The hardships and sufferings to which Our nation is to be subjected hereafter will be certainly great. We are keenly aware of the inmost feelings of all ye, Our subjects. However, it is according to the dictate of time and fate that We have resolved to pave the way for a grand peace for all generations to come by enduring the unendurable and suffering what is insufferable…
Let the entire nation continue as one family from generation to generation.
“If it had gone on any longer,” writes Yukio Mishima, “there would have been nothing to do but go mad.”
“An atomic bomb,” the Japanese study of Hiroshima and Nagasaki emphasizes, “… is a weapon of mass slaughter.” A nuclear weapon is in fact a total-death machine, compact and efficient, as a simple graph prepared from Hiroshima statistics demonstrates:
The percentage of people killed depends simply on distance from the hypocenter; the relation between death percentage and distance is inversely proportional and the killing, as Gil Elliot emphasizes, is no longer selective:
By the time we reach the atom bomb, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the ease of access to target and the instant nature of macro-impact mean that both the choice of city and the identity of the victim has become completely randomized, and human technology has reached the final platform of self-destructive-ness. The great cities of the dead, in numbers, remain Verdun, Leningrad and Auschwitz. But at Hiroshima and Nagasaki the “city of the dead” is finally transformed from a metaphor into a literal reality. The city of the dead of the future is our city and its victims are — not French and German soldiers, nor Russian citizens, nor Jews — but all of us without reference to specific identity.
“The experience of these two cities,” the Japanese study emphasizes, “was the opening chapter to the possible annihilation of mankind.”
On August 24, having recently heard about the man holding an eyeball, Dr. Michihiko Hachiya suffered a nightmare. Like the myth of the Sphinx — destruction to those who cannot answer its riddle, whom ignorance or inattention or arrogance misleads — the dream of this Japanese doctor who was wounded in the world's first atomic bombing and who ministered to hundreds of victims must be counted one of the millennial visions of mankind:
The night had been close with many mosquitoes. Consequently, I slept poorly and had a frightful dream.
It seems I was in Tokyo after the great earthquake and around me were decomposing bodies heaped in piles, all of whom were looking right at me. I saw an eye sitting on the palm of a girl's hand. Suddenly it turned and leaped into the sky and then came flying back towards me, so that, looking up, I could see a great bare eyeball, bigger than life, hovering over my head, staring point blank at me. I was powerless to move.
“I awakened short of breath and with my heart pounding,” Michihiko Hachiya remembers.
So do we all.
Epilogue
The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki horrified Leo Szilard. He felt a full measure of guilt for the development of such terrible weapons of war; the shape of things to come that he had first glimpsed as he crossed Southampton Row in Bloomsbury in 1933 had found ominous residence in the world partly at his invitation. In the petition to the President that he had circulated among the atomic scientists in July 1945 — the petition Edward Teller in consultation with Robert Oppenheimer had decided not to sign, writing Szilard he felt “that I should do the wrong thing if I tried to say how to tie the little toe of the ghost to the bottle from which we just helped it to escape” — Szilard had argued that large moral responsibilities devolved upon the United States in consequence of its possession of the bomb:
The development of atomic power will provide the nations with new means of destruction. The atomic bombs at our disposal represent only the first step in this direction, and there is almost no limit to the destructive power which will become available in the course of their future development. Thus a nation which sets the precedent of using these newly liberated forces of nature for purposes of destruction may have to bear the responsibility of opening the door to an era of devastation on an unimaginable scale.
The United States set that precedent in Japan; Szilard wrote Gertrud Weiss his despairing August 6 letter saying it was difficult to see what wise course of action was possible after that; but within days he was moving to protest and debate. Upon hearing of the Nagasaki bombing he immediately asked the chaplain of the University of Chicago to include a special prayer for the dead and a collection for the survivors of the two Japanese cities in any service commemorating the end of the war. He drafted a second petition to the President calling the atomic bombings “a flagrant violation of our own moral standards” and asking that they be stopped. The Japanese surrender mooted the issue and the petition was never sent.
Besides White House and War Department press releases the United States government immediately published a detailed report on the scientific aspects of atomic bomb development, in preparation during the preceding year by Princeton physicist Henry DeWolf Smyth.
With the atomic secret, such as it was, made public Szilard went to see the Chicago chancellor, Robert Maynard Hutchins, “and told him that something needed to be done to get thoughtful and influential people to think about what the bomb might mean to the world, and how the world and America could adjust to its existence. I proposed that the University of Chicago call a three-day meeting and assemble about twenty-five of the best men to discuss the subject.” Hutchins liked the idea and began contacting twice that many participants, including Henry Wallace, Tennessee Valley Authority chairman David E. Lilienthal, the ubiquitous Charles Lindbergh and a number of academics and scientists. The meeting took shape for late September.
The day after the Nagasaki bombing Ernest Lawrence had flown to New Mexico, partly to escape newspaper reporters clamoring for interviews, partly to work with Oppenheimer on a report on postwar planning that the Interim Committee had solicited from its Scientific Panel. The inventor of the cyclotron, who approved of the use of the bombs to avoid invasion and force a Japanese surrender, found his Los Alamos colleague weary, guilty and depressed. Oppenheimer wondered if the dead at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not luckier than the survivors, whose exposure to the bombs would have lifetime effects. His mood that weekend found expression during the next weeks in letters. “You will believe that this undertaking has not been without its misgivings,” he wrote his former Ethical Culture School teacher Herbert Smith, the confessor of his youth; “they are heavy on us today, when the future, which has so many elements of high promise, is yet only a stone's throw from despair.” To Haakon Chevalier, his friend at Berkeley in Depression days, Oppenheimer repeated that “the circumstances are heavy with misgiving, and far, far more difficult than they should be, had we power to remake the world to be as we think it.”
Lawrence could muster only limited patience for Oppenheimer's remorse. He thought the atomic bomb a “terrible swift sword” that would end the war and might succeed in “ending all wars.” He also seems to have claimed it as his own. “In one newspaper interview out of many published the day after Hiroshima,” notes Stanislaw
