The Future of the Atom Bomb

When I was in Hiroshima, I had a chance to stand in the middle of what, 60 years ago, was a flattened wasteland. I stood by the banks of a beautiful tree lined boulevard, and realised that thousands of souls had jumped into this very river and whose corpses floated out to sea.

The bomb kills in four ways. The fireball simply incinerates everything within a kilometre radius, the blastwave flattens everything further out, the resulting firestorm burns down everything else, and a sickening radiation remains in the soil and in the air.

In some ways, the atomic bomb is no more horrible than other weapons of war. They still burn, maim, dismember, batter helpless bodies - women, children, babies. What I suppose is so horrific is the scale, the speed, the finality. In that one moment, you have just decided that a city's worth of people shall have their lives destroyed. For what ends?

Visiting the Peace Museum, I was strangely distanced. Here was a nation - Japan, that had invaded and terrorised my ancestors from China to the Malayan Peninsular. This was a bomb that brought about a quick end to the war; that had saved many more lives in the long run; that was inevitably brought upon by Japan's militaristic leaders and their refusal to surrender; that had taken lesser lives than the incendiary bombings of Tokyo. This was the bomb that humbled an emperor; that made the unenduarable enduarable. This was the bomb that brought peace, and this peace has lasted through the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction - a MAD plan that made it crazy for anyone to ever use the weapon again.

The horrors expounded in the musuem seemed to have a hollow ring. It decried the bomb but ignored the larger realities of war. When I asked a Japanese guide whether she knew anything about the war in South East Asia, she didn't know and didn't seem interested. It was outside her sphere of comprehension. If I had asked her whether the bomb was justified she would probably have answered "Never".
"Too simplistic", would be my reply.

The Peace Flame, burning in the center of the park, was lit from a flame that had been kept burning for more than a thousand years. [It was first lit by a revered buddhist saint in 800+AD and kept burning through the centuries by his followers.] And it will be kept burning till the day that atomic weapons no longer exist on earth. [Which is forever - a friend proclaimed. I beg to differ - it will be when we have moved off planet and brought our nuclear weapons with us, or when we have annihilated the whole planet with them].

In contrast, the thing that, strangely, struck me most in the musuem was a simple digital clock. It displays the number of days since the last nuclear bomb went off. It had a number for years, days, hours, minutes, seconds. It said something in the range of 260 days. So recent? Yesterday, the clock was reset again when North Korea conducted a nuclear test. It now reads 1 day.

to be continued