that spanned the ta River close to the center of the city; the others approved. Seven B-29S would take part in the mission: three would fly ahead, over Hiroshima and the alternative targets of Kokura and Nagasaki (the latter a fresh addition to the targets’ list), to check on the weather; another would be flown to Iwo Jima, where it would serve as a backup carrier for Little Boy if something went wrong with the bomb-bearing plane in flight; and two more—Charles Sweeney’s Great Artiste and George Marquardt’s prosaically named No. 91—would accompany the atomic bomber, carrying blast measurement instruments and cameras respectively. The seventh B-29 would be piloted by Tibbets himself. It had never been named.

Back on Tinian on Saturday 4 August, Tibbets summoned the crews of the mission bombers to the unit’s briefing hut. He had two officers pull aside drapes to reveal blackboard-mounted maps of the three target cities. He then stepped aside for William ‘Deke’ Parsons, head of the Manhattan Project’s Ordnance Division, who was instrumental in developing the uranium gun at the heart of Little Boy and who would arm the bomb on mission day and fly with Tibbets. Parsons had brought with him a film clip of the Trinity test and started to screen it for the men, but the projector jammed irretrievably—whereupon Parsons described the blast from memory. He never used the words ‘atomic’ or ‘nuclear’, but he warned the pilots against straying too close to the mushroom cloud the anticipated explosion would generate. They could not know for certain what would happen, Parsons concluded, but the consequences of a successful drop were likely to be enormous. Tibbets then finished the session with reminders about routes and timings and reassurances concerning rescue should any of the planes be forced down over water. He told the crewmen not to say anything about the mission, in letters home or on base. He ended with a pep talk—and the declaration that the bomb ‘would shorten the war by at least six months’. Thus sobered, and encouraged, the men shuffled off to contemplate their course. Tibbets then took his crew for a final rehearsal over Tinian. He flew straight and level and Ferebee released a pumpkin over the sea. It all checked out.

[abhishek_sharma]

From ^^

4. Mission No. 13

On the following day, having scanned the weather forecast, LeMay gave the word: the mission was on for the 6th. Little Boy was taken from the 509’s air-conditioned assembly hut and pulled gently, by a tractor, to a pit on the runway. Several of the men had written messages on the bomb with crayons. Some were obscene missives for the Japanese, but Major John E. Moynihan, the public-relations officer for the mission, wrote, ‘No white cross for Stevie’—his young son at home. The bomb was loaded into the pit, and the annointed bomber, No. 82, was towed over it. The bomb was winched into the plane’s forward bomb bay and secured with a central shackle and several braces. The loading went smoothly. Meanwhile, Tibbets had decided his plane needed a name. He summoned from a base Softball game a sign painter and instructed that ‘Enola Gay’, his mother’s first and middle names, be painted on the fuselage.

...

The plan called for Deke Parsons to ready the bomb while the plane remained on the ground, inserting into its rear end the explosive and the detonator that, once activated, would fire it off, sending the uranium bullet home. Parsons had wanted to perform this operation once the plane was in flight, but Groves, worried about turbulence and the tiny space in which Parsons would have to work, said no. Parsons had accepted the verdict—until he saw the alarming rate at which B-29S taking off from Tinian’s Runway A, the one to be used by the Enola Gay, had crashed short of liftoff. A crash with a nuclear bomb on board might obliterate Tinian. Now he confided in Farrell: he would do the final bit of assembly only after the plane was airborne. Farrell cautiously consented, and Parsons folded himself into the tiny space behind Little Boy and practiced inserting the charge until his hands bled.

...

...

Photographs were taken of the Enola Gay’s crew, after which they climbed into their plane. The men all had pistols, and Tibbets secretly carried a metal box holding twelve cyanide capsules; if the plane went down over Japan, any crewman left alive would choose suicide by self-inflicted bullet or self-administered poison. ‘Let’s go,’ said Tibbets at 2.45, and he throttled his plane forward. It was heavy, some 15,000 pounds over spec with its weighty bomb and extra fuel, and Tibbets badly frightened co-pilot Lewis by using nearly all of Runway A to gain speed. At what seemed the last second Tibbets lifted the plane’s nose, and the Enola Gay rose over the night sea, flying northwest at low altitude to save fuel and ease the task of Parsons, squatting behind the bomb in the unpressurized bomb bay.

