When death fell from the sky

Many times have I marked with a post here this infamous date--on August 6, 1945, the first atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

75 years have gone by.

Some day, sooner than later, I hope we will end this nuclear madness.

The following is a slightly edited post from August 2017.
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In response to one of my columns in The Register Guard, I received a letter from a then 96-year old woman--"a member of the WWII generation."  She wrote in the letter, which was in response to my op-ed on homelessness in America:

You and no one living in the USA at this moment would be where he or she is if my generation had not made it possible.  That includes the dropping of the bomb.

This pacifist hates wars. Hates conflicts. The older I get, the less I am able to tolerate fights and destruction even in movies.  Therefore, it is always jarring to me when people defend the destruction to civilian life and property from the bombs that were dropped in Hiroshima--on August 6th--and three days later on Nagasaki.

The interpretations of the historical happenings are conflicted.  I am biased; I believe that the war could have, would have, been brought to an end without America flexing its nuclear muscles. My preferences for peace are why I find it discouraging that there is a majority in America that agrees with the letter writer regarding the bomb:

Source

In his final year in the White House, Obama visited Hiroshima, ahead of the anniversary of the tragic event.  In all these years since 1945, Obama was the first sitting president to visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial.  In a moving speech, Obama noted how the world changed since "death fell from the sky" on that cloudless August morning in Japan:

Those who died, they are like us. Ordinary people understand this, I think. They do not want more war. They would rather that the wonders of science be focused on improving life and not eliminating it. When the choices made by nations, when the choices made by leaders, reflect this simple wisdom, then the lesson of Hiroshima is done.
The world was forever changed here, but today the children of this city will go through their day in peace. What a precious thing that is. It is worth protecting, and then extending to every child. That is a future we can choose, a future in which Hiroshima and Nagasaki are known not as the dawn of atomic warfare but as the start of our own moral awakening.

These are dark times.  But, one has to be hopeful; what other choice do we have.  Here is to hoping that we will get on to the path of our own moral awakening after the 3rd of November.

Our own moral awakening

More than a year ago, I received a letter from a then 96-year old woman--"a member of the WWII generation."  She wrote in the letter, which was in response to my op-ed on homelessness in America:

You and no one living in the USA at this moment would be where he or she is if my generation had not made it possible.  That includes the dropping of the bomb.

This pacifist hates wars. Hates conflicts. The older I get, the less I am able to tolerate fights and destruction even in movies.  Therefore, it is always jarring to me when people defend the destruction to civilian life and property from the bombs that were dropped in Hiroshima--on August 6th--and three days later on Nagasaki.

The interpretations of the historical happenings are conflicted.  I am biased; I believe that the war could have, would have, been brought to an end without America flexing its nuclear muscles. My preferences for peace are why I find it discouraging that there is a majority in America that agrees with the letter writer regarding the bomb:

Source

A year ago, Obama visited Hiroshima, ahead of the anniversary of the tragic event.  In all these years since 1945, Obama was the first sitting president to visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial.  In a moving speech, Obama noted how the world changed since "death fell from the sky" on that cloudless August morning in Japan:

Those who died, they are like us. Ordinary people understand this, I think. They do not want more war. They would rather that the wonders of science be focused on improving life and not eliminating it. When the choices made by nations, when the choices made by leaders, reflect this simple wisdom, then the lesson of Hiroshima is done.
The world was forever changed here, but today the children of this city will go through their day in peace. What a precious thing that is. It is worth protecting, and then extending to every child. That is a future we can choose, a future in which Hiroshima and Nagasaki are known not as the dawn of atomic warfare but as the start of our own moral awakening.

These are dark times.  But, one has to be hopeful; what other choice do we have.  Here is to hoping that despite the effects of the fateful elections this past November, we will get on to the path of our own moral awakening--sooner than later.

We have all become Death, the destroyer of worlds?

About this time in August, every year I have posted about nuclear weapons since re-starting this blog.  Why?  Simply put, I find the world's continuing fascination with nuclear weapons despite the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to be shocking, awful, pathetic, and tragic.

Take a look at the following data:

Source

Every one of those is way more powerful than the relatively tiny bombs ("Little Boy" and "Fat Man") that the US dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the world has almost 16,000 of them!

Seriously, how many of those weapons do we need?

The bombing of Nagasaki; image source

In this op-ed titled "Nagasaki, the Forgotten City," the author writes:

About 74,000 people in Nagasaki died instantaneously or within five months of the bombing. Only 150 were military personnel. Another 75,000 people were injured, and these numbers do not count those who fell ill and died from radiation-related conditions in the decades to come.
Initially, purple spots appeared on their bodies, their hair fell out, and they developed high fevers, infections, and swollen and bleeding gums. Later, cancer rates surged. The survivors, known as hibakusha, lived in constant fear of illness and death.

