Our nuclear nightmare continues | Opinion
It was a story that the U.S. government did not want told. After the war, the military had carefully controlled access to Hiroshima. While the press was permitted in, the narratives that emerged were sanitized.
“The hurt ones were quiet; no one wept, much less screamed in pain; no one complained; none of the many who died did so noisily; not even the children cried; very few people even spoke,” the German Jesuit priest, the Rev. Wilhelm Kleinsorge, said.His experience was mirrored by another survivor, the Rev. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, who wrote to an American after the war that “I never heard any one cried in disorder, even though they suffered in great agony.
Hersey recounts that discussions of the ethics of the bomb were mixed in postwar Japan. There was anger at Americans. But there was also anger at the militarists who had controlled the nation.Among the surviving Jesuits, it was a common topic. One, a Rev. Siemes, wrote a report to the Holy See that concluded, “It seems logical that he who supports total war in principle cannot complain of a war against civilians.
At the same time, Allied air superiority was so well established by that point that weather planes and bombers flew more or less freely over Japan at high altitudes. The sound of the B-29 bomber was so familiar to residents of Hiroshima that they called it B-san or “Mr. B”. The allies were advancing in the Pacific, at the cost of heavy casualties. Meanwhile, a two-day firebombing run over Tokyo in March 1945, where napalm was used, had itself taken tens of thousands of civilian lives.
Hersey noted in one survivor, Hatsuyo Nakamura, a “kind of passivity” that he associated with a long Buddhist tradition. She didn’t offer opinions about the bomb or its effect, though it had terribly injured her and left her with radiation sickness that affected her the rest of her life. She summed it up in an aphorism: “Shikata ga nai” meaning “It can’t be helped.”
The atomic and nuclear age might have reduced the likelihood of conventional conflict among great powers, but it sowed proxy wars that have wrought destruction on nations and people without the technology and wealth to obtain their own weapons of mass destruction.
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