Parsons inserted cordite charges into Little Boy’s back end, but he left a key circuit undone so the bomb was not yet armed. Tibbets tried to sleep, failed, and chose instead to disclose at last the full truth about their payload. The sky grew lighter, indicating fair weather ahead. Just before 6.00 (5.00 in Japan) they reached Iwo Jima, where Tibbets climbed to 9,000 feet and rendezvoused with the Great Artiste and No. 91, the instrument and photo planes. Parsons and his fellow weaponeer Morris Jeppson finished arming the bomb. ‘It won’t be long now,’ said Tibbets over the intercom. The Straight Flush, the B-29 that overflew Hiroshima, sent word that the skies over the primary target were largely clear, so Tibbets committed to his course and brought his plane to bombing altitude, 31,000 feet. The crew, though not their pilots, put on flak suits, and all drew on smoked-glass goggles to protect their eyes from they knew not what. Bombardier Ferebee spotted the target and took charge of the Enola Gay’s course for the bombing run. The other two planes slowed and let the Enola Gay run to the target alone. Ferebee saw the Aioi Bridge. ‘I’ve got it,’ he called. Then, just after 8.15 Hiroshima time, the bomb-bay doors opened and the bomb tumbled out. Ferebee later said he could see it turn its nose to the ground, as it was supposed to. Free of its load, the Enola Gay leaped up. Tibbets’s months of training took over, and he dived and sheared off, speeding frantically away from the blast area. The bomb’s proximity fuse was set for roughly 1,850 feet above the ground, which meant that the bomb should explode 43 seconds after it had left the bomb bay. Jeppson was counting it down. He got to 43—nothing. ‘It’s a dud,’ he thought. Then an intense light lit the plane, followed by a powerful jolt. It felt, recalled the navigator, Dutch Van Kirk, as though he had been sitting on a metal garbage can that someone had hit with a baseball bat. Tibbets first thought it was flak. Then came a second blast wave, and the pilot calmed down; he knew what it was, and that there would be no more.

[dinesha]

Nuclear effects of Agni-V
-By Bharat karnad
newindianexpress.com/opinion/Nuclear-effects-of-Agni-V/2013/10/04/article1817217.ece

The Advanced Systems Laboratory (ASL), Hyderabad, along with the other project in mission-mode, Advanced Technology Vehicle (the nuclear-powered ballistic missile-firing Arihant submarine, SSBN), are the two jewels in the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) crown. Under high-class chiefs R N Agarwal, Avinash Chander (recently promoted to head DRDO), and now G K Sekharan, ASL has rescued DRDO’s reputation, of course. But it has, with the second launch of the Agni-V intermediate range ballistic missile on September 16, also saved the credibility of India’s strategic deterrent with thermonuclear pretensions from being completely eroded.

But, first, why is India’s claim to thermonuclear status mere pretence? Well, because, Dr R Chidambaram, the one-time chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and, for the last decade, adviser on science and technology to the PM, despite being a scientist doesn’t believe in collecting empirical data! Along with strategic enclave stalwarts like the late K Subrahmanyam and the school of thought the latter spawned, he urged the Narasimha Rao government in the mid-90s, for instance, to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, arguing that the data collected from the single 1974 8-12 kiloton (KT) nuclear test was quite enough for the country to have an adequate deterrent and that India need never test again.

After the BJP government ordered the 1998 Shakti-series of nuclear tests anyway, and consistent with his previous advocacy, Chidambaram averred that the obvious malfunctioning of the thermonuclear weapon design tested in 1998 notwithstanding, India can rectify the flawed design and even update the weapons inventory by simply using computer simulation. By this standard, the Indian Air Force ought to operate combat aircraft entirely computer designed but never test-flown, and the army to induct an artillery piece that came out of a computer-assisted design shop but not test-fired. His unexplained and incomprehensible antipathy to nuclear testing has made a mockery of the country’s strategic wherewithal. On this issue, however, it is difficult to know where Chidambaram’s counsel ends and prime minister Manmohan Singh’s inclination to stick with the “no testing” central predicate of the nuclear deal with the US, begins.

Consider this: China has conducted over 80 tests to India’s six tests in all. It has advanced technology such as inertial confinement fusion (to replicate thermonuclear explosions in miniature) and a Dual-Axis Radiographic Hydrodynamic Testing facility (to simulate and study the implosion of an atom bomb triggering the combustion of the thermonuclear fuel), which India lacks. Chinese computing speeds will reach some 100 petaflops (million-billion functions per second) by 2015 while Indian super computers at present are at the 250 terraflop (trillion functions per second) level. With all these advantages, China has embarked on a new round of nuclear arsenal modernisation and US weapons designers have warned that without new tests the performance of American nuclear arms cannot be guaranteed. New Delhi, in contrast, has all but sworn off nuclear testing, whence its boast of the Indian deterrent featuring high-yield thermonuclear weapons in the 125KT-275KT categories risks an enemy calling India’s bluff and borders on foolhardiness. So, that’s the problem: An Indian 275KT fusion bomb may, by fluke, reach the full yield or, as is more likely, produce yields anywhere between the high figure and the fission trigger level of 20KT! It’s this appalling uncertainty about the effects of the Indian thermonuclear weapons that’s created a real operational dilemma for the Strategic Forces Command.

