50 Years After Hiroshima - Hell On Earth

By Editor June H.L. Wong 
The Star (Section 2) - Monday July 31, 1995

Fifty years ago on Aug 6, atomic warfare was unleashed on Hiroshima. Packing 4.6 tons of force per square yard, the A-bomb reduced homes to cinde piles and drove concrete support pillars into the earth. Five consumed whole neighbourhoods and fanned incendiary updrafts that tossed burning timber heavenward. Roof tiles turned to gum. The surface of gravestones oozed. People suffered unspeakable deaths. A woman standing outside a bank was reduced to vapour - only a shadow of her form on the structure remained. Desperate for relief, many victims pitched themselves into the city's rivers. A man riding his bike across a bridge was transformed into a charcoal statue. Many endured the blast but lost body parts - ears, eyes, lips. In photographs, the blank expression of survivors seemed to go beyond pain to disbelief - to realm of chaos and confusion that suggested souls had been seared as surely as flesh. Screamed one Hiroshima victim: "This is hell on earth!"

 

LIVING UNDER A CLOUD

FRED BRUNING revisits the Hiroshima A-bomb - the controversy that won't go away.

A STORM boiled in the desert. Winds hit 30mph and rain flogged the barren acreage of the Alamogordo Bombing Range in New Mexico, United States.

Lightning splintered the sky. At 2.30 am, a floodlamp blew out briefly and the 100ft-tower it illuminated blended into the inky New Mexico horizon. As though in a final operatic flourish, nature was heralding its power and prerogatives.

Man's turn would come next. Bad weather retreated and scientists counted toward a 5.30 am zero-hour. Attention focused on the tower, again bathed in light. At the top was a metal shack and in the shed, the bulbous form known as "the gadget" - a strangely benign tag for a weapon so formidable that some wondered if the test soon to take place would consume the compound, the city of Los Alamos about 240km away, or the state of New Mexico, or whether detonation of this first atomic bomb would be simply set the atmosphere on fire and smother the world.

Describing the A-bomb's debut, a reporter for The New York Times - the only journalist invited - wrote: "On that moment hung eternity."

But J. Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant, meditative physicist who helped build the bomb, said later he was reminded of a passage from sacred Hindu scripture. As the A-bomb's incandescent mushroom cloud imposed its false and frightening sunrise on the site code-named Trinity, Oppenheimer pondered a sobering verse from the Bhagavad-Gita: "I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds."

Fifty years ago in July 16, the Atomic Age began with a bang equal to 17,000 tons of TNT and to paraphrase T.S. Eliot's poem The Wasteland, a faint, existential whimper too.

Science had harnessed the energy of the uncerse and at the same time nudged the planet toward extinction - a cruel dichotomy that haunted people then as now.

But a path had been chosen.

Little Boy and the Fat Man

Only three weeks after Trinity, a B-29 bomber plane named the Enola Gay dropped an A-bomb fuelled by uranimum on the Japanese industrial city of Hiroshima. Dubbed "Little Boy," the bomb was a wrathful intruder of unprecedented fury.

A great blast of superheated air toppled much of the city and, in an instant, killed 80,000 residents - many of them literally vapourised as though in some dreadful science-fiction episode.

Before Japanese leaders could come to grips with the Aug 6 attack, the United States dropped a plutonium-based bomb on Nagasaki. Forty thousand people died when the device known as "Fat Man" detonated just after 11 am on Aug 9. Scores more would perish from radiation exposure. Burned, disfigured and in excruciating pain, survivors were not necessarily the most fortunate.

Though heartbreaking, the devastation meant US researchers at the nuclear warfare group known as the Manhattan Project had brought years of intense work to successful conclusion. In the view of many, thousands of American - and Japanese - lives were saved in the process.

The bomb brought a swift close to the war in the Pacific Japan-surrendered on Aug 15 - avoiding need for a US invasion to finally rout a fierce but doomed enemy. Even conservative estimates foresaw weeks of savage fighting and staggering casualities, a formidable prospect for Amricans already exhausted from the war in Europe.

