http://www.truthout.org/080409G?nFor the Sixty-Fourth Time: No More Nuclear War
Reflections on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Our World
by: Frida Berrigan
TomDispatch.com: August 3, 2009
I can't help myself. I still think it's worth bringing up, even for the
64th time. I'm talking, of course, about the atomic obliteration, at the end
of a terrible, world-rending war, of two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, on August 6 and 9, 1945, whose anniversaries - if that's even the
appropriate word for it - are once again upon us.
In this, at least, I know I'm not a typical American: Hiroshima and
Nagasaki still seem all too real to me. As the child of anti-nuclear
activists, I was raised to pay attention to two significant dates in
American history - the day when the Enola Gay, a B-29 Superfortress bomber
named after the pilot's mother, dropped Little Boy, a five-ton uranium
explosion bomb, on Hiroshima; and the moment, three days later, when another
plane, jokingly named Bock's Car (after the plane's original pilot), dropped
Fat Man (a moniker supposedly given it in honor of former British Prime
Minister Winston Churchill), a more complex plutonium implosion bomb, on
Nagasaki.
When I was little, in preparation for those dates - and in this we were
truly a minority of a minority in this country - we showed films documenting
the aftermath of the atomic bombings. To this day, I can remember threading
our old 16mm projector and then watching the shocking, shaky, grainy,
black-and-white footage of ruined cities and ruined bodies filling the
living room wall as one of those somber male over-voices narrated the facts.
So now, as the 64th anniversary of so many deaths approaches and
thinking the unthinkable remains incomprehensibly in vogue, it seems worth
the bother to recall one more time just what it means for the unthinkable to
become reality.
The Death Count
In Hiroshima, Little Boy's huge fireball and explosion killed 70,000 to
80,000 people instantly. Another 70,000 were seriously injured. As Joseph
Siracusa, author of Nuclear Weapons: A Very Short Introduction, writes: "In
one terrible moment, 60% of Hiroshima... was destroyed. The blast
temperature was estimated to reach over a million degrees Celsius, which
ignited the surrounding air, forming a fireball some 840 feet in diameter."
Three days later, Fat Man exploded 1,840 feet above Nagasaki, with the
force of 22,000 tons of TNT. According to "Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Remembered," a web resource on the bombings developed for young people and
educators, 286,000 people lived in Nagasaki before the bomb was dropped;
74,000 of them were killed instantly and another 75,000 were seriously
injured.
In addition to those who died immediately, or soon after the bombings,
tens of thousands more would succumb to radiation sickness and other
radiation-induced maladies in the months, and then years, that followed.
In an article written while he was teaching math at Tufts University in
1983, Tadatoshi Akiba calculated that, by 1950, another 200,000 people had
died as a result of the Hiroshima bomb, and 140,000 more were dead in
Nagasaki. Dr. Akiba was later elected mayor of Hiroshima and became an
outspoken proponent of nuclear disarmament.
Surviving Hiroshima
Those who somehow managed to survive call themselves Hibakusha, which
literally means "those who were bombed." Most of the inhabitants of those
two cities who miraculously made it through those hot and terrible August
days are, if alive, now in their seventies or eighties, and they continue to
tell their unique stories of horror, destruction, and survival. Their urgent
pleas for peace, disarmament, and atonement often go unheard by a
twenty-first century American culture that often seems to barely recall what
happened last week, much less 64 years ago. Many of them have, over the
years, traveled to the United States to tell their stories and show their
scars, demanding that we never forget and that the world work towards
nuclear disarmament.
Akihiro Takahashi is 77 years old now, but part of him will always be
the 14-year-old boy standing in line with his classmates on August 6, 1945,
less than a mile from where Little Boy detonated. He still recalls how he
and his classmates were knocked off their feet by the blast. When he stood
up again, he "felt the city of Hiroshima had disappeared all of a sudden.
Then I looked at myself and found my clothes had turned into rags due to the
heat. I was probably burned at the back of the head, on my back, on both
arms and both legs. My skin was peeling and hanging."
Since that time, Takahashi has endured many operations and spent
countless hours in the hospital to repair the damage wrought in that single
instant. On that August morning, he began to walk home - though there were
few homes left in the leveled city - stopping to relieve the terrible heat
and pain of his burns in the Ota River that flows through Hiroshima.
Along the way, he encountered injured friends, including a boy with
terrible burns on the bottoms of his feet whom he half carried along with
him. "When we were resting because we were so exhausted," he related in an
oral history, "I found my grandfather's brother and his wife, in other
words, great uncle and great aunt, coming toward us. That was quite [a]
coincidence... [W]e have a proverb about meeting Buddha in Hell. My
encounter with my relatives at that time was just like that. They seem[ed]
to be the Buddha to me wandering in the living hell."