The ASL retrieved this intolerable deterrence situation somewhat with the accurate, lightweight, Agni-V missile. This Agni will eventually be all-composite, including the casing and rocket motors made of Kevlar-carbon-carbon, Guidance on Chip for terminal accuracy, and distributed communications nodes through the length of the missile to minimise wiring. As the two tests of this missile have proved, using the Russian Glonass GPS and the on-board inertial guidance system and ring laser gyroscope, 15-20 meter CEP (circular error probable — a measure of accuracy) at 5,500km range has been achieved. Moreover, armed with 4-8 MIRV (Multiple Independently-targetable Re-entry Vehicles) warheads — a technology permitting a single missile to carry multiple bombs for dispersed targeting that has been a “screwdriver’s turn away” from being test-ready but whose testing has not been approved by Manmohan Singh, the Agni-V range can be extended to intercontinental distances.

In any case, even before this precision targeting capability was proved, official strategists trying to justify the test-moratorium began claiming that Agni missiles with single or MIRVed 20KT fission warheads will be just as daunting for any adversary, and that the strategic credibility and clout of India’s deterrent is, therefore, not in doubt. MIRVed Agni missiles do afford the strategic forces certainty of impact and versatility but 20KT warheads are not prime dissuaders.

Missile accuracy at extreme range is fine but it is only the high-yield, preferably, high-yield thermonuclear armaments that really matter. The sheer scale of destruction promised by a single incoming megaton (MT)-warheaded missile can be guaranteed to induce the worst sort of dread in, and impose immense psychological stress and pressure on, the adversary state’s leadership, something the relatively small yield 20KT bomb simply cannot do. In any test of wills, the country armed with the 20KT weapons will fold before a state with MT weapons, call off the confrontation and, whatever is at stake, accept a compromise on the former’s terms.

Then again, the Indian government has little understanding of conventional and, even less, nuclear deterrence when dealing with a powerful foe. In fact, India is so self-damagingly Pakistan-fixated on both counts it does not see the folly of training strategic weapons on a tactical-level threat. India is also an exception to the rule of nuclear weapons states nursing high-yield fusion arsenals. The standard issue warheads for the long range Dong Feng missiles being one megaton or 3.3MT, China can deter America. Weak-kneed Indian governments have not shown the gumption to resume thermonuclear testing to obtain a host of safe, proven, and reliable fusion weapons including the MT type to deter China.

[sivab]

Tessy Thomas ... The latest in the series Agni IV and V was totally a technical challenge but however, having successfully developed it, the country has been established as a technologically advanced nation now. This progress was evident, she said, as no other country has achieved the single digit pin point accuracy that India has achieved.

http://newindianexpress.com/cities/koch ... 812412.ece

Ms. Thomas, Project Director of the 4,000-km-range Agni-IV and Project Director (Mission) of Agni-V, said both missiles saw the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) attain great breakthroughs in missile technology. Agni-V, test-fired with “pinpoint, single-digit accuracy,” was important in the global scenario, obliquely referring to the ICBM range of the nuclear-capable missile.

http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp ... 191824.ece

[ramana]

The Manorama Week

R. Prasanan:

Long and Short of Missiles


I wish he called MMS by fullname its not like MMS is his jigir yaar.

Long and short of Missiles:
R. Prasanan

I had written in this column a fortnight ago that the Nuclear Command Authority, headed by the PM, won't have short-range or tactical nuclear missiles. Several readers have since asked me, why not? Especially when Pakistan is inducting tac-nukes in dozens and naming them after men who invaded India—Ghaznavi, Ghauri, Abdali and so on.

Our nuclear weapons are of longer range: Agni missiles with 2,000km and more, and bombs that can be dropped by Sukhoi planes that can fly 3,000km and more. These weapons are not at the disposal of the generals. Their use has to be authorised by the PM—he keeps the key.

We have a no-first-use policy, spelt out by A.B. Vajpayee and followed by Manmohan and by all the PMs in the foreseeable future. Pakistan does not have such qualms. They will launch their nukes, even if an enemy attacks them with Bofors guns, T-90 tanks, swords or slings (not drones). For that they need short-range missiles, 80km upwards, which can be used in the battlefield. India's nuclear weapons are meant only for retaliation, after being nuked. The question is: would we be alive to hit back?

Those in the know tell me that they have done the needful to save the NCA, including the PM, from a first strike by the enemy. Don't ask how; they won't tell.