Fallout from the A-bomb was not limited to the pernicious spread of radioactive particles. There was a profound cultural, political and emotional impact too, and humanity has struggled for a half-century to cope with the consequences.

Art, literature and political conversation still show signs of a kind of post- bomb jitteriness. Contends former US Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, now a lawyer who represents American victims of radiation poisoning: "No event of this century had left a deeper imprint on human consciousness."

If anything, that psychic bloom may be growing more vivid. President Harry S. Truman's decision to drop the A-bomb remains a matter of debate so passionate in the United States that it sometimes threatens to achieve critical mass. US postal authorities had to yank a mushroom cloud stamp after complaints that the image was bloodthirsty, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washingtom revised a Hiroshima exhibit because veterans branded it soft on the Japanese.

When a scaled-back show opened at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum last month, anti-bomb demonstrators poured blood and ashes on the Enola Gay, centrepiece of the exhibit.

Japan is still at odds with itself too. harsh memeories accompany the 50th anniversary of the bombing as well as a wrenching discussion over how, or if, to apologise for conduct during World War II.

Surveys show the Japanese public favours a strong statement ofd remorse but - in an odd parallel to the Smithsonian affair - many veterans and their legislative supporters say any apology should emanate from Washington, not Tokyo.

Japan's ruling coalition finally approved a compromise resolution expressing regret for inflicting "unbearable pain to people abroad, paticularly in Asian countries," but the statement satisfied few Japanese and did little to settle the controversy.

A sense of tranquillity is likely to mark anniversary abservations in a country that has vaulted from the ignominy of defeat to one of the world's premier manufacturing and financial powers - a stuning and speedy postwar comeback that few could have envisioned.

THE DEBATE CONTINUES

Defense and denial

While Japan's wounds mainly have healed, baffling moral questions about nuclear warfare - and the bombings of 1945 - persist.

From the outside, some critics argued that Truman and his advisers opted for a nuclear strike too hastily - the president scribbled a go-ahead in pencil immediately upon learning results of the Trinity test, an eyewitness said - and analysts continue to argue today that the United States acted precipitously.

Many Americans head for meltdown when US motives are challenged. Burr Bennett, a World War II veteran who opposed the original Smithsonian Insitution exhibit as head of a group called the Committee for the Restoration and Proper Display of the Enola Gay, resents what he says is a move "toward making US the culprit."

Bennett's impatience is echoed by many other veterans who remain convinced that the bomb saved their lives bu eliminating the need for a land war against Japan.

"Now I look at my family and my grandchildren and think if they hadn't dropped that bomb, may be none of us would be here now," said Daniel Hanke, 69, of New York City, who served with the navy on a troop transport ship in the Pacific.

Other veterans say Japan was a ruthless adversary that brought tragedy in itself. They point to Pearl Harbour, Okinawa, the Bataan Death March, the treatment of prisoners of war.

Alumni of the Army's old 509th Composite Group - the Enola Gay unit - are distributing a bumber sticker that declares: "If Thre Hadn't Been A Pearl Harbour, There Wouldn't have Been A Hiroshima."

Also unimpressed by revisionist claims, Army historian Edward Drea rejects the idea that Truman had viable options other than dropping the bomb.

"I have trouble with the notion that there was somehow a simpler solution," said Drea, chief of the research and analysis division at the US Army Centre of Military History in Washington. "For the life of me I can't see a way."

But what some view as a defense of US policy, others call denial.

"It bothers people to raise historical questions about the decision to drop the bomb," says Gar Laperovits, author of the 1965 book Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam. "The notion that our leaders don't have flaws is a fundamental error. These men are flawed like all of us."

Alperovitz argues that by dropping the bomb, Truman forced Soviet entry into the nuclear arms race and assured German rearmament. The atomic bomb "was a primary catalyst of the Cold War," Alperovitz said last year in an article for the publication Foreign Policy.

