I wasn’t going to come back after being so roundly castigated for pointing out the moral ambiguity of debate on future nuclear conflict on the anniversary of Nagasaki. The anger that I don’t thank you for a nuclear umbrella that you view not just as necessary but also morally defensible.

However David Lange died on Saturday. The NZ Prime Minister who declared NZ nuclear free 20 years ago which has resulted in punitive fiscal measures from your government ever since. 20 years ago he debated just these points at the Oxford Union to great worldwide acclaim.

Here’s an excerpt

“It is my conviction that there is no moral case for nuclear weapons. That the best defence which can be made of their existence and the threat of their use is that they are a necessary evil; an abhorrent means to a desirable end.

The fact is that Europe and the United States are ringed about with nuclear weapons, and your people have never been more at risk. There is simply only one thing more terrifying than nuclear weapons pointed in your direction and that is nuclear weapons pointed in your enemy’s direction: the outcome of their use would be the same in either case, and that is the annihilation of you and all of us. That is a defence which is no defence; it is a defence which disturbs far more than it reassures. The intention of those who for honourable motives use nuclear weapons to deter is to enhance security. Notwithstanding that intention, they succeed only in enhancing insecurity. Because the machine has perverted the motive. The President of the United States has acknowledged that the weapon has installed mass destruction as the objective of the best-intentioned.

The speakers for the negative who asked the question, are we prepared to have a nuclear umbrella from the United States in terms of an ANZUS arrangement … the answer to that is very simply, very definitely, is not only are we [not] prepared to accept it, we deny it, we refuse it and we specifically say – we do not want to be defended by nuclear weapons!

[Applause]

INTERJECTION: Sir, I would just like to say, don’t you feel that you should weigh your moral stance with the pernicious effects it will have not only on Asian security, but western security as a whole? Particularly in light of the fact that there are movements in Japan, Australia and NATO itself, that would like to pull out, and use your precedent as an example, and pull out of their responsibilities to the alliance. And I for one as an American do not feel that we should shoulder the defence of the western world. And I think it’s something that everybody should contribute to and you, sir, are not doing your part

This country New Zealand is not going to contribute to a nuclear alliance. This country New Zealand never has. New Zealand was declared by the former government to be no part of a nuclear alliance – and we will pick up the tab by conventional defence. And one of the immoralities of nuclear weaponry, surely, is that it creates such a level of depersonalisation that the infinite capacity of destruction is unleashed by a few. Much more is there a moral posture in the conventional event where the humanity of a situation has to be constantly assessed, and where there is always a possibility of restraint, because individual people say, dammit, I’m not going to go ahead and do that, because it is absolutely immoral, contrary to the whole ethos of humankind, to do that. You don’t get the checks and balances along the nuclear trail.

And in my country, we pay our tab. We are not creating a policy for imitation or export. We can’t even deport it to Australia! It’s 1200 miles away! And if you think that Belgium and Holland and Greece developed a certain posture, an undercurrent, a surge because of the New Zealand position, you do us a considerable flattery about our omnipotence, because, you, know, we didn’t even know they were even thinking about it! And we are no threat to that.

I say to you we are prepared to pay that price. We have a long history of being anti-nuclear. One of my predecessors in office sent those ships to Mururoa. We’ve had the fight in the legal areas. We are constantly at issue with France. We proposed in ’75 a South Pacific Zone. We are going to work to protect that. We have honoured our long-standing commitments. We’ve not welshed on any deals for defence.”

David Lange Prime Minister.

He uses the word evil a lot too.

While the nuke club postures they are saving the world their greatest hatred is saved for those who say that the method gives the world the shits.

Don’t come to our rescue. Bugger you. Why should you. We’ve only come to all your wars, why would you want to come to ours?

60 YEARS AND NO-ONE HAS LET OFF A BOMB. PERHAPS YOUR GREATEST SUCCESS WAS SHOWING JUST HOW HORRIFIC AND EVIL IT WAS AND NO-ONE HAS YOUR STOMACH FOR THE FIGHT. GOOD ON YOU. JUST DON’T EXPECT ANYONE TO THANK YOU.

