President Obama has become the first sitting U.S. president to visit the Japanese city of Hiroshima since U.S. warplanes dropped the first atomic bomb on August 6, 1945. The bombing killed 140,000 people; another 100,000 were seriously injured. Three days later, the U.S. dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, killing another 74,000 people. Obama spoke today at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, but offered no apology for the bombings.
Despite President Obama’s call for an end to nuclear weapons, a new study by the Federation of American Scientists has determined the Obama administration has reduced the nuclear stockpile at a far slower rate than any of his three immediate predecessors, including George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush. In addition, the United States has been quietly upgrading its nuclear arsenal to create smaller, more precise nuclear bombs as part of a massive effort that will cost up to $1 trillion over three decades.
Kai Bird talking:
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Obama, when he was about to go to Hiroshima, he said, “I’m not going to offer an apology.” He was very explicit about that. He said, “That is—that historical incident, that—what happened in Hiroshima, the decision to use the bomb, I will leave that for the historians.” Well, you know, 70 years later, the historical consensus, looking at the documents and all the evidence from both sides, has really shifted enormously. And we now understand that the decision to use the bomb on Hiroshima was a redundant thing. It was not necessary. What really persuaded the Japanese emperor and the military generals around him to surrender was the entry into the war of the Soviet Union. They feared the Bolsheviks invading the Japanese home islands. And that’s really—that was the tipping point. So the bomb was redundant and, ultimately, unnecessary.
And by using it, though, we legitimized the use of nuclear weapons. And by legitimizing nuclear weapons, we made ourselves, for the last 50 years, 70 years, extremely vulnerable. And we are very lucky that these weapons have not been used on a third occasion in anger. And people forget that the father of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, within three months of Hiroshima, was saying things like, “If we continue to go down this road and rely on nuclear weapons and they are used again someday in war, people will curse the names of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” And so we’re still living with that threat.
Why the second bomb, and so quickly after Hiroshima? Well, one of the answers is that Harry Truman, the president at the time, didn’t even know that a second bomb was going to be used so quickly. He had given his acquiescence to the use of the bomb. It was General Groves, who was in charge of the Manhattan Project, who decided on the timetable. And Hiroshima happened on August 6, and they wanted—Groves wanted to use the second bomb, which was a different—a technically different bomb. So there were two different types of bombs, and he wanted to, in effect, test both. And, you know, three days was not enough for the Japanese emperor and the military establishment there to respond. They had no idea really what had happened in Hiroshima. It took them days to absorb the news and fathom what had happened. And, in fact, you know, their decision to surrender came when the Soviets entered the war just a few days later. That was the tipping point.
Oppenheimer was a very complicated man, and he himself never, “apologized” for the bomb. He never apologized for quantum physics, for his role in inventing the bomb. He thought that this science was inevitable, the scientific journey of discovery to understand our world, our physical world, was inevitable, and that what he did was, you know, inevitable and a part of the human journey of self-knowledge. But he very quickly—you know, again, within months of Hiroshima, he was giving speeches, which shook the military establishment in Washington, saying things like, you know, this bomb was used on an essentially already defeated enemy. Now, you think about that. That’s a very striking thing for the father of the atomic bomb to acknowledge, just within months of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that the bomb was used on an essentially defeated enemy.
Setsuko Thurlow talking:
I was a 13-year-old, grade eight student at the girls’ school. And I was mobilized by the army, like together with a group of about 30 schoolmates. And we were trained to act as decoding assistants. And that very day, being Monday, we were to start the day’s work, the full-fledged decoding assistant. At 8:00, we had a morning assembly, and the Major Yanai gave us a pep talk. And we said, “We will do our best for emperor’s sake.” And at the moment, I saw the bluish white flash in the windows. I was on the second floor of the wooden building, which was one mile, or 1.8 kilometers, away from the ground zero. And after seeing the flash, I had a sensation of floating in the air. All the buildings were flattened by the blast and falling. And, obviously, the building I was in was falling, and my body was falling together with it. That’s the end of my recollection.
