On August 6, 1945, The Progressive appeared on newsstands with a front-page editorial: “What’s the Matter with America?” It was about how U.S. occupying forces were treating German citizens following the end of the war in Europe.
“What’s happened to the conscience of America?” asked the editorial by then-editor Morris Rubin. “Has it been so battered and bashed by nearly four years of total war that we have lost all feeling for freedom, all sensitivity to injustice and oppression?”
The question would stick in readers’ minds that day, as the news came that the United States had exploded an atomic bomb over Hiroshima, Japan, killing at least 66,000 people instantly and injuring close to 70,000 more. (Eventually, the death toll would rise to as many as 166,000 people that year as a result of the explosion, fires, and radiation from the bomb.)
The attack on Hiroshima was followed by another deadly blast on August 9, when U.S. planes dropped a second atomic bomb on the smaller city of Nagasaki, Japan. The following week, on August 13, the then-weekly magazine would declare:
“The atomic bomb, harnessing the basic power of the universe by drawing its force as the sun draws its power, is the deadliest and most terrible weapon in all history, and unless the principles developed by scientists in studying the atom are harnessed for constructive purposes, this world-shaking development could lead to the destruction of the very civilization which produced the atomic bomb.”
From “The Progressive,” August 27, 1945.
This drew a letter, published in the magazine’s September 3, 1945 edition.
“Dear Sirs,” it began. “Truly you may ask, in the August 6 issue, ‘What Is the Matter with America?’ with her boasted so-called civilization, her humanitarianism, her righteousness ad nauseum. By her unbelievable inhuman conduct in this war, she has forfeited any claims she may have had of being civilized, but has proved beyond a doubt her fiendish savagery and predatory traits.” The writer praised The Progressive as “one of the few (if not the only) redeeming voices that still have the courage of their convictions to fight evil at its source.”
The magazine continued to highlight the dangers of the atomic age. On August 20, the staff wrote: “The unveiling of the terrifying atomic bomb in raids over Japan prompted avid and widespread discussion this week over the social and political as well as the military implications of this fantastic development in science.”
Besides the letter quoted above, The Progressive’s September 3, 1945, issue contained a long essay by William Henry Chamberlin titled “Atoms, Armaments, And America.” It said:
“The terrific destructive power of this formidable scientific discovery makes it highly probable that the next great war would leave in its wake not the victors and vanquished of the relatively humane wars of the past, not even the frustrated and impoverished winners and the bomb-wrecked losers of the recent struggle, but only the exterminated and the survivors in a sad new world of cave-burrowers.”
A few months later, in a cover story titled, “Three Musts For The Atomic Age,” Chamberlin noted warnings “put forward not by alarmist crackpots, but by eminent scientists acquainted with the demonic forces of destruction which they have helped to unloose, that 40 million Americans might be wiped out in a single atomic blitz . . . . There is a well-justified concern [that] the bell which tolled for Hiroshima and Nagasaki may toll in the living span of many Americans now alive in New York and Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia.”
Twenty years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the magazine ran a cover story, “The Decision to Drop the Bomb,” by the historian and political economist Gar Alperovitz based on his exhaustive study of the government records and documents pertaining to this first use of nuclear weapons.
“I believe new evidence proves not only that the atomic bomb influenced diplomacy,” he wrote, “but that it determined much of Mr. Truman’s shift to a tough policy aimed at forcing Soviet acquiescence to American plans for Eastern and Central Europe.”
Truman had told his Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, that the atomic bomb “gave him an entirely new feeling of confidence.” And his Secretary of State, James F. Byrnes, did not believe it was necessary to use the bomb against Japan to win the war. Rather, he believed “that our possessing and demonstrating the bomb would make Russia more manageable in Europe.”
In July 1984, as Cold War tensions increased, The Progressive’s contributing editor, Sam Day, impugned the scientific community for its role in allowing the nuclear genie, once out of the bottle, to become normalized.
The August 1965 cover of “The Progressive.”
“The Bomb’s debut as a shatterer of worlds sealed the most promising exit from the arms race: nuclear disarmament,” wrote Day, an anti-nuclear activist and former editor at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. “The route taken instead, with the atomic scientists pointing the way, was a process the world has come to know as ‘arms control’—the management of the nuclear balance of terror. Arms control has meant accepting nuclear weapons as a fact of life and devising arrangements to minimize the possibility of their use.”
This arrangement, Day argued, has allowed the arms race to continue: “True, the world has thus far escaped nuclear war. But, looking back to 1945, it is difficult to imagine how America's destiny could have been worse managed.”
To this day, The Progressive has continued to add its voice to calls for nuclear disarmament. Our June/July 2019 issue featured articles on the topic by Martin Fleck and Ira Helfand.
Fleck, program director for Physicians for Social Responsibility’s nuclear weapons abolition program, wrote: “Hiroshima was flattened by an American bomb with a ‘yield’ equivalent to 15,000 tons of TNT. Modern thermonuclear weapons are many times more powerful. Current American and Russian land-based missiles carry warheads ranging from 100 to 800 kilotons. That’s six to fifty-three times the size of the Hiroshima bomb.”
Helfand, past president of Physicians for Social Responsibility and co-president of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, noted that, in the estimation of former U.S. government defense officials and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock, “We are closer to a nuclear war than we have ever been.”
Helfand concluded his article with a statement that expresses the sentiments of The Progressive since we first addressed these issues: “To erase the threat of unparalleled catastrophe that has existed since the dawn of the nuclear age, we must articulate a clear strategy to eliminate these weapons before they eliminate us.”