早稲田国際教養AO, Now That the Dust That Was Hiroshima and Nagasaki Is Settling

解答のポイント

主題：　広島・長崎への原爆投下直後、イギリスのTime紙の投稿欄は、原爆使用に対する否定的見解であふれた。

 

資料からは、戦争目的が正しければ、あるいは早期終結のためになら何をしても許されるのか、大量破壊兵器所有・使用への疑問、人種的偏見との関連性などの問題を、原爆投下直後に一般のイギリス人（日本にとっては敵国側で彼ら自身、日本と同盟国のナチスドイツの爆撃で多くの犠牲者を出していた）が指摘し、強い反対の意思を表明する人が多くいたことが分かる。

　

問１　

番号10「どの選択肢も当てはまらない」の正解は、選択肢B　「戦争早期終結のための原爆使用に肯定的な投稿がいくつかある。」

 

この問題は、消去法でも解けるが、この資料の特徴（原爆使用に対し肯定的意見がひとつもないこと）に気付いていると早く解ける。目を通す内に、敵側の日本への攻撃であったにもかかわらず、原爆投下を称賛する意見が出てこないことに気付いて感銘を受ける。

 

その他の選択肢―別紙参照

 

問２　

別紙参照

 

 

《参考》

Excerpts from “The Bomb” by Howard Zinn

 

Hiroshima

  Breaking the Silence

 

The bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, turned into powder and ash, in a few moments, the flesh and bones of 140,000 men, women, and children. Three days later, a second atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki killed perhaps 70,000 instantly. In the next five years, another 130,000 inhabitants of those two cities died of radiation poisoning.

  ….

…. When private bands of fanatics commit atrocities we call them “terrorists,” which they are, and have no trouble dismissing their reasons. But when governments do the same, and on a much larger scale, the word “terrorism” is not used, and we consider it a sign of our democracy that the acts become subject to debate, If the word “terrorism” has a useful meaning (and I believe it does, because it marks off an act as intolerable, since it involves the indiscriminate use of violence against human beings for some political purpose), then it applies exactly to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

 

   The sociologist Kai Erikson, reviewing the report by the Japanese team of scientists, wrote:

The attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not “combat” in any of the ways that word is normally used. Nor were they primarily attempts to destroy military targets, for the two cities had been chosen not despite but because they had a high density of civilian housing. Whether the intended audience was Russian or Japanese or a combination or both, then the attacks were to be a show, a display, a demonstration. The question is: What kind of mood does a fundamentally decent people have to be in, what kind of moral arrangements must it make, before it is willing to annihilate as many as a quarter of a million human being for the sake of making a point.

….

　…the climate of World War II.

  It was a climate of unquestioned moral righteousness. The enemy was Fascism. The brutalities of Fascism were undisguised by pretense: the concentration camps, the murder of opponents, the tortures by secret police, the burning of books, the total control of information, the roving gangs of thugs in the streets, the designation of “inferior” races deserving extermination, the infallible leader, the mass hysteria, the glorification of war, the invasion of other countries, the bombing of other civilians. No literary work of imagination could create a more monstrous evil. There was, indeed, no reason to question that the enemy in World War II was monstrous and had to be stopped before it enveloped more victims.

 

  But it is precisely that situation－where the enemy is undebatably evil－that produces a righteousness dangerous not only to the enemy but to ourselves, to countless innocent bystanders, and to future generations.

 

  We could judge the enemy with some clarity. But not ourselves. If we did, we might have noted some facts clouding the simple judgment that since they were unquestionably evil, we were unquestionably good.

…

  As for our country, we recall expelling Spain from Cuba, ostensibly to liberate the Cubans, actually to open Cuba to our banks, railroads, fruit corporations, and army. We conscripted our young men and sent them into the slaughterhouse of Europe in 1917 to “make the world safe for democracy.” …

 

  In World War II, the assumption of a common motive for government and citizen was easier to accept because of the obvious barbarity of Fascism. But can we accept the idea that England, France, the United States, with their long history of imperial domination in Asia, in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, were fighting against international aggression? …

 

  The question of “motive” for the United States in making war against Japan is put this way by Bruce Russett in his book, No Clear and Present Danger:

Throughout the 1930s the United States government had done little to resist the Japanese advance on the Asian continent. 〔But：〕The Southwest Pacific area was of undeniable economic importance to the United States－at the time most of America’s tin and rubber came from there, as did substantial quantities of other raw materials.

 

  A year before Pearl Harbor, a State Department memorandum on Japanese expansion did not talk of the independence of China or the principle of self-determination. Again on the American motive, it said:

…our general diplomatic and strategic position would be considerably weakened－by our loss of Chinese, Indian and south Seas markets (and by our loss of much of the Japanese market for our goods, as Japan would become more and more self-sufficient) as well as by insurmountable restrictions upon our access to the rubber, tin, jute, and other vital materials of the Asian and Oceanic regions.

….

  … And the persistent notion that the Japanese were less than human probably played some role in the willingness to wipe out two cities populated by people of color.

 

….

  The New York times military analyst Hanson Baldwin wrote, shortly after the war:

The enemy, in a military sense, was in a hopeless strategic position by the time the Potsdam demand for unconditional surrender was made on July 26s. Such then was the situation when we wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Need we have done it? No one, of course, can be positive, but the answer is almost certainly negative.

 

  The United States Strategic Bombing Survey, whose team interviewed the important Japanese decision-makers right after the war, came to this official conclusion.

Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December, 1945, and in all probability prior to1 November, 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.

….

  General Dwight Eisenhower was a dissenter from the prevailing opinion at the high levels of government. He was briefed by Stimson on the fact that the bomb was about to be used, and later described that meeting:

During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of feelings of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives ….

 

  Another dissenter, though it is not clear that he expressed this before bombing, was Admiral William D. Leahy, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said: “The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.”

….

  The strategic argument, which I and other historians have tried to answer with the evidence that there was not military necessity to use the bomb, is not enough. We need to confront the moral issue directly: faced with the horrors visited on hundreds of thousands of human beings by the massive bombings of modern warfare, can any military-strategic-political “necessity” justify that?

 

  And if the answer is no, as I believe, what can we learn to free us from the thinking that leads us to stand by (yes, as the German people stood by, as the Japanese stood by) while atrocities are committed in our name?

 

  We can keep in mind the words of Richard Rhodes, who has studied the history of the atomic bomb probably more closely than anyone:

The national security state that the United States has evolved toward since 1945 is significantly a denial of the American democratic vision: suspicious of diversity, secret, martial, exclusive, monolithic, paranoid….Other nations have moderated their belligerence and tempered their ambitions without losing their souls. Sweden was once the scourge of Europe. It gave way…. Now it abides honorably and peacefully among the nations.

 

  We can be wary of “technological fanaticism,” which blinded many of the scientists of the Manhattan Project even more than the flash they saw in the desert, and which still intoxicates our whole culture.

 

  We can reject the belief that the lives of others are worth less than the lives of Americans, that a Japanese child, or an Iraqi child, or an Afghani child is worth less than an American child. We can refuse to accept the idea, which is the universal justification for war, that the means of massive violence are acceptable for “good ends,” because we should know by now, even though we are slow learners, that the ugliness of the means is always certain, the goodness of the end always uncertain.