Visiting the atomic bomb museum in Nagasaki reminded me of how much of an accidental target Nagasaki was. As late as July 23rd, 1945, Nagasaki hadn’t been put on the target list for atomic bombing.
Even on August 9th, the day the bomb was dropped, Kokura, not Nagasaki, was the primary target. Bock’s Car, the B-29 carrying the Fat Man bomb, circled over Kokura, but couldn’t find the aiming point, due to haze and smoke.
With little fuel left, they flew to Nagasaki to make a single bombing run. Ashworth, the weaponeer, authorized a radar bombing run, against protocol, since the cloud cover was so thick. Then, a break in the clouds gave the bombardier a view of the Mitsubishi stadium. The bomb was released and exploded at 11:02AM, 1650 feet over a tennis court in Mastuyama-machi. Nagasaki was profoundly unlucky.
Today, a thin, black obelisk, ringed by concentric stone circles, marks the hypocenter. Anyone standing at this point 60 years ago simply disappeared; instantly vaporized by the bomb’s intense heat and light, then blown to the winds by the shockwave that followed. A more cruel fate awaited those further away from ground zero: painful burns, radiation sickness and, for those that survived, a lifetime of anxious waiting, wondering if a radiation-induced cancer would claim them.
The loss was greater than the simple sum of human and property damage, of course. Richard Rhodes quotes a haunting passage from Hannah Arendt in The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Arendt describes the destruction of what she calls the “Common World”:
In the case of an atomic bombing…a community does not merely receive an impact; the community itself is destroyed. Within 2 kilometers of the atomic bomb’s hypocenter all life and property were shattered, burned and buried under ashes. The visible forms of the city where people once carried on their daily lives vanished without a trace. The destruction was sudden and thorough; there was virtually no chance to escape… Citizens who had lost no family members in the holocaust were as rare as stars at sunrise…
The atomic bomb had blasted and burned hospitals, schools, city offices, police stations, and every other kind of human organization…Family, relatives, neighbors, and friends relied on a broad range of interdependant organizations for everything from birth, marriage and funerals to firefighting, productive work and daily living. These traditional communities were completely demolished in an instant.
I’m not smart enough to figure out the moral calculus of Nagasaki. How much worse is it to have dropped two atomic bombs, instead of just one? When you take real lives lost by bombing, atomic and otherwise, and divide them by hypothetical lives saved by shortening the war, do you come out ahead? These questions—ultimately questions of choice and culpability—weighed heavily on me.
My mood was lightened, though, by the phalanx of children from the local preschool that arrived right after we did. They ran around the park and its monuments, clad in light-blue cotton smocks to protect their clean clothes underneath. While I took pictures, one girl tried to play hide and seek with me, ducking behind the obelisk whenever I looked her way. For her, it was just another day in the park.
Posted by pmk at May 10, 2005 11:44 PM | TrackBackOddly enough, my great aunt was nearby — I think about 30 miles away — at the time, and died of cancer in her early 40s.
Posted by: Roz at June 6, 2005 3:51 PM