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What Would It Mean to Remember Hiroshima Without Hypocrisy?
There is no true way to meaningfully honor its memory while so many countries, including the one that dropped the first bomb, actively prepare for future nuclear war.
Aug 12, 2025
On August 6, 2025, the world marked the 80th anniversary of the American destruction of Hiroshima. As in decades past, Hiroshima Day served to honor the first victims of atomic warfare and to reaffirm the enduring promise that their suffering would not be in vain, that they and the residents of Nagasaki, devastated three days later in 1945, would be the last places to endure such a fate.
Within that commemorative framework, Hiroshima has been effectively rendered an abstraction and reduced to a cautionary tale. With the involuntary sacrifice of that city and its inhabitants, humanity was offered a profound lesson. In the ruins of Hiroshima, the world confronted a vision of nothing less than its own potential end. And awareness of that apocalyptic possibility emerged almost immediately. The very next day, in fact, the American newspaper PM, based in New York, ran an article speculating on the catastrophic consequences of an atomic bomb detonating in the heart of that very city.
For the first time, thanks to Hiroshima, human beings became an endangered species. People everywhere were presented with an existential choice between the quick and the dead, between one world and none. Humanity could recover its moral bearings and pursue the abolition of nuclear weapons and the renunciation of war, or accept the inevitability that such man-made forces would ultimately abolish most or all of us. (Think “nuclear winter.”) Only through the former could we hope for collective redemption rather than collective suicide.
In our annual ritual of remembrance, Hiroshima is recalled not so much as a site of mass slaughter, but as a symbol of peace, hope, and resilience, a testament to our professed commitment to “never again.” Yet this year, such sanitized appeals of official memory rang increasingly hollow. After all, eight decades later, humanity (or at least its leadership) continues to demonstrate that it learned remarkably little from the horrors of Hiroshima.
At this moment, the history of the bomb needs to be reconsidered, not as an isolated development in an increasingly distant past but as inextricably linked to broader questions of mass violence now, including in Gaza.
What, after all, could it mean to commemorate such a moment in a world where today not one, but nine nuclear-armed states hold humanity hostage to the threat of sudden, total annihilation? Worse yet, today’s arsenals contain thousands of thermonuclear weapons, some of them up to 1,000 times more powerful than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Worse yet, those arsenals are being “modernized” regularly, the American one to the tune of $1.5 trillion or more as a significant portion of our national resources continues to be siphoned away from meeting human needs and redirected toward preparations for (in)human destruction.
Worse yet, all too many of those weapons remain on hair-trigger alert, poised to extinguish life on Earth in what Daniel Ellsberg, the man who long ago released the top-secret Pentagon Papers, once described as a “single, immense hammer-blow to be executed with the automaticity of a mousetrap at almost any provocation.”
Under this country’s current launch-on-warning posture, President Donald Trump (and any president who follows him) holds sole, unquestioned authority to initiate a retaliatory nuclear strike, with as little as six minutes to decide following an alert about a possible nuclear attack (despite a well-documented history of false alarms). This scenario also presumes that the U.S. would only be acting in “self-defense” in response to a nuclear strike by another nation, although mutually assured destruction renders such concepts obsolete. In reality, that assumption is far from certain. Washington (unlike, for example, Beijing) has never adopted a no-first-use policy and continues to reserve the right to initiate a nuclear strike preemptively.
Moreover, what does it mean to remember Hiroshima in a world where, while no atomic bomb has been dropped on Gaza, the tonnage of “conventional” explosives unleashed there is already equivalent to six Hiroshima bombings? As the nuclear abolitionist organization Nihon Hidankyo, composed of Japanese atomic bomb survivors, warned in the lead-up to being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2024, the suffering of Gaza’s children all too eerily mirrors their own experiences in Hiroshima.
That city is therefore not merely a past atrocity but an open wound, not simply a lesson of history but an ongoing nightmare. There is, in short, no true way to meaningfully honor its memory while so many countries (my own included) actively prepare for future nuclear war.
