Last month, while American consumers were being prepped and primed by media outlets and marketers for the 40th Anniversary of the Woodstock Festival, another anniversary was taking place at the beginning of August. I don’t want to be some kind of killjoy and take away from the nostalgic image blitz of stoned-out youth frolicking in the New England mud bathed in the electric rain of rock gods and demigods, many of whom I still worship. But, as Frank Zappa once said to me, “The world will end in nostalgia,” so it seems logical that I can’t get thoughts of August 6, 1945 out of my mind. Maybe it’s because the hills above my house have been on fire for the last several weeks, raining down ash and producing atmospheric conditions around us that resemble the smoky, yellow eclipse lit haze of some other planet. Driving back home from San Diego, I could see the giant mushroom cloud pluming over Pasadena from over a hundred miles away.
At 8:15 AM on that August morning 64 years ago, a B-29 bomber dropped a single-bomb with the charming nickname “Little Boy” over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. On August 9, a second bomb called “Fat Man” was dropped on the city of Nagasaki. These particular targets were chosen according to Stephen M. Younger in his book, "The Bomb: A New History", because they “had not suffered from the devastating bombing raids that had reduced Tokyo and other cities to little more than smoldering ruins. The hills that surrounded Hiroshima and Nagasaki would focus the effect of the blast, further increasing the destruction caused by the bombs.”
“Little Boy” dropped in forty-three seconds to nineteen-hundred feet above Hiroshima and exploded. The height had been chosen “to maximize the damage produced by the expanding nuclear fireball.” Its detonation created an intense flash that was called “brighter than a thousand suns.” Within seconds, an immense shock wave and firestorm swept the city destroying everything in its wake including some 68,000 buildings. Three days later, as Younger reports, “the United States demonstrated to Japan and the world that Hiroshima was not a one-off event” when it completely destroyed Nagasaki with a second atom bomb.
I heard a recent, breathless radio promo for a show called “Surviving Disaster” on Spike TV that described it this way—you have 20 seconds to cover your eyes and about 20 minutes to take cover from radioactive fallout. The promo ponderously warned, “It’s not a question of whether it will happen, but when.”
Just how the show is drawing the conclusion of inevitability is unclear, but the leap from the catastrophic events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to nuclear attack as entertainment value is a mind-boggling, but not necessarily American impulse. Godzilla is not only an iconic film monster, but is held in Japan with an almost religious reverence. One reason why is that Godzilla, Rodan, and other Japanese monster movies have been seen as a symbolic, subliminal response, inspired by the Japanese experience with the atomic attacks. Godzilla awakes in the film as the result of French nuclear tests in the Pacific. Despite its grave delivery, the Spike promo is completely removed from the terrible reality of what actually occurred in August, 1945.
Estimates for the death toll from both bombings has been estimated at well over one-hundred times the casualties from the 9/11 attacks. This figure includes an estimated from sixty-six-thousand to one-hundred-forty thousand instant deaths in Hiroshima and an estimated forty-thousand in Nagasaki. We know that in the immediate five years following, one-quarter of a million more died with untold hundreds of thousands more in the decades following the bombings from radioactive related diseases. But statistics remove us from the human factor of disaster and the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is beyond human imagination.
Hiroshima has been called “the exclamation point of the twentieth century”, but two perspectives from survivors are more than enough to tattoo the pictures forever in one’s brain. Stephanie Cooke tells of one in her recent book, "In Mortal Hands: A Cautionary History of the Nuclear Age": “…a nineteen-year-old girl who survived reported a remarkable sight near a public garden. Amid the bodily remains, burned black and immobilized at the moment of impact, there was, she said, ‘a charred body of a woman standing frozen in a running posture with one leg lifted and her baby tightly clutched in her arms.’”
In "Uranium: War, Energy and the Rock That Shaped the World", Tom Zoellner describes how Japanese writer, Yoko Ota, remembers the white flash as “the collapse of the earth which it was said would take place at the end of the world.”
Zoellner continues, “Even President Truman, who was famously coolheaded about the decision to use the weapon on Japan, wondered in his diary if the act he would soon authorize was ‘the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley Era, after Noah and his fabulous ark.’"
