Aug. 6 was the 65th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. I have read many books, including details of how the Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb (named Little Boy) in Hiroshima. A couple of years ago, my brother-in-law Yuki and my sister Adela Kono invited me to take the Shinkansen Bullet train from Tokyo to Hiroshima and back on a day tour. Visiting Hiroshima is a must if we advocate for a nuclear-free world.
Seeing the Genbaku dome, which was directly under Ground Zero and seeing the Hiroshima museum which had a huge diorama of how Hiroshima looked before the bombing and another diorama on how it looked after the bombing, including many artifacts from the debris was a moving, albeit sacred experience. For instance, they have on display melted medicinal bottles, fused into one, which looked more like art than evidence of the nuclear holocaust. There was a set of stairs with a shadow imprinted that used to be a man sitting on it, who vaporized when the nuclear blast struck.
I have also seen several photos, mostly black and white about the bombing, showing the mushroom cloud from the moment of the explosion up to the time it reached the atmosphere, mostly taken by American photographers from the escort plane of the Enola Gay in order to record history. But at the Hiroshima museum, it was the first time that I ever saw a photograph of the mushroom cloud a few kilometers from ground zero.
If I didn’t write about the Hiroshima bombing in last Friday’s column, it is because I have already written about it many times before. But I’m writing about it today because it is the 65th anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki. Everyone talks about Hiroshima, but the bombing of Nagasaki is merely a footnote in history. History teaches us that it was the last city to be nuked! This is the problem of being the second city to be nuked! They dropped “Fat Man” from a B-29 Superfortress “named Bockscar”.
People call it fate that Nagasaki was bombed, when the primary target of Bockscar was the City of Kokura. But because it had too much cloud cover the secondary target, Nagasaki was the one that was bombed. Also, Nagasaki is the Japanese City inhabited by many Catholics.
So you will have a better understanding about the casualties in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the initial bombing explosion killed some 90,000 people, but eventually this figure rose to 166,000 from the effects of nuclear radiation. In Nagasaki, Fat Man instantly killed 60,000 and the nuclear radiation caused the deaths of another 80,000. There were more casualties in Hiroshima because the area surrounding the city is very flat, unlike in Nagasaki, which is surrounded by mountains, hence limiting the spread of the nuclear blast.
Last Friday, CNN came up with the 65th anniversary report of the bombing of Hiroshima, this time focusing on the question whether America should offer an apology for the twin bombings. Apology? How times have changed since then. I do not recall the Japanese making a public apology for the bombing of Pearl Harbor or Manila for that matter. The Japanese lost World War II. There should be no apology for that! I fully support a nuclear-free world, if at all that is possible, but those who start a conflict and lose the war have no right to demand an apology from the Americans.
In truth, the Manhattan Project that created the nuclear bomb was the American way of finding a more efficient way to kill people using only one bomb instead of hundreds or a thousand. In the firebombing of Tokyo on March 9, 1945 where 335 B-29 Superfortresses from bases in Guam and Tinian dropped some 1,700 tons of bombs, it destroyed some 16 square miles of Tokyo and killed 100,000 people. The resulting firestorm killed and injured 40,000 more rendering a million homeless.
The firebombing of Tokyo produced casualty figures that were much higher than the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The only difference is in the cost of the bombing raid. The US only sent three planes over Hiroshima and Nagasaki - the main aircraft that brought the nuclear bomb and the two other planes that carried photographic and monitoring equipment.
By inventing the nuclear bomb, the US invented a more efficient device to destroy cities with only one bomb carried by one airplane. It merely made war more efficient. In the book “God’s Samurai” the biography of Mitsuo Fuchida by author Gordon Prang, Fuchida who achieved icon status when he lead the attack planes that bombed Pearl Harbor (he was the one who shouted, Tora, Tora, Tora) Fuchida only wished that Japan had that bomb. Seeing a nuclear explosion, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the lead scientist of the Manhattan Project said, “We are become as gods, destroyer of worlds!”
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Email: vsbobita@mozcom.com