At this moment, the history of the bomb needs to be reconsidered, not as an isolated development in an increasingly distant past but as inextricably linked to broader questions of mass violence now, including in Gaza. Such an approach, in fact, would reflect the way the bomb was originally understood by many of the scientists who built it, sensing that it would prove to be what some of them would soon describe as “a weapon of genocide.”
Destroying Cities and Calling it Peace
After those two atomic bombs leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki, slaughtering up to 210,000 people, the vast majority of them civilians by deliberate design, most Americans responded with relief. Echoing the official narrative, they celebrated the bomb as a triumph of scientific ingenuity and a “winning weapon” associated with bringing a swift and decisive end to World War II, the bloodiest conflict in human history.
Decades of historical scholarship have demonstrated that such a narrative is largely a myth. In the aftermath of those two bombings, a carefully constructed postwar consensus quickly emerged, bolstered by inflated claims that those two bombs were used only as a last resort, that they saved half a million American lives, and, perversely enough, that they constituted a form of “mercy killing” that spared many Japanese civilians. In reality, clear alternatives were then available, rendering the use of nuclear weapons unnecessary and immoral as well as, given the future nuclearization of the planet, strategically self-defeating.
Nonetheless, a war-weary American public overwhelmingly endorsed the bombings. Postwar polls indicated that 85% of them supported a decision made without their knowledge, input, or any form of democratic oversight. Notably, nearly a quarter of respondents expressed a further vengeful, even genocidal disappointment that Japan had surrendered so quickly, denying the United States the opportunity to drop “many more” atomic bombs (although no additional atomic weapons were then available).
It remains unclear whether, had they been ready, Washington would have used them. Despite President Harry Truman’s public posture of steely resolve, his private reflections suggest a deep unease, even horror over their use. As Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace recorded in his diary, Truman had “given orders to stop atomic bombing. He said the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible. He didn’t like the idea of killing, as he said, all those kids.”
Why, then, were most Americans not similarly horrified? As historians John Dower and Ronald Takaki have shown, such exterminationist sentiments were fueled by anti-Asian racism, which framed the Pacific War in the American imagination as a race war. But perhaps more important, the way had been paved for them by the normalization of the practice of devastating area bombing, or more accurately, the terror bombing of both Nazi Germany and Japan.
Over the course of the war, the United States and Great Britain had “perfected” that indiscriminate method of destruction, targeting civilian morale and the collective will and capacity of a nation to sustain its war effort. This came despite the fact that President Franklin D. Roosevelt publicly condemned the aerial bombardment of civilian infrastructure before the U.S. entry into the war as “inhuman barbarism.”
As Daniel Ellsberg observed, when it came to the rapid erosion of ethical restraints under the exigencies of an existential war, “liberal democracies… in fighting an evil enemy, picked up the methods of that enemy and made them into a private ethic that was indistinguishable really from Hitler’s ethic.” That moral collapse would be evident in the devastation wrought upon the German cities of Hamburg and Dresden, as well as in the similar destruction inflicted by the firebombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities.
That descent into “barbarism” was not lost on contemporary observers. Reflecting on the 1943 Allied bombing of Hamburg, outspoken pacifist Vera Brittain described the destruction as a scene from “the evil nightmare of a homicidal maniac” and as “irrefutable evidence of the moral and spiritual abyss into which Britain and her rulers have descended.” She warned that such actions stemmed from a selective and hypocritical blindness, observing that, “in the Nazis and the Japanese we recognize cruelty when we see it, yet that same cruelty is being created, unperceived, amongst ourselves.”
And such a recognition wasn’t confined to pacifists but extended to policymakers. In response to the devastation caused by the “conventional” bombing campaign against Japan, including the burning to death of as many as 130,000 people in Tokyo in a single night in March 1945, Secretary of War Henry Stimson warned that, if such attacks continued, “we might get the reputation of outdoing Hitler in atrocities.” (The New York Times reported that the bombing of Tokyo may have killed as many as 1-2 million people. While not necessarily accurate, such reporting reflected a broader desensitization to mass death that had come to define the logic of total war, as well as a growing public tolerance among Americans for urbicide, the city-scale slaughter of civilians.)
