The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour

Intro

ROBERT MacNEIL: Good evening. These are the top headlines today. All over the world people marked the 40th anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. South Africa's state-run radio hinted that changes in apartheid will be announced soon. The space shuttle Challenger landed after eight days in orbit. For the second time in four years, major league baseball players have gone on strike. Jim?

JIM LEHRER: After the news of the day the 40th anniversary of Hiroshima is what the NewsHour is all about tonight. We will hear from novelist Kurt Vonnegut, writer-historian William Manchester, former national security official McGeorge Bundy, psychiatrist Alvin Toussaint, educator Jacqueline Wexler, bank vice president Deborah Edwards and our regular essayist Roger Rosenblatt of Time magazine. News Summary

MacNEIL: Around the world today people and nations marked the 40th anniversary of Hiroshima, some with prayers and some with protests and accusations. Pope John Paul II held a special mass and urged young people to reflect on what happened at Hiroshima and what he called the errors of yesterday. In Moscow the Soviet Communist Party newspaper Pravda said that dropping the first atomic bomb was a barbaric crime by the United States. In Hiroshima itself they observed the anniversary at the site that marks the center of the blast that killed 138,000 people.

[voice-over] A crowd of about 50,000 people gathered for the ceremony in Peace Memorial Park, where they listened to somber music and the tolling of memorial bells. A number of Japanese and foreign dignitaries were present, including Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, who placed a wreath at the cenotaph inscribed with the names of the victims of the explosion. The tolling of the traditional Buddhist bell was a signal for prayer. Then about 600 people fell to the ground in a symbolic die-in. And a few moments later 1,500 doves were released and flew off out of the park with a great flutter of wings.

LEHRER[voice-over]: And there were several Hiroshima anniversary demonstrations in this country. Churches in Boston and several other places in Massachusetts and Rhode Island rang bells. In Chicago there was an all-night vigil and a floating gallery of peace art. In Baltimore, Pittsburgh, San Francisco and many other cities, including Washington, sidewalks were whitewashed with shadows to duplicate the image of those killed at Hiroshima. The tying of ribbons was also a major activity of the day. One was put around the governor's mansion in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and a peace ribbon was used in a California demonstration that went from Santa Monica to downtown Los Angeles. Dozens of small ribbons were tied together to make the large, 500-feet-long ribbon which was displayed on Wilshire Boulevard. That ribbon was included in another demonstration, a human chain that was to stretch 15 miles from the Santa Monica seacoast to the Los Angeles Civic Center. This demonstration was apparently peaceful, but in some others around the country, at least 150 people were arrested, principally at weapons-manufacturing plants and government buildings. [on camera] Hiroshima is the subject of the NewsHour tonight, after this news summary.

Meanwhile, the State Department confirmed today the Soviet Union has agreed to international inspection of some of its civilian nuclear reactors. A spokesman said the decision was important and welcome and marked the first time such inspections have been allowed. Their point is to confirm the reactors are not being used for military purposes. They will be conducted by an agency of the United Nations. The Soviets were heard from directly on another nuclear front today. A Soviet arms negotiator in Geneva said the Soviets would not accept President Reagan's invitation to send observers to the next U.S. atomic test in Nevada. He called the invitation a propaganda gimmick.

MacNEIL: South Africa's state-run radio hinted today that the government is about to announce changes in the system of apartheid. A commentary on the radio, which reflects the thinking of the white minority government, said that it was time to publish plans to modify apartheid, the system of racial separation that has come under mounting world criticism in recent weeks. The commentator said that important policy statements were expected in the next few weeks. In the past year the government of President P.W. Botha has talked of concessions in the pass laws which restrict blacks' movements and in political representation. Meanwhile, in a township outside Johannesburg, a tense confrontation between blacks and government forces was defused. Here's a report from James Robbins of the BBC.

JAMES ROBBINS, BBC [voice-over]: As Bishop Tutu arrived in Daveyton Township, it was clear the emergency laws governing funerals would be upheld today with force rather than discretion. Police and troops guarded almost every street corner, and from an armored personnel carrier they looked down on the tent beside the Komalu family's home where the funeral service was being held for their 16-year-old daughter Elizabeth. She was shot dead by the police with two other teenages girls after a funeral two weeks ago. As the service was going on, just outside, a student leader on the run, fearing detention, had been dragged into a car by police and was being driven away. The Bishop ignored the emergency ban on political statement, making one of his strongest condemnations of apartheid.

Rt. Rev. DESMOND TUTU, Bishop of Johannesburg: It is in Russia where the ministers are told what to preach. It was in Nazi Germany where the people were told what to preach. And if we are told in this land what to preach, then who can doubt that when I said apartheid is as evil as communism and as nazism that I was not speaking the truth?

ROBBINS [voice-over]: The burial itself was a hurried affair. The crowd, apparently anxious to disperse, aware of a cavalry unit facing them across the plain. Once again today it seems Bishop Tutu's influence helped prevent bloodshed in a situation where blood has so often been spilled before.