Not only the PM and the NCA, but our missiles and bombs also have to survive a first strike. They got to be kept in places beyond the range of enemy missiles, or kept hidden. So we are building missiles that can be stored in silos, are road-and-rail-mobile, can fly 5,000-plus km to hit enemy targets, and can be kept hidden in nuclear-powered submarines. We believe these will survive a first strike by the enemy and will be there to hit him back. The idea, experts say, is to have half of the bombs on submarine-based missiles, 40 per cent of them on land-launched missiles, and 10 per cent as plane-dropped bombs.

Our first nuclear-powered submarine Arihant, which Manmohan's wife, Gursharan Kaur, launched in 2009, will soon be nuclear-armed. Arihant's sister-ship is getting ready. Meanwhile, we have borrowed a Russian nuclear-powered sub, without arms, to learn the complex drills involved in its operation. Manmohan is learnt to have asked Putin, when he met him a few days ago in the Kremlin, if he could lend a second one, for another crew to train.

Our battlefield missiles, non-nuclear, are the 150-km Prithvi and 290-km BrahMos. Prithvi is ballistic—flies like a bolt that can't be controlled after it leaves the bow. BrahMos, jointly developed with the Russians, is a cruise missile. It flies like a plane, following an undulating trajectory it is ‘told' to follow.

The 15-year BrahMos joint venture with the Russians, ending this year, is being renewed indefinitely. The PM's outing last week had a heavy military overhang. Couldn't be avoided. He was visiting a country which supplies most of the arms, and another which is the target of most of those arms.

The Chinese, who were told by Mao that power flows from the barrel of a gun, listen when we negotiate from strength. PM's security aide Shiv Shankar Menon says that the maximum work on strengthening the northern borders was done in the last decade. No wonder the Chinese exited Depsang Valley in three weeks, and have signed a border military agreement.

TAILPIECE: Pakistan has got both its history and territory mixed up. Ghaznavi, Ghauri and Abdali were Afghan kings who invaded not only the territory that is today called India, but also the territory that is today called Pakistan. Who knows, Pakistan may soon have missiles called Sikander or Bobby Clive.

Forget it; what's in a name? As Juliet didn't tell Romeo in the Shakespeare play, a bomb by any other name would kill as many.

prasannan@the-week.com

Not very professional but then he has the data. Others dont.

[Supratik]

If 50% of NW are to be kept in submarines, the overall numbers are low. Is it sufficient to counter China?

[sivab]

http://www.eurasiareview.com/02122013-i ... -analysis/

India-Pakistan And Tactical Nuclear Weapons: A Step Closer To The Abyss – Analysis

By Vice Admiral (retd) Vijay Shankar

The Futility of TNWs

In March 2013 a workshop was conducted under the aegis of the Naval Post Graduate School Monterey. It sought to examine the escalation dynamics in a South Asian crisis under a nuclear overhang. A scrutiny of the scenario suggested that a vertical escalatory spiral was central to the paradigm and therefore intrinsic to its anatomy was an inexorable traction to extremes. First blood had been drawn by a Pakistan State sponsored terror attack, it targeted leadership at a very large public gathering leading to extensive casualties; in most strategic lexicons this is an act of war. The demands of the Indian side, unfortunately, were given short shrift. Had some movement been made towards apprehending and handing over the terrorists, the situation could have been defused.

Accordingly, a swift punitive military thrust was launched by Indian forces across the LOC and a Maritime Exclusion Zone was decreed. Forces primarily used were the less intrusive Air and Sea arms. This in turn escalated to action that was not restricted to the LOC. The introduction of tactical nuclear weapons (TNWs) into the battle area attained inevitability. To Indian Leadership the question posed was how would offensive Indian forces respond? In the event a deliberate decision was made to search out and strike the nuclear tipped Nasr batteries as with other tactical artillery pieces without discrimination; and should a nuclear Nasr launch occur on Indian Forces it would be regarded as a First Strike and India would reserve the right to launch massive retaliatory strikes to the dictates of her Nuclear Doctrine. The adversary balked from deploying TNWs.

What is it All About? The Essence of Stability

Marshall Ferdinand Foch, one of the lesser of the meat grinding generals of the First World War when faced with the bewildering nature of the larger strategic situation is said to have countered with a fundamental question, De quoi s’agit-il? – What is it all about? Indeed this poser if understood and answered in the context of nuclear stability would bring us to the complexities that face nations with the coming of a weapon that can obliterate the very purpose of warfare; in the circumstance the separation of the conventional from the nuclear is a logical severance. A major divergence from the Two-Bloc-Nuclear-Face-Off of the past is nuclear multilateralism. In this altered plurality the true enemy is the dynamic that rocks the equilibrium.