On Nazi and Nuclear Holocausts
Not everyone in the Allied nations shared in the prevailing atmosphere of apathy or even jubilation over those nuclear bombings. Before the second bomb struck Nagasaki, French philosopher Albert Camus expressed his horror that even in a war defined by unprecedented, industrialized slaughter, Hiroshima stood apart. The destruction of that city, he observed, marked the moment when “mechanistic civilization has come to its final stage of savagery.” Soon after, American cultural critic Dwight Macdonald condemned the bombings in Politics, arguing that they placed Americans “on the same moral plane” as the Nazis, rendering the American people as complicit in the crimes of their government as the German people had been in theirs.
American scholar Lewis Mumford likewise regarded that moment as a profound moral collapse. It marked, he argued in 1959, the point at which the U.S. decided to commit the better part of its national energies to preparation for wholesale human extermination. With the advent of the bomb, Americans accepted their role as “moral monsters,” legitimizing technological slaughter as a permissible instrument of state power. “In principle,” he wrote, “the extermination camps where the Nazis incinerated over 6 million helpless Jews were no different from the urban crematoriums our air force improvised in its attacks by napalm bombs on Tokyo,” laying the groundwork for the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
If we don’t dedicate ourselves to building a world without war and without nuclear weapons, sooner or later we will undoubtedly witness just such devastation on a global and irreversible scale.
The specter of Nazism has always loomed large over the atomic bomb. It was, after all, the fear of a Nazi bomb that first catalyzed the Manhattan Project that would create the American bombs. While the fall of the Nazi regime preceded the use of atomic weapons on Japan by nearly three months, as soft-spoken astronomer Carl Sagan once observed, the ideological imprint of Nazism was etched into the littered landscape of charred bodies and scorched earth of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It endured in the brutal logic of total war carried forward through the ensuing Cold War arms race with the Soviet Union and culminated in the grotesque accumulation of nuclear arsenals with tens of thousands of world-destroying weapons poised to obliterate humanity.
In a 1986 keynote address before the World Jewish Congress in Jerusalem, “The Final Solution to the Human Problem,” Sagan argued that Hitler “haunts our century… [as] he has shattered our confidence that civilized societies can impose limits on human destructiveness.” In their mutually reinforcing preparations to annihilate one another, erase the past, and foreclose the possibility of future generations, he concluded, “the superpowers have dutifully embraced this legacy… Adolf Hitler lives on.”
Lacking Hitler, Sagan suggested, Washington and Moscow imposed his image on each other. This was necessary because “nuclear weapons represent such a surpassing evil that they can be justified only by an equally evil adversary.” Humanity, he warned, was then locked in a downward spiral into a moral abyss reminiscent of a Greek tragedy. “When we engage in a death struggle with a monster, there is a real danger that we ourselves will, by slow and imperceptible changes, become transmogrified into monsters. We may be the last to notice what is happening to us.”
This influence was evident in the fact that fear of a Nazi bomb had served as the initial impetus for the Manhattan Project and that the future nuclear state would share certain characteristics of the Nazi regime. As psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton described it, such a state would rely on “the genocidal mentality,” a psychological willingness, combined with the technological capacity and institutional planning necessary to, under certain circumstances, deliberately destroy entire human populations.
No More Hiroshimas
In concluding his 1986 address, Carl Sagan warned that World War II had never truly ended. And in a sense, it hasn’t ended even today, given that nine countries now possess such world-destroying weaponry. After all, were a nuclear war to happen in the years to come, a scenario the most powerful states have spent the past 80 years preparing for and making ever more likely, the Allies will have retroactively lost the war. In the radioactive ruins of what was once Washington and New York, Leningrad, Moscow, and Beijing, New Delhi, and Islamabad, no less potentially across much of the rest of this planet, we would witness “the fulfillment of Hitler’s last and maddest vision.”