Only 150 of the 74,000 were military personnel!  It is one thing if an earthquake or a typhoon caused utter destruction to property and life.  It is another when we humans manufacture such destruction.  So many of the horrors in history were results of human decisions.  What a tragedy!

To counter growing criticism of the bombings, American leaders established a narrative that the bombings had ended the war and saved up to 1 million American lives by preventing an invasion of Japan. (These postwar casualty estimates were far higher than pre-bomb calculations.) Most Americans accepted this narrative.

Of course, a patriot never, ever questions the government's narrative, as the war-criminal, scoundrel, Dick Cheney always reminded us!

In a related op-ed, the same author writes:

Immediately after the bombings, high-level U.S. officials publicly — and adamantly — rebuffed news reports about the bombs' horrific aftereffects. Gen. Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bombs, dismissed these reports as propaganda, even as he sent teams to measure radiation levels to ensure the safety of U.S. troops about to enter both cities. Later that year, Groves testified before the U.S. Senate that death from high-dose radiation exposure is "without undue suffering" and "a very pleasant way to die."

A"very pleasant way to die."  Read that again. And again.  The horror of that sentence seems worse than the deaths themselves!  

I will end this post with the famous words uttered by Robert Oppenheimer:

We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, "Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." I suppose we all thought that one way or another.

There is no finish to a war

I know of only one way to fight, whether at workplace or in geopolitics--civil disobedience.  Thanks to Gandhi, of course.  And the older I get, the more I turn away from violence.  

Thus, these days, this news junkie finds very little to be enthused about.

We are far from Gandhi's pacifism.  What a horrible spring and summer it has been in this year alone.  It is almost as if we humans decided that we will not rest until we completely nuke away the "peace dividend" that we thought was possible when the Soviet empire collapsed and the Cold War ended.

It appears that we have forgotten that, as Hemingway put it, war is hell.  He wrote in A Farewell to Arms:

"There is nothing as bad as war. ... When people realize how bad it is they cannot do anything to stop it because they go crazy.  There are some people who never realize. There are people who are afraid of their officers. It is with them the war is made"
"I know it is bad but we must finish it."
"It doesn't finish.  There is no finish to a war."
"Yes there is."
Passini shook his head.
"War is not won by victory. ...

Yet, we continue with wars. There certainly seems no finish.

The following, which Einstein said in the context of nuclear weapons, is applicable to the non-nuclear kind too:

We cannot desist from warning, and warning again, we cannot and should not slacken in our efforts to make the nations of the world, and especially their governments, aware of the unspeakable disaster they are certain to provoke unless they change their attitude toward each other and toward the task of shaping the future.

Even Japan, a country that renounced war, in favor of peace, right in its constitution, has eased up on that and now encourages exports of weapons.  We humans are, perhaps, doomed to live as the most violent animals until we cause our own extinction.

This piece at the New Yorker discusses, via a Hirohima survivor, a public-health hypothesis that

suggests that untended wartime trauma can move vertically and horizontally through individuals and families, morphing across years, decades, or even centuries.

All the more to worry that there is no finish to a war, right?

Sixty-nine years ago last week, a slender woman named Tomiko Shoji was struck and sent aloft by a bright white light. She’d just arrived at her secretarial job, at a tobacco factory, and was standing by the door when the flash occurred; the light’s source had a nickname, Little Boy, but it meant nothing to her at the time. She flew backward under the crushing force of the office door, passed out, and awoke with shards of glass in her head and an expanse of bodies around her—some dead, some alive but dazed, and many more, she soon found, floating “like charcoal” in nearby rivers. The nineteen-year-old climbed up and out of the shell of her younger self; she had survived the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Nearly seven decades later, Keni Sabath, Shoji’s youngest granddaughter, started to wonder: Had the bombing’s aftermath reshaped not just the psyche of her bachan (grandmother) but also, in ways both culturally and historically particular, her own?

The horrors of war!

