Of atomic bombs, Animal Farm and a looming inflection point in world history

On 15 August 1945, the Japanese emperor’s prerecorded message of unconditional surrender was broadcast to his nation by radio. To most Japanese, much of it was almost indecipherable, spoken in the emperor’s high-pitched voice using the subtle, allusive language of the imperial court.

Nevertheless, the key moment when he told his subjects that they “must endure the unendurable” was clear.

The nation would lay down its arms and submit to Allied forces.

Beginning in 1942, in vicious fighting across the Pacific Islands, on the Chinese mainland and in Burma, Japanese forces had been pushed back towards their home islands and some portions of China and Southeast Asia.

While massive aerial bombardments and incendiary bombings had levelled cities including Tokyo, Kobe, Osaka, Yokohama and Nagoya, a few cities had largely been spared by the bombing campaigns, kept on a list for the possibility of being targeted with the first atomic bombs — if the Manhattan Project succeeded in building those weapons.

Japan’s civilian population was facing the spectre of starvation, and millions had been displaced from the ruined cities into the countryside. But despite everything, the Japanese military insisted the country must fight on, regardless.

The first test detonation of an atomic device near Alamogordo, New Mexico, on 16 July gave the US government confidence that the new weapon, developed at vast cost, could bring the war to an end. By August (Germany had already surrendered in May), two atomic bombs were ready for use against a Japan seemingly determined to fight on.

Meanwhile, a secret debate raged on in Washington about how best to use this new, untried weapon. Should it be a direct attack on a city, a demonstration bombing of an island near the capital — or should it even be used at all? What if the bomb was dropped but failed to explode? Might that stiffen further Japanese resistance, despite their massive losses?

Ultimately, US leaders made the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan in the belief that an invasion of the home islands with its consequent casualty list of nearly a quarter of a million Allied soldiers would be disastrous.

Henry Stimson, the US secretary of war, had insisted that Kyoto, the repository of much of Japan’s history, art, and culture, be kept off any atomic weapon target list. He believed strongly that once the war was over, if Kyoto was destroyed, it would take generations — if ever — before Japanese enmity towards the US would be erased.

As a result, the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August, and the Japanese response was to “reject with contempt” — “mokusatsu” — the demand for unconditional surrender. The second bomb was detonated over Nagasaki three days later.

By that time, Japanese Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo had been pushing hard but carefully for a way out of the war for his nation after he took office early in 1945. Despite opposition in the war Cabinet, after the devastation of two cities by atomic blasts, Togo’s view prevailed, and the emperor decided his nation would surrender.

He made two recordings of his surrender message to be broadcast on 15 August. The broadcast almost did not take place when diehard, ultra-nationalist generals attempted to seize the recordings to prevent the country’s surrender and to continue the fight, despite the obvious madness of that position.

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The collective impact of the two atomic blasts (and the lack of knowledge about whether the US had more of these weapons available), together with the Soviet Union’s late entry into the war and its consequent rapid advance into Manchuria against the Japanese army there, ultimately proved decisive.

US global hegemony

The formal surrender documents were signed on 2 September 1945 aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. That moment ushered in an era of US global hegemony that was effectively challenged militarily only by the Soviet Union over two generations, until that empire largely disintegrated in 1991. Unlike all the other combatants in World War 2, the US came out of the war with an expanded, undamaged industrial base.

The great institutions and instruments of the post-war age, with the US as a key instigator of this system, were soon established. These included the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (later renamed the World Trade Organization, or WTO).

These bodies helped set the landscape for an expansion of global growth and trade, and an increasingly open international order as the presence of trade barriers shrank in consequence, often under US guidance or direction.

More recently, China’s explosive growth came after the ideological economic strictures of the Cultural Revolution were ended by the more open stewardship of Premier Deng Xiaoping, along with China’s entry into the WTO system.

This period was marked by the retreat of empires and a wave of independence across Asia and Africa. The breakup of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European empire, however, would have to wait until the last decade of the century, when the power of the old order there crumbled from external and internal pressures.

Meanwhile, in this post-war world, Americans felt the roller-coaster dangers of imperial overstretch, with a low point being their defeat in Vietnam in 1975 after a decade-long effort.

That was replaced by a national sense of triumph with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the premature declaration of the “end of history,” and the presumed triumph of the international liberal economic and political order.

But that, in turn, was turned upside down by the twin disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan — as well as the terror of 9/11. Now, the ongoing war in Ukraine — depending on how it ends — may deliver yet another reversal of fate or perhaps reinforce current circumstances and trends.

Orwell creates a stir

But even as it was believed that Japan’s surrender on 15 August 1945 represented a peak moment for democratic forces and international order, author George Orwell was creating a huge stir — and more than a little foreboding — with two works: his allegory, “Animal Farm”, published on 17 August 1945 — just two days after Japan’s surrender — and then a prescient essay, “You and the Atomic Bomb”, issued just a few months later.