Such a future is anything but hypothetical. It may, in some sense, already be unfolding around us. It takes no great imagination to envision Hiroshima in the wreckage of Gaza or in the increasingly bombed-out cities of Ukraine. And that’s just a hint of the future, were nuclear weapons ever to be used. If we don’t dedicate ourselves to building a world without war and without nuclear weapons, sooner or later we will undoubtedly witness just such devastation on a global and irreversible scale.
To survive as a species and preserve our humanity, we must, as Dwight Macdonald urged us in August 1945, begin to think “dangerous” thoughts “of sabotage, resistance, rebellion, and the fraternity of all [people] everywhere.” Only then could we commemorate Hiroshima Day without the hypocrisy of talking peace while endlessly preparing for a world-ending war. Only then could we begin to fulfill the enduring promise of never again, no more Hiroshimas.
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80 Years of Living and Writing in the Shadow of the Bomb
My acute focus on the danger of nuclear war may stem in part from the accident of my birthday on August 9, 1945.
Aug 09, 2025
I was born on August 9, 1945, the day the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan, three days after dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Fear of nuclear war was widespread among children of my generation. There were air raid drills where we hid under our desks or crouched alongside the wall in the hall. There were debates about the construction of fallout shelters. Fallout from nuclear testing caused the radioactive element strontium 90 to appear in the milk supply, we were told. When I visited the Oceanside public library when I was 12 or so, I read the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Each issue included a picture of a nuclear clock showing how close political and military tension was pushing us to midnight and the risks of a nuclear war, which the scientists viewed as unthinkable.
For my 76th birthday, my older brother Ron gave me a puzzle of The New York Times front page on the day of my birth. The three-line banner headline for the day read: “Soviet Declares War on Japan; Attacks Manchuria, Tokyo Says; Atom Bomb Loosed on Japan.” The importance of the Soviet Union joining in their allies’ war against Japan was rightly emphasized by the Times. Unfortunately, the alliance came apart soon after the end of the war, and the Cold War between two nuclear-armed powers shaped global and domestic politics for over 40 years. Although several arms control agreements were reached between 1963 and 2010, in the last 15 years, the cancellation and suspension of these agreements and increasing political and military tension have put the Bulletin’s clock closer than ever to midnight.
We grew up with the fear that the Cold War could become a nuclear war, and each of us had to decide what attitude to take to both the Cold War and the nuclear danger. My parents shaped my attitudes, raised my brother and me to support unions, working people, and civil rights and to oppose the Cold War and McCarthyism. When playing touch football and other games with three other boys when I was about 12, we debated the U.S.-Soviet conflict. We usually played in a field near the Ocean Lea complex where the three of them lived. Touch football is a pretty easy, fun game to play when it’s two against two, at least when the four players are similar sizes, ages, and skill levels. We took breaks from throwing, running, and catching to debate politics, especially international affairs. In these discussions, I was critical of Cold War confrontation and favored negotiations to reduce the dangers of nuclear war and achieve eventual nuclear disarmament.
My acute focus on the danger of nuclear war may stem in part from the accident of my birthday. I’ve been writing about the dangers presented by nuclear weapons for over 60 years. I hope the reader will forgive me for quoting some of my previous writings.
Cuban Missile Crisis and Nuclear Test Ban Treaty
When I was a senior in high school, I wrote some political essays for the Oceanside High School newspaper, Sider Press. I wrote an essay about the nuclear danger just before the Cuban missile crisis erupted. I commented:
On a recent television program, Howard K. Smith made the extraordinary statement that President Kennedy was experiencing a decline in popularity because there was no great crisis for him to overcome. Mr. Smith overlooked one extremely important crisis—that of the threatened nuclear holocaust.
If President Kennedy were to effect a decrease in world tension during the next two years, he would undoubtedly be returned to office. The stage would then be set for the president to work toward a successful disarmament agreement during the next four years. If the president accomplished this task, he would become one of the most popular presidents in the nation’s history.
