Forgettable Fire: On Not Remembering Hiroshima

Crossposted with TomDispatch.com

As another August 6th has arrived, let me tell you a little story about Hiroshima and me:

As a young man, I was probably not completely atypical in having the Bomb (the 1950s was a great time for capitalizing what was important) on my brain, and not just while I was ducking under my school desk as sirens howled their nuclear warnings outside. Like many people my age, I dreamed about the bomb, too. I could, in those nightmares, feel its searing heat, watch a mushroom cloud rise on some distant horizon, or find myself in some devastated landscape I had never come close to experiencing (except perhaps in sci-fi novels).

Of course, my dreams were nothing compared to those of America's top strategists who, in secret National Security Council documents of the early 1950s, descended into the charnel house of future history, imagining life on this planet as an eternal potential holocaust. They wrote in those documents of the possibility that 100 atomic bombs, landing on targets in the United States, might kill or injure 22 million Americans and of an American "blow" that might result in the "complete destruction" of the Soviet Union.

And they were pikers compared to the top military brass who, in 1960, found themselves arguing over the country's first Single Integrated Operational Plan for nuclear strategy. In it, a scenario was laid out for delivering more than 3,200 nuclear weapons to 1,060 targets in the Communist world, including at least 130 cities which would, if all went well, cease to exist. Official, if classified, estimates of possible casualties from such an attack -- and by then, nuclear weaponry and its delivery systems had grown far more powerful -- ran to 285 million dead and 40 million injured (and this probably underestimated radiation effects).

From the National Security Council and the Pentagon to a teenager's nightmares, an American obsession with global annihilation undoubtedly peaked when President Kennedy came on the air on October 22, 1962, to tell us that Soviet missile sites were just then being prepared on the island of Cuba with "a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere." Listening to his address, Americans everywhere imagined a nuclear confrontation that could leave parts of the country in ruins. Nuclear fears, however, began to fade (even as the superpower arsenals grew) when the Cuban Missile Crisis was defused and, along with atomic tests, went underground after the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was signed in 1963. Then, of course, the Vietnam War seemed to swallow the world.

In 1979, after the reactor core of a nuclear plant at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania partially melted down, the bomb returned to me in an odd way. Then a book editor, I went out to lunch with a potential author who had been on one of the investigatory panels created by the President's Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island which Jimmy Carter had set up. She told me of a Japanese journalist who testified before her panel. He had interviewed the mothers of young children and pregnant women belatedly evacuated from the potential danger zone to an iceless ice rink in the state capital, Harrisburg. None of them had heard of Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

This so startled me that I decided to search for a book to publish on what had happened on those August days in 1945 when two Japanese cities were wiped out by a new weapon and the nuclear age began. With the help of a historian and friend, I finally came across a Japanese book of images drawn by Hiroshima survivors, few of them artists, sometimes with school materials borrowed from their own grandchildren. Each drawing caught a moment experienced on that terrible day when Hiroshima was wiped out and was accompanied by a little personal description. Many of images were in pastels, or even crayon, and looked invitingly sprightly until you read the horrific accounts that accompanied them. The book was called Unforgettable Fire and it played a small role in the massive anti-nuclear movement that arose in those years. Unfortunately -- and this tells us something -- it's now long out of print.

A couple of years later, I was invited by Japanese publishers to visit their country. Only on arriving did I discover that the man who had shepherded Unforgettable Fire to publication -- and who was surprised to discover that an American editor wanted to publish it in translation -- planned to take me to Hiroshima.

As a former atomic dreamer, who now knew a good deal about the history of the dropping of the bomb, and was, above all, the editor of possibly the only mainstream visual record in the U.S. of what had happened under that mushroom cloud, I was touched by the gesture, but somewhat bored by the idea. After all, Japan was then dazzling. It was the era of "Japan as Number One" mania and there was so much to see in a few brief days -- and I, of course, knew pretty much what there was to be known about the experience of the first A-bombing. That's just how plain dumb I was.

The trip to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum with its caramelized children's lunchbox and permanently imprinted human shadows was, to say the least, unspeakably horrifying. In fact, it left me literally speechless, so much so that, although I returned to New York babbling about Japan, I found, for a long time, I couldn't talk about what I had seen in Hiroshima.

And that, mind you, was only the museum, which means it was next to nothing compared to what actually happened that long ago day. When American strategists in the 1950s confidently began, in Herman Kahn's famous phrase, "thinking the unthinkable," they, too, undoubtedly had no idea what they were incapable of imagining. By and large, they still don't. The weapons that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the equivalent of BBs compared to what's now in the major nuclear arsenals on this planet. So sweet dreams this Hiroshima Day.