But like many in the decision-making loop, Truman may have been a captive of history. "I don't see harry Truman as any better or worse than any of us," Alperovitz said.

To Ed Hedemann of the New York based peace group Enola Gay Action Committee, avoiding issues raised by Hiroshima could be hazardous to the health of the world. Ten nations have atomic weapons or could build them quickly - The United States, Britian, France, China, Russia, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, South Africa - and there is concern that additional members of the so-called "nuclear club" soon might be inducted.

I don't know any sane person who wants more atomic bombings," said Hedemann, whose organisation opposed the decision by Smithsonian officials to overhaul the Enola Gay exhibit. "How do we avoid that?" We need to have open, critical discussions."

Though the A-bomb debate has particular significance this year, many of the questions are familiar:

• Were the Japanese on the brink of surrender when Truman dropped the bomb?
• Should Washington have issued an iltimatum - a perhaps staged a demonstration bombing - before levelling Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
• If the United States had executed plans to invade Japan instead of using the A-bomb, would American losses have reached the 200,000 anticipated by those pressing for nuclear force?
• Did Truman use the A-bomb to end hostilities before the Soviet Union - hungry for territory - could enter as a major force on the Allied side?
• Did the US president have a choice.

Moral issues attending the A-bomb were elusive in 1945. president Franklin D. Roosevelt declared before the United States entered the war that no nation should "undertake the bombardment from the air of civilian populations or unfortunate cities."

But Allied bombers reduced Dresden, Germany, to rubble in the latter days of the European campaign, and massive US firebombing of Japanese cities in 1945 took far more lives than did Little Boy or Fat Man.

Historian Drea says the country's warweart mood discouraged ethical debate within the Truman administration. "There was no one in the administration or in the scientific community saying there was absolutely no reason to use the bomb," Drea said in an interview.

A few physicists - including Leo Szilard, who in 1939 urged Rossevelt to launch the Manhattan Project - lobbied against deployment of the A-bomb, but several scientists said they believed then, and now, that their work was essential.

"I have no regrets," said Victor Weisskopf, 86, now retired, "It was important to develop the bomb."

Though horrible in its effects, the bomb was viewed by American leaders as a natural extension of modern warmaking - an unavoidable step in a world where the likes of Hitler threatened global domination.

America's determination to build an atomic arsenal was based on the belief that Germany was trying frantically to do the same.

"The notion of the Third Reich in posession of atomic weapons for a thousand years just chilled the blood," said Richard Rhodes, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Making Of The Atomic Bomb.

Hitler never manufactured a nuclear weapon, however, and after the Allied victory in Europe, focus shifted to the Pacific. American leaders considered Japan an intransigent enemy controlled by fanatical elements of the military.

Determined to end the war quickly, Truman and his advisers turned to the most powerful weapon ever invented - "the greatest thing in history," as the president exclaimed.

Bomber and the Bombed

If Truman considered the bomb a materstroke, the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki found it a ghastly instrument of horror and destruction.

A half-century later, many have difficulty putting their memeories to rest.

One survivor, Akihiro Takahashi, was 14-years-old student awaiting classes on Aug. 6, 1945, when a single American bomber appeared overhead.

Suddenly blistering heat consumed Takahashi's schoolyard and a crypt-like darkness descended. He recalls a single thought that still resonated today: "How is this possible on Earth?"

Several years ago, Takahashi visited Washington to attend a Hiroshima commemoration and encountered Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the Enola Gay. After formalities, Takahashi said, Tibbets and he sat on a park bench behind the Capitol and talked - the warrior and the survivor.

Takahashi asked if Tibbets regretted the A-bomb mission, and the pilot said he did not - that he would carry out the orders again under similar circumstances. But Tibbets said he hopes there never would be another war like the last, nor reason to drop another Little Boy.

Tibbets reached for Takahashi's hand, scrred from the bombing. He covered it with both his own. I think he understood my pain and sadness," Takahashi said.

Only when they parted a half-hour later did the men let go. - LAT-WP.

 

 

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