In recent years, a growing body of scholarship has sought to better understand accounts like Shoji’s and Sabath’s through the framework of “trans-generational trauma,” which traces experiences of catastrophic loss across the span of a family or a community. A wide range of studies have examined evidence of “secondary trauma” in the children of Holocaust survivors, the wives of Vietnam veterans, and, more informally, in the families of U.S. veterans who’ve faced P.T.S.D. after deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2007, a study on the wives of fifty-six traumatized war veterans in Croatia found that more than a third of the veterans’ wives met the criteria for secondary traumatic stress; often, this meant symptoms “similar to those present in directly traumatized persons: nightmares about the person who was directly traumatized, insomnia, loss of interest, irritability, chronic fatigue, and changes in self-perception, perception of one’s own life, and of other people.” More recently, speaking to Mac McClelland for an article on trauma in the families of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans, the clinical psychologist Robert Motta said, “Trauma is really not something that happens to an individual.” Instead, he proposed, “Trauma is a contagious disease; it affects everyone that has close contact with a traumatized person.”

Wishing for peace is something we have been doing for thousands of years.  Perhaps every time we think we are getting close to achieving it, we humans decide to return to our old ways of killing.  I will leave it to Hemingway to explain why this happens:

"There is a class that controls a country that is stupid and does not realize anything and never can. That is why we have this war."
"Also they make money out of it."

I am guessing that the typical war-monger has never read Hemingway :(

Caption at the source:
MORA DE EBRO, Spain—Hemingway on the front lines with members of Gen. Enrique Lister’s Loyalist 5th Regiment
who were holding out against Gen. Franco's offensive, Nov. 5, 1937.

Update at 22:45 on Aug 14th:

Marine Cpl. Robert Richards, a medically retired combat veteran who was badly wounded in Afghanistan and later appeared in a controversial video urinating on dead Taliban insurgents, was found dead Wednesday night in his home in North Carolina. He was 28.
...
a sniper team led by Richards recorded a video on July 27, 2011, of him and other Marines urinating on the remains of Taliban fighters they had killed. It was never intended to be seen by the public, but Richards later said that the Marine who owned the camera stepped on an IED a couple weeks afterward, and it ended up in the hands of another Marine in the unit. It was posted online, causing an international uproar that led to eight Marines facing discipline.
...
In an exclusive 90-minute interview with this reporter for Marine Corps Times in September 2013, Richards acknowledged intense struggles with post-traumatic stress and night terrors afterward, and taking a variety of medications to deal with it. In one ugly night in Florida, he said he was caught off-guard by a celebration involving replica cannons being fired, and fired a pistol in his hotel room while his wife, Raechel, was present. He thought he was under attack, he said.

There is no finish to a war :(

War interrupts my road trip. How rude!

I didn't have to search at all for a spot near Ashland's Lithia Park, and the best thing was that it was shaded by trees.  I grabbed my lunch box, the fruit bag, and the water bottle, and sought out a place in the park.

On the way, I passed a table with a whole lot of posters and brochures and books, marking the horrible anniversary of the dropping of atom bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The pacifist that I am, I didn't need any additional selling on this idea of banning nuclear weapons. 

War is hell, as Hemingway so pithily described in A Farewell to Arms, and anybody who thinks otherwise is not human. As Catch-22 showed us, war and the military are simply insane as hell!  But then, what other sentiments do you expect from a guy who routinely tells students on Memorial Day about never ever having held a gun in his life, right?

Anyway, I have been off-the road for more than a few hours now and, of course, here I am reading and blogging about those A-bombs in Japan.

This one, in particular, had me thinking a lot about the hell that war is, and why I am so ready to condemn any politician or commentator who talks about war as if it is just yet another activity.  (One of the most troubling aspects with my favorite public intellectual, Christopher Hitchens, was his rah-rah support of the Iraq War.  But, at least he made up for it by subjecting himself to waterboarding!)

This horrifying image shows a young boy scarred by the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki in August 1945. Almost unbelievably, he would not only survive, but live into the 21st century.

The U.S. military shot miles of color film documenting the effects of atomic bombs on residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then classified the footage as secret and locked it away until the 1980s. On the 60th anniversary of the dropping of the Bomb, the Sundance Channel ran the documentary Original Child Bomb, which brought some of the long-suppressed images to a wide audience for the first time. That same month, in response to legal action taken by the watchdog group the National Security Archive, the Pentagon released several dozen uncensored photos of flag-draped coffins of troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and agreed to comply "as expeditiously as possible" with future Freedom of Information Act requests for images of casualties.

If you can stand to search for it in the melted flesh of the boy's back, you may find the reason why all governments try to conceal the human costs of war. Even on those rare occasions when the cause is unambiguously just, such images represent a blurred, nightmare landscape in which easy patriotism disappears.

Yes, those "easy" patriots would so quickly become pacifists if only they experienced the brutal horror of war!

What was the experience of that young boy in the photo?

