70 years ago, the US military dropped their first atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The US military literally unleashed hell on Hiroshima as the bomb killed thousands of Japanese (mainly civilians because most military targets in Japan had already been obliterated from the air) whose bodies were simply turned into non-matter in either a second or two. Thousands and thousands more died from the terrible burns caused by the firestorm or the radiation which spread over kilometres and kilometres (‘Damage from the atomic bombing’, website of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum).
The simple attempt of trying to imagine the terrible destruction which this and the next atomic bomb (only three days later) wreaked upon the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki makes me feel dizzy. To me, such a hellish vision* is invariably linked to the issue of responsibility, be it of the military/politicians who were part of the decision-making (i.e. the chain of command) or of the actual bombing processes or that of the scientists who designed this hellish weapon of massive destruction and its many and far more powerful descendants.
The people (the top brass in the US military and the US president and his advisers**) who had decided to use the atomic bomb against the Japanese were the first to have claimed that it would save lives (both US and Japanese, they had argued). Christian Appy, in an article published on TomDispatch*** this week, questions this claim and, in my view, correctly relates it to the bipolar world that was emerging at the time: ‘US officials, in fact, were intent on using the first atomic bombs to create maximum terror and destruction [...] part of Truman's motivation for dropping those bombs involved not the defeated Japanese, but the ascending Soviet Union.’
Although I would concede that the nuclear arsenals of the world’s main military powers have probably allowed the inhabitants of this planet to avoid seeing one of the many, many conflicts involving these same powers, either directly or through proxies, spiral out of control into one of these catastrophes which mankind experienced in 1914-1918 and 1939-1945 because of the quasi certainty of ‘mutual assured destruction’, this does not mean that it will necessarily remain the case indefinitely. The more so as a nuclear war could even be triggered by some software glitch or, in a terrible nightmarish ‘sci-fi’ scenario, by some mutant, malicious form of artificial intelligence (some famous scientists recently warned us of the dangers of artificial intelligence – BBC, 2 December 2014).
As such, and as I wrote a year ago elsewhere, ‘the only solution is to abolish them [nuclear weapons] once and for all’. However, is humanity sufficiently wise to do so? Not only do I think it is, but I would say that the decision rests with all of us; in other words, we (the inhabitants of this planet) have to force our leaders to do so through pacifist activism, for example by signing the online petition for a world free of nuclear weapons because ‘zero is the only safe number of nuclear weapons on the planet’.
* If I may quote the English author Stephen Walker (as
based on his talk, 31min14sec into his reading of his book):
The impact was at once
immediate and catastrophic [...] the thermal energy contained in that
single moment's flash was intense enough to evaporate internal organs,
literally boiling off intestines in less than a fraction of a second.
Birds ignited in mid air; telegraph poles, trees, clothing, thatched
roofs, wooden buildings, household pets and entire streetcars
spontaneously combusted; steeled framed buildings liquefied like wax;
rubble and bone fused together in a single amorphous mass. Watches and
clocks stopped suddenly, their hands permanently burned into their
faces, forever recording the precise moment of detonation. Hundreds of
fires sprang up simultaneously all across the city […]. In some cases,
individuals were so completely incinerated that nothing remained but
their shadows […] And it all happened in the first three seconds.
** I have not yet read Stephen Walker’s Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima, but I have listened to a talk he gave on 4 August 2005 – link provided below.
*** A website that, to me, seems to be directed primarily against US militarism; not that I have anything against such a stance (on the contrary!)…
Links
‘Damage from the atomic bombing’, website of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum
Talk given by Stephen Walker (about his book Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima), at the National Press Club in Washington, on 4 August 2005
‘Apparently, H.G. Wells
had already imagined it!’