The essay went on to recommend cultural exchanges and a compromise to achieve an end to nuclear testing. “What we need most is for both sides to make a sincere effort to bring about a decrease in world tension. President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev should acknowledge the fact that nuclear war would result in the destruction of mankind. There would be no winner in the event of a nuclear catastrophe.” Before my essay appeared in print, Cold War tensions and the danger of nuclear war reached a peak with the Cuban missile crisis. Eight months after the confrontation over Cuba was resolved by diplomacy, the U.S. and the Soviet Union agreed on the Limited Test Ban Treaty.
I explored the significance of the events of 1962 and 1963 in an essay published in The Japan Times in 1999:
...the experience of the missile crisis led Kennedy to move away from seeing foreign policy as a tough competitive game. He came to appreciate the human stakes involved. He was, after all, a parent of young children as well as a president.
In a speech at American University on June 10, 1963, Kennedy indicated the changes in his thinking. He said that the U.S. should seek a “genuine peace“ so that nations can “build a better life for their children” rather than a “Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war.“
Casting a critical eye on cold war attitudes, Kennedy sought to “make the world safe for diversity.” He stressed that “we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”
Members of Massachusetts Peace Action, an organization to which I belong, have also been highlighting Kennedy’s American University speech. It’s possible for individuals and presidents to think anew, and it’s dearly needed at a time of the genocide in Gaza and the ongoing and dangerous war in Ukraine.
Ronald Reagan, the Nuclear Freeze Movement, and the INF Treaty
Shortly after he was inaugurated president, I wrote to Ronald Reagan asking him to accept Leonid Brezhnev’s suggestion that they meet in a summit conference:
I am very concerned about the escalation in anti-Soviet rhetoric that has characterized your first weeks in office. A return to 1950s rhetoric can only lead to increasing tensions between our country and the Soviet Union. Such tensions can bring us to the brink of nuclear war again. And who knows if once at the brink, you will be able to stop from falling over into a nuclear holocaust that would destroy us all... Are you afraid that if peace breaks out, you will find it more difficult to line the pockets of the defense contractors with still more billions of taxpayers’ dollars? Whatever your... fears, I believe you should fear nuclear war more. The overwhelming desire of the peoples of the world is to see an end to the nuclear arms race which threatens us all.
Reagan’s initial aggressive posture led to the development of a massive nuclear freeze movement in the U.S. and a movement in Europe against accepting new U.S. intermediate range nuclear weapons. I was among over 1 million people in New York City on June 12 ,1982 demanding that all sides add no new weapons to their nuclear arsenals. It was the nuclear freeze movement, which the Soviet Union supported, and the Reagan administration attacked, that eventually led to a reversal in Reagan’s policy and the adoption of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987. Initiatives by a new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, also played a part in Reagan’s change.
Japan and Peace
About a decade after Reagan left the White House, I was a Fulbright scholar at Tohoku University in Japan. When I arrived in Japan, I mentioned at the initial Fulbright scholar gathering my birth date, my opposition to nuclear weapons, and my experience as part of a generation involved in peace and civil rights activism. Two others around the table, Lois Helmbold, a historian who became a close friend, and Sam Sheppard, the director of the Fulbright program in Japan, mentioned they were also born in 1945. In interviews I’ve conducted with members of my birth cohort, it seemed clear that most of us were influenced by Kennedy’s idea that “the world is very different now.” As San Antonio playwright Sterling Houston put it in my interview with him: “Coming of age in the 60s when there was this ferment [and] the possibilities of change and all this stuff was happening... It seemed like it really could happen... we really could make it better.”
The most memorable experience of my stay in Japan was the visit my younger daughter Leah and I took to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and the Children’s Peace Monument in Peace Memorial Park. We were already aware of the story of Sadako Sasaki and the folding of paper cranes. Seeing the exhibits in the museum, the monuments, the film Hiroshima: A Mother’s Prayer, and the thousands of cranes in the park brought both of us to tears.
With the danger of nuclear war, greater than ever, we need a renewed grassroots movement to support the eradication of nuclear weapons from the planet.
