Seventy-five years ago today, the United States dropped the uranium bomb “Little Boy” on the Japanese manufacturing city of Hiroshima, killing 80,000 people instantly. Three days later, on Aug. 9, 1945, plutonium-based “Fat Man” was dropped on Nagasaki, killing 40,000 people instantly. Tens of thousands more died later from radiation exposure.
In Japan, survivors of the nuclear fallout are called hibakusha. They aren’t soldiers. They are civilians. Many of the ones still living today were children when the explosion decimated their homes and families. One of the hibakusha, photographed and interviewed by Lee Karen Stow, Reiko Hada was 9 years old when Fat Man detonated over Nagasaki. Fat Man’s intended target was the city of Kokura, which was home to Japanese munitions plants. But when the sky over Kokura was too cloudy, the B-29 bomber called Bockscar dropped its payload on Nagasaki, a town nestled into the valleys between mountains. The topography saved Hada’s life; her community was on the other side of Mount Konpira, shielded from the worst of the devastation. Hada recounted the aftermath: “Many fled over Mount Konpira to our community. People with their eyes popped out, their hair disheveled, almost all naked, badly burned with their skin hanging down.”
When we learn about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we are taught first about the horrors of Pearl Harbor. Then we are taught that the two explosions ended World War II. We are taught that President Truman’s decision saved a million American soldiers. But the very real impact on very real people gets glossed over.
On the 75th anniversary of the first time an atomic bomb was used in war — and three days from now on the 75th anniversary of the last time an atomic bomb was used in war — we need to remember why nuclear weapons haven’t been used since. The destruction is both instant and long-lasting; Little Boy leveled more than five square miles of Hiroshima in an instant and radiation poisoning killed or disabled many who remained.
Seventy-five years from the day nuclear warfare changed the world, the Doomsday Clock stands the closest it ever has to midnight. The Doomsday Clock, created in 1947 by some of the same scientists who worked on the Manhattan project that developed the atomic bomb, uses “the imagery of apocalypse (midnight) and the contemporary idiom of nuclear explosion (countdown to zero) to convey threats to humanity and the planet,” according to Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, keepers of the clock. For the first time in the clock’s history, we are less than two minutes to midnight; the clock reads 100 seconds to midnight. Before 2020, the closest we had come to a nuclear apocalypse was in 1953, at the start of the Cold War, and 2018, when nations across the world started investing in their nuclear arsenals, and the clock read two minutes to midnight.
The United States and Russia are each sitting on a nuclear stockpile of more than 6,000 weapons, with other nations trying to join the race. A new nuclear warhead was requested, designed and produced under the Trump administration, according to Defense News. As the world races toward “mutually assured destruction” — and our current elected officials do nothing to slow it down — it’s worthwhile, on this anniversary, to reflect on the very real, very human cost of nuclear war.
Morgantown Area News
'Thursday, April 18, 2024'
