Kyoko Hayashi nearly died on Aug. 9, 1945, in the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. She was 14 years old and working at a factory less than a mile from the epicenter of the atomic explosion. She traveled barefoot for nine hours through the ruins of Nagasaki, passing many dead and dying who had been crushed, burned and wounded.
The unique tragedy of those who lost their lives to the bomb, Hayashi feels, is that the bomb not only deprived them of their lives but also of “their own personal deaths.”
And for the survivors like herself, known as “hibakusha,” the “shortening of a given life, not being able to live fully — this was the promise made between an atomic bomb and its victims.”
The bomb changed time for her.
“I could not make an appointment longer than a month ahead,” given
In one of her many published stories, Hayashi invents a new calendar, the “A-bomb calendar,” which designates 1945 as the first year. Why?
“The significance of the birth of Christ or Buddha pales in comparison” with the event that demonstrated that, “Humans had gained the means to destroy their own species, all other species and the Earth.”
Fifty-four years after surviving the bomb, she journeyed from Japan to the Trinity site in New Mexico, the site of the first atomic bomb explosion, a national landmark since 1975, and “a hibakusha’s birthplace,” as she deems it.
Standing at “Ground Zero” at the site, she looks out to the red mountains and wilderness beyond and suddenly senses a kinship with desert plants and animals.
“Until now, as I stand at Trinity Site, I have thought it was we humans who were the first atomic bomb victims on Earth. I was wrong. Here are my senior hibakusha. They are here but cannot cry or yell.”
After viewing museum films that lionized the scientists of the atomic bomb project, she writes, “I understand winners create a proud history… (but) the world did not need your experiment.’’
Hayashi’s bitter words echo the stark sentiment Admiral William Halsey, commander of the Third Fleet, expressed in 1946: “The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment … It was a mistake to ever drop it.” And he testified before Congress in 1949 that “bombing — especially atomic bombing — of civilians is morally indefensible.”
Key World War II American military leaders from all branches of the armed forces, among them Gens. Eisenhower, Arnold, Marshall and MacArthur and Adms Leahy, Nimitz and Halsey, strongly dissented from the decision to use the bombs. Some did so before August 1945. Some did in retrospect — for both military and moral reasons.
In December 1996, retired Air Force Gen. Lee Butler, former commander of the Strategic Air Command that oversaw the entire nuclear arsenal, used a National Press Club luncheon as a forum to urge his government to take the lead in abolishing all nuclear weapons.
“Nuclear war,” he held, “is a raging, insatiable beast whose instincts and appetites we pretend to understand but cannot possibly control.”
Nothing, he concluded, not deterrence, not national security, justifies these weapons of physical and genetic terror.
Contrast this realist wisdom from military and defense experts with our government’s current nuclear weapons policy. Over the next 30 years, the United States plans to spend $1 trillion to modernize the existing arsenal of nuclear bombs and warheads and their delivery systems by air, land and sea, despite our existing capacity to destroy the world many times over.
No other long-term public expenditure approaches this immense sum, nor is it clear how it will be paid for: “We’re … wondering how the heck we’re going to pay for it,” concedes Defense Undersecretary Brian McKeon.
Nor did presidential debate moderators raise this mammoth public expenditure for nuclear weapons modernization in questions to the candidates.
We live in a state of widespread public ignorance and public passivity because of government secrecy and denial about the “raging, insatiable beast” of nuclear weapons and because of the immense insider power of the defense industry.
Pick your issue of Americans’ insecurity and suffering: a child poverty rate of 20 percent (38 percent for black children), paychecks working people cannot live on, the costs of education and housing, climate change, prisons, human trafficking. Imagine what our trillion dollar taxes targeted to modernize nuclear weapons and police the world could do re-invested in what the majority of Americans need and want for a sustainable and secure future.
Today, a commemoration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims will be held at 6:30 p.m. at McConnell Hall at Smith College in Northampton.
On Tuesday, a community peace gathering will take place from 4:30 to 6 p.m. at First Congregational Church at 165 Main St. in Amherst.
Frances Crowe has been a
lifelong activist against nuclear weapons since the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Pat Haynes has opposed nuclear weapons since she witnessed, with shame, the shattering effects of the first atomic bomb at the Hiroshima’s Atomic Bomb Museum and Peace Memorial Park three decades ago.