Jigoku de hotoke ni au you is the phrase. In English, the equivalent
would be "an oasis in the desert," something rare that provides great
relief. There were not many such oases in Hiroshima that day.
Imagining Nagasaki
Akihiro Takahashi's story (of which the above was but a small part) is
just one of so many thousands - and hardly one of the grimmest. Of course,
80,000 to 140,000 stories went with their potential tellers to their graves
that day. Along with the stories that could be told, there were also the
photographs to help us imagine the unimaginable.
Yosuke Yamahata was 28 years old and working for the Japanese News
Information Bureau in August 1945. Along with Eiji Yamada, a painter, and
Jun Higashi, a writer, he was dispatched to devastated Nagasaki by the
Japanese military just hours after Fat Man exploded and instructed to
"photograph the situation so as to be as useful as possible for military
propaganda."
Their train arrived at the outskirts of the ruined city in the middle of
the night. Here's how Yamahata describes the scene: "I remember vividly the
cold night air and the beautiful starry sky... A warm wind began to blow.
Here and there in the distance I saw many small fires, like elf fires,
smoldering. Nagasaki had been completely destroyed." By the time the sun
rose, Yamahata had made his way to the center of what was no longer a city.
As the day went on, he retraced his steps, along the way taking photographs
of the carnage and destruction until he was back at the train station.
All in all, he took 119 photographs that day, capturing some of the most
haunting and enduring images of the atomic age. In one, a bloodied boy
holding a rice ball stares, his head covered with an air raid hood (a dark
cloth that the Japanese military handed out to civilians telling them it
would protect them from American bombs); in another, an exhausted-looking
woman nurses a badly burnt baby.
In almost every image, the ground is littered with burnt bodies and
unattached limbs, household items, rubble, and timbers. As he walked through
the missing city, people cried out for water or for help uncovering bodies
buried in the rubble. "It is perhaps unforgiveable," reflected Yamahata,
"but in fact at the time I was completely calm and composed. In other words,
perhaps it was just too much, too enormous to absorb." Returning to Tokyo,
Yamahata took advantage of the general confusion that surrounded the
Japanese surrender to the Americans and managed to hold on to his negatives,
rather than turning them over to his superiors.
A handful of his images were published in Japanese newspapers at the end
of August 1945, before the American army arrived and the U.S. occupation
began. In October 1945, occupation authorities imposed a ban on
photographing the atomic sites and on the publication of all atomic-related
stories (and the images that went with them). Most of Yamahata's photographs
from Nagasaki were not seen until 1952, after Japan was once again an
independent nation and Life Magazine published a few of his Nagasaki photos.
That same year almost all the Nagasaki photographs were published in Japan
under the title: Atomized Nagasaki: The Bombing of Nagasaki, A Photographic
Record. The book includes sketches by Eiji Yamada and an essay by Jun
Higashi, his two companions in Nagasaki that day.
In the introduction, Yamahata wrote: "Human memory has a tendency to
slip and critical judgment to fade with the years and with changes in life
style and circumstance... These photographs will continue to provide us with
an unwavering testimony to the realities of that time."
Remembering
When I was young, to keep memory from "slipping," our family and friends
marked the anniversary of those terrible days in a distant land with a
demonstration or vigil. Often, we ended with a ceremony of remembrance,
setting paper lanterns afloat on water in honor of those who died.
Admittedly, this would not pass for a carefree American summer evening,
but even as a little girl I came to feel as if I knew some of the A-bomb
survivors personally - the experience of Akihiro Takahashi, the photographs
of Yosuke Yamahata, and perhaps closest to my heart, the story of Sadako
Sasaki.
The children's book, Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, written by
Eleanor Coerr, brought me close to one girl whose life was cut short by my
government's A-bomb long before I was born. I was then a chubby, sedentary
kid, and so found myself strangely intrigued and confused by Sadako's deep
love of running.
She was just two years old when Little Boy exploded above her city, but
eight or nine as the book begins, impatient and uncomfortable with all the
obligatory ceremonies surrounding the anniversary of the bomb in Hiroshima.
She did not like to look at the survivors or care to hear the terrible
stories. All she wanted to do was run. Lithe, athletic, and popular, Sadako
joined a footrace on the very anniversary of the destruction of her city
and, when she found herself unable to finish, was taken to the doctor only
to discover that she had "atom bomb sickness" - in her case, leukemia.
