August 13. Thursday - Lest We Forget

artwork by Hiroshima bombing survivor

For the last week I have been thinking about what I might do to remember the 64th anniversary of the nuclear bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the US military, that occurred on Aug 6 and Aug 9, 1945, the year before I was born. When I lived in Colorado I often helped to organize a memorial gathering in honor of the victims of the bombing. That had a kind of soothing effect on my grief. What can you do but be a witness to the atrocity of war and especially this kind of unthinkable mass destruction of innocent life in all of its holy manifestation? Now that I live in the deep woods, I can't really organize a gathering. So I thought I would dedicate this essay to the memory of the 200,000 people who died and the equal number of survivors of those August days in 1945 when life on this planet was changed forever.

This morning when I was doing the research for this essay, I watched one of those old black and white news shorts that they used to show before the main feature in movie theaters. This one was created just days after the bombing. The camera pans the razed cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the narrator extols the obvious immense power of America’s bomb. Cement buildings were turned to dust and steel girders were “twisted and bent like pipe cleaners”. As the camera moves past the site of a former factory in Hiroshima the narrator mentions, almost as an aside, that 20,000 people had worked in this factory. Other than this there is no mention of victims. As banal as most of the narration is, surprisingly at the end very end it asks a profound question. With rising ominous orchestral drama in the background, a man in US military uniform traces with chalk the outline of a human body which had been incinerated into the sidewalk, and the narrator booms in his deep voice, “Unparalleled progress or unparalleled destruction, atomic power puts the question squarely to mankind!”

Sixty some years later we still have not faced this question and its consequences. The generation of people who lived through the experience of the bomb is passing. For the most part we have failed to listen to their story. In 1995 to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the bombings, the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC planned an educational exhibit about the 1945 bombings of Japan. After months of planning, the exhibit was scrapped due to controversy over graphic photos of victims, a school girl’s charred lunch box and the mention of scholarly historical studies some of which suggest that the bombings may not have been necessary to end the war. Americans are not yet ready to take a hard look at what our country did and why, and the unthinkable consequences of these acts. Yet, this very failure to face the truth, this national cowardliness or lack of stomach for the truth, may also be keeping us from seeing the truth of our current situation in regard to the ominous threat to our world posed by nuclear weapons.

According to Nuclearfiles.org a project of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, the, there are approximately 31,000 nuclear warheads in the world today. Of these 13,000 are deployed and 4,600 are on high alert, meaning they can be launched within minutes. Each of these warheads has the destructive power of 100,000 to 400,000 tons of TNT. In comparison, the bombs dropped in 1945 had the force of 15,000 tons of TNT. There are eight nuclear armed countries in the world including, the US, Russia, Britain, France, Israel, China, Pakistan and India. Ninety-five percent of the nuclear warheads are in the US and Russia. In addition, according to the International Panel on Fissile Materials, substantial quantities of highly enriched uranium used to make the bombs, remain in more than 40 non-weapon states. There are varying accounts of how much enriched plutonium is actually missing. Most likely, non-state terrorists have access to some of this missing plutonium, if not the means to manufacture a nuclear weapon. The state of the world in terms of the risk of nuclear holocaust is dire. In fact,there is a doomsday clock, maintained by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and used to symbolize our proximity to global annihilation. Currently this symbolic clock is set at 5 minutes to midnight.

Any day is a good day to start to look this beast in the eye, but August seems particularly appropriate. It is incredibly difficult work. I think that the only way we can do this is to gather the necessary courage from each other. The issue is not only about how many thousands of nuclear warheads are aimed at us, and at our perceived enemies. It is about the hopes and dreams we each have for our children and their children and for the future of human life on this planet. We must learn to tell our stories and above all to listen. Surely, we will come to find mutual benefit in nuclear disarmament, ending forever the nightmare of nuclear weapons. Governments and corporations will not then be able to convince us that we need these weapons of mass destruction for our safety. We will together see the lie.

Toward this end, an enlightening documentary film has been released by HBO, “White Light, Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki” directed by Japanese American, Steven Ozakazi. It premiered on television on Aug 6, the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and will run throughout August. This film tells the stories of 14 of the 200,000 survivors of the bombs. In an interview on YouTube Okazaki said that he has been trying to produce this film for ten years. Neither US or Japanese movie companies wanted to get involved, saying that the people were not ready for this. Then last year, to his relief and surprise, the proposal was accepted by HBO and he was given free reign to tell the story through the eyes of the survivors. He says, “The conversation is never about people’s lives. It is about just strategy, as if war is just strategy and battles won or lost. The point of the show is to put a human face on it and to show the real tragedy of it.”

After watching the trailer and the interview of Mr. Okazaki, I feel that these survivors have something important to tell us. I don’t have HBO so I will have to wait to get it from NetFlix. I am sure that in a way it won’t be easy to watch. But in another way, it will be so beautiful, a story of human courage. Here is a site that shows some of the art work of survivors. You can see immediately the pain they experienced and also the beauty of the human spirit. We do not get this kind of opportunity very often so if you are able, please watch this movie and encourage your friends and family to watch it also.

White Light/Black Rain airs August 13 at 11:30 a.m. and 11 p.m.; August 19 at 3 p.m. and August 22 at 4 p.m.. It also plays on HBO2 August 16 at 12:30 a.m. and August 20 at 8 p.m. All times are Eastern Standard Time. You can of course also purchase the video from Amazon or HBO or rent it from NetFlix and maybe your local video store.

Although the situation is dire, it is not hopeless. After their meeting in July Presidents Obama and Putin announced a preliminary agreement to reduce each of their respective country's nuclear stockpiles by thirty percent. This is a pretty big deal.
Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, a Washington foundation focused on nuclear-weapons reduction and nonproliferation said, “They’ve hit the sweet spot in finding numbers that will be a significant reduction and likely to get the necessary support in their respective parliaments,” In fact, the numbers announced Monday, Mr. Cirincione notes, “amount to a 30 percent reduction in the nuclear arsenals of the two countries that possess 95 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons.”

Even on this hot August day there is reason for hope, while at the same time being aware that if these cuts are made, there will still be enough nuclear weapons in the world to destroy all life on the planet many times over. It seems to be the gift of our times to live with this kind of paradox. Just exactly what is hope in the face of the kinds of issues which face us? A thirty percent reduction sounds good for today, and we will work for total nuclear disarmament as we celebrate. We have examples of courage to guide us. Even when their loved ones and entire world disintegrated before their eyes, the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not give up. Their lives give us courage. Isn't that part of what it means when we call ourselves the human “family”? We take our courage and support from each other especially in the things that are too big to look at alone. I am grateful that even a few of these people were able to speak to the world before their voices are gone forever.