For the Sixty-Fourth Time: No More Nuclear War

This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.

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.

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