My birthday, in August, is wedged between two of the most ignoble dates in human history, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That confluence of dates conjures a cacophony of memories.
One is my best birthday present ever: when I turned eight, my dad, who I loved dearly and 20 years after his passing still miss every day, took me — just me! — to a game at Yankee Stadium. But as years passed, around those dates and other times we’d have ferocious arguments about the United States dropping those atomic bombs.
Those arguments started when I was, maybe,12, after I’d read John Hersey’s Hiroshima, which seared into my consciousness the immorality of war and nuclear war. By the time the Vietnam War was raging, I’d added to my arsenal of arguments facts about civilian deaths and war crimes.
In World War II my dad served in the Navy as a communications officer on an LST (Landing Ship, Tank). The LST would offload troops who would storm island beaches in the South Pacific. Men they’d shared dinner with the night before an attack would die the next morning.
In August 1945, he and the crew were stationed in Australia, training for the invasion of Japan. He’d argue that the anticipated invasion could have cost a million Americans dead or wounded, with him quite possibly among the casualties.
The photo I have of my dad in his Navy whites shows a handsome, smiling young man who would have abhorred the infliction of horrifying deaths on civilians, women and children. The person in that photograph also had strong feelings about Pearl Harbor, kamikaze pilots and the Bataan Death March.
My father told me that when he and his shipmates heard the news, they knew almost nothing about an atomic bomb. Mostly what they’d understood was that the bomb had fast-forwarded their mantra, “Golden Gate in ’48;” they’d be going home soon.
Indeed, in late 1945, my dad disembarked in California, took a train cross-country and arrived home in time for a New Year’s Eve party, where his sister set him up with a date who would become my and my sibs’ mom.
In what I believe was my grandmother’s (my dad’s mom’s) wicker basket I have the letters he wrote home during the war. Each envelop bears the stamp “Passed by Navy Censors.” Inside the return address varied: “Philippines, “So Pacific,” “In Port,” “At Sea.”
When I first saw these letters, I was struck by how clear and legible his handwriting was — in ink, with almost no cross-outs, compared to the shaky scrawl near the end of his life.
Some of his letters home were introspective, reflecting on the passage of time and the calmness of the Pacific or sharing a dream he remembered. Some were chatty — the book he was reading, thanks for a gift, news in a letter from a family friend. Many were mundane — the weather, the food, looking forward to shore leave, that sort of thing.
I’ve been to Japan once, in 1985. While staying with friends in Kyoto, I took the bullet train to Hiroshima to see the iconic skeletal ruin of the building known as the Atomic Bomb Dome. While standing close to the epicenter of the atomic attack, I felt a cloak of sadness and solemnity enveloping me.
Years later I experienced the same hard-to-describe feeling while on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, the spot where Dr. King was standing when he was assassinated, part of the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis.
Trump has let the New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) expire, and the country is gearing up for a trillion-dollar renewed nuclear arms race with Russia and China. The need to thwart this madness is urgent.
One hundred countries have signed the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, the title of which accurately describes its abolitionist intent. The United States is not one of those nations. Nor is any other nuclear power.
Although the political, ideological and technological obstacles to enacting the treaty are formidable, we must hold fast to a gimlet-eyed perspective that since 1945, luck has allowed us to avoid an accidental or intentional nuclear exchange. We must recognize that someday our luck will run out.
Unfortunately, the public only intermittently fears the possibility of nuclear Armageddon. When the impetus for the fear passes, our concern seems to vanish. Vladimir Putin’s threats at the beginning of the Ukraine War provide a recent case in point.
President John F. Kennedy in his July 1963 television address to the nation, advocating for the proposed Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which outlaws testing in the atmosphere, underwater, and in outer space quoted the Chinese proverb, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” He exhorted us to “step back from the shadows of war and seek the way of peace… (to) let history record that we, in this land, at this time, took the first step.”
In August 2026, here we are again. I believe that the wherewithal and intelligence that has enabled human beings to construct these weapons surely should allow us to figure out how to never use them. I also believe that if the people lead, maybe the leaders will follow, which raises this question: if not now, when?
Bill Newman, an attorney and radio show host, writes a monthly column. The founders and leaders of NuclearBan.US, part of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, are Northampton residents Vicki Elson and Timmon Wallis as is Ira Helfand, co-founder of Back from the Brink campaign.