In an essay published in The Japan Times after I returned home, I commented on the impact of the visit to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and my concern that Japan was sending 600 soldiers to join the U.S. occupation of Iraq. I mentioned my fear that the government of Japan was undermining the country’s peace constitution. The New York Times article on Japan’s military mission emphasized that the U.S. “imposed” the peace constitution on Japan, but I pointed out the Times failed to note “the strong desire of the Japanese people after the war to break with the militarism and aggression that had brought enormous harm and suffering to Japan’s neighbors and disaster to Japan itself.” I added that “I learned from my time in Japan that strong sentiments for peace and opposition against nuclear arms persist to this day.”
I learned a great deal from the peace museum’s “documentation of the many times my government has threatened to use nuclear weapons and of the continuing advocacy of nuclear disarmament by the citizens and leaders of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” I argued, that “at a time when a neoconservative clique seeking world hegemony plays a leading role in U.S. foreign policy formation... Japan’s antinuclear advocacy is needed now more than ever.”
Anti-Nuclear Weapons Advocacy Today
Commemorations of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are taking place throughout the world this week. On August 6, 2025, United Nations Under-Secretary-General Izumi Nakamitsu issued a statement to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial on behalf of United Nations Secretary General António Guterres:
...today the risk of nuclear conflict is growing. Trust is eroding. Geopolitical divisions are widening. And the very weapons that brought such devastation to Hiroshima and Nagasaki are once again being treated as tools of coercion.
Yet, there are signs of hope.
Last year, the Japanese organization Nihon Hidankyo—which represents the survivors of the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombings—was awarded the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize for its tireless work in raising awareness about this critical issue.
We must focus our attention on the genocide in Gaza and the “escalating violence” and “forced displacement” in the West Bank, the continuing war in Ukraine, and the humanitarian crisis in Sudan. With the danger of nuclear war, greater than ever, we need a renewed grassroots movement to support the eradication of nuclear weapons from the planet.
Nuclear arms agreements among the nuclear powers are nearly defunct. The people who live in the nuclear armed states need to pressure their governments to eliminate their nuclear stockpiles and instead pursue diplomacy with all the other nations of the world rather than nuclear intimidation.
The United Nations notes that September 26 “The International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons has been observed annually since 2014.” The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons adopted by the United Nations entered into force on January 22, 2021. We the people of the states possessing nuclear weapons must do all in our power to persuade our governments to ratify the treaty and implement its provisions that will lead to a world without nuclear weapons. The survival of humanity is at stake.
This piece was originally published on Martin Halpern’s Substack, A Marxist Writing and Making History.
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Testimony of the Hibakusha of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: No More Nuclear Weapons
They have been telling their stories for nearly 80 years. It’s about time more of us listen.
Aug 09, 2025
CONTENT WARNING: This article contains descriptions of nuclear weapons effects, including disturbing accounts of the victims.
On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped the first atomic bomb ever used in warfare on the city of Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, on August 9, the second was dropped on Nagasaki. Both cities were totally destroyed by the bombs, a new type of weapon developed by the United States, infamously through the Manhattan Project. In Hiroshima, over 140,000 were killed. In Nagasaki, over 70,000. In the blink of an eye, humanity witnessed two of the darkest days in history.
This year marks the 80th commemoration of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Each year, scores of Japanese peace organizations, and those from other nations, hold events in the two cities to remember the tragedies and renew passions for continuing the fight for peace.
This year, I had the privilege of being invited to attend one such event: the World Conference Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs, organized by Gensuikyo. It has been a tremendous honor to join as part of a delegation from the United States and as a representative of the Campaign for Peace, Disarmament, and Common Security, an organization whose board I sit on.
What I have experienced has moved me powerfully. I learned from testimony from nuclear bomb survivors (Hibakusha), technical descriptions of the events of those days, diplomatic arguments from around the world, and demonstrations of peace movements from Japan and beyond. In the aftermath of such powerful testimony, the natural conclusion is inescapable: Nuclear weapons should be made illegal, never used again, and dismantled. The wealth of resources going toward their production should instead be dedicated to programs that actually create security like education, diplomacy, material security, and cooperative institutions.