Q: So how were you rescued? How did you survive?
Taniguchi: I was rescued after three days and sent to the country clinic about 18 miles away from Nagasaki. I was laid on the floor of a primary school. It was August 11th, so there was no medication, but I was given food. After another three days, my wounds started to bleed and I started to feel some pain, but not too much. I was moved from one school clinic to another. In mid-September, I was moved to a primary school clinic in Nagasaki city, where patients were being treated by the University Hospital team. After I was transferred there , the first proper medical treatment I received was a blood transfusion. But my body couldn't take it. I suffered badly from anemia, and became just skin and bones.
Q: What happened to the patients around you?
Taniguchi: Well, very few patients were crying out in pain. They just died one after the other. I thought it was strange that no one said "ittai "["it hurts"]. Maybe our nerve systems were affected. We didn't bleed because perhaps even the function to produce blood was affected by radiation. So the first medical treatment at the University Hospital was blood transfusion, but as I said, even that didn't work.
From that time on -- about a month after the bomb exploded -- my wounds started to rot and run. My living body was burnt, but only after a month did it start to rot. While I was lying on my stomach, I had old cloths to my sides which became soaked with pus and had to be replaced several times a day. Most victims of the A-bomb said that they became infested with maggots, but it took me over a year to have flies lay eggs on me. Even a small fly could not dare to come near my body. A professor of biochemistry said that maybe my body exerted a kind of smell that repelled the flies.

On days like this, I wonder whether my life would be better off if I didn't spend time thinking about such things.

Nope.  That would be a tremendous disservice to all those who died in wars for no fault of their own. 

Photo of the day: remembering Hiroshima and the A-Bomb

Caption at the source:
Doves fly by the gutted Atomic Bomb Dome, (seen in the background), preserved as a landmark for the tribute to the A-Bomb attack, following a speech delivered by Prime Minister Naoto Kan, marking the 66th anniversary of the world's first atomic bombing in Hiroshima on Saturday.

 The photo below shows the remnants of the building (Industrial Promotion Hall) which was capped by this dome:

More photos of the post-bomb Hiroshima here.

So many wars over the thousands of years humans have been on this planet  The Japanese included. So unfortunate.  Even more tragic is the reality that we haven't gotten rid of our instinct to bomb the shit out of life anywhere on earth :(

As Hemingway wrote:

There is nothing as bad as war. ... When people realize how bad it is they cannot do anything to stop it because they go crazy. 

A Hiroshima survivor's experiences

Nuclear bombs: never again

We remember those who died a torturous death, or endured unimaginable pain and suffering, as a result of the two nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The description of the photo on the left, from this source:

This boy, who was burned to death with his hands placed on his chest, leaving an impression of agony, is believed to have been a mobilized student exposed to the A-bomb in Iwakana township, which is about 700 meters from the hypocenter.
In those days, students who were in the 7th or 8th grade or in middle school were mobilized to munitions factories, farms, and national defense crews. They hardly did any learning at school. In the Urakami district of Nagasaki, there were several factories, including the Mitsubishi munitions, to which many students were mobilized. The death toll of mobilized students is unknown.
Regarding the disaster in Iwakawa township where this student was burned to death, the record of the Nagasaki A-bomb War Disaster reads as follows:
The instant the A-bomb exploded, almost all of the houses collapsed. The scattered pieces of wood and other debris covered the ground, and in some places they were heaped into drifts. Those who were outdoors all died, and those who were caught under the collapsed houses were screaming for help, and those who barely escaped frantically ran around. The town got dark, and, when visibility was regained, the collapsed houses started to smolder and then took fire. While there were mixed outcries of calls and for help, the town turned into a sea of flames."

Why we continue to make nuclear bombs that can wipe out life on the planet many times over is a tragic mystery to me.  Here is to hoping for peace.

64 Years later. Nukes haunt us.

Here is to hoping that we will never ever again use a nuclear bomb, as we did in Hiroshima and Nagasaki 64 years ago.

It is an unfortunate irony that news of Burma's interest in acquiring nukes with North Korean assistance comes at the same time.

I hope that President Obama will sincerely follow-up on, and implement, his grand statement in Prague earlier this year:

Just as we stood for freedom in the 20th century, we must stand together for the right of people everywhere to live free from fear in the 21st century. (Applause.) And as nuclear power –- as a nuclear power, as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act. We cannot succeed in this endeavor alone, but we can lead it, we can start it.

So today, I state clearly and with conviction America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons. (Applause.) I'm not naive. This goal will not be reached quickly –- perhaps not in my lifetime. It will take patience and persistence. But now we, too, must ignore the voices who tell us that the world cannot change. We have to insist, "Yes, we can."