The essence of stability is to find agreement on three foundational truths. Firstly, technology, while it provides for modernization it invites covertness whereas its impact demands transparency. Secondly, that the army in Pakistan is the real power centre, and therefore for India to engage an enfeebled civilian leadership is self defeating. Thirdly, TNWs make for a dangerously unconvincing deterrent correlation.

Why would a nation turn its back on the prudence of the past six decades and deliberately reduce the nuclear threshold through the introduction of TNWs and in a situation of mortal internal collapse, invite the increasing probability of the breakdown of nuclear deterrence? After all it was the Pak foreign Minister Mr. Aga Shahi in dialogue with the American Secretary of State in 1979 who suggested that the “value of nuclear weapons lies in its possession and not in its use”. TNWs are marked by several features that prop up the illusion of control and the misguided belief that the adversary would, for some reason, abjure the opportunity to escalate response. Its deployment will attract pre emptive suppressive action and doctrine for employment follows conventional field axioms with the risk of accidental, unauthorized or mistaken use. It therefore promotes only one cause and that is the Pakistani military establishment’s hold on that hapless state. Recognizing the politics of the South Asian region and the emasculated nature of civilian leadership in Pakistan; the dangers of adding nuclear violence to military perfidy, as recent proliferatory history and Jihadist terror acts have shown, is more than just a reality.
The NATO Paradigm

Pakistan in defense of TNWs often cites the NATO analogy . However, by the 1980s NATO was doctrinally imbued with the idea of the irrelevance of nuclear weapons against less than existential threats. With this conviction, both Britain and France perceived the use of nuclear weapons (of any yield) as a failure of deterrence and therefore not a realistic alternative to conventional forces. Employment of TNWs through the doctrine of ‘flexible response’ did not provide the lever to control the escalatory ladder. The strategy, even in concept lacked conviction for limited nuclear war is a contradiction in terms.

The Burden of God’s Gift

The South Asian nuclear imbroglio is evolving under circumstances that are unique. A shared antagonistic history; geographic contiguity; a political and structural contradiction between a centralized de facto military leadership and a democratic dispensation; a yawning economic gap; and, awkwardly a self ordained military that (mis)perceives in antagonism an existential peril and a reason for self perpetuation. India also views the complicity of China in the Pakistan nuclear weapons programme as suggestive of doctrinal links that permit a ‘Janus’ faced approach to the latter’s no first use posture.

Pakistan contends that the articulation of a nuclear doctrine is unnecessary for the purpose of establishing deterrence. Unfortunately, a nation that announced its nuclear weapon status and views it as “God’s gift” must also realize that a deterrent relationship is essentially about mutual knowledge of purpose. Ambiguities, deception and carousing with non state actors can only serve to obfuscate.

The Challenge: Contending with Pakistan’s Perspective

The impending introduction of a sea-based deterrent into the Indian arsenal, rather than being seen as an element of stability that will enhance credibility of the second strike, is perceived through a curious logic as an asymmetric trend that somehow adversely impacts crisis stability. Given the opacity of Pakistan’s strategic nuclear underpinnings, descent to TNWs and duplicity of policies, it has become increasingly prickly for India to either understand nuclear thinking in Islamabad or to find coherence between a mania for parity, the rush for stockpiling fissile material and the loosening of controls over nuclear weapons.

More puzzling is the strategic notion that the perceived conventional imbalance between the two countries may be countered by Pakistan exercising one of two options: firstly, secure an assured second-strike capability; secondly, place the arsenal on ‘hair trigger alert’ and then the argument goes, introduce TNWs as “another layer of deterrence” designed to apply brakes on India’s military doctrine of Cold Start (ala NATO’s discredited formulation). As Feroz Khan posits, “Pakistan’s flight-testing of the short-range, nuclear-capable rocket system Hatf-9 (Nasr), was introduced to add ‘deterrence value’ to Pakistan’s force posture.” The author in a bizarre contradictory temper adds “due to the proximity of targets, short flight times and the technical challenges of assuring information accuracy, the likelihood of inadvertence is high.” He further holds that “…central command and control will become untenable and the ‘Nasr’ with its marked footprint will attract punishing pre-emptive conventional attack. Thus, battlefield nuclear weapons such as Hatf-9 will pose a ‘use it or lose it’ choice, precipitating a nuclear exchange that may not be intended.” The unbiased political examiner is left bewildered that if such be the imbalances in the power matrix, then why does Pakistan not seek rapprochement as a priority of their military, economic and political policies? The answer perhaps lies in asking, “Who stands to gain in this power play?”

