The Bomb at Eighty

But it was that unearthly power to turn day into night that finally convinced the Japanese Empire to lay down its arms. The sheer unnaturalness of Hiroshima. Nothing natural could do it, not even the imminent invasion of Japan. “The sooner the Americans come, the better…. One hundred million die proudly” boasted the Japanese government in the summer of 1945.

By Christmas of that year Operation Magic Carpet planned to transfer over 700,000 U.S. servicemen to the Pacific aboard several hundred U.S. Navy ships. Were it not for the end of the war in August 1945, the first phase of Operation Downfall (the invasion of Japan) would have been executed as Operation Olympic. An even bigger operation, Coronet, was planned for March 1946, an invasion of the Kanto plain area near Tokyo. This dwarfed the physical power of those early fission devices. It was the seemingly magical power of nuclear weapons that tipped the scales where other, much larger threats had failed. Even in Japan the Tokyo firebombing killed more people.

But there was something mysterious and supernatural about the A-bomb that broke the will of the Japanese empire. A US Army War College publication describes victory as breaking the enemy’s will. It is a condition of the mind as much as a physical circumstance. “If war is a political act, victory at the highest levels is correspondingly defined in political terms. … because it is a perception or assessment, victory is heavily dependent on perspective.” A foe who refuses to surrender may be killed but not defeated in the political sense.

Hamas' will remains unbroken. Thus in the midst of complete military collapse of its Gaza fortifications it remains unbowed and is even setting conditions for Israel to follow. In a statement, it said its "armed resistance … cannot be relinquished except through the full restoration of our national rights, foremost among them the establishment of an independent, fully sovereign Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital." The fact that war is a contest of wills explains why action-movie villains sometimes theatrically floss their gums with razor blades or cut themselves. This demonstrates he has an inhuman will that normal people don't have. The point of such demonstrations is to communicate that you will never beat the villain by any conceivable means, not in a hundred years. Hamas exudes this "strength" in spades.

By contrast ordinary people often reach the point where they just want the suffering to stop. They understandably can't bear it any more. “Iris Haim, the mother of slain hostage Yotam Haim, suggested in a social media post Sunday that Israel should 'surrender' to Hamas and end the war to free the remaining hostages in Gaza.” There is nothing abnormal about this mother’s reaction. It is people like Tojo, Hitler and Hamas that are abnormal.

But if a villain’s will cannot be broken by any conceivable means it can still be crushed by the inconceivable, the spooky, the mysterious. Therein lay the power of atomic weapons. As Thomas Schelling,  one of the pioneers of deterrence game theory, put it in his Nobel Prize lecture in 2005, “These weapons are unique, and a large part of their uniqueness derives from their being perceived as unique.” The abnormal men were – for a time – unmanned by the unique weapon.

That atomic magic gave nukes an extraordinary deterrent quality, able to terrify even the samurai class of Japan with its seemingly supernatural powers. But in the 80 years since Hiroshima, the A-bomb has been dwarfed by seemingly greater magics: the Internet,  AI and bioweapons. It has dwindled to myth; shrunk by the passage of time to a child’s story we no longer heed. It has become commonplace, something that even North Korea, Iran and Pakistan can brandish; a commodity.

Today we find ourselves surfeit with megatons but bereft of magic. In all the mighty armories of the West there is no weapon that can break Hamas’ will though they have at their disposal things that can unman the West: namely the sight of human suffering. Hamas can break Western will with that. In all cinematic history there is perhaps no better a description of this process than Colonel Kurz’s monologue in Apocalypse Now.

“I remember when I was with Special Forces. Seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate the children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for Polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn’t see. We went back there and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember… I… I… I cried. I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realized… like I was shot… like I was shot with a diamond… a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought: My God… the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we. Because they could stand that these were not monsters. These were men… trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love… but they had the strength… the strength… to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral… and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling… without passion… without judgment… without judgment. Because it’s judgment that defeats us.”

Eighty years later, they and not we, have the mental magic; in emotional terms they have the Atomic Bomb.