In the hospital, a friend reminded her of an ancient Japanese belief: if
you fold 1,000 paper cranes, the Gods will grant you a wish. So with the
help of her classmates, she began to do just that. Scrap paper, candy
wrappers, fancy printed paper: all become tiny origami birds of hope.
With her as an inspiration, I learned to fold paper cranes, practicing
until I could do so with my eyes closed and fold them as small as a pea.
Childhood being childhood, what may have impressed me most was a friend of
mine who could fold those origami birds with her toes.
On October 25, 1955, with 356 birds left to go (as Coerr tells it),
Sadako died. Since 1958, a statue of Sadako holding a golden folded crane
has stood in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, draped with small paper birds
sent from children all over the world, a symbol of peace.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki Today
Sixty-four years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we need more than symbols
of peace. Folding paper cranes alone cannot, unfortunately, end the threat
of nuclear war. Memories of the destruction fade, the hibakusha grow even
older and die, the haunting pictures end up in books stored spine out on
bookshelves.
Meanwhile, the terror of nuclear annihilation - so keen at certain
moments during the long superpower Cold War stand-off - seems to have worn
off almost completely. That's too bad, since the actual threat of nuclear
war remains hidden but potent. The nine nuclear powers - the United States,
Russia, France, England, China, Israel, Pakistan, India, and North Korea -
have more than 27,000 operational nuclear weapons among them, enough to
destroy several Earth-sized planets. And in May, Mohamed
ElBaradei, the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency,
warned that the number of nuclear powers could double in a few years unless
new disarmament is a priority. Is it any wonder then that, according to a
recent Rasmussen opinion poll, one in five Americans believe nuclear war
"very likely" in this century, and more than half, "likely"?
The unthinkable is still under consideration - even as the Obama
administration takes its first steps in the right direction. In an April
speech in Prague, President Obama publicly embraced the goal of seeking "the
peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons." In its wake, his
administration has begun taking still quite modest but potentially important
steps towards that goal, including: renewed talks with Russia over mutual
nuclear reductions, conversations initiated in the Senate about
jump-starting the ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban, stalled these
last 10 years, and of negotiations for the also stalled Fissile Material
Cutoff Treaty, imagined as an internationally verified ban on the production
of nuclear materials for weapons.
Right now, however, the American nuclear landscape - little acknowledged
or discussed - remains grimly potent. According to the authoritative
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the United States still maintains a
nuclear stockpile estimated at 5,200 warheads - of which approximately 2,700
are operational (with the rest in reserve), while the Obama administration
will spend more than $6 billion on the research and development of nuclear
weapons this year alone.
At some point early next year, the administration will complete a
Nuclear Posture Review outlining the role it believes nuclear weapons should
play in the American pantheon of power, and, if the president follows
through on his anti-nuclear statements, perhaps that document will at least
begin to limit the scenarios in which such weapons could be used. In the
meantime, the policy of the United States remains no different than it was
in 2004, when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed the Nuclear Weapons
Employment Policy. It said, in part, that the United States possesses
nuclear weapons for the purposes of "destroying those critical war-making
and war-supporting assets and capabilities that a potential enemy leadership
values most and that it would rely on to achieve its own objectives in a
post-war world." Read that sentence again, and think, under such a doctrine,
what might the United States not bomb?
Keep in mind as well that the bombs which annihilated two Japanese
cities and ended so many lives 64 years ago this week were puny when
compared to today's typical nuclear weapon. Little Boy was a 15 kiloton
warhead. Most of the warheads in the U.S. arsenal today are 100 or 300
kilotons - capable of taking out not a Japanese city of 1945 but a modern
megalopolis. Bruce Blair, president of the World Security Institute and a
former launch-control officer in charge of Minutemen Intercontinental
Ballistic Missiles armed with 170, 300, and 335 kiloton warheads, pointed
out a few years ago that, within 12 minutes, the United States and Russia
could launch the equivalent of 100,000 Hiroshimas.
It is unthinkable. It seems unimaginable. It sounds like hyperbole, but
consider it an uncomfortable and necessary truth. The people of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki and the children of our future need us to understand this and
act upon it - 64 years too late... and not a minute too soon.
--------
Frida Berrigan, a Senior Program Associate at the New America
Foundation's Arms and Security Initiative, is the eldest daughter of peace
activists Liz McAlister and Philip Berrigan. The two met during the Vietnam
War, founded the Jonah House community in the early 1970s and spent eleven
years of their marriage separated by prison sentences stemming from their
anti-nuclear and peace activities. Phil Berrigan died in 2002 at the age of
79.