Conclusion: the Quest for a Response

Pakistan espouses an opaque deterrent under military control steered by a doctrine obscure in form, seeped in ambiguity and guided by a military strategy that finds unity with non-state actors. The introduction of TNWs exacerbates credibility of control. It does not take a great deal of intellectual exertions to declare whose case lowering of the nuclear threshold promotes. Two options present themselves to the Indian planner; firstly to generate specialised forces that continuously track and mark TNWs and incorporates an airborne conventional capability to neutralise them. The second option is a soft one that aims at dispelling the veil of opacity that surrounds the nuclear deterrent. What may have impact is a combination of the two.

Nietzsche astutely warned that “And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee”. Thus far nuclear relations in the region have been bedeviled by a persistent effort to combat the monsters that the shroud of covertness has cast; it has left us the unenviable task of out staring an abyss. Nietzsche in the circumstance would have advised an assault on the first causes – dispel opacity and engage the military through dialogue and from a position of total preparedness.

Vice Admiral (retd) Vijay Shankar
Former Commander-in-Chief, Strategic Forces Command of India & Distinguished Fellow, IPCS

[abhishek_sharma]

Nukes of Hazard:Eric Schlosser’s “Command and Control.”

[shiv]

Words of wisdom for any new government that takes over from the dead duck government that is currntly not running anything at all in India
http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp ... 603882.ece
A mismatch of nuclear doctrines
Raja Menon

Manufacturing a nuclear weapon does not, as a senior Indian Minister in 1998 claimed, create credible deterrence. Deterrence is entirely a matter of perceptions, a mental effect that is created on the adversary that nuclear use will entail assured retaliatory holocaust. The possibility of nuclear use is thereby pre-empted. The Indian nuclear doctrine, in that sense, is well articulated — on paper. Since 1998, more than 15 years have passed and in the Indian sub-continent, nuclear arsenals have grown far beyond the small nuclear ambitions that were articulated then. Yet there is an increasing fund of world literature being published, pointing to structural and operational weaknesses in the Indian nuclear arsenal. The question is not whether India has built enough nuclear bombs. Hardly anyone questions this basic fact, but the ideational systems that will ensure the ‘massive’ retaliation promised in the doctrine are being increasingly questioned by scholars and analysts worldwide. Pakistani observers cannot help but be swayed and dangerously influenced by such literature, thereby inducing them to think the unthinkable. What does not help in encouraging sober thinking is the fact that since the end of the Second World War, South Asia has seen the largest number of shooting wars in the world. So the questions of nuclear use will not arise in the quiet peace of neighbourly relations, but in the stress of combat over the Line of Control or the international border.

The 1998 test

Critics of the credibility of India’s nuclear arsenal begin with their doubts on the success of the thermo-nuclear test of 1998, which they claim was a ‘fizzle.’ There has been much toing-and-froing in technical journals, of the veracity, accuracy and interpretation of seismic readings. There has also been an occasional closed door briefing by select bomb makers — but surprisingly there has not been, to date, a clear unambiguous public statement from the right source about the country’s thermo-nuclear capacity being fielded in India’s nuclear arsenal. This is a matter of some negligence, considering that the only members of the scientific community who have spoken on this issue are deeply sceptical of the success of the thermo-nuclear test.

The command and control of nuclear forces are another area of criticism, and not surprisingly so, since India is the only nuclear weapon country without a Chief of Defence Staff to act as the interface between the Prime Minister, the National Command Authority and the military who ‘own’ the weapons — at least most of it. In the guise of safety, India’s nuclear weapons are not only ‘de-mated’ and the core and ignition device separated from the warhead, but the separate components are under different departmental control. The actual reason for this bizarre arrangement is quite obvious. There is a petty turf war, and neither the Department of Atomic Energy nor the DRDO is willing to let go of the controlling part of the bomb, even if it means a cumbersome and unnecessary loss of control. Needless to say, between the military, the DAE and the DRDO, none of them has any hierarchical control over the other two.

Other critics have written to say that having opted for road or rail mobile launching arrangements, India does not have the robust transport, road and rail infrastructure to move the missiles, warheads and cores from safe storage to launch hideouts and dispersal points with confidence and alacrity.

These weaknesses have led to critics stating that India’s nuclear capability is disaggregated and with weak institutional features. In the case of China, it is conceded that India feels more threatened by Chinese nuclear delivery than vice-versa. Yet, in the absence of the Agni long-range missiles, it is vaguely surmised that the Indian retaliatory capacity is based on air delivery weapons, which could mean anything — Mirages, Jaguars, Su 30s. The absence of the CDS results in even knowledgeable Indians conjecturing that the Strategic Forces Command (SFC) will completely bypass the military chain of command and operate directly under the PMO. This, of course, raises other more serious problems.