Andrew,

You had casualties in WWII. Good for you. Guess what. The world didn’t become a paradise of peace and security after the Big One. You lot have done bugger all since then and enjoyed all the benefits, such as they are, of not having the USSR snatch your very desirable island from you. That’s the reason for my comment about parasites. I would say tha your attitude is very European, except that you might take that for a compliment. You get other people to protect you, if only for their own selfish reasons, and then preach about how vicious their methods are, like some damsel blowing a rape whistle because she won’t soil her pretty hands with a nasty old gun.

And by the way, you can’t really imagine that you would have been ablee to keep the Japanese off by your own efforts, do you? You don’t win wars by suffering a glorious number of casualties.

As for historians who doubt Trumans’s motives, historians are all over the map. Google for some that deny the Holocaust. Truman’s motives really don’t matter, his effects do. The real question is which course of action would have killed more people, and how horribly, maybe.

Nukes are absolutely horrible. That isn’t the argument. Callimachus’ and my generation know that in a way that, thank God, is academic for you. There is not some hierarchy of bad to good weapons with nukes in some priveliged spot, so no, they were not going to be used in limited land wars during the Cold War.

By the way. I am tired of “If we hadn’t used it they would have�.

It was you who chose to debate the bombings of Japan as a pure moral issue, not a matter of military practicality. You are the one who introduces “evil” over and over into the discussion (gee, I thought it was Shrubbie McChimplerburton and the other Christians who were obsessed with “evil”).

It was you who wanted to talk about “the gall and the murderous intention” and to insist that only America had that evil.

It’s not a matter of “if we didn’t use it they would have.” You’re as clumsy at reading blogs as you are at reading history. It’s a matter of “our allies, in the same position as America found itself in 1945, would have done the same thing, and lost even less sleep over it than Truman did;” and of “our enemies would have done it just for the joy of it, regardless of military calculation.”

It would have been nice to spend the day ruminating on the fact that America’s nuclear arsenal is now, since the end of the showdown with the Soviets, a heavy burden that does us little good and brings great risks. We have too much of what we can’t use. With the aberation of the Cold War over, nuclear weapons stand revealed for what they are: the weapon of the weak, not the strong.

Or that the horror of nuclear weapons was not the dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — as horrible as that was, it was in the continuum of World War II — but in what they became in just a few years after that: true end-of-the-world machines.

You’re talking to someone whose most common recurring nightmare, in my late childhood, was the missiles raining down from the skies and the sun blooming on my street. You’re talking to someone who remembers my mother sending my father off to work during the Cuban missile crisis, and both of them thinking it was very possible they were saying goodbye for the last time.

But instead I didn’t have the chance to ponder any of that because I was too busy shooting down the trollish historical libels of some flake from New Zealand.

Your opinion of this country and how it behaves is duly noted. As one who had two beloved uncles in wartime service in the Navy, men who might have gone to the floor of the Coral Sea with the sleek hulk of the “Lexington,” I would gladly have respected your wish to be untained by “vengeful” American military decisions. And I am sure you would have made a fine adornment to the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

Perhaps the U.S. should negotiate “treaties of guaranteed non-assistance” with nations that find us so odious. We’d promise not to protect them from foreign invasion. We’d also promise them non-assistance from anything remotely connected with the U.S. military in the event of some earthquake or tidal wave.

If nukes are so much better than the alternatives, why don’t you use them all the time. Think of all the lives you could have saved over the past 60 years. It reminds of the ‘we had to destroy the village to save it’ mindset

NZ was in the war. From 1939. In Europe and Asia. And the first one too. We were very tired of the war too. Wars happening on lands 1000 of miles away from our serence islands. We were standing by our friends. 10s of thousands of us were slaughtered from a country of 1.5 million. Don’t call us parasites. NZ is proud of it’s record. Look it up. It’s also not very hard to find plenty of historians who believe Truman’s motives had little to do with battle fatigue or the desire to reduce casualties.

But in creating a post nuclear age you have created the very exclusive nuke club where anyone without the bomb seems not allowed to debate and anyone not with you must be against you. Excellent.