MacNEIL: Britain is faced with a strike tomorrow which could shut down much of its television and radio news. Journalists in the British Broadcasting Corporation have called the walkout to protest against a decision by the BBC's board of governors not to run a documentary on Northern Ireland. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's government admits asking the BBC to cancel the documentary but denies censorship. Today the BBC governors met to consider again whether or not to air the program. From London, Bill Hamilton of the BBC reports.

BILL HAMILTON, BBC [voice-over]: A week to the day that the governors had decided to stop transmission of the documentary on Irish extremism, they were summoned back to Broadcasting House to think again. Though most entered tightlipped, those who gave even a hint of their thoughts were obviously determined to stand their ground.

[interviewing] Sir John, have you any regrets about the decision the governors took last week?

Sir JOHN BOYD, BBC Board Member: Oh, none whatsoever. Grave regrets about the decision of the journalists. They're laboring under a multitude of erroneous ideas.

BOARD MEMBER: We did not give in to government pressure.

HAMILTON [voice-over]: The world's media surrounded the home of British broadcasting while upstairs in the third-floor boardroom the governors decided what action they should take following the huge storm of protest over the ban. Across the road, 300 members of the Broadcasting Entertainment's Trade Alliance gave up their lunch hour to stage a mass demonstration. Then, at about 3:30, the governors, trying to avoid the media's attention, began leaving by a side entrance. Their decision was to abide by their original judgment.

LEHRER: The troubled space shuttle Challenger had no trouble returning home today. The spacecraft with its seven astronauts aboard made a smooth landing this afternoon at Edwards Air Force Base in California. The shuttle traveled three million miles in its eight days in space on a mission to study the sun, among other scientific things. It did it despite a flawed beginning that saw one of its three engines shut down ahead of schedule, but the landing today was picture perfect.

In Washington the Education Department came up today with a foolproof system for collecting bad debts. Education Secretary William Bennett said he has asked the Internal Revenue Service to withhold tax refunds from some one million Americans who have defaulted on student loans. He called it the ultimate trump card.

MacNEIL: Major league baseball players went on strike today after last-minute negotiations failed to prevent the second mid-season walkout in four years. The strike takes effect at 7:30 p.m. Eastern Time, when scheduled night games were due to begin. The strike brings the season to an abrupt halt two months before it was due to end. Eight months of negotiations broke down over the owners' desire to limit the players' resort to arbitration in salary disputes.

In New York today, a former Wall Street Journal reporter was sentenced to 18 months in jail for using his position at the paper to make profits in the stock market. The former reporter, R. Foster Wynans, was also fined $5,000. He was found guilty of conspiracy, securities fraud and wire and mail fraud.

On Wall Street, the stock market suffered its biggest loss in a year. The Dow Jones industrial average dropped 21.73 points to close at 1325.16. Analysts attributed the decline chiefly to technical factors. Hiroshima Remembered

MacNEIL: Forty years ago today there was an event that changed the world in many ways. The first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, by the orders of President Harry S. Truman. As we reported, people around the world have been marking that anniversary today. We do so tonight by devoting the rest of the NewsHour to a discussion of what Hiroshima means. For this unusual program we have an unusual cast. Novelist Kurt Vonnegut, whose book Slaughterhouse Five dealt with the horror of the fire-bombing of Dresden; William Manchester, the writer and historian who barely survived his wounds on Okinawa and wrote, "Thank God for the atomic bomb"; McGeorge Bundy, national security advisor to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson during two great crises of the nuclear cold war; Jacqueline Wexler, a former nun, now director of the National Conference of Christians and Jews; Dr. Alvin Poussaint, professor of psychiatry at Harvard; and Deborah Edwards, a vice president with the First National Bank of Chicago, the only one of our guests born into the nuclear age.

Starting with you, Kurt Vonnegut, can you tell us where you were 40 years ago and what you thought about the bomb being dropped?

KURT VONNEGUT, Jr.: Well, I was in my parents' home in Indianapolis, Indiana. I had gotten home from the war in Europe where I'd been an ordinary soldier and a prisoner of war in Dresden. And I had been given a long furlough, and the expectation was I would be retrained and assigned to a division and go into the attack on Japan. My brother was with me, and when we heard the news he was able to gauge the enormity of this news because he was a physicist. He is Dr. Vonnegut. And he understood immediately that a new, absolutely intolerable dimension of weapon had come into the world. And so he brought that home to me very quickly. And I had seen devastation, not at all on that order, but tending in that direction of course, in the firebombing of Dresden. So, yes, I was in Indianapolis when I heard the news.

MacNEIL: William Manchester, where were you?