In the case of deterrence with Pakistan, it is accepted that the doctrines of the two countries are mismatched. India intends to deter nuclear use by Pakistan while Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are meant to compensate for conventional arms asymmetry. At the same time, Pakistan relies on 20,000 LeT cadres as an extension of its armed forces to create terror strikes, to which the Indian answer is to punish the Pakistani state with conventional war. Thus arises the vague and elastic concept of a nuclear threshold. Yet, the Indian National Command Authority is ill designed to manage the inevitable South Asian transition from conventional war to a possible nuclear exchange — or the frantic strategic signalling that is bound to occur as the threshold approaches.

If, for instance, the threshold was to materialise as a result of an armoured incursion, the Indian NCA by its location, composition and infrastructure would be entirely unaware of the impending catastrophe. Hanging untethered to any commanding authority, civilian or military, would be the Integrated Defence Staff, a well-staffed organisation designed for the civilian-military interface, but currently without a head, nor with any links to the SFC.

After much persuasion, there now exists a skeleton nuclear staff under the NSA, normally headed by the retired SFC. But while its Pakistani counterpart, the Strategic Plans Division (SPD), is highly active both on the domestic and international conference circuit, its Indian counterpart seems to be totally tongue tied, non-participatory and holed up at its desk. Foreign critics have noted the introduction of battlefield nuclear weapons in Pakistan’s arsenal and raised doubts of the likelihood of ‘massive’ retaliation in response to a small ‘warning’ shot by Islamabad. This is what the Indian doctrine promises. Life for the leaders of the strategic community would be easy if a doctrine, once written on paper, could be left unchanged for decades without reinforcement, to prove its validity.

That unfortunately is not the case in a dynamic field where the stakes are the survival of nations. Even K. Subramanyam had warned that ‘massive’ retaliation was an outmoded concept and difficult to enforce without periodic reinforcement. So this article is inspired not because India is not continuing to arm itself with bombs and missiles. This piece is inspired by the increasing clamour in international literature that India’s penchant for secrecy is ill-suited to conveying the stabilising threat of nuclear deterrence. Against China where our capabilities are undeveloped, a certain amount of ambiguity is sensible, but against a country which is openly wedded to first use, and is introducing battlefield weapons, an untended 10-year-old piece of paper is inadequate.

Signalling, overdue

Something needs to be done to reassure both the domestic and international audience that with high pressure terrorism lurking across the border, it is not just India’s strategic restraint that will keep the peace — as it did after Mumbai and the attack on Parliament. Nuclear signalling from the Indian government is hugely overdue, so much so that it will take some effort to restore stability to South Asian deterrence. The first target should be the Indian strategic community and there are enough discussions and conferences where officers from the SFC and nuclear staff could provide discrete assurances that things are not anarchic with India’s nuclear command and control.

The strategic community in turn will carry the message abroad or to foreign observers that in the face of Indian official silence, they need not imagine the worst. The establishment needs to do more than arrogantly refer to the doctrine as being the sole answer to all questions. In deterrence, only perceptions matter and there is a disturbing build-up of literature indicating that the disbelief of others in our nuclear command and control is in urgent need of correction.

[arun]

X Posted from the "India Nuclear News and Discussion 4 July 2011" thread.

US think tank Stimson has published a book titled "Deterrence Stability and Escalation Control in South Asia":

Deterrence Stability and Escalation Control in South Asia

December 12, 2013

India and Pakistan have developed and flight tested seventeen new nuclear weapon delivery vehicles since testing nuclear devices in 1998 - an average of more than one per year. Military doctrines have also evolved to emphasize more rapid mobilization to engage in limited conventional warfare. Diplomacy to reduce nuclear risks has lagged far behind nuclear weapon-related advances and doctrinal change. Since 1998, Pakistan and India have negotiated four notable military-related Confidence-Building and Nuclear Risk Reduction Measures. No new measures have been agreed upon since 2007.

There is no basis for deterrence stability on the Subcontinent when diplomacy and nuclear risk reduction are moribund while nuclear capabilities grow and military doctrines evolve. The most desirable off-ramp to increased nuclear dangers is to secure normal relations with a nuclear-armed neighbor. This collection of essays - the product of bi-monthly discussions at the Stimson Center - provides analysis and ideas for deterrence stability and escalation control on the Subcontinent. This pursuit awaits leadership in India and Pakistan that is strong enough to persist in the face of violent acts designed to disrupt progress.

Clicky

[member_20317]

Pits per year production.