I’d like to report back what I experienced and learned for the benefit of those unfamiliar with the details of nuclear weapons control—especially those in the United States. As someone who grew up through U.S. public schools and engages with students in higher education, I can say that we are woefully ignorant of the truth. Let this correct the record and help open more eyes to the truth.
The Reality of the Bombings and their Aftermath
I want to share both the technical details of what happened during nuclear bomb detonation as well as testimony from those who survived the blasts, the Hibakusha. Both are difficult to read. I urge readers to open their minds and hearts and imagine to their greatest ability what those who experienced the bombings felt like as horror unfolded before their very eyes.
At the World Conference, Professor Oya Masato of the Nagasaki Institute of Applied Science shared a scientific account of the bombing of Nagasaki. This second bomb exploded at 11:02 am on August 9, 1945, 503 meters above the town of Matsuyama, about three kilometers north of Nagasaki city center. Instantly, the bomb turned into a fireball of tens of millions of degrees. The surface of the fireball cooled to approximately 7,000°C in 0.1 seconds. The ground temperature at the hypocenter (point of detonation) rose as high as 3,000-4,000°C, and humans in the area were instantly carbonized. The bomb generated a shock wave and blast which traveled at 440 meters per second at the hypocenter and 60 meters per second two kilometers away from the hypocenter. Those shock waves destroyed most of the city, an area of 405 square kilometers, within 10 seconds. Fires emerged and burned an area of 6.7 square kilometers. Thousands were instantly killed, and by the end of 1945, the death toll rose to 74,000.
This scientific description begins to describe the horrors of the bomb. But it can be hard to imagine. What stands out is the sheer power and devastation: a whole city leveled and engulfed in flames within seconds. Devastation on a scale never before seen. Callous destruction, indiscriminate murder.
What truly rends the heart is the testimony of Hibakusha, those who survived the bomb and tell their stories. The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum depicts many such stories. It’s nearly unbearable to take in and try to imagine even a sliver of what these horrors would feel like. The stories make clear that the atomic bombs created a literal hell on Earth.
A device that can cause this amount of suffering has no place in human society.
One story, shared by a Hibakusha of Hiroshima, Park Jung-soon, 11 years old at the time, describes her experience. On the morning of the bombing, she and her six family members living together were surprised by a flash like lightning and thunder. The sky lit up. Suddenly, a blast and tremendous sound shook the whole house, lifting the entire structure upward. The house fell back down, collapsed, and crushed the family beneath it. It all happened in seconds. They could not move their bodies and thought they would die.
Imagine the sheer terror of suddenly being launched into the air only to plummet down and be crushed by your home. Imagine your home, something that we hold deep attachment to and a place of safety, comfort, and love, collapsing down on you and your whole family. In moments your safe haven becomes the source of incredible pain. Imagine those you love looking at you with the fear of death in their eyes for a split second before having your gaze ripped away by the force of crushing weight.
Jung-soon opened her eyes and found herself trapped under a thick beam. Her mother desperately pulled her out and helped her crawl out of the collapsed walls. Her head was bleeding heavily, but she rose to her feet and looked around: The house next door had fallen down as well, people were running away, crying, shouting. The village as she knew it was falling apart.
While the family fled, they saw people dead on the ground, or alive but in agony crying or shouting. People were pulling carts carrying wounded or dead neighbors. People were covered in burns and suffering in pain. She describes it as like the hell of a cartoon but in reality.
At the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, there were many such stories and testimonies, as well as photographs and artwork created by Hibakusha attempting to visually depict what they experienced. Details like those in Jung-soon’s story were common. People burned beyond recognition. Structures flattened. The dead littering the city. People walking around with flesh peeling from their bodies, literally melting off, begging and screaming for water. It was, indeed, hell on Earth.
