Lest we see a mushroom cloud

Most of us in this part of the world paid little attention in the past five days when Japan marked the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombings of its two cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.  140,000 Japanese men, women, children and soldiers died from the blast and fires that accompanied those attacks and another […]

Most of us in this part of the world paid little attention in the past five days when Japan marked the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombings of its two cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.  140,000 Japanese men, women, children and soldiers died from the blast and fires that accompanied those attacks and another 60,000 people died in the ensuing years due to radiation illnesses. These atomic bombings were the worst events in the annals of human warfare, but we are paying little attention to the anniversary.
There are good reasons why we should pay closer attention. Let us begin with a small rendition of the human tragedy that occurred at Hiroshima on the morning of August 6, 1945 and a similar one at Nagasaki three days later. The first jarring account I ever read of the atomic bombing was in David Bergamini’s 1971 book Japan’s Imperial Conspiracy. The book is long, 1200 pages of very small print but since I read it when I was in Form Three I tend to remember very well the part about the atomic bomb.
US Air Force Colonel Paul Tibbets and his co-pilot Major Thomas Ferebee had been practicing bombing runs in their B-29 Superfortress bomber called Enola Gay. They practiced how to drop odd-shaped pumpkins on Japanese cities, but on August 6, when they took off for the real thing, they received unusual orders. They were told to fly over the island of Iwo Jima and proceed under very strict radio silence to Hiroshima. “You should approach the target at 300 mph and maintain a steady bombing platform at 30,000 feet. Bombing will be visual. If the city of choice is not clear, proceed at your discretion to another target. As bomb is released, you will immediately turn at a 150 degree angle. You must not, repeat must not follow standard bombing procedure by proceeding as usual to fly over the target. After bombs away, turn sharply so as not to be over Ground Zero when the device explodes. You may even wish to lose altitude to put more distance between yourself and zero.”
The bomb they carried was a long and slender container called Thin Boy, made up of small pieces of uranium-235 at one end waiting to be fired at a large piece at the other end. At 8.15 am they tossed out the bomb and its parachute over Hiroshima and Tibbets made a sharp turn and sped away. Two minutes later the bomb exploded 15 miles away from them and they felt the plane leap like a bronco. Captain Robert Lewis, who was logging entries in the plane’s log book, wrote, “My God!”
What he saw was not godly. The atomic bomb exploded 1500 feet above the city of 245,000 people. A ball of fire 250 feet in diameter hung over Hiroshima and in an instant 64,000 people were set ablaze or crushed by crumbling buildings. Light from the blast was seen 100 miles away and the accompanying thunder levelled 6,820 buildings. The entire city centre caught fire at once and a spout of ash shot into the atmosphere, the infamous “mushroom cloud” of an atomic explosion. 
We cannot reel out here all the ghastly aspects of the attack. Suffice it to say that power supply was knocked out and Hiroshima’s water pipes ruptured in 70,000 places. There were few places for the injured to run to because of the 45 hospitals in Hiroshima that day, three were left standing. Of the 290 doctors living in Hiroshima that day, 26 survived the blast and of the city’s 1780 nurses, only 120 were uninjured. Six months after the attack, the death toll stood at 90,000 civilians and 10,000 soldiers. Since then many more people have died from radiation diseases.
Nagasaki’s turn came three days later. The US had a second atomic bomb called Fat Boy, three times more powerful than Thin Boy. This one was made up of plutonium atoms distributed through a compressible medium. A spherical shell of normal explosives encased them. The bomb is detonated by detonating the explosives, which will then blow the plutonium atoms tightly against one another and achieve a much greater explosion. It was loaded onto another B-29 called Bock’s Car, piloted by Major Charles Sweeney.
The tragedy of Nagasaki was that it was not even the primary target that morning. The main target was Kokura, an industrial city of 170,000 people which was also very close to three other industrial cities with a total 610,000 people. Though the weather was excellent when Bock’s Car appeared over Kokura at 9.30 am on August 9, the bombardier failed to see the target point as they flew over it due to smoke billowing from war factories. After two more unsuccessful tries the plane proceeded to its secondary target, Nagasaki and dropped the bomb. It exploded 1540 feet above the city and achieved complete destruction. 40,000 people died within six months. Calculations were that if the bombers had seen their primary target at Kokura, perhaps 300,000 people would have died in four cities.
Now, in the whole history of human warfare there never was a weapon as destructive, as inhuman or as indiscriminate as the atomic bomb. Young lads in Nigeria must be scratching their heads as they read this and they must be wondering how and why the United States, a nation which today aggressively preaches human rights to all and sundry, will throw such a bomb at anyone. So far USA has been the only nation that ever did so.
It was all so awful but it is difficult to comprehend the matter in isolation. The story of the atomic bomb attack should be studied in relation to the story of World War II as a whole. The impression we have of Japan today is that of a nation of peaceful engineers who manufacture the best electronics and who do not poke nose into other people’s affairs the way Westerners do. That national posture was substantially caused by the Atom Bomb. Back in the 1930s and 1940s Japan was an extremely aggressive nation that set out to build an empire through ruthless conquest and spoliation of other people’s lands. Among the many heinous crimes committed by Japanese soldiers in those days was the rape of Nanjing; an estimated one million women were raped by Japanese soldiers in the Chinese capital city in one month. Japan also dragged USA into the war through the sneak attack on the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbour, Hawaii, on December 6, 1941.
If you believe the version told by American officialdom, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not meant to avenge for Japanese atrocities but to force the Japanese government to surrender earlier than it otherwise would. In July 1945, after Hitler’s Germany had already surrendered, the Allies warned Japan in the Potsdam Declaration that its cities faced “prompt and utter destruction” unless it surrendered. This was a veiled warning about the atomic bomb. US President Harry Truman calculated that using the atomic bomb to force Japan’s surrender will actually save millions of lives because the Joint Chiefs of Staff calculated that the US needed one year and 5 million troops to invade and subdue Japan. Their estimate was that they would kill 10 million Japanese and lose a million men of their own before Japan was subdued. Whether those figures mitigate the disaster of using atomic bombs, I leave it to you to judge.
The much bigger worry today is that nine nations in the world have nukes, each of them 1,000 times more powerful than Thin Boy and Fat Boy. Today USA has 4800 nukes; Russia has 4500; France has 300; Britain has 225; China has 250; Pakistan has 120; India has 110; Israel has 80 and North Korea has 10. What if any of these nations, either accidentally or out of desperation [as Israel nearly did in 1973] throw a nuclear bomb at some other nation? We don’t want to see a mushroom cloud over any city again, ever. All nukes should be discarded; that is the big lesson from the tragedies called Hiroshima and Nagasaki.