Then I regained my consciousness. And when I regained, I found myself in a total darkness and a silence. I tried to move my body, but I couldn’t. So I knew I was faced with death. I thought, “Finally, Americans got us.” Then I started hearing the whispering voices of my classmates who were around me in the same room: “Mother, help me. God, help me.” And all of a sudden, strong male voice said, “Don’t give up. I’m trying to free you. Keep moving. Keep pushing. And you see the sun ray coming through that opening. Get moving toward that direction. Crawl.” That’s what I did in the total darkness. I didn’t see anything.
But by the time I came out, the building was on fire. That meant all my classmates who were with me, about 30 of them, were burned to death alive. And I and two other girls managed to come out. The three of us looked around outside. And although it happened in the morning, it was dark, dark as twilight. And as our eyes got used to recognize things, those dark moving objects happened to be human beings. It was like a procession of ghosts. I say “ghosts” because they simply did not look like human beings. Their hair was rising upwards, and they were covered with blood and dirt, and they were burned and blackened and swollen. Their skin and flesh were hanging, and parts of the bodies were missing. Some were carrying their own eyeballs. And they collapsed onto the ground. Their stomach burst open, and intestines start stretching out.
The soldiers said, “You girls join that procession. Escape to the nearby hillside.” Well, we learned how to step over the dead bodies, and escaped. By the time we got to the hillside, at the foot of the hill was a huge army training ground about the size of two football fields, quite a big place. The place was packed with dead bodies and dying people, injured people. And people were just begging in whisper. Nobody was shouting in strong voice, just a whisper: “Water please. Water please.” That’s all the physical and psychological strength left. They just whispered.
We wanted to be of help to them, but we had no bucket and no cups to carry the water. And we found ourselves relatively lightly injured. So he went to the nearby stream, washed off our dirt and the blood, and tore off our blouses, soaked them in the water, and dashed back to the dying people. We put the wet cloth over their mouth, and who desperately sucked in the moisture. That was the level of rescue relief work we were able to offer. Nothing else. I looked around to see if there were doctors or nurses helping. I saw none in that huge place. Of course, the doctors and nurses were killed, too. But a small number of remaining surviving people were working somewhere else. So thousands of thousands of people at the place where I was, they had no medication, no water even and no medical attention or anything. That’s how most of the people died.
And when the darkness fell, we three girls sat on the hillside and all night watched the city burn, feeling stunned and numbed from watching the massive death and suffering all day. We weren’t feeling. We weren’t responding appropriately emotionally. We were not able to. And it was a good thing we were not able to respond emotionally. If we did, we couldn’t have survived for each horror we had to witness that day.
My father was out of town, so he saw the rising mushroom cloud, and he came back to the city. And my mother was doing the dishes after breakfast, and she was rescued. So I was lucky. I had both parents. Later on, we moved to outside of the city and where my uncle fed us, housed us and fed us and clothed us. We were lucky. Not many people had that kind of luck. They just spread a piece of old paper or cloth on the ground, and that’s where they slept, without knowing anything about the effects of radiation from the contaminated ground.
But we found that my sister and her four-year-old child were on their way to the doctor. They were walking over the bridge in the central part of the city that day. And they were badly, badly burned. And we saw them the next day. We could hardly recognize them, only by their voices. And according to my mother, by the special hairpin she had in her hair, she recognized it was she. But anyway, she survived for four days, four nights, and the child died shortly after. But we supposedly looked after them, but we didn’t have anything to give except some fluid.
And my sister-in-law was directing student work in the center part of the city. There were about 8,000 grade seven and grade eight students from all the high schools working in the center part of the city, just below the detonation. And they are the ones who simply vaporized, melted and carbonized. And my father and I looked for the body of my sister-in-law, who was directing the students there. We never found them. She’s still missing on paper. But we were so happy my favorite uncle and aunt survived, we heard, and they were outside of the city.
I listened to President Obama’s voice talking about the precious lives of the children who were lost, I was thinking of my four-year-old nephew, who was burned and blackened beyond recognition. I cared for them for several days. He died, together with his mother. He just happened to be walking over the bridge to the doctor’s. That’s why this was his fate. And whenever I remember their agony, I think of all the children. My four-year-old nephew came to represent all the children of the world. And that’s a very important image I have, burned to my retina, as I keep speaking to the people of the world about the danger of nuclear war. So, anyway, I had tears when I listened to the president, as far as that is concerned.