Mr. MANCHESTER: I was in a naval hospital in San Francisco. I had been gravely wounded on Okinawa on June 5th; I'd been operated on in Saipan and Hawaii, and I was on my way to the naval hospital in San Diego for another operation. I was shown copies of the San Francisco newspapers and my first reaction was that newspapers in San Francisco are sensational beyond belief. I couldn't grasp it.

MacNEIL: You couldn't grasp it.

Mr. MANCHESTER: I couldn't grasp the enormity of nuclear weapons.

MacNEIL: But --

Mr. MANCHESTER: It was an occasion on which reality exceeded the imagination.

MacNEIL: In your own personal case, how did you react to the idea that this might have ended or might be about to end the Second World War in a great hurry?

Mr. MANCHESTER: Well, as it sank in, my feeling about it may be called self-serving, because it meant I was going to live. I would have been patched up, probably in time for the November 1st landing in Kyushu, and certainly for the March 1st landing on Honshu. And the Marine divisions were going to go ashore in the first wave, and we would have been slaughtered. There are many estimates on how many people would have died, but the most reliable American estimate is that America would have lost over a half a million casualties, of whom 110,000 would have been dead. The Japanese -- the figure was in the millions, approximately 30 million. The Japanese had 2 million soldiers in four islands, and 32 million members of the militia -- men and women and children of all ages. The children were taught to strap exposives around themselves and then roll under tanks. The children were called Sherman carpets. So the devastation ahead -- far more Japanese lives were saved by the bomb, the two bombs. And I should say that it wasn't until the second bomb --

MacNEIL: On Nagasaki.

Mr. MANCHESTER: -- had been dropped that the emperor intervened.

MacNEIL: Jacqueline Wexler, where were you and what was your first reaction?

JACQUELINE WEXLER: I was 19, just back from my first year in college on a farm in Illinois and working in a factory, running a riveter in the war effort during the summer, both to help with the war effort and to earn my way through college. I had an older sister who was at that point still in Europe, having served as an evacuation nurse, seeing the worst that American women had seen in wartime. And all of my friends from high school were -- my male friends -- were there somewhere. Many of my tribal cousins were in that theater. My sister's fiance was in that theater, a tailgunner. So it was very real to me that this was a chance for the war to be ended. I didn't at that point, like Kurt Vonnegut, have a physicist in that tribal family, no one who could explain to me, no television that could show to me the devastation of that kind of event. And, as far as I can remember, it was an event which would probably end the double-jeopardy war in which we had been involved.

MacNEIL: McGeorge Bundy, where were you and what was your reaction?

McGEORGE BUNDY: I was in an infantry division that was being shipped across the United States then across the Pacific from Germany to take part in the scheduled invasions of Japan. So that my first reaction was quite naturally one of enormous relief, coupled of course with astonishment or fear of the power of this new explosive, but my more sober thoughts about the matter certainly came later.

MacNEIL: Dr. Poussaint, where were you?

ALVIN POUSSAINT: I was in New York City, in East Harlem. I wasw 11 years old, and what I remember is the frenzy about the war and the very strong anti-Japanese feelings, that people were so angry with the Japanese. And I think there were racist components to it, that everyone rejoiced that they were being paid back. There was all of this talk constantly that even children got about the need for revenge about Pearl Harbor. And I think that that had a special effect on me because I had a brother who was in the segregated Marine Corps, and I felt that therewas some wish to just annihilate those people. So I had a little bit of a mixed reaction, although at the time I was also caught up in the frenzy of the war and wanted the war to end and so on, but later, on reflection, it disturbed me, a lot of the sentiments at that time that I felt probably entered the decision to drop that bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

MacNEIL: Ms. Edwards in Chicago, you're the only one among us who is too young to have been alive then. You're 33, if you don't mind me telling your age.

DEBORAH EDWARDS: It's okay.

MacNEIL: How old were you when you first found out about what happened at Hiroshima, and how did it affect you?

Ms. EDWARDS: Well, I guess I'd have to say that I learned about it in school as part of history books. For me it was a historical event. It was not part of my daily life; it was not anything that had anything to do with current events. It was no more real to me than the Civil War or anything else that was of historical significance.

MacNEIL: Well, we'll come back.

Ms. EDWARDS: It was the end of the Second World War.

MacNEIL: Thank you. Jim?

LEHRER: Forty years later, the question remains, did the United States do the right thing in dropping that bomb? McGeorge Bundy, you said a moment ago that your sober thoughts about it have come to you since. What are those sober thoughts?

Mr. BUNDY: Well, I think I am not disposed to criticize the use of the existence of the bomb to help to end the war, but it does seem to me, looking back on it, that there were opportunities for communication and warning available to the United States government which were not completely thought through by our government at that time. In July and early August, 1945, the United States government knew three things that the Japanese government did not. One was that the bomb was coming into existence, had been successfully tested. One was that the United States government was prepared to allow the emperor to remain on his throne in Japan, and the third was that the Russians were coming into the war. And the question, it seems to me, that was not fully studied, fully presented to President Truman, was whether warning of the bomb and assurance on the emperor could not have been combined in a fashion which would have produced Japanese surrender without the use of the bomb on a large city, with all of the human consequences that followed.

