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A Hiroshima Memorial
A Hiroshima Memorial. Friday was the 65th anniversary of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, an event that that has touched me in many ways.
I never had any doubt for the need to use the bomb in 1945. My father had orders to join his third marine division in Okinawa for the invasion of Japan when it was dropped. If the plan had gone ahead, I would not be writing this letter today. My biochemistry major and math minor at UCLA landed me a summer job as a research assistant at the Nevada nuclear test site in the late sixties where I got to know the men who worked with Dr. Robert Oppenheimer to build the bomb. There, “yields” meant millions killed, not interest paid.
When I first landed in Japan, I made a beeline straight to the Atomic Bomb Victims Hospital to interview survivors 30 years after the attack. I listened to stories about people vaporized, but whose image was etched into solid granite, and the rivers that were choked with countless bodies. Textile patterns were permanently burned into human skin, the light colors reflecting radiation, while dark ones absorbed it. Some 50 of the city’s 150 doctors were killed instantly, and the rest were seriously injured. They were futilely left to treat gamma rays and beta particles with only mercurochrome, or traditional Japanese folk remedies like moxabustion. Tens of thousands showed up at hospitals with no visible injuries, only to die agonizing deaths within the day.
Two weeks after the bomb, everyone’s hair started falling out and immense welts called keloid tumors appeared, classic symptoms of then unknown radiation poisoning. American scientists descended on the city by the hundreds measuring every imaginable parameter with grim precision, such as the heat at ground zero that reached an unbelievable 6,000 degrees, and the melting of ceramic roof tiles to a radius of 1,300 yards. They told the Japanese that no one could live there for 20,000 years. The residents ignored them and moved back in to rebuild as soon as the fires abated.
I met one spry Japanese American woman who grew up in Fresno, California and spoke perfect 1930’s English, but was sent home to Hiroshima to avoid the war. I’ll never forget the massive scars on her forearms where her summer yukata cut off. A barking dog caused her to briefly look away from the curious descending parachute from a lone B-29 overhead, thus saving her face and her eyesight. Her three young children didn’t make it.
For me the experience converted an interesting physics experiment into the greatest source of human misery of all time. As the years went on I met many more Hiroshima survivors, known as bakusha, who after a third shot of Suntory whiskey would talk about the artificial weather the bomb created, the gale force winds and the black rain. Every type of plant strangely flourished after the bomb, but men and women were left sterile, and birth defects skyrocketed. In later years I attended memorial ceremonies where 140,000 candlelit paper boats were placed in the Motoyasu River at night to symbolize the lost souls.
Ironically, those who survived the bomb now have the greatest lifespan of any group in Japan. I guess that if you can survive an atomic bomb, you can handle anything. I’m sure free health care for life and pensions helped too. There was also that one dose of radiation treatment, courtesy of the US government.
Today Hiroshima is a major focus of international pacifist and disarmament groups. The effort is being led in the US by former secretary of state, George Schultz, who has played a key role in cutting American nuclear stockpiles by 75% to 5,113 today. Some 20% of America’s nuclear power is currently generated by plutonium from recycled warheads from the former Soviet Union.
You can learn more about his efforts by visiting the Plowshares Fund at http://www.ploughshares.org/ .To buy John Hersey’s Pulitzer Prize winning Hiroshima, which describes the doomed city immediately after the attack in all its horrific detail, please click here at http://www.amazon.com/Hiroshima-John-Hersey/dp/092389165X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1281130125&sr=1-1 . It is not a light summer beach read, but is enlightening and sobering.
To see the data, charts, and graphs that support this research piece, as well as more iconoclastic and out-of-consensus analysis, please visit me at www.madhedgefundtrader.com . There, you will find the conventional wisdom mercilessly flailed and tortured daily, and my last two years of research reports available for free. You can also listen to me on Hedge Fund Radio by clicking on “This Week on Hedge Fund Radio” in the upper right corner of my home page.
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Agree wholeheartedly.
http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/104205/
http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2010/08/06/the-foundations-of-o...
Snip: As the New York Times remembers Hiroshima, try this quiz. Name the two greatest losses of civilian life in the Pacific war. Hint. In both cases the civilian casualties were greater than Hiroshima’s.
From the comments:
Those killed at Hiroshima, and later Nagasaki, were killed in spite of their being non-combatants.
Most of those killed in Manila and the vast majority of the slain in Nanjing were killed because they were non-combatants. Wherever the Japanese went, the slaughter started after resistance ceased.
When the Americans carried the day, the killing stopped as soon as the victory was won.
We've nothing to apologize for.
You BOTH have 100s of thousands to apologize for.
I hardly read the crap you write but this post was deep and moving, thank you.
P.s. Don't get carried away, as your ecenomic posts are garbage like buy BP
Yup... the "ecenomic" stuff is just plain ignurt.
+1
+1
+1
"Ironically, those who survived the bomb now have the greatest lifespan of any group in Japan."
Horace Blegg
This past year the only person who survived both atomic blasts in Japan passed away. That is some weird kind of luck.
Or not...
not sure if this is related at all to anything mentioned here...if you were one of the half million that died would that be a silver lining????probably not...
Well done and moving commentary.
No reason in this world can justify killing innocent civilians
What US did was wrong; whether it was in Japan, or middle east since 2001
How can you justify killing civilians like you and me?
How different is it from what terrorists do?
Can Saddam's cronies say the same thing about the shiate rebels in 1988 when he gas bombed villages and towns?
Did he save many lives that would have been shed in religious conflicts by one single act of cruelty?
History ,sadly, has always been a reference-for-convenience
not to mention certain accounts of Japanese attempts to surrender months before the bomb was used.
Google it, but the wikipedia entry regarding this came up missing somehow or other.
Get over it people the only thing I hate more that celebrating events from over 10 years ago is....
...Facing reality? For people like you, I only have this to say: in the 60s, France held a series of nuclear tests in Algerian desert, 1000 km from coastal populated areas; shortly after, black rain was falling over southern Portugal, nearly 1500 km away, and cancer cases ensued.
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