A
statement of peace, or an epitaph
August 6 marks 68
years since the United States committed what is arguably the single gravest act
of terrorism that the world has ever known. Terrorism means the deliberate
targeting of innocent civilians, and targeted they were,
“That fateful summer, 8:15,” the mayor of
Hiroshima recalled at a memorial service in 2007, “the roar of a B-29 breaks
the morning calm. A parachute opens in the blue sky. Then suddenly, a
flash, an enormous blast—silence—hell on earth. The eyes of young girls
watching the parachute were melted. Their faces became giant charred blisters.
Others died when their eyeballs and internal organs burst from their bodies.
Hiroshima was a hell where those who somehow survived envied the dead. Within
the year, 140,000 had died.”
It was followed three days later by the “Fat
Man” bomb leveling Nagasaki, with a comparable disastrous impact on a largely
civilian population that had no effective control over the decisions of the
emperor who initiated the war. Nagasaki was a last- minute substitute for
Kyoto, which Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson ordered spared because he had
fond memories of his honeymoon in that two decades earlier. The devastation of
those two cities was so gruesome that our government banned the showing of film
footage depicting the carnage we had caused.
We have never been very good at challenging
our nation’s own reprehensible behavior, but if we don’t take proper measure of
the immense extermination wrought by two small and primitive nuclear weapons as
compared with today’s arsenals, we lose the point as to why they must be
banned. We are the country that designed and exploded these weapons that are
inherently implements of terrorism in that, as the nuking of Japan amply
demonstrated, they cannot distinguish between civilian and combatant.
For those who believe that honorable ends
absolve a nation of evil means, there is the argument that the bombings
shortened the war, although the preponderance of more recent evidence would
hold that the Soviet entrance into the war against Japan two days after
Hiroshima was a more decisive factor. But the basic assumption of
universal opposition to terrorism is a rejection of the notion that even noble
means justify ignoble ends, and a consistent opposition to the proliferation,
let alone use of nuclear weapons, must insist that they are inherently
anti-civilian and therefore immoral.
Why, then, on this anniversary, do we not
acknowledge our responsibility as the nation that first created these weapons,
has been the only country to use them, and is still in possession of the
biggest repository of such weapons of mass destruction on earth? Is it not
unwise, as well as wrong, for Aug. 6 to pass, as it generally does, without any
widespread discussion of our culpability for the vast death in Hiroshima and
Nagasaki?
Indeed, in Santa Monica, Calif., home of one
of the rare reminders of the catastrophe we unleashed, a sculpture of a
mushroom cloud, designed by three-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Paul Conrad, is
slated for destruction. That sculpture,
called “Chain Reaction,” was given to the city in 1991 thanks to the
beneficence of Joan Kroc, the widow of the founder of McDonald’s, who used her
fortune to advance the cause of public enlightenment. It is a grim warning that
the best educated can commit the most heinous of crimes. Conrad, world famous as the editorial
cartoonist for The Denver Post and Los Angeles Times for four decades, was
himself a veteran of the war in the Pacific, one of those whose life the bomb
was ostensibly designed to save. Conrad joined the Army in 1942 and
participated in the invasions of Guam and Okinawa, where he was stationed at
the time of the Hiroshima bombing.
His sentiment about that horrific event is
inscribed on his powerful sculpture: “This is a statement of peace. May it
never become an epitaph.” Conrad’s
critically important sculpture might soon be gone. As a nation, we excel at
obliterating reminders of our own failings.
[Abbrev.] http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/08/06-1
© 2013 TruthDig.com
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