LEHRER: Bill Manchester, what are your views of it, 40 years later?

Mr. MANCHESTER: I'd like to comment on Mack Bundy's remarks. The Potsdam declaration contained an ambiguous paragraph, paragraph number seven, which seemed to imply that the Japanese could keep their emperor. It was ambiguous. But what is interesting is that Premier Suzuki in Tokyo so interpreted it that the Japanese government believed the Potsdam declaration assured them that they would have their emperor. The device which was exploded at Los Alamos was not a bomb; it was a static device. And there was no certainty that that bomb, when dropped on Hiroshima, would explode. It was indeed only after two bombs were exploded that the Japanese responded, and even then there was rebellion in Japan. The general commanding the Imperial Guards division was murdered when he refused to join in the revolt. Hirohito had recorded an announcement to the Japanese people. The rebels were intent upon getting hold of that and destroying it. Over 2,000 kamikaze planes had been used. They had another 5,000 reserved, and Hirohito had to send his younger brother to persuade these people not to do it. The leaflets were dropped -- the bombwas dropped at 8:16 a.m. on Monday, August the 6th. On August the 4th the leaflets were dropped on Hiroshima warning them of a coming 7event], urging people to leave. I think that Mr. Vonnegut is quite correct in saying that the President should have made this clear to the Japanese. Truman was a new President. He hadn't been in office long, and he relied heavily upon his advisors. And when Suzuki in March had sent peace feelers through to Russia, which was still a neutral country, Truman wanted to follow it up, but three advisors -- MacLeish, Harry Hopkins and Dean Acheson -- urged him not to. It has been argued that we should have -- and the Navy felt they could blockade Japan, that Japan could be starved to death. You cannot stop a war unless all of your allies agree. The Russians were in the war. There was already heavy fighting in Manchuria. And had we remained aloof, having conquered so much of the Pacific, the Russians, indifferent to casualties, would certainly have taken over those four islands. And at the very least they would have had Hokkaido, which would make Japan divided, as Germany and Korea were.

LEHRER: Dr. Poussaint, what's your view of whether or not the bomb should have been dropped?

Dr. POUSSAINT: I think the bomb should not have been dropped because I don't think it was just a military decision. I think the bomb by its very nature is an instrument of genocide, that you're not just hitting military targets. When you talk about nuclear weapons, you're talking about all of the people, and that element, I think, in it for me, and even in relationship to the Japanese is very, very, very frightening. That it's something that affects all people. You're not just annihilating a military target, but you endanger the total community and, right now, the total world when you think about the use of nuclear weapons. I think, too, there was a possibility that has not been mentioned, that they could have demonstrated the power of the bomb in some neutral area where there were no people, and that perhaps would have frightened the Japanese. The other thing I don't understand is why they only allowed the Japanese three days to make a decision before they dropped another atomic bomb on Nagasaki. I think it's clear to me that there was a wish at the time to punish the Japanese, to blow them into oblivion, and I think because of the frenzy of the times, the racial feelings and so on, that people were not sober enough to think and feel the enormous impact of what they were about to do to a group of people.

LEHRER: Kurt Vonnegut, where do you come down on this?

Mr. VONNEGUT: Well, I think we have to acknowledge that what we did, for one reason or another, was the equivalent of Auschwitz in a capsule. A public relations man could attach a story to this particular capsule. But we went into the business of burning civilians alive, of having people watch the death of their children and their parents and so forth. So at the very end we went into the Auschwitz business, and it was a terrible loss of honor, perhaps for a significant military gain. But if one branch of your armed forces is devoted to killing civilians, as the German army had the SS, then honor is lost. It's not possible for the most humble infantryman to consider himself an honorable person because one branch of his armed forces is engaged in genocide. And, yes, I think that was our business there in Hiroshima that day.

LEHRER: And do you think it was justified, looking back on it?

Mr. VONNEGUT: Short term, I think so, yes. And I regard it as a historical tragedy. Inany event, we would have the arsenals we have today whether we had dropped a demonstration bomb. We would be facing the same problem now. And so whether we should have dropped it or not, we can rue the survivors, the people who still suffering from their wounds.

LEHRER: Ms. Edwards in Chicago, how do you feel about the question of whether or not the bomb should have been dropped?

Ms. EDWARDS: I think that war is a horrible thing no matter which way you look at it, and that at the time it must have been a very difficult decision, both politically and morally, and yet there was a war going on, and I think that probably people had an incentive to get it stopped, to make it be over, and dropping the bomb was one way out. It was at tragedy, of course, it was a horrible thing, but war is a horrible thing.

LEHRER: You mean it's already horrible, and Hiroshima didn't make it any worse?

