The impact of nuclear war

After Hiroshima, divisions remain over the morality of developing and using weapons of mass destruction.

“ON the way to Kyoto, the train took Tunku Abdullah past Hiroshima – a city completely devastated, with all its buildings demolished for miles and miles around. It was an awesome and frightening sight. The people had only been told that a large bomb had been dropped. He hoped that his friends, Syed Omar and Nik Yusof, had somehow escaped.”

This was how Tunku Halim recalled how his father (and my great-uncle; the youngest son of the first Yang di-Pertuan Agong) witnessed the devastation of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, dropped this week 78 years ago.

Tunku Abdullah was studying at the Malay College Kuala Kangsar (MCKK) before the war, but after the Japanese occupation – following their invasion that began at Kota Baru on Dec 8, 1941, before the attack on Pearl Harbor – they sent a handful of Malayans to study in Japan under their Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Programme.

A fuller account is in the re-released biography of Tunku Abdullah, A Prince called ‘Charlie’.

Tunku Abdullah, along with Raja Nong Chik and Raja Shaeran Shah, chose to study agriculture, but two of his other friends were studying education in Hiroshima.

Unfortunately, they were killed by the bomb – Nik Yusof by burns soon after the blast and Syed Omar five days later due to the harrowing effects of radiation.

Another Malayan, Abdul Razak Hamid, survived.

“Everything was flattened. It was as if a thousand hurricanes had just swept across the nation. I wondered then if that was the end of the world,” he was quoted as saying. Later, he became an academic, given the nickname “Razak-sensei” and led Malaysia’s Look East Policy with Japan.

These individuals also have interesting family ties.

Datuk Abdul Razak’s son is now the Rector of the International Islamic University Malaysia, Tan Sri Dzulkifli Abdul Razak. Syed Omar Mohammad Alsagoff’s sister was Sharifah Azah, the journalist who was also wife of Royal Professor Ungku Abdul Aziz.

Apart from being parents of Tan Sri Dr Zeti Akhtar Aziz, the former governor of Bank Negara, they both feature in wider connections to Hadrami Arabs and the Ottoman Rogayah Hanim, as written by Syed Farid Alatas.

The recent release of Oppenheimer has naturally ignited a debate about the morality of developing and using the atomic bomb – although the YouTube feed is now attempting to teach me about nuclear physics as well.

The main argument for its use is that it shortened the war, thus saving American and Japanese lives, though historians are divided on whether the casualty numbers estimated by former president Herbert Hoover, General Douglas MacArthur and competing US admirals were accurate.

However, my learned friends who watched J. Robert Oppenheimer’s agony as played by Cillian Murphy – “I feel I have blood on my hands,” he told former US president Harry Truman – were unanimous in arguing it was not morally right nor militarily sound. As a matter of historical curiosity, there is another perspective for us too. Had the war been prolonged, the post-conflict situation in Malaya could have been radically different.

No doubt for many, there would have been ongoing hardship, brought about by appalling economic conditions and the brutality of the Kempeitai.

On the other hand, perhaps local opposition to the Japanese, with its significant left-wing component, could have triumphed before the return of the British, setting post-war politics into a completely different trajectory: indeed, with different leadership and geopolitical priorities, it’s possible that Malaysia might not have been formed at all!

Today, the South-East Asia Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone signed in 1995 by Asean member states keeps the region free of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction.

Still, with great power rivalry being omnipresent, the lessons of the horrors of war, including the impact of nuclear weapons, should still be taught in schools.

At the moment, no Asean country generates nuclear power; apparently Malaysia reviewed the possibility in the 2010s but decided against it.

However, some energy experts argue it should be considered, especially as part of a strategy of going green – though others maintain that investing in renewables is the only way forward.

Quite possibly, the only times that a nuclear reactor is in the region is when a US nuclear-powered aircraft carrier sails past, as the USS Theodore Roosevelt did in 2018.

In the meantime, the personal tragedies of those Malayans who died in the war should be remembered, as should the wider lessons offered by the experience of conflict, imperialism, regional politics and its resultant impacts on science and morality.

Tunku Zain Al-‘Abidin is the founding president of the Institute for Democracy and Economic Affairs (Ideas). The views expressed here are the writer’s own.