A CONVERSATION WITH CHRISTINE HONG
The 1945 defeat of Japan was meant to signify Korean liberation. In Manchuria, anticolonial and communist Korean guerillas were joined by the Soviet Union and Mongolian armies in August 1945, and proceeded to oust the Japanese from Korea. The US, however, imposed a partition of the peninsula following the 38th parallel, which was crystallized by the “bombing holocaust” of the Korean War starting 1950. In this conversation, Christine Hong provides useful historical context to understand the significance for Korea of the few weeks/years that followed the US nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
LÉOPOLD LAMBERT: When I visited the Nagasaki memorial in 2024, I was struck by the sole presence of the Republic of Korea flag, a state that “represents” only the southern half of the country, and that did not exist in 1945 for the colonized Korean laborers in Japan killed by the nuclear bombings. How were the weeks that followed crucial for the way Japan-occupied Korea gave birth to the two militarized regimes we know today?
CHRISTINE HONG: The historian Gar Alperovitz once stated that the atomic bombings of Japan represented not just World War II’s last act, but also the Cold War’s opening salvo. Few people would dispute that the US bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the closing punctuation point to World War II, but Alperovitz’s revisionist account compels us to consider their proleptic Cold War significance. By use of the atomic bomb, the United States sought to secure for itself a position of regional domination, if not global supremacy. Even though there was a two-front, US-Soviet Allied strategy for Japan’s defeat, the atomic bombings were a unilateral act, a spectacular showcase of US annihilatory power. The goal was to gain the upper hand in shaping the postwar world order. And let’s be clear: contrary to the retroactive propaganda tale spun by Truman’s secretary of state Henry Stimson that were it not for the bomb, over a million US soldiers would have been killed in the Pacific Theater, Japan had been negotiating surrender for about a year. Stimson’s postwar insistence on the bomb’s military necessity thus obscures the political implications of the US decision to use the bomb. By putting the Soviet Union, its wartime ally, on notice, the United States launched the Cold War.