 

Comments

[Overtone]

Thousands of nuclear weapons remain on hair trigger alert in the U.S., Russia and elsewhere. It is urgent to eliminate the nightmare of their possible use. On Armistice Day, 1948 General Omar Nelson Bradley warned, “We live in a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants, in a world that has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. We have solved the mystery of the atom and forgotten the lessons of the Sermon on the Mount. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about dying than we know about living.”

The Brooklyn Project in Energy, Economics and Education, is intended to provide constructive alternatives that can stimulate the economy by rapidly reducing the need for fuel and moving toward a little known program designed to generate millions of new jobs and introduce functional economics. It is intended as a catalyst - to advance recognition that human survival now requires our rapid transformation into a learning civilization.

The Manhattan Project was the incubator for nuclear weapons that still threaten massive death and destruction – The Brooklyn Project is intended to explore the other side of the bridge. It is intended to open and accelerate new paths, as well as provide new perspectives toward averting catastrophe and creating a more peaceful and prosperous planet. To read more about The Brooklyn Project, see: www.aesopinstitute.org

[texterdexter]

A principle lesson to emerge from WWII is that the government people elect/permit to gain power has consequences. The Japanese government built up a ruthless war machine based on racism and extremism. National attitudes translate into national policies and the results are often catastrophic.

[1OfReason]

Its a dirty little secret in the world today that Japan Killed 20 million people in China--they even dropped infected fleas on the population a led slaughters that would make Hitler cringe. I dont see any memorials for the 20 million Chinese. I dont see pictures of their LunchBoxes.

Today..we like to react to topics without even thinking about the world as it was at the time. 60 million people were dead. The idea that 200 thousand more to end it all was a pipe dream---yet it happened. Look at Japan now, we love them. They are a beautiful people, our friends that we have swore to protect. Those who seek to justify themselves, with their 3rd graders view of the world, say the US was evil. This is the typical liberal response in which you blame the prosecutors of justice(cops, soldiers) over the wicked.

Its a lack of reasoning to approach a topic from a position of ignorance. Even with the facts, people will allow their biases to cloud reason to the point of myopia. Somehow, we regard death and suffering by 1 huge bomb, greater than the death of 100 times the human beings by a thousand cuts. If your gonna talk about WWII--know what your talking about. The problem is some people can only fit a a small list of partial facts into their minds. You must consider every fact, and most importantly, try and place yourself in the time period.

[consumetheconsumer]

your post brought something immediately to mind -- and the American "settlers" treated the American Indians how?

Re: "Somehow, we regard death and suffering by 1 huge bomb, greater than the death of 100 times the human beings by a thousand cuts" -- perhaps you're right. think 9/11 and the Indians. Have a great day.

History is full of inconvenient facts.

[MikeDu]

Over on another site I ran across a poster claiming his buddy had great fun shooting down farmers with a .50 cal machinegun. Whether we're talking one or one million, its chilling how readily otherwise 'normal' people start killing without compunction once they're given official permission to do so. The most notorious Abu Graib guards turned out to have been 'weekend warrior' reserves! See that neighbor who lives down the street? For all you know he may have been the marine who shot the 3 year old execution-style at Haditha.

[OkieIntellectual]

As horrible as the destruction and loss of life was, I cannot imagine how much worse it would have been had we not had The Bomb & had to engage in an overland invasion of Japan.

[NYC07]

Maybe People should look at what the Japanese were doing before condemning the US :http://www.centurychina.com/wiihist/germwar/germwar.htm

[MikeDu]

Yeh, two wrongs make a right.
Saddam was a 'bad president' so we cause the deaths of a million Iraqis to oust him. And we're the self-proclaimed 'good guys'. Just like we were the 'good guys' in Guatamala - another conflict with the word genocide attached to it.

[texterdexter]

Truman's primary intention was to win a war by ending a war while minimizing US casualties. The millions upon millions killed by conventional weapons are no less dead than the thousands killed by atomic bombs. The Japanese started a war with the US by attacking Pearl Harbor and the war played out from there. Unfortunately for Japan, and probably for all of us sooner or later, military technology made a quantum leap in the direction of greater lethality. Lesson? When countries start wars, things often don't run as planned (Vietnam, Somalia, Afghanistan for Greeks, Brits, Russians and Americans?).