Thank you Montag for looking at the issues and not closing up in defence. There is no moral weapon. But there are rules of engagement. If we lose all sense of fairplay on the field, from diplomacy, dialogue to combat, then we might as well slaughter each other as it’s the end of civilisation.

“The bomb was used by Truman for revenge for Pearl Harbour and to justify it’s enormous expense to the Senate as development had cost 1 third of the entire war’s armament. ”

What a mind reader you are. Of course you know better thatn we Americans what Truman’s reasons were. It couldn’t be that by that time people just wanted the war over.

“You gotta agree that looking in from the outside you guys do seem a little strange.”

And you gotta agree that from the outside you guys do not seem strange at all; no you seem very familiar – parasites who profit from a world system secured by the nasty, horrible power politics of the “bullies” of the world and then put on a show of moral superiority to assuage your sense of dependency.

The fact is that you have a Puritanical obsession with nuclear weapons, although in actual use they have been less murderous than most alternatives – no, all, if you include machetes. India and Pakistan have nukes – oh horrors! What are the chances they wouldn’t have had more than a few land skirmishes without the dread of annihilation hanging over them?

However, to say we can never use such weapons is to have already disarmed. The fact is we can use them, and given sufficient cause, we will use them. If a 50 kiloton bomb goes off in Manhattan, the probability that some foreign capital will be vaporized approaches 100%. And if we don’t retaliate, the probablity that more US cities get incinerated approaches 100%. Sometimes terrible options are all we have left.

It’s a paradox, or a catch 22, but I don’t feel we would be morally justified to retaliate with WMD against a population center even if NYC was targeted. Especially in the case of an oppressive totalitarian regime where the civilian population is powerless in terms of their leaders’ actions.

Andrew Dickens:

But nukes will never end until the world does, while you and Montag discuss in reasonable and moral terms the varying levels of incineration you can live with. You gotta agree that looking in from the outside you guys do seem a little strange.

I have a zero tolerance for the use of nuclear WMD and advocate full disarmament. I can communicate the same point in reasonable and moral terms, or in shrill extremist terms. Which is more constructive?

It’s the anniversary of Nagasaki and you started debating flashpoints and advocating the use of the BOMB on the anniversary of the death of 74 Thousand people in an eyeblink at your state’s behest. Now that’s insensitive. For your own reference point, how will you feel when we debate using the new Airbus on September 11. No, I thought not.

I think this is a very appropriate discussion for this anniversary. I also think it is oversensitive to object to Icepick’s comments just because of the date. I’m not so sure anybody actually advocated using “the BOMB” anyway.

Do not debate how to wage nuclear war on Nagasaki Day. It’s unseemly.

Sorry about the non sequitor but I got it from this

But if a small nuclear weapon kills fewer people than a huge conventional one (MOAB), does that make it less evil?

Look the debate here is the BOMB on Nagaski Day. I want the world rid of it. Tut tut. How naive. How immature. It seems to me considering it’s great expense and technological requirements it should be easier to get rid of than terrorism. A handfull of men could do it tomorrow. Men we see daily campaigning for peace and democray.

You say Hiroshima and Nagaski was not about revenge. That somehow America’s act of using it was more noble than other acts of extreme violence? Come on.

The bomb was used by Truman for revenge for Pearl Harbour and to justify it’s enormous expense to the Senate as development had cost 1 third of the entire war’s armament. He had to blow it to show where the money went. Revenge, mate, and political survival and it also showed Russia who’s boss. Military advice was against the bomb. If you believe that warranted the instant death of a quarter of a million, well fine. I hope you never get in power Trigger.

Whatever. You let it off. Sorry History will never change that. You can do it first and that’s OK, no one loses their job. After that, well, just think about having the bloody things then you’re all criminals and we will wage war to protect the world from the people who aspire to do what we did. Vaporise people. It’s a beautiful sliding morality.

How bout this….Sure you had it first…Good on you. Why didn’t you trade on it. Why did the only public display of the worst man made wrath have to be on kids, civilians and old people. Was this mature and responsible use of the ultimate weapon. Look at the history books. Were the Japanese truly warned. Leaflets were not dropped on Nagasaki. It was BRUTAL. TWICE.

