Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of acronyms
- Introduction
- 1 In the shadow of Hiroshima: the United States and Asia in the aftermath of Japanese defeat
- 2 The Korean War, the atomic bomb and Asian–American estrangement
- 3 Securing the East Asian frontier: stalemate in Korea and the Japanese peace treaty
- 4 A greater sanction: the defence of South East Asia, the advent of the Eisenhower administration and the end of the Korean War
- 5 ‘Atomic Madness’: massive retaliation and the Bravo test
- 6 The aftermath of Bravo, the Indochina crisis and the emergence of SEATO
- 7 ‘Asia for the Asians’: the first offshore islands crisis and the Bandung Conference
- 8 A nuclear strategy for SEATO and the problem of limited war in the Far East
- 9 Massive retaliation at bay: US–Japanese relations, nuclear deployment and the limited war debate
- 10 The second offshore islands crisis and the advent of flexible response
- 11 The Chinese bomb, American nuclear strategy in Asia and the escalation of the Vietnam War
- Conclusion: from massive retaliation to flexible response in Asia
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - In the shadow of Hiroshima: the United States and Asia in the aftermath of Japanese defeat
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of acronyms
- Introduction
- 1 In the shadow of Hiroshima: the United States and Asia in the aftermath of Japanese defeat
- 2 The Korean War, the atomic bomb and Asian–American estrangement
- 3 Securing the East Asian frontier: stalemate in Korea and the Japanese peace treaty
- 4 A greater sanction: the defence of South East Asia, the advent of the Eisenhower administration and the end of the Korean War
- 5 ‘Atomic Madness’: massive retaliation and the Bravo test
- 6 The aftermath of Bravo, the Indochina crisis and the emergence of SEATO
- 7 ‘Asia for the Asians’: the first offshore islands crisis and the Bandung Conference
- 8 A nuclear strategy for SEATO and the problem of limited war in the Far East
- 9 Massive retaliation at bay: US–Japanese relations, nuclear deployment and the limited war debate
- 10 The second offshore islands crisis and the advent of flexible response
- 11 The Chinese bomb, American nuclear strategy in Asia and the escalation of the Vietnam War
- Conclusion: from massive retaliation to flexible response in Asia
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
After the rain came a wind – the great ‘fire wind’ – which blew back in towards the centre of the catastrophe, increasing in force as the air over Hiroshima grew hotter and hotter because of the great fires. The wind blew so hard that it uprooted huge trees in the parks where survivors were collecting. Thousands of people were simply fleeing, blindly and without an objective except to get out of the city. Some in the suburbs, seeing them come, thought at first they were Negroes, not Japanese, so blackened were their skins. The refugees could not explain what had burned them. ‘We saw the flash,’ they said, ‘and this is what happened.’
In many respects, the use of the atomic bomb against Japan seemed a fitting climax to the Far Eastern War of 1941–5, a conflict where many Americans exhibited a level of hatred for their Asian adversary that some historians have argued gave the fighting in the Pacific a different quality to that found in the European theatres of war. Racial animosity, fuelled by a desire for revenge, it is maintained, became one of the defining characteristics of the struggle with Japan. Having reared its head several times already since early in the century, anti-Japanese racism in the United States poured forth during the years after Pearl Harbor, with the enemy frequently caricatured in subhuman terms, in some cases fit for little more than extermination.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- After HiroshimaThe United States, Race and Nuclear Weapons in Asia, 1945–1965, pp. 7 - 56Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010