Now, your question whether I want a apology, now, this has been talked about both here in the United States and Japan, too. If the president offered it, I think it’s appropriate. If he chose not to offer it, I understand, given American political climate. Well, I hope I made my idea clear. Well, certainly, we deserved it. We could have received apology, although I don’t—I didn’t demand. I think apologies should be voluntary action. What meaning does it have if we force other party to say sorry?
But really, the killing of massive humanity, including my nephew and hundreds of thousands of innocent noncombatants indiscriminately—the killing noncombatants in war, that’s a—it’s immoral, and it’s forbidden by the international law. But that was the pattern of mass killing, started in Tokyo, and about 70 percent of the urban centers of Japan had been destroyed. And Hiroshima was the 10th largest city. And we waited for it, and we kept wondering why Hiroshima was not attacked. Little did we know that the U.S. had a secret new bomb they wanted to experiment on a special city. So, Air Force was instructed not to attack Hiroshima, although all the other—most of the major cities had been attacked. Hiroshima was kept intact. And you can put two together, that, you know, the new bombs and keeping one city intact, and what’s the connection? I think you can make the guess. Anyway, all this kind of things were happening. Very carefully calculated act.
people are still denying, and they are living—sleepwalking, I would say. They know a little bit, but they don’t want to face it. They push it in the corner of their brain and pretend as though nothing is going to happen to them. But we do have close to 16,000 nuclear weapons. Each one of it is much more destructive than the little one dropped over my head. Sixteen thousand of them, owned by nine—five nuclear weapon states recognized by the U.N., and four additional nations. And people just don’t even know this kind of simple fact.
And Mr. Obama just recently declared that he was planning to spend $1 trillion to update a weapons system, I mean, to modernize nuclear weapons and delivery system, $1 trillion. What can we do with that money for schools, hospitals and community services and so on? We have been depriving people’s daily lives in order to waste the money to make the armaments to kill masses of people, not just small troops and soldiers and so on. I mean, those strategies are planning to be effective in killing, by killing more in a more cruel way. And this time, I think Mr. Obama talked about—well, maybe strategists talked about making a more usable type of nuclear weapon. Well, to me, the whole thing and whole effort of having more and more, by more and more nations, for over 71 years, this is just simply insanity.
And it pains me, it pains many other survivors who survived, because we have been recording our painful story to tell the world as a warning about the danger of nuclear weapons. I want the world to wake up to the reality of this totally unacceptable reality. And I hope more people will stand up and say, “We are not going to take this nonsense anymore.” As a matter of fact, 127 nations signed the humanitarian pledge, and they are saying we have waited for so long for the nuclear weapon states to fulfill their legal responsibility, obligation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and to start working for the elimination, abolition of nuclear weapon. But they haven’t done anything in 45 years. Therefore, we non-nuclear weapon states are going to stand up and take the initiative toward that goal—and civil society, like International Red Cross, and the NGOs, like ICAN. And so, the government and nongovernment people are standing up and now working.
As a matter of fact, this year, United Nations created a open-ended working group, and which met in February and this month and once again in August. And this group will be making their recommendation to the General Assembly in September about the way of achieving a prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons. In other words, let’s ban the nuclear weapon. It’s not impossible. Mr. Obama talked about it might take a lifetime. It shouldn’t. We have waited 71 years. We just cannot wait another 71 years. It has to happen tomorrow, really. That’s how I feel. The sense of urgency is real. I wish Mr. Obama said something like that this morning in Hiroshima, with a stronger sense of commitment and urgency, and come up with concrete actions, not rhetoric.
the meeting that’s taking place this month in Geneva, nearly a hundred countries discussing the prospect of a nuclear ban treaty.