Ms. EDWARDS: It didn't make it any worse and did end it. I mean, you don't know how many more people would have been killed had it not been stopped at that point. You don't know what other tragedies might have occurred. It couldn't have been an easy decision.

LEHRER: Dr. Wexler, what's your view, 40 years later?

Dr. WEXLER: Well, my view 40 years later is that it is ours in our time to make decisions for today based on everything we've learned. I would not be arrogant or naive enough to second-guess Harry Truman with the evidence that he had at that point and with the experience that he had at that time. I would take very strong exception to what I think Kurt said, Kurt Vonnegut said in comparing it to Auschwitz. I think on many levels there are no one-to-one comparisons. The holocaust victims were not victims who have had a war declared on them as a class of people. That was not a state of war. When you move it to a state of war you have the first degree -- you have the first difference in kind, not just in degree. We had already been through, as I have seen it in retrospect. Younger people have to recognize there was no television at that time in which we watched devastation, but we had already been through the bombing of cities, the bombing of cities in London, all over England and in the West, where the dividing line between the conscripted soldier and the citizen of the country had already been greyed over. I think this was, for all of us, in retrospect, the great kind of catalyst divider. You know, have we come to this? Has war come to this? And what I know I've learned from it, 40 years later, at 59 rather than 19, is that the only game in town, the only grace worth pursuing is to find some other way for human beings to settle their problems. The order of magnitude is devastating in an atomic bomb. The order of magnitude would be beyuond all comprehension in a nuclear bomb. But the evil of killing conscripted or non-conscripted citizens in the name of settling disputes is godawful.

LEHRER: Thank you. Robin?

MacNEIL: We're going to continue this discussion, taking up two lines of thought. What impact has Hiroshima had on war as a concept and what impact on people personally, their anxieties, their confidence? Those themes are introduced for us by our regular essayist, Roger Rosenblatt of Time magazine, author of the current book, Witness: The World Since Hiroshima.

ROGER ROSENBLATT: Have you been to Hiroshima? It's a lovely place. No Leningrad or Paris, but there is much to admire in the zip of the city. Shops glow like fruit on the fashionable streets. Young people dress to the nines. Everywhere you look an office building humming noiselessly like a computer. All new, of course, built up since the morning of August 6th, 1945, when the Enola Gay dropped the atomic bomb and suddenly there was no Hiroshima. The crew of the B-29 watched a red-purple bulb rise toward them from below while down in the city the air shimmered with shock waves. Houses collapsed. People ran from fires, their skin hanging from their limbs like loose-fitting coats. Oh, but you can't see any of that today, except in museum exhibits or in the Peace Park, where the dead, 113,000 counted so far, are honored with statues and the lawns are trimmed. Where the bomb exploded, flowers bloom in patches near a new blue parking garage.

So where is Hiroshima? It must be somewhere, the old city, the cradle of the Atomic Age. After August 6th, 1945, nothing in the world was to be the same again. Everyone knows that. Not war, peace, politics, not us. You'd think there would be great piles of remnants on every continent to commemorate so vast a revolution. Instead, the world displays a whole new set of Hiroshima reminders -- souvenirs called Pershings, Tridents, SS-18s. In high, flat farmland missiles lie planted like tall vertical seeds waiting for a signal to sprout. That is where Hiroshima is today. The city is getting around.

And then there are people's fears. Hiroshima lives there, too, transferred from history to nightmares of mushroom formations, much more colorful and glorious than that first primitive explosion. Familiar visions in the Atomic Age. Thanks to the incredible range of those Pershings, Tridents and SS-18s, Hiroshima may also be found in Terre Haute, Jerusalem, Sao Paolo. The strategy of bombing civilian populations was one of the lasting legacies of World War II. With every citizen a potential target, a thousand Hiroshimas lie open every morning.

This then is where we are these days. Hiroshimas everywhere one looks, and this is how we are -- fraught with anxiety about sudden death from the sky, poring over books about the arms race, sitting hunched before the television set while movies like "The Day After" recapitulate Hiroshima, and we yammer endlessly about the fact of our extinction. Oh, sure, the superpowers will keep their cool, but what about a crazy like Qaddafi? Every child knows the litany. The only difference between our age and the world before August 6th, 1945, is that we have replaced surprise with anticipation.

Will we make it through? Who knows? In one sense this has been the worst of times, all this perpetual jumpy fragility. In another sense this Atomic Age of ours may turn out not to be the end of the world after all, but merely a transitional period, hardly worth mentioning, in which the nations armed themselves to the gills and effected a standoff. Maybe war simply will not be practical anymore. It would be heartening to think so.

Meanwhile, we pace and fret and tell ourselves that the world is not in our hands, but we know that it is, just as it was 40 years ago, or 41, before there was a Hiroshima. Once the bomb dropped, there we were as usual, responsible for ourselves, for one another, for the place we live. Have we been to Hiroshima? We never left.

