The Nuclear Elephant
It Could Happen
Every year on this day we are reminded of the scariest, ugliest, most menacing, existential elephant in the room that threatens our earthly existence and it is not climate change, it is not right wing politicians, it is not civil war, it is not COVID.
Seventy-six years ago, on Aug. 6, 1945, a B-29 bomber named “Enola Gay,” so called after the mother of its pilot, Col. Paul Tibbets, made its way through the clouds over the Pacific, to its fateful detonation, armed with a 9,000 pound “Little Boy,” which soon fell from the sky and in the wink of an eye, the temperature soared to 5,400 degrees, birds ignited in mid-air, asphalt boiled, men without feet stumbled on their charred ankles, women without jaws screamed, bodies described as “boiled octupses” littered the streets, children with swollen tongues and parched throats, pushed aside floating corpses to get to bloody river water. Hiroshima had for all intents and purposes disappeared and 140,000 people were dead. Three days later, Little Boy’s big brother, a second atomic bomb weighing in at 10,000 pounds and known affectionately as “Fat Man,” was released over Nagasaki, incinerating another 70,000 Japanese.
A 2015 story in the Daily Beast reported that American military archives showed that if the Japanese had not surrendered they would have been hit by a third and potentially more powerful atomic bomb a few days later and then, eventually, an additional barrage of up to 12 further nuclear attacks. The carnage was unimaginable with two bombs. A dozen attacks would have been even more unfathomable, if that’s possible.
Photos were published in newspapers around the world of the vile, monstrously, gargantuan mushroom cloud and eight days later, the newspapers had photos of euphoric crowds, including that iconic shot of the sailor in uniform embracing a nurse in white, amid the flood of happy Americans at New York City’s Times Square. The perverse nature of the two contiguous scenes is inhumane.
It was the first and only time in history that a nuclear weapon was intentionally detonated but as years pass, less and less attention is paid to avoiding a nuclear conflict because we are under a false assumption that it could never happen. It could never happen? The Holocaust could never happen, terrorists could never slam into and topple the tallest buildings in New York City and kill thousands, wildfires, the scope of which we have never seen before, could never happen, a worldwide pandemic could never happen.
This year, as with every year, the anniversary of the bombings were solemnly commemorated in Japan, where Japanese leaders again urged leaders around the world to unite to eliminate nuclear weapons as the world has united to battle the COVID-19 pandemic. For all intents, the call for disarmament has been like spitting in the wind.
“Nuclear weapons, developed to win wars, are a threat of total annihilation that we can certainly end, if all nations work together,” said Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui. “No sustainable society is possible with these weapons continually poised for indiscriminate slaughter.”
The global Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons took effect in January and was ratified by more than 50 countries, but it has not been signed by the U.S. and other nuclear powers and Japan, which relies on the U.S. nuclear umbrella for protection.
There was little mention in major U.S. media of the anniversary of the atomic bomb attacks and American leaders have been busy with more pressing matters. The headlines were about the pandemic spread, infrastructure improvement, voting rights but these will all be meaningless and irrelevant in event of a nuclear war.
Much has been written about why there has not been a nuclear war in the 76 years since the first bombs were dropped. Circumstances, technology, politics, personalities all play a part as does simple luck. Kokura, Japan, was targeted as the second city to be bombed but luck in the face of inclement weather saved the people of Kokura and forced the U.S. to the alternative target of Nagasaki.
Optimists would say that the leaders of nations with nuclear weapons are rational and will never be irresponsible enough to start a nuclear war, knowing it would mean the end of the civilized world. The myth of rational and reasonable leaders was summarily exploded with the trump administration and the continuing lunacy of such unhinged leaders as Kim Jong-un and certainly there are more feckless lunatics in the wings, waiting to take control with greater and greater dangers. The passage of time is not proof of rational leaders but rather is proof that the a leader irresponsible and evil enough has not yet emerged with nuclear weapons and has not been faced with a war worth using nuclear weapons. And always there is the potential for miscalculation, of leaders misreading warning signs of incoming strikes or similar errors. Time is not on our side.
Madelyn Hoffman, of Mount Olive, a longtime peace activist, has visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the past and has been involved in efforts to end nuclear weapons. Hoffman posted in Facebook that former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara said, in the movie “Fog of War,” that “what the U.S. did was a war crime but because we were on the winning side in WWII we were never held to account for what we did. He also said that it shouldn’t matter if you won or lost. A war crime is a war crime is a war crime.”
“Think how history might have been different had the U.S. been held to account for killing at least 210,000 people instantaneously and indiscriminately and countless others slowly and painfully from radiation poisoning,” Hoffman posted.