By Andre
Damon
Global Research, April 12, 2016
On Monday, US Secretary of State John Kerry
visited the Japanese city of Hiroshima, the target of the first nuclear bomb
ever used in wartime. On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic
bomb on the city, killing between 70,000 and 146,000 civilians outright. Three
days later, on August 9, the US dropped a second nuclear bomb on the city of
Nagasaki, killing a further 39,000 to 80,000 civilians.
The Obama administration made clear that Kerry,
the highest-ranking US official ever to visit the city, was not coming to
apologize for these terrible crimes.
“There is no effort…to seek an apology from the
United States, nor is there any interest in reopening the question of blame for
the sequence of events that culminated in the use of the atomic bomb,”
the State Department said Monday.
Declaring that “the peaceful, stable
international system that we have built in the decades since World War II are
not a given,” Kerry said the bombing of Hiroshima “reminds everybody of the
extraordinary complexity of choices in war and of what war does to people, to
communities, to countries, to the world.” He did not seek to reconcile this
hypocritical statement with the fact that he is a representative of the state
responsible for the crime.
Kerry’s visit took place against the backdrop
of a major escalation of Washington’s belligerent actions against China. Not
since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 has the danger of war and the use of
nuclear weapons been so acute.
The main purpose of Kerry’s trip was to cement
US alliances in East and Southeast Asia for the militarily encirclement of
China. The ceremony at the site of the 1945 bombing followed a summit of G7
foreign ministers in Hiroshima, which issued a pointed statement warning China
(although not by name) against “intimidating, coercive or provocative
unilateral actions that could alter the status quo and increase tensions.”
Last week, the New York Times reported
that the United States was preparing a third “freedom of navigation” operation
in the South China Sea, in which the US will send a warship within 12 nautical
miles of territory claimed by China. Admiral Harry Harris, the head of the US
Pacific Fleet, has been agitating behind the scenes for the next such action to
include “military” operations, potentially including the firing of weapons.
As Kerry was speaking, US Defense Secretary
Ashton Carter was in the midst of a visit to India, which the US is seeking to
integrate into its anti-China alliance. From there, Carter will move on to the
Philippines, which is receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in exchange for
its cooperation in the US war drive. Carter will visit a location less than 100
miles from the disputed Spratly Islands archipelago claimed by China.
Japan, together with Australia, forms the
linchpin of Washington’s anti-Chinese alliance. To this end, the US has
encouraged the aggressive remilitarization of Japan, promoting the very
tendencies that led to the deaths of millions of people and horrendous war
crimes during Japan’s invasion of China and other countries in the Pacific in
the 1930s.
Earlier this month, a reinterpretation of
Japan’s pacifist constitution, agreed to in 2014, went into effect, allowing
the Japanese military to fight wars abroad in support of its allies, including
the United States. Last week, Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said the
country’s constitution did not prohibit it from possessing nuclear weapons.
The deepening US-Japanese anti-China alliance
is at the heart of a sweeping remilitarization of the Asia-Pacific region,
where military spending increased by six percent last year. The Philippines and
Indonesia, key US allies in the gang-up against China, increased their military
spending by 25 percent and 16.5 percent, respectively.
Within US military and policy-making circles
there is open talk of a “Second Pacific War,” in which, as one expert put it,
“painful losses—in ships and aircraft, sailors and aviators—would have to be
expected as a matter of course, and they would probably accumulate quickly, on
both sides.”
In his remarks, Kerry praised President Barack
Obama’s efforts “to create and pursue a world free from nuclear weapons.” In
reality, despite Obama’s vow early in his presidency that the US would “not
develop new nuclear warheads or pursue new military missions or new
capabilities,” the US government is in the midst of a $1 trillion program to
upgrade its nuclear stockpile.
In 2011, the latest year for which figures are
available, the US spent $61.3 billion on its nuclear weapons program, more then
all other countries combined. The amount was nearly 10 times more than China
and almost 100 times more than North Korea.
Despite claiming in 2009 that it would “reduce
the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy,” the White House
made explicit in a 2010 strategy document that the US military maintains the
right to use nuclear weapons without being attacked, including against
countries that do not possess nuclear weapons themselves.
Behind the scenes, the US military, politicians
and think tanks are drawing up plans for a preemptive nuclear strike. A report
published last month by a leading policy think tank, entitled “Rethinking
Armageddon,” elaborates scenarios in which the United States carries out
nuclear first strikes against both North Korea and Russia.
In this context, Kerry’s visit must serve as a
warning to the working classes of Asia and the entire world.
The use of nuclear bombs against Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, under conditions in which the Japanese government was actively
seeking terms of surrender, was not, as the official US narrative claims, a
measure to hasten the end of the war. Rather, the nuclear incineration of
hundreds of thousands of people was intended to communicate, particularly to
the Soviet Union, that the United States would stop at nothing to secure its
hegemony in the postwar order.
With Europe and the Pacific all but destroyed
by the war and US industry dominant throughout the world, the use of nuclear
weapons was a calculated tactical decision. As the American historian Gabriel
Jackson wrote in 1999,
“In the specific circumstances of August 1945,
the use of the atom bomb showed that a psychologically very normal and
democratically elected chief executive could use the weapon just as the Nazi
dictator would have used it.”
Today, the United States, wracked by internal
maladies and facing the protracted decline of its economic power, has only one
trump card to secure its preeminent place in the global capitalist pecking
order: the threat to use its enormous military and nuclear arsenal. This makes
the danger all the more acute.
Workers and young people across the world must
take a warning from these developments, which threaten the very existence of
human society. The struggle against war depends on ending the capitalist
system, which is its source.
The original source of this article is World Socialist Web Site
Copyright © Andre
Damon, World Socialist Web Site, 2016
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