THE 60TH anniversary of the defeat of Japanese aggression enables us to thank those survivors who accomplished it. To the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, on the other hand, it represents an opportunity to inculcate into schoolchildren a tendentious political message.

CND has produced a Hiroshima Education Pack nominally about the dropping of the A-bombs on Japan in August 1945 but giving no indication of the historical debates over that decision. Its treatment of the subject consists in denouncing as a “lie” the notion “that the US dropped the nuclear bombs in order to minimise casualties, claiming that a ground war would have killed many more people”.

The rest of the pack includes a selective history of CND, denunciations of the alleged bellicosity of the current US and UK governments, and a candid admission addressed to CND supporters that “the 60th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is an important opportunity for us to raise awareness amongst the general public of the horrifying reality of nuclear war and the need to join CND’s campaign”. There are also role-playing games that, in specifying that “students should be organised in mixed-ability groups to support each other”, charmingly recall an educational idée fixe of a bygone age.

CND’s sole cited source for its historical claims is a long-debunked thesis of 40 years ago. Recent historical research supports what CND denounces as lies. In 1997, D. M. Giangreco, of the US Army Command and General Staff College, concluded after exhaustive research of the primary sources that “the estimate that American casualties (in a ground invasion of Japan) could surpass the million mark was set in the summer of 1944 and was never changed”. In 1998, the Japanese historian Sadao Asada demonstrated, after assessing newly released documents about the surrender, that the dropping of both bombs was crucial in strengthening the position of those within the Japanese Government who wished to sue for peace.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were terrible acts of warfare undertaken to avoid the certainty of far greater casualties on all sides. The charge that the bombs were dropped for cynical reasons of US realpolitik is ahistorical. CND’s dissemination of it to schoolchildren in order to buttress its current campaigns is intellectual irresponsibility of a high order.