Somehow your anger seems to be that we can’t pull you up on the obvious contradiction there is between your battle against WMD and the plain fact that you’re the only country to have used it in anger. Live with it and show us the maturity that the world’s greatest nation is supposed to have. Do not debate nuclear wars on Nagasaki Day. It’s unseemly.

By the way. I am tired of “If we hadn’t used it they would have”. Come on, are we in high school. Nyah nyah nyah. I’m looking forward to hitting my boss with baseball bat tomorrow and getting off because if I hadn’t someone else might have. You had the balance of terror. Why did you use it?

We speak English. America is our friend. Check the record. We’re on your side. We have died for you and we were there in Afghanistan and Iraq. We didn’t fight but we were first in to fix up the mess and help you install democracy, such as it is.

If you don’t like what a New Zealander says then you want to hear what the people who don’t like you say.

Read this if you’re worried about the true proliferators of WMD and attack them at will.

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/08/02/the-treaty-wreckers-/

Fifth, Britain and France can’t afford it anymore so theirs will rust away.

Another howler. You think Britain and France are just going to walk away from the nuclear club? Especially France, which has such a fondness for being a world-shaping power, but so precious little to back it up anymore except the nuclear capability.

France has about 450 nuclear warheads mounted on bomber- and submarine-launched ICBMs. The French have invested in MIRV technology and sophisticated decoy systems. Those numbers are decidedly not “rusting away.”

“If the Germans had dropped atomic bombs on cities instead of us, we would have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them.�

Still fixated on the two atomic bombs. Hell, you could have gotten any number of American military leaders on war crimes charges well before the Enola Gay took off. E.g. Curtis LeMay for the firebombing of Tokyo 3/9-10/45 (more than 100,000 civilians killed). Even LeMay knew the only thing that saved him was his side won.

But then you’re back to the conventional weapons. The ones everybody used. Even (perish the thought) non-Americans. The tactics that had been honed in London and Berlin and Tokyo before America got into the war. And then you’ve lost your unique set-up of America in the “war criminal” stockade and every other nation on earth standing outside throwing crap at it.

And that’s no fun for you at all, is it?

Calm down boys.

Looks like a bad case of projection.

There’s a country that has a mortgage on blinkered and insensitive.

And I bet you know exactly who it is, don’t you? Bright boy.

Fact. Only one nation has had the gall and the murderous intention to use the ultimate weapon.

Yes, that’s what it was all about, wasn’t it? Murderous intention. Had nothing to do with the grace of the gods allowing the Americans to develop the technology first, before the Japanese, Russians, Germans, British, or anyone else. They NEVER would have done such a thing.

You own the record for the deathliest second in the world. So own it. Osama owns his moment happily.

What’s with the obsession with speed? You probably know that other air raids in that war caused more casualties, and other atrocities killed more people. Only more slowly. Slow death is preferable to a quick one? Or is it just that this particular way of killing has, so far, by the grace of aforesaid gods, been done only by Americans, so the fixation with it suits a fixation with Americans as uniquely evil?

It’s the anniversary of Nagasaki and you started debating flashpoints and advocating the use of the BOMB on the anniversary of the death of 74 Thousand people in an eyeblink at your state’s behest.

First you demand that we commemorate the day and reflect on the use of the bomb, then you scold us for talking about it. Pick one way of hating America and stick with it, please.

For your own reference point, how will you feel when we debate using the new Airbus on September 11. No, I thought not.

Talk away. It’s a free country. Say any damn thing you like. Just don’t be all pissy if we happen to notice and remember. What exactly are you implying here, anyhow? You have intentions for an Airbus?

Nukes are wrong.

OK, so we drop 10 conventional big bombs and get the same bang. That make you happy?

Could it be that underneath it all you’re proud of using it first? Could it be that you regret nothing?

We re-hash that decision over and over. Every year when the anniversary comes up, if not more often. But unlike you, we do it with a bit more complexity than nuclear = evil, America = nuclear, America = evil. Our calculations take into consideration the state of Japanese resistance, the likely casualties in an invasion, the status of slave laborers and captives in Japan-occupied East Indies, and yes, even the likely civilian casualties in a land war in Japan.