MacNEIL: McGeorge Bundy in Boston, starting with you. To use Rosenblatt's phrase just now, maybe wars simply will not be practical anymore. You were in the center of policymaking in the early '60s when at least on two occasions nuclear war became thinkable. Is war not practicable anymore between the great powers because of nuclear weapons?

Mr. BUNDY: The existence of nuclear weapons now in tens of thousands, the other power's weapons constitute a very great cautionary force upon the two great governments. And I think we did learn that in the Cuban missile crisis in particular. It is sometimes thought that the United States government felt somehow enormously confident because at that time we had a certain arithmetical superiority in numbers of weapons and deliverable -- survivable, deliverable megatons, but that's not so. What President Kennedy understood and what, as it turned out, Nikita Khrushchev understood, too, in that crisis was that neither side could face with any equanimity whatever the prospect that decisions by the other or events moving out of control might bring a nuclear exchange. And that did have a great cautionary effect. One must add, however, that that crisis was caused, in very large part, by the nuclear weapons competition because it was Khrushchev's decision to put his medium-range and intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Cuba that made a strong American reaction really inevitable, given the then-feelings of our country and our people. So it cuts both ways. It induces caution, but it also produces competition in armaments which has had moments of grave danger.

MacNEIL: William Manchester, would we have had a war with Russia by now, with the Soviet Union, had there not been atomic weapons?

Mr. MANCHESTER: Almost certainly, if you take the political climate in this country and in Moscow in the early 1950s, there would have been a war. We have gone 40 years without a war. If I may, I'm deeply troubled by the implication that this was genocide, that this was racist. The initiative for the development of nuclear weapons was taken by Jewish physicists who had been expelled or who had fled from Europe. They knew that their former colleagues in Germany were working on a nuclear device, and they had no doubt that Hitler would use it. And so they wanted to get it first. And they were thinking about Germany. Suppose -- and Germany, not Japan, was considered the prime target. Suppose the weapon had been ready in July of 1944. Millions of lives would have been saved, including the majority of the people who were destroyed at Auschwitz. Hiroshima was a tragedy. Surely we don't even take pride in it. It was part of a greater tragedy, World War II, in which approximately 50 million human beings died. We did not start terror bombing. The Japanese started it at Shanghai. The Germans did it in the Blitz. And it should be remembered that 37,000 Britons died because of those raids. Then the pendulum swung to our side and we did perpetrate the crime; the destruction of Dresden, the firebombing of Hamburg, were intolerable. I don't think they shortened the war. I think that, in the case of Japan, they did save lives. They left us with a terrible heritage, which we're still groping with.

MacNEIL: Since it was Dr. Poussaint who raised the racism question, let me ask him to respond to that. Bill Manchester said it wasn't racism.

Dr. POUSSAINT: Well, I think that all of the elements were there. I remember as a child they depicted the Japanese as being savage, wild, big teeth, ready to slay you, chasing white women in particular, and let's recall that we put the Japanese, Japanese-Americans, in concentration or internment camps in the United States. So that that was a racist position from the start. And I think it's that type of attitude that we had toward the Japanese people that I think may have played a role in the dropping of the bomb. Now, we can't say what would have happened to Germany. But I have a hunch that the considerations would have been a bit different toward Germany because we didn't intern German-Americans because they were German and see them as a threat and constantly use terms like "Yellow Peril" to describe the Japanese, that they were somehow uncivilized people and so on. I think that the color question was an issue. We had an armed services that was segregated, that were fighting for democracy with black troops and with white troops, and they even had some Japanese troops at the end. How can we deny the reality of racism being a very significant element in American policy and thinking at that particular time in history?

MacNEIL: Can we come back to the point of whether the Atomic Age has so changed the nature of warfare that it has rendered big wars unlikely or impossible? Do you have an opinion on that?

Dr. POUSSAINT: Well, I think that if you're building nuclear weapons and getting arsenals that there is a chance, a good chance, that someone is going to use nuclear weapons, that humans are not perfect; they have wild and crazy emotions sometimes, they become very angry and feel justified. I think that other nations will get the bomb. I think that some countries already have the bomb, probably, that we don't acknowledge. I think South Africa may have the bomb. Would South Africa use nuclear weapons to save themselves against the black hordes in South Africa, since they're 22 million and white South Africans are four million? I don't know. I am not as optimistic about our ability to control these savage impulses I think that many human beings have, and our wish to win. And since -- over the past number of years since Hiroshima it's been reported about six times that the United States itself thought about and considered dropping nuclear weapons. Well, United States leaders, I guess, wouldn't compare themselves with Qaddafi, who they think is a nut, and maybe Qaddafi would do it. The other thing is, that bomb is in the control of the major powers, primarily the Soviet Union and United States. They are white nations, right? It has become partly an instrument of domination, I think, of Third World countries. China has recently gotten the bomb. But we try really hard to make sure Third World people do not get nuclear weapons because it's a way of those two major powers dominating the world and the colored peoples of the world.