(A few years later, his dystopian novel, “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, would crystallise fears of authoritarian rule, along the way coining phrases that have become watchwords of our age, such as “Big Brother is watching.”)

Read more: Wanted: A rallying cry to hold back the coming ‘Dark Time’ — and someone to write it

“Animal Farm” — written by a British socialist who had fought fascism in Spain, investigated and revealed the poverty of the working poor, and who had earlier resigned from the British Imperial Indian Police in disgust over what he was supposed to be enforcing — became an almost-immediate, international bestseller. It was translated into multiple languages and bootlegged into Russia’s satellite nations in Eastern Europe.

Orwell’s fable set out the fundamental corruption of authoritarian socialism (and the right as well) in simple language hard to misconstrue. Its message struck home with its trope “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” Besides the printed word, it became an animated feature film and has repeatedly been turned into a staged work.

But there was more from Orwell’s typewriter. In his essay on the nascent, emerging international order, “You and the Atomic Bomb”, Orwell became the first person to offer the prediction encapsulated in the phrase, “the Cold War” in its modern guise.

He predicted that the world would be divided into three great blocs — one led by the US and its junior partner, Great Britain, a second on the Eurasian landmass dominated by the Soviet Union, and a third guided by a resurgent China. Each would be bolstered by the power of the new atomic weapons, but they would be held partially in check by the ensuing “balance of terror” — the precursor idea to the MAD (mutual assured destruction) doctrine.

His prediction soon seemed to gather strength once the Soviet Union acquired nuclear weapons just a few years after the Americans. In this essay, too, there is, therefore, the germ of what became the political landscape of his novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four”.

Slave empires

Orwell wrote, “More and more obviously, the surface of the Earth is being parcelled off into three great empires, each self-contained and cut off from contact with the outer world, and each ruled, under one disguise or another, by a self-elected oligarchy. The haggling as to where the frontiers are to be drawn is still going on, and will continue for some years, and the third of the three super-states — East Asia, dominated by China — is still potential rather than actual. But the general drift is unmistakable, and every scientific discovery of recent years has accelerated it.

“We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity. James Burnham’s theory [of the political rise of a professional managerial class] has been much discussed, but few people have yet considered its ideological implications — that is, the kind of world view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of ‘cold war’ with its neighbours.”

Nevertheless, for many analysts, politicians and scholars writing and working between Orwell’s era and this one, the evolution of that global balance was seen as more benign than horrific.

However, as The Economist warned in a recent column, “Once again the world is entering an age of disorder. Multilateral institutions founded after the Second World War, from the United Nations to international courts that hear charges of crimes against humanity, are losing their authority. The final fate of the post-1945 system will not be known for some time. That is no reason to wait, resignedly, for the world to slide into anarchy and unconstrained violence.”

Now the US-led international order is slowly (or not so slowly) and erratically slipping away from that US hegemony, and it may be moving to either a version of the 19th century’s Concert of Europe that balanced national ambitions in Europe for almost 100 years — or perhaps it is heading to spheres of influence in the manner of Orwell’s foretelling.

One vision is how Michael Kimmage of the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute put it in a recent article in the magazine Foreign Affairs: “In the years to come, the kind of order these [national] leaders fashion will greatly depend on Trump’s second term. It was, after all, the US-led order that had encouraged the development of supranational structures following the Cold War. Now that the United States has joined the twenty-first century dance of nations, it will often call the tune. With Trump in power, conventional wisdom in Ankara, Beijing, Moscow, New Delhi, and Washington (and many other capitals) will decree that there is no one system and no agreed-on set of rules. In this geopolitical environment, the already tenuous idea of ‘the West’ will recede even further.”

In a companion article, by contrast, Hal Brands of the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies and a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, worries that the emerging new international disorder “will require Trump to consistently channel his best geopolitical instincts when he will be sorely tempted to follow his most destructive ones instead. If he follows this destructive path, the United States will become less globally engaged but more aggressive, unilateral, and illiberal. It won’t be an absent superpower but a renegade one — a country that stokes global chaos and helps its enemies break the US-led system.”

In short, we may now be, in that often-used phrase, heading into an inflection point, or perhaps a multiroad intersection, with each path generating very different outcomes. We will have left behind a world where the US unquestionably was “primus inter pares” — first among equals — and heading to something that may become a world of spheres of influence à la George Orwell, a global concert of nations previously established in response to the chaos of the Napoleonic Era, or even a “world of all against all” envisioned in Thomas Hobbes’ “Leviathan” — a world without rules and structures to enforce them. DM