Could it be that your nation understands vengence in just the same way that a suicide bomber or a man with a boxcutter does? Could it be that you are no different to those that you detest?

Do you have to work to be so vile, or does it come naturally. What, pray tell, was the nuclear bombing of Japane a “revenge” for? Who ever, in calculating that decision, justified it in terms of revenge?

I think about the way the Japanese use August the 6th to advocate peace and not hatred towards the States for such an offence.

Then you haven’t paid attention to the full spectrum of public expression in Japan. Why am I not surprised?

If a gun kills only one person is that less evil?

If you answer everything in widening circles of non sequiteur, have you lost your mind?

If North Korea can afford the BOMB maybe New Zealand can. We just don’t think it’s right. Shame on us.

Hey, the “can’t afford it” line was your idea. Now, caught in an obvious mistake, rather than admit it, you scamper up the moral high ground.

from Wikipedia

One of the prominent critics of the bombings was Albert Einstein. Leo Szilard, a scientist who played a major role in the development of the atomic bomb, argued:

“If the Germans had dropped atomic bombs on cities instead of us, we would have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them.”

Who hung?

You have just gone to war against a nation who might have had weapons of mass destruction. Might.

The other insult is why drop 2. Why Nagasaki. Were they warned. Why not flatten Mt Fuji and warn you’re next.

There is much for America to ponder in this 60th anniversary. And to ask that you debate it is not to insult or not to say that fundamentally we are on your side.

Fact. Only one nation has had the gall and the murderous intention to use the ultimate weapon.

Yes there is a lot of evil in the world, whether it’s pogroms or machetes or concentration camps or planes or nukes. Don’t think we don’t know that. But don’t deflect culpability because there may be equivalent violence in the world. I’m always reminded of the line in a Elvis Costello song “It only takes one little finger to blow you away”. You own the record for the deathliest second in the world. So own it. Osama owns his moment happily.

Let’s go back to the original article. It’s the anniversary of Nagasaki and you started debating flashpoints and advocating the use of the BOMB on the anniversary of the death of 74 Thousand people in an eyeblink at your state’s behest. Now that’s insensitive. For your own reference point, how will you feel when we debate using the new Airbus on September 11. No, I thought not.

Nukes are wrong. You used them. Eisenhower and McArthur thought it was wrong. It was. No one else used them. Ever. Maybe we should thank you but I’m sure there’s a lot of people in Japan who would disagree. Maybe no one really has your courage to fly in high and kill so many on a hot morning at 8.15 as school settled in.

Could it be that underneath it all you’re proud of using it first? Could it be that you regret nothing? Could it be that your nation understands vengence in just the same way that a suicide bomber or a man with a boxcutter does? Could it be that you are no different to those that you detest?

I wonder how Hiroshima Day is comemmorated in the States. Here there are vigils and candles set free on rivers. Yet on this site we’ve debates about where deployment is needed. Is this typical?

I think about the way the Japanese use August the 6th to advocate peace and not hatred towards the States for such an offence.

And I’m sorry but I’ll put money on the internal combustion engine getting you before a bomb. Watch your step as you cross the road tomorrow.

FYI

If a gun kills only one person is that less evil?

If North Korea can afford the BOMB maybe New Zealand can. We just don’t think it’s right. Shame on us.

… the very few nations who can afford the nuclear race …

North Korea is richer than New Zealand?

Who knew?

… we could discuss all night the criteria of evil. But it is safe to say that in terms of a death/time rationale that 250,000 in 1 second is a pretty good effort.

Evil = kill ratio/time.

But if a small nuclear weapon kills fewer people than a huge conventional one (MOAB), does that make it less evil?

And I find your BS about “humans slowly forgetting about the idea of mass destruction” to be blinkered and offensive. Blaming America for THAT concept ignores the whole of human history. 3,000 people died right goddamn fast just a few years ago, and the key weapon was boxcutters. And how many hundreds of thousands of people got hacked to death by machetes in the last twelve years in Central Africa? Oh, I guess that doesn’t count. What’s important is that I drive a car with, GASP! THE HORROR!, an internal combustion engine! Where will it all end?!!?