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/nuke/R43406.pdf
U.S. Nuclear Weapon “Pit” Production Options for Congress
By Jonathan E. Medalia
dated 21-02-2014

[Lilo]

PM proposes no-first use of nuclear weapons
PTI

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Wednesday proposed a global convention on ‘no-first use’ of nuclear weapons as it could lead to elimination of atomic arsenal.

“If all states possessing nuclear weapons recognise that if this is so (nuclear weapons are only for deterrence) and are prepared to declare it, we can quickly move to the establishment of global no-first use norm.

“In many ways this can open the ways to gradual reduction and finally elimination through a nuclear weapon convention.

Such a convention would require necessary verification. It would also require political measures to ensure the stability is maintained at the level as nuclear arsenal approaches zero,” he said.

Dr. Singh was speaking at an IDSA seminar on “A Nuclear Free World: From Conception to Reality.”

“More and more voices are speaking out today that the sole purpose of nuclear weapons while they exist should be to deter a nuclear attack,” he said.

Dr. Singh said that it was important to reduce the importance of nuclear weapons. However, this cannot be done by a single nation, but requires a multilateral agreement.

“What is important today is an agreed multilateral framework that can involve all states possessing nuclear weapons. What is needed is focus on practical measures that reduce nuclear dangers,” he said.

Dr. Singh said that although India supports a nuclear-free world it declared itself a nuclear state owing to the “harsh” security environment.

“As a responsible nuclear weapons state India supports the idea of a nuclear weapon-free world.

“We are the only country that demonstrated its capacity in 1974 but maintained a quarter century of restraint, before a harsh security environment obliged us to (conduct) test in 1998 and declare ourselves nuclear state,” he said.

While spelling out the dangers of the nuclear power and the need to control the use of atomic weapons, Singh also highlighted the benefits of nuclear energy.

“There is no theme more important and politically more challenging in the domain of international security.

Scientists and political leaders began grappling with the idea almost as they discovered the immense destructive power of nuclear weapons.

“Along side there was realisation that nuclear energy has great potential for common good. This dichotomy rendered the challenge only greater. The dilemma was to ensure human kind could continue to benefit by peaceful use of nuclear technology while controlling and eliminating the destructive uses it could be put to.”

The Prime Minister noted that by 2032, India intends to produce 62,000 MW of electricity through nuclear power.

http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/p ... ?css=print

We need more echo chambers for this message , may be countries like Iran,Japan,Srilanka,Vietnam etc could be prodded to give own versions of above - instead of mutely accepting Nuclear Hegemony by Big five.

Bharat's ideological challenge to the NPAs since Rajeev Gandhi's time must be watered regularly and mere mouse squeaks in the air by an outgoing MMS is unacceptable.

[ramana]

Lilio, Its not helpful for India anymore. MMS and his ilk are still in Nehruvian Morass and propose irresponsible ideas like AAP.

Now that India is a nuclear power proposing silly stuff like global NFU makes as the first candidates to be volunteered for disarmament. He has no business talking about tall this after having done nothing in last ten years when he could do something.

Are we sure this is not MMS April Fools Day speech?

[ShauryaT]

MMS should dig 10 holes 300 ft deep and retire quietly.

[ramana]

Its not the holes. Its what goes into holes!

[wig]

one, Jonathan Pollard, - shortly to be released from gaol is the former US intelligence agent who was convicted of spying for Israel by compromising Pakistan’s nuclear secrets. this implies that the US was complicit of Paki nuke capability and was actively assisting in masking it
Pollard, J was jailed in 1987 for spying for Israel, gave his spy handlers information on Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme, according to declassified documents. He is currently serving a life sentence for selling classified information to the Israeli government between 1985 and 1987. CIA assessment states that Pollard focused on “Arab and Pakistani nuclear intelligence” and gave his Israeli handlers information on a secret Pakistani ‘plutonium reprocessing facility near Islamabad’.
http://www.dawn.com/news/1097169/us-spy ... e-released
and
http://www.dawn.com/news/772350/how-isr ... tani-nukes

[SSridhar]

one, Jonathan Pollard, - shortly to be released from gaol is the former US intelligence agent who was convicted of spying for Israel by compromising Pakistan’s nuclear secrets. this implies that the US was complicit of Paki nuke capability and was actively assisting in masking it

wig, for a start, you may see the following posts in BRf:

http://forums.bharat-rakshak.com/viewto ... 6#p1004746
http://forums.bharat-rakshak.com/viewto ... 3#p1023993
http://forums.bharat-rakshak.com/viewto ... 46#p771546
http://forums.bharat-rakshak.com/viewto ... 78#p686178
http://forums.bharat-rakshak.com/viewto ... 4#p1383594