When news of the successful atom bombing of Hiroshima reached the team of scientists behind its invention in Los Alamos, New Mexico, “there was a general excitement, and scientists rushed to book tables at Santa Fe’s best restaurant to celebrate the achievement. But that night’s party on the mesa was a grim affair. Almost nobody danced, and people sat in quiet conversation, discussing the damage reports on the other side of the world. When J. Robert Oppenheimer left the party, he saw one of his colleagues—cold sober—vomiting in the bushes.”
The decision to drop the atom bomb is a controversy that will remain unsettled and is examined at length by Richard Rhodes in his books about the nuclear age. One school of thought is that the Japanese doctrine of "defense at all costs" was a bluff; another indicates that they had already expressed a willingness to negotiate a cease-fire through Russian back channels. According to the Russians, the atom bomb was secondary and it was the declaration of war against Japan by Moscow that was the deciding factor in ending of the war.
In her illuminating book, "Troubled Apologies: Among Japan, Korea, and the United States", Alexis Dudden describes both US media censorship and outright fabrication about the bombing of Japan as propelling “the basic story line for Hiroshima and Nagasaki that Americans would come to cling to as history at the cost of learning what was actually going on: ‘the bombs saved lives.’…the US government and its officially placed mouthpiece at the New York Times established as a fact that no one in Hiroshima had died from radiation and that only foreign lies (British or Japanese) suggested otherwise.”
The New York Times’ science writer who was an eyewitness over Nagasaki, William “Atomic Bill” Laurence, won a Pulitzer Prize for his early, evangelical coverage of atomic weapons. His account of the event demonstrates that he was not only distant from the event by mere altitude, but close to some kind of atomic rapture:
“Being close to it and watching it as it was being fashioned into a living thing so exquisitely shaped that any sculptor would be proud to have created it, one felt oneself in the presence of the supernatural…Awe-struck, we watched it shoot upward like a meteor coming from earth instead of from outer space, becoming ever more alive as it climbed skyward through the white clouds. It was no longer smoke, or dust, or even a cloud of fire. It was a living thing, a new species of being, born right before our incredulous eyes.”
Historically, not everyone was sold. Harvard physicist George B. Kistiakowsky witnessed the Trinity test in July, 1945 only several weeks before the atomic bombing raid on Japan and called it, “the nearest thing to Doomsday that one could possible imagine. I am sure that at the end of the world—in the last millisecond—the last man will see what we have just seen.”
John Hersey was the first to write of the human factor in his long August 1946 New Yorker essay profiling regular people on the ground in Hiroshima. The day after the Trinity test sixty-eight scientists at the University of Chicago signed a confidential letter to Harry Truman urging him not to use the device. They wrote presciently: “If after the war a situation is allowed to develop in the world which permits rival powers to be in uncontrolled possession of this new means of destruction, the cities of the United States as well as the cities of other nations will be in continuous danger of sudden annihilation.”
Leo Szilard, the scientist who persuaded his colleagues to write the letter, and the man who conceived of the chain reaction and worked on the Manhattan Project later referred to himself and other atomic scientists as “mass murderers.”
“Why did they have to go and drop another?" a wife of one of the atomic scientists asked upon hearing the news of Nagasaki. “The first one would have finished the war off.” Short of an apology, this kind of self-reflection on the part of civilians as well as the scientists—including Einstein—who were behind the creation of the Atomic Era, leads one to wonder what we can do to make amends today.
There is a long tradition—if not ritual—of apology in Asian cultures. It is one that seems to have been adopted for some time by Americans, who are now accustomed to press conference scenes where morally straying politicians apologize to the nation, their constituents, wives, and families for errant behavior. More recently, other kinds of less predictable apologies have appeared.
Last February, the Senate apologized to Native Americans for atrocities committed during the opening and seizing of their lands. On July 29, the US House of Representatives issued a resolution formally apologizing to black Americans for slavery one-hundred forty years after its abolition. After forty years of silence, at a local Columbus, Georgia Kiwanis Club on August 21, Lt. William Calley (the only Army officer convicted of the 1968 My Lai massacre), in an extraordinary and unexpected apology, expressed his “remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry."
Twenty years ago, Congress apologized for the World War II interning of Japanese Americans in concentration camps. Why not Hiroshima? None other than the author of "Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World" said the following in 1995: “The United States owes no apology to Japan for having dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” Bill Clinton was just towing a bipartisan line.