LEHRER: Jacqueline Wexler, do you think that the awe created in the public and in the minds of policymakers by the nature of nuclear weapons has made big war less likely?

Dr. WEXLER: Yes, I think it has made it less likely. If you had said impossible, I would have answered in a very different way.

MacNEIL: Let me just add a piece to that. Therefore, is the anxiety that lives in so many American and Western breasts, and people of the Eastern bloc for that matter as well, is that misplaced anxiety?

Dr. WEXLER: No, I think it's well-placed anxiety. I think a relative degree, a significant degree of anxiety about what would happen in such a war is one of our best ensurers that we will not give way to the kinds of emotions that lead people to do these sorts of things. I would agree that there were obviously very many racist sentiments in the United States at the time of the Second World War -- the segregated armies, certainly the containment of of American Japanese people. I think if you asked Americans today how they felt about that, you would get a mea culpa, a much more general mea culpa than you would on the dropping of the bomb. But we have got to try to use that anxiety to get people to deal with it as a good anxiety, totry to invest in the only game in town. Again, that game being to get people to solve problems at the domestic level and at the national level and at the international level without going to brutality, which has now been geometrically expanded.

MacNEIL: Kurt Vonnegut, are you confident that this awe and deep impression of the power of nuclear weapons has raised the moral and intellectual quality of policymaking regarding war?

Mr. VONNEGUT: We have been talking about 40 years of peace, and I don't know -- I'm not aware that we've had 40 years of peace. We were in Vietnam, we were in Korea, took heavy casualties there. I believe we fired more shells off in Vietnam than we did in all of World War II. So I'm not aware that these hell bombs have restrained anybody. And I suppose that in one way or another the Russians and the Americans give each other permission to operate in their own spheres of influence, in Indochina, in some way we received a signal, I think from the Soviet Union [unintelligible] and I think we have given them every possible assurance that, as terrible as things are in Afghanistan, we're not going to nuke them. So I think the weapons are really quite useless and have done us no favors. They may have prevented us from fighting the Russians themselves. It prevented the Superbowl game and I guess that's what people mean. But right now, is what are the casualties in Iraq-Iran -- is on a par with World War I now, I believe.

Mr. MANCHESTER: Well, I agree. I mean, when I said 40 years I meant 40 years of peace between the Soviet Union and the United States, and you're quite right. These others -- I think that we've reached a stage in history in which wars are being fought by client states which --

MacNEIL: But does nuclear weapons make that possible? That otherwise the main contenders for world power would be going at each other, whereas --

Mr. MANCHESTER: The nuclear weapons in a sense are emasculating. As late as the early 1940s, when I enlisted in the Marine Corps, it was possible for one man with a rifle to make some difference, however infinitesimal, in the war against fascism. Today the rifleman is a preposterous figure because he's overshadowed by this immense destructive power. Everyone is entitled, I think, to one crackpot idea, and I'd just like to give mine. I think that a step which certainly wouldn't encourage nuclear warfare would be the adoption of a custom in which one member of the President's immediate family should live in Moscow, not always the same one. They could rotate. It would be some hardship, but at the same time one member of the chairman of the Communist Party's immediate family would live in Washington. Now, I know that sounds simplistic, but I offer it as a thought.

Mr. VONNEGUT: I have a companion crackpot idea, and it is I've never met a general or an admiral who could imagine any use for these weapons, could not imagine any circumstance where it would make sense militarily to fire them off. So I say fill the warheads with jellybeans. Since these things cannot be used, and I think the exchange of relatives is a good idea.

Mr. MANCHESTER: But the nuclear weapons put the generals and admirals out of business.

Mr. VONNEGUT: Yeah.

Mr. MANCHESTER: I mean, they become ridiculous. There is no function for them.

MacNEIL: Let me pass it over to Jim. Jim?

LEHRER: Yeah, let's move on to a more individual level and, Ms. Edwards in Chicago, do you feel that you're a different person than you would have been had you not been born in this "nuclear age"?

Ms. EDWARDS: Than if I'd not been born in the nuclear age? Well, yes, but I was born in the nuclear age. I mean, it's part of everything that I do and think about. There's no small comfort to me that there's enough nuclear weapons in existence today to destroy almost the entire world, and that says something about the way in which we live. And the fact that it renders war useless or a fear in the future. I mean, it is there. you can't deny it.

LEHRER: But is it there all the time, and is it something you think about a lot?

Ms. EDWARDS: I don't think how you can not think about it. I mean, you can remember when they were testing the neutron bomb which would kill every living thing. Those are horrible thoughts. And it's with you. It's just as much with you as computers and anything else in our technological society. We live in a technological age that has immense power.

LEHRER: Dr. Poussaint, you're a psychiatrist. Is there such -- there's an awful lot of talk about the fact that the umbrella, the cloud of nuclear war hangs over all of us and the effect it has on people. What's your feeling about how serious that is?

