To Be Atom Bombed
By Raymond G. Wilson
11/08/08 "ICH"
-- August 6, 1945: At the hypocenter in Hiroshima, at Shima
Hospital, it was worse than if a Richter-10 flaming cosmic-quake
came blasting down upon them from the gods, rattling the earth’s
axis, scorching, searing, and radiating everything and everyone
below. In this first nuclear war some people disappeared they
say, completely vaporized by the heat.
In the city ruins the nuclear radiation began its dirty, deadly,
prolonged and profane massacre. It killed for years. In 1955,
ten years after the bombings, 12-year old Sadako Sasaki, one of
thousands to die in the years after, succumbed to the ravages of
leukemia induced by the bomb’s radiation. She was only one of
more than 140,000 people to die from this small, primitive
nuclear bomb.
The average nuclear weapon of today is 10 times more powerful
than the Hiroshima bomb; some are 1,000 times greater. Imagine
what it could be like in 2008 over any city.
The 1989 Japanese motion picture Black Rain, directed by
Imamura, attempts to relate this destruction of humans in
Hiroshima. At the end of the story, in 1950, five years after
the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the death
toll from the two bombs has reached beyond 210,000; Mr. Shizuma,
a survivor, is listening to radio news about the possible use of
nuclear weapons in Korea. He caustically comments, “Human beings
learn nothing. They strangle themselves. Unjust peace is better
than war of justice. Why can’t they see?”
It would be some
22-30 years after 1945 before the United States would allow
anyone to see. This was a human slaughter of more than 210,000
people and the deadly truthful evidence of it was confiscated by
the American occupation forces, the photographs of the victims,
held as “confidential” and not revealed until 1967. Almost
nothing of this human story appears in standard, supposedly
scholarly textbooks in American schools even though these atomic
bombs were selected by journalists as the “story of the past
century.” Human beings anywhere in the world cannot learn if
they are not taught.
My friend, Sumiteru Taniguchi, a postman at age 16, was on his
bicycle a little more than one mile away from the Nagasaki
hypocenter. That was not far enough from this small nuclear
bomb. Of the 28 postmen, he alone survived. He knows of only one
other person burned, blasted, and radiated as badly as he was,
to survive to this time. Taniguchi spent 21 months on his belly
in vicious pain, often pleading to his doctors, “Kill me! Kill
me!”
Taniguchi’s personal feelings: “The people that built this bomb,
the people that gave the orders, the people that let it be used,
and those who enjoyed this, I don’t think these people are
human; I can never forgive them.” Taniguchi knows the truth
about nuclear war and wants all people to know. He finds it
strange for a country with so many nuclear weapons to tell other
countries that they can’t have them.
Japan was and is a nation poor in natural resources. In the
early 1900s, to achieve greatness, the decision was made to
obtain by force if necessary, Japan’s needed and vital resources
from other Asian countries. Western nations and industrialists
had been doing this for generations throughout Asia and even in
Africa. The Japanese militarized government failed to recognize
that its most vital resource was its own people and they
sacrificed some three million of them in war.
But look what the Japanese people did without war and mainly
with their own resources and ingenuity in rebuilding their
destroyed nation in only 35 years following 1945. How much more
wisdom, creativity, inventiveness, and productivity was lost
among the three million killed? “They strangled themselves.”
Since 1946 more than 20 million people have died due to wars
that were non-nuclear. Nuclear weapons are only the symptom of a
much more profound and widespread cancer of the spirit of the
world and of humankind. There is a practical cure for this
disease which would make the possession of nuclear weapons a
counterproductive unnecessary hindrance. “A New Way of Thinking
about Achieving and Preserving Peace” is accessible on the
Internet at, http://titan.iwu.edu/~rwilson/Peace.pdf
We need to think about the future of America. Shall we succeed
through wartime force and nuclear threats to secure our vital
interests in other nations? Or is there a better way to achieve
the peace the world craves, the world peace that is possible?
Who will lead the way?
Raymond G. Wilson is an emeritus associate professor of physics
at Illinois Wesleyan University who has taught about nuclear war
issues for 49 years. He is co-director of the Hiroshima Panorama
Project in the United States and is associated with the
http://www.atomicbombmuseum.org/ web site.
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