Alexis Dudden traveled with President George W. Bush on a trip to Tokyo during 2002 on a mission, among other things, to thank the Japanese government for its support of the War on Terror and to launch plans to celebrate the 150-year anniversary of Japanese-American relations. Dudden relates that she “had an unexpected, theatrical education in one of the trajectories of Hiroshima’s history during (a) routine walk.” As she passed down the main boulevard near the Japanese Parliament and National Library, “several of the notorious black trucks popular with the country’s extreme right wing passed…with the lead van blaring the customary martial songs. This was not unusual, but the message pouring from the loud speakers stopped me flat—‘Welcome to Japan, President Bush of the United States of America! Apologize for Hiroshima and enjoy your stay!’”
She goes on to say, “Throughout the recent era of apologies all around—or maybe in spite of it—there has remained one matter on which Washington holds firm, regardless of who is in office—there will be no apology for Hiroshima or Nagasaki.”
Originally, the lowest projection of how many American lives would have been saved by avoiding a costly land invasion of Japan by using the bomb was twenty-six thousand casualties. Dudden observes, “Americans transferred what happened—the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—for an event that never took place—the proposed land invasion of Japan—to stand in for history. By the early 1950s, the imagined truth was American myth, and in 1959, President Truman wrote for the record that the bombs spared 'half a million' American lives, and that he 'never lost any sleep over the decision.' Over the years…American storytelling has come to count the number of ‘saved’ Americans as high as 1 million. (This number appeared squarely in David McCullough’s 1993 Pulitzer Prize winning biography, Truman, despite abundant evidence to the contrary at the time.)”
Apologies are more complicated than they appear. Dudden’s book details the way that formal apologies can be used to cloak deeper strategy to avoid restitution and financial penalties. As to the US government’s obdurate stance, Dudden concludes, “The chronic inability to confront how America’s use of nuclear weapons against Japanese people in 1945 might constitute the kind of history for which survivors would seek an apology, let alone why the use of such weapons might represent a crime against humanity, is sustained by Washington’s determination to maintain these weapons as the once and future legitimate tools of the national arsenal. It is not at all by chance that among weapons of mass destruction—nuclear, chemical, and biological—only nuclear weapons are not prohibited by international law. Were it otherwise, the likelihood that the history of America’s use of them on Japan would generate changes of attempted genocide against the United States or Harry Truman would increase exponentially.”
Last April, President Obama made strong statements during a visit to Prague about his commitment to abolish nuclear weapons. His speech called for an international summit on the subject by the end of the year. The Mayor of Hiroshima, Tadatoshi Akiba said, “As the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act, defining U.S. responsibility in a historical context." Akiba asked Obama to hold the summit in Hiroshima.
Our family had a Japanese exchange student staying with us for a year. After she had been living with us for a while, I felt compelled to speak with her about her hometown of Hiroshima and to apologize in my own way for what had happened before either of us had been born. She seemed surprised at my gesture and we spoke about the event in the abstract—her parents had been children at the time and spoke little to her, if at all, about their memories. I suppose that the American generation preceding mine who experienced the direct consequences of World War II might argue with my stance on apology citing my distance from the events that defined them, in many cases, for the rest of their lives.
I find it interesting that the word “apology” and “apocalypse” have the same prefix. Apology is said to be rooted in words originally meaning “regret, defense, or justification” and giving an account or story of oneself. Apocalypse is rooted in the Latin word meaning “revelation” and the Ancient Greek meaning “to uncover” as in to lift a veil. The prefix “apo” means “from, away, off”. Perhaps there is a connection between the act of apologizing and the avoiding of apocalypse—by this logic, if we lift the veil that hides our own truth, then revelation might follow. A year after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the esteemed Indian yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda, reflected on the discovery of uranium: “The human mind can and must liberate within itself energies greater than those within stones and metals, lest the material atomic giant, newly unleashed, turn on the world in mindless destruction.”
With the first new ruling party now established in Japan in over fifty years, an appropriate overture to the new government from the American President whose campaign mantra was “change” should be to agree to hold the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference in Hiroshima and take the world stage by opening his remarks with an apology to the people of Japan. Think about it the next time you are being served sushi—these people were our enemies? Or as Allen Ginsberg might say, “We are the Japan.”
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