Dr. POUSSAINT: Well, there's disagreement. I think some studies show that children are very frightened about nuclear war. Other studies show that they are not really. Adults when you question them are very frightened. I think it depends on how much the activists and how much the society is concerned about nuclear war that will affect human response. And I think there has to be some reality given to that. I think for a lot of Americans war is an abstraction, that for the past 100 years or so we have never really experienced war and devastation here on American shores. I don't think that they feel the threat of war, even nuclear holocaust, in the same way that other nations who have experienced directly war would experience those feelings. For instance, in Europe, the anti-nuclear movement is much stronger because they are so close to the Soviet Union and the threat of those weapons. I think here in the United States, unfortunately and pathetically, too often it seems like an abstraction, something that really can't happen to us because we have been so very much protected and sheltered from some of the realities of the devastation.

LEHRER: McGeorge Bundy, how do you feel about that? Do you agree with that?

Mr. BUNDY: No, I really can't agree with that. It does appear to me that, while there have been times when public opinion has been focused on other questions, notably, for example, the Vietnam War, which never came near to becoming nuclear, and I nd that an important point. There have been such times. But I think certainly in the last 10 years we have had a very strong and to me encouraging increase in public concern about nuclear danger. First it was about the danger of nuclear energy but now, I think increasingly and properly, of nuclear weapons. It's much harder to find concrete and wise and progressive ways of reducing that danger than it is to be concerned about it, but concern is a good beginning. I think it is very much a product of the opinion of the democratic nations that we have seen this increasing caution and prudence on the part of our own government and other friendly nuclear governments, the French, the British. And that caution and prudence are one critically important, indispensable part of the effort to see to it that there is not nuclear war, and that if a first nuclear warhead or warheads are ever used, the decisions that then are made are aimed not at winning the war but at stopping it, which is quite a different thing.

LEHRER: Jacqueline Wexler, do you know anybody personally who worries continually about nuclear war? I don't mean as a political issue, but as a personal issue?

Dr. WEXLER: No, I do not. I do not. I think other people may know such persons, but I do not have a friend -- an acquaintance, much less a friend, who worries all the time about it.

LEHRER: What about you, Bill Manchester? You teach on a college campus, Wesleyan University up in Middletown, Connecticut. Is it something that the young people worry about on a personal level?

Mr. MANCHESTER: No, I cannot say that they do. I think if anything their attitude can be described as fatalistic. There is --

LEHRER: It's going to happen, there's nothing they can do?

Mr. MANCHESTER: There is a fear I have, and I lose sleep over it, is that at some point, probably within the next 10 years, terrorists are going to have a nuclear device, and there is no way that we can cope with that. But when I bring this subject up, the subject is changed. People just don't want to think about it.

LEHRER: Kurt Vonnegut, have you ever lost any sleep at anything connected with nuclear war?

Mr. VONNEGUT: No, I don't think so. I have lost sleep over the smallness and weakness of the peace movement in this country, which is something else, that rationally, we're in a heck of a jam and there don't seem to be very many people interested in doing anything about it.

Mr. MANCHESTER: The Vietnam War is the only war that's ever been stopped by public opinion.

Dr. WEXLER: But it seems to me that fatalism, if Bill Manchester is correct, an attitude of fatalism among the young is the most dangerous of all. If for whatever reasons you do not think that you must have leverage on the society, however small, then you don't take responsibility. And to be fatalistic is to be non-responsible, and it's why I will always reject a cynical attitude or a fatalistic attitude of the world. It is the ticket to irresponsibility. I think what McGeorge Bundy was saying earlier is that rather leaders in nations and citizens in nations in a global community, unlike every one we've ever known, with open transportation and open communications as well as bombs and nuclear energy, that is it incumbent upon citizens to recognize that however small the step, however small the decision, it has consequences.

LEHRER: Deborah Edwards, do you agree with that, or are you fatalistic about it?

Ms. EDWARDS: To some extent I think I am fatalistic about it. I think that it could very easily get into the hands of somebody like Qaddafi or a Third World nation and I'm not sure what would happen after that. I'm not sure that I believe that we have control over the process anymore. I think there is enough going on in terms of world politics that it could very easily be out of control. And somebody mentioned that it's irresponsible, but on the other hand, I'm not sure anybody knows what to do at this point in time. Don't we have enough nuclear weapons in the world? What more can you do?

LEHRER: I think we will leave it with your question hanging. Ms. Edwards in Chicago, thank you very much. In Boston, Dr. Poussaint and McGeorge Bundy, our thanks to both of you. In New York, Jacqueline Wexler, Kurt Vonnegut and William Manchester. Robin?

MacNEIL: Good night, Jim. That's our NewsHour for tonight. We will be back tomorrow night. I'm Robert MacNeil. Good night.