[califlefty]

Mr. Englehardt implies that America bears the guilt for bombing Hiroshima. He should read "Hell to Pay: Operation DOWNFALL and the Invasion of Japan, 1945-1947", by historian D.M. Giangreco. It describes the actual plans in place to invade Japan and Japanese plans for their defense. Hiroshima saved many lives by snapping Japan out of its determination to prevail or die trying. Typical of Japanese plans, children who grew up in Kyushu, described being trained to hide in a hole with a straw mat on top, and explode a grenade when American vehicles drove over the hole.
We bombed Japanese cities killing hundreds of thousands and they STILL wouldn't surrender.

If Englehardt sees using the a-bomb as a war crime it is moral posturing that avoids the hard truth of all the others saved by that awful destruction. He should interview the survivors of Japanese concentration camps for their point of view, or captured Marines already suffering unthinkable torture in Japanese camps or Dutch and English civilians imprisoned all over the Pacific. Truman dropped the bomb because the Japanese were not going to surrender. Truman was looking at the possibility 150,000+ American deaths, plus the Japanese deaths.

As for the era of the 50's and 60's I would like to see some historical perspective there too - the role of the Soviets and the International Communists who enslaved half of europe and most of Asia and postured menacingly against the free world would be a good starting point.

[mydwyf]

I have a book, long out of print, found at a book sale, called By The Bomb's Early Light.
It is in storage right now so I can't tell you who compiled it. But someone had the foresight
to compile a collection of compelling essays about The Bomb in the very first years after
Hiroshima / Nagasaki, before we became conditioned to the idea of nuclear holocaust.

These essays are so very eloquent and still very timely. The authors immediately grokked
(to use a great word coined by scifi writer Robert Heinlein) the ramifications of the nuclear
peril to the individual and collective psyche. One author made the point that, it wasn't the
immediate future that would be the most dangerous . . . it would be fifty years down the road,
when no one was concerned with nuclear war anymore but what would be by then aging
and antiquated systems would still be in place. That is where we are now.

It would only take one Tunguska-like event occurring over a major city or military base to
trigger a nuclear war. We came close in 1995 with a small aerial explosion of space debris
over Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska.

Those of us who grew up in the fifties and sixties really have a visceral sense of the
nuclear peril. One friend of mine said all the students at his school were issued dog tags
'to identify their bodies after the bomb dropped'. It is up to us

[Jackalheadedgod]

We argued in our classroom with the nun about the direction the blast would come from. We thought it would probably come from the northwest, from LA or Long Beach. The Navy was there. But maybe it would come from the south, from San Diego. The Navy was there too. By the time I was college/draft age I imagined myself a soviet attack planner for MIRVs and decided that various defense industry installations scattered among us might fit the bill for those tactical nukes. I reasoned that in Southern California there would be no escape, so let 'em rain. And yes, it was nightmarish, and it remains so.

Cheers,
Jack

[nhrick]

We were luckier out on mid-Long Island, we were sure we knew where the blast would come from. For we kiddies of the 50's it was "under the desk and point your ass toward New York City". Funny we never thought about the Brookhaven National Lab as a potential target. We were practically sitting on top of it, plus many of our parents worked there . . .

[MikeDu]

I grew up in the far rural reaches of northern Maine. We were hundreds of miles from anything remotely considered a target... except for that one giant B-52 base fifteen miles away. The local school only bothered to do a couplepro-forma air raid drills, What was the point? We'd be dead and we knew it.

[COPerez]

I'm slightly younger than you, Tom, but I used to have those dreams as well. They were informed and colored by slightly later impressions and, more than the actual mushroom clouds, mine often included the sight of the vapor trails of launching missiles - as though I were standing in the middle of the great mid-west launch sites. I've read the histories and, as a military officer, trained at the end of the cold war to fly my helicopter while in "MOPP4": the full nuclear-bi­ological-c­hemical protective gear. Despite the training and the full assurance of the brass, most of my fellow officers and I were pretty sure it would have been nearly impossible to conduct any kind of military operation while so encumbered.

We fooled ourselves for decades that we could fight and win a nuclear war; and I think most conservatives still believe that. Experiences like yours and mine give lie to that belief. We can only hope that in these days of ignoring the experts on everything from global warming to health care, that somebody will listen. That the lessons of the past can be learned and passed on.

It may be our last, best hope.

Thanks for your post and your memories.

[TryToBeFlexible]

My understanding is the the human brain, when dreaming, is incapable of dreaming heat or cold. Is your dream of searing heat just poetic licence?

[SSGVABEACH]

Your understanding is wrong