It may be difficult, but I implore you to try to deeply imagine what these words convey. In a world where many of us are constantly exposed to language of indiscriminate violence through news media, it may be easy to simply read this and register it as fact. But try to register it as feeling. What would it feel like to feel your own broken body throb with pain while simultaneously witnessing mass death all around you? Can you imagine a human being burnt beyond recognition? Someone with their flesh melting off? The sounds of screams, crying, wailing, and pure fear were profoundly traumatizing.
The effects of nuclear weapons, the scenes described by the Hibakusha, are things that should never be visited upon this Earth. A device that can cause this amount of suffering has no place in human society.
This does not even describe the effects of the bombing that persisted long after the initial devastation. Hibakusha faced severe effects from radiation poisoning and the physical damage—burns, breakages, disfigurations—they sustained. They were also subject to discrimination for decades, as people feared contamination if they came in contact with Hibakusha. Many kept their stories secret.
These are tragic tales that the Japanese peace movement describes and uplifts for all to learn from. They have been telling their stories for nearly 80 years. It’s about time more of us listen.
Telling the Truth in the United States
In the United States, there is a profound culture of ignorance surrounding nuclear weapons. I experienced this firsthand growing up in U.S. public schools and then in collegiate engineering studies.
When I was in high school, I elected to take the upper-level U.S. history class—one which gives college credit if you do well enough. The course is infamous in American high schools: AP U.S. History, or APUSH for short. Our teacher taught out of a book used in many classrooms across the country, titled The American Pageant: A History of the Republic by Kennedy, Cohen, and Bailey. This book, like many others used in the U.S., describes the atomic bombing as the key to ending the second World War, a tough but necessary decision by President Harry Truman. The argument goes that dropping the bombs eliminated the need for a U.S. ground invasion, which would have cost half a million lives (which Howard Zinn notes in A People’s History of the United States seemed to have “been pulled out of the air to justify the bombings”). It becomes a trolly problem of sorts: Would you end 200,000 lives to save half a million?
That’s as far as we typically get in U.S. depictions of the bombings. We are stuck thinking at a high school level about nuclear weapons—in a country whose high schools are not known for their rigor or nuanced teaching of U.S. history. Now, when I teach at universities and talk with students in engineering, their understanding of the bombings is the same: an unfortunate necessity or political blunder. Even the faculty teaching the course, presumably sharp thinkers with PhDs, repeat the same lines.
Students should not be indoctrinated into a version of the story favorable to the U.S. perspective.
In popular media, the story is no different. 2023’s blockbuster Oppenheimer—which broke box office expectations and was given seven awards at the Oscars—was a shallow depiction of the events. As it told a dramatized version of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer’s work on the Manhattan Project, it attempted to depict his inner turmoil as he grappled with visions of what must have become of victims. However, the screen time dedicated to his haunting visions does not exceed five minutes in a three-hour film.
Accurate depictions of the horrors of nuclear bombings are nowhere to be found in dominant U.S. education and media. Textbooks do not describe the detailed suffering of victims, the social discrimination they experienced afterward, or the stories of their deeply difficult lives. Films choose not to center the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but rather the perpetrators. It is tragic and laughable to consider the fact that a film like Oppenheimer is praised for its critique of nuclear weapons while it entirely centers the life of the man who was instrumental in their creation rather than the lives of his victims.
Peace organizations across the U.S. are pushing against these narratives, trying to spread the truth, and fighting for nonproliferation. But without countering the widespread ignorance of our own population, we will not get far. In a world increasingly plagued by misinformation and falsehood, we have our work cut out when it comes to effectively spreading the truth about nuclear weapons. We need to dispel the veil of ignorance covering our communities if we are to build a large enough movement to push the U.S. to disarm, re-engage in treaties, and work toward peace under cooperation rather than precarious stability based on fear and threats.
One of the first steps can be to simply tell the truth. Stories matter, and how we tell the history of our own nation matters. Students should not be indoctrinated into a version of the story favorable to the U.S. perspective. Media should accurately describe the horrors. The stories of the Hibakusha should be known by everyone.
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