None of the nuclear weapon states were there. You can understand why I am upset. Do they really seriously thinking of the day without nuclear weapon? He often talks about it. Does he really mean it? I have serious question. We have to start getting rid of them as quickly as possible, before the accident takes place, before terrorists take serious action. I have seen the massive death and suffering, and I don’t want to see the similar situation multiplied by the hundreds and thousands. I just can’t understand. I want the United States—as Mr. Obama said, United States has the moral responsibility to lead action toward abolition. Please back that statement with concrete action, soon.
back in 1945, right at the time and afterwards of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the discussion of radiation was raised by, among others, an independent journalist, Wilfred Burchett, who’s made his way beyond the MacArthur ban on reporters going to Hiroshima. He made his way for 30 hours in a train and got out and saw this kind of moonscape that was once your city of Hiroshima. And he sat down with his Hermes typewriter, and he tapped out the words, “I write this as a warning to the world.” He didn’t even know the word “radiation.” He talked about some kind of A-bomb sickness, people with their hair falling out. The United States government and Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project with J. Robert Oppenheimer, would call this Japanese propaganda. The New York Times would write a series of articles countering this. Their reporter, William Laurence, was actually on the payroll of the Pentagon, as well.
my school built a hut in the mountain, and the school invited us back. We were so happy to find who survived. Well, you know, many girls showed up wearing the bonnet or scarves, because they were bald, bald-headed. And I lost my hair, too, not completely like other girls. I was inside the building. Maybe that helped. But I, too, lost hair, bleeding from the gum, internal bleeding and diarrhea and all these kind of common symptom everybody shared in the city.
Let me talk about my favorite uncle and aunt. We heard that they were OK, they survived, they were alive, and they didn’t have any external evidence of injury. But a week later, their bodies started showing purple spots all over the place. And there was a rumor: If you have that purple spot, that was a sure sign you’re going to die. So, in those days, the first thing we did in the morning, before we got dressed, was to check every part of our body to make sure we didn’t find. That was the kind of anxiety we lived with. Anyway, my parents looked after this sick uncle and aunt. And according to my mother, their bodies, my uncle’s and aunt’s bodies, seemed to be their internal organs seemed to be rotten and dissolving and coming out as thick black liquid. So, my mother had to use any old material or old newspaper to use as the diapers, well, until their deaths, that everything came out from their body just in a thick black fluid.
Radiation seemed to have affected people in many different ways and many different times. Somebody died immediately, and some a week later, month later, a year later. And, you know, that famous little girl who folded the paper cranes, I think she died 10 years later. The fact is, 71 years later, today, people are still dying as a result of the delayed effect of radiation. Atomic bomb hospitals are full of those people. So, the effect has been continuing on and on. And so, every time I go to Japan, I go to the atomic bomb hospital, I get a close checkup. I am grateful for that. And I am kept OK on a medication.
Stop pretending. Face squarely the reality. Find out unacceptable reality of nuclear weapons. We can’t just leave it to the politician, military experts. They believe—the nations which still have those nuclear weapons, they believe in military doctrine of deterrence. They think by having more wicked stuff and by threatening the people, they can maintain security. But, to me, it’s just sheer illusion and delusion. I want the people to come out of that mentality.
Life is worth living, and we have to, together, explore how we can have that kind of life. Well, one practical thing we can do is, first, let’s get rid of nuclear weapons. They are not going into provide—giving us the security. It gives us more insecurity. I think we just have to study the issue, and this is what I often say to high school students, college students. Let’s learn about the issue and form some kind of opinion, and once you have opinion, communicate your opinion with your members of Parliament and pressure the government to take action. I’d like to say it, both United States and Canada. Well, Canada has a new government, but Canada’s nuclear policy hasn’t changed. I was hoping it would have more fresh, creative approach. But right now, I understand, Mr. Dion’s ideas seem to be the same old idea from the other regime.
Justin Trudeau? I don’t know if he has had a chance to inform himself about this. He seems to be busy with other issues. But really, it’s about time he should put himself to learn the issue. And together with the foreign minister, I’d like to see the change, and just don’t hide behind U.S. military doctrine. Just because Canada is a member of NATO, I guess it has the military moral responsibility. But it can choose to be more independent, more free and democratic. Democracy is really the key. In this nuclear age, democracy doesn’t seem to be valued. You know? In secrecy, things are decided and implemented. And I don’t feel my views are listened to appropriately. Millions of people working around the world are feeling the same. And we are not going to take it.
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Setsuko Thurlow
survivor of the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. She is an anti-nuclear activist and has worked as a social worker for decades in Toronto, serving Japanese-speaking immigrants.
Kai Bird
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and journalist. He and co-author Martin Sherwin won the Pulitzer Prize for their book, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.
— source democracynow.org