When We Dropped the Atomic Bomb

August 9, 1945. My grandfather lay in rubble. His neck was covered with cuts. One-third of his colleagues at the Nagasaki Medical University hospital--that was the rubble--had died. His wife, his daughter (six years old), and his son (four years old) were still at home. Still at home--he wanted to see them. He forged his way back to them through the eerily unfamiliar wreckage of the other places that had been damaged too, and he listened to the silence. His two children had already died. His wife later died in the hospital. My grandfather survived.

Although my grandfather and his first family lived in Japan at the time, they were all Taiwanese, for during World War II the island of Taiwan was a Japanese imperial colony. Funny that they suffered even though they weren't born Japanese and had never chosen to be under Japanese control. When my grandfather returned to Taiwan, he eventually married my grandmother and had four children, the youngest of whom is my mother. He frequently ate pumpkins, because he was told that pumpkins would prevent radiation sickness, but he was lucky enough to avoid most of its symptoms anyway. As a child, my mother would often ask my grandfather why he had so many scars on his neck. He always told her that he had been bitten by a tiger, as if an animal, not a human, had done this to him. My grandfather does not like to talk about the atomic bombing.

But I, for one, am eager to hear more about the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki because they kindle within me a fascinating conundrum. I think of my grandfather's first family, and of all their innocence, and I wonder why they were destined to die and yet I deserve to live. It isn't fair. I feel like a traitor to them for being American. And yet . . . I'm ashamed to say this . . . but I'm sort of glad that it happened. How could I not be? Had they not died, had my adopted country not dropped the atomic bomb on them, my mother would never have been born and neither would I. Is that very selfish of me? Am I somehow so deficient in human sympathy that I cannot fully condemn the United States for its horrible actions, simply because my own life sprang in a way from the nuclear incineration that cremated my grandfather's first family?

Perhaps. But I am only a part of the larger scheme of things. The atomic bombings were not really so shocking and incomprehensible because they killed people--we had killed people before--but because in dropping them we lost our human dignity. In fact, in previous war campaigns we had killed more people, but the power of the atomic bomb was so much more concentrated and instantaneously destructive than that of any other weapon. We humans pride ourselves on being superior to animals because we can think, and feel, and understand. But with the atomic bombings we neither thought about, nor felt, nor understood exactly what we were doing. The effects raged out of our control and the sorrow that we inflicted on fellow humans mounted exponentially. What good, then, is our technological expertise if we don't use it responsibly?

Consider John Hersey's chronicle of how our technology affected one particular Hiroshima survivor. In his book Hiroshima, he tracks the perpetual uphill battle that Hatsuyo Nakamura fights daily: she struggles to support herself and her three children on low-paying jobs over the next four decades; she suffers gravely from radiation sickness; her relatives are killed in the bombing, as were my grandfather's.

While Hersey tries to be objective in his narrative, we sense his sympathy through the quiet pathos he creates around Hatsuyo as she strives to recover from her hapless chance meeting with the atomic bomb. He never condemns the bombing outright. Nor does he ever insert himself into his essay in any way. Yet his rendering of Hatsuyo's story is such that he casts the morality of our technological accomplishments into doubt. Despite his journalist's detachment from his subject matter, Hersey intentionally selects certain scenes from Hatsuyo's life that vividly show her suffering and recounts those scenes so compellingly that it's hard not to feel qualms about our decision to drop the bomb. We begin to wonder: was it worth it?

I cannot deny that the atomic bomb is an unprecedented scientific creation. Its power is formidable, and it is hard to believe that humans, diminutive creatures that they are, can now literally extinguish all life on the planet. In his article "Atomic Bombing of Nagasaki as Told by Flight Member," William L. Laurence admires the bomb's power. Journalistically he unfolds various scenes from his firsthand involvement in the Nagasaki bomb mission (he was allowed on board as a trusted veteran reporter). He watched the atomic bomb drop on my grandfather. On the surface, the overall tone of his account seems to be that of one who contends that the atomic bomb advanced the prowess of the human race dramatically. But Laurence seems to explore Hersey's implication that the atomic bomb signaled not human progress, but human regression instead.

The sense of community that binds all people gives us our human dignity. But even so, it is not invincible, for we are as capable of cruelty as we are of compassion. There can be little argument about what constitutes lack of compassion in a situation like the atomic bombing. To begin with, the very concept of inflicting so much suffering on a population not of military personnel but of civilians--ordinary, noninvolved civilians like my grandfather and Hatsuyo--is proof enough of brutality. As Hersey reports, Hatsuyo Nakamura finds herself not just a single parent, but moreover a single parent battling radiation sickness that at times leaves her too weak even to work.

Even so, Hatsuyo strikingly chooses not to condemn any one person or group of people for her misery. Rather, she resigns herself to her fate with a phrase meaning, loosely, "It can't be helped." As illogical and even superhuman as her passivity seems, that she attributes her troubles to an impersonal destiny logically reveals the mind-boggling dimensions of the atomic bombing.

Never before has man-made destruction on such an unimaginable scale been witnessed, so consequently Hatsuyo naturally equates the bomb with a catastrophe over which no human has control: an earthquake, or a volcanic eruption, or a tsunami. Maybe that is why my grandfather does not talk about the atomic bombing--maybe he feels that it is useless to do so. After all, humans have compassion. So of course this could not possibly have been a human act; this must have been the act of some force that is larger than life, that is crueler and colder and more impersonal. In reality, though, it was the work of people, and of ordinary people, too. But how could ordinary people be so uncompassionate as to raze two healthy, ordinary cities? The answer is that they did not think about, nor feel, nor really understand what they were doing. Their decision was more like that of a wild animal than that of a rational human being. The reason why Hatsuyo could not accept the idea of human responsibility for the bomb is that we are so used to advancing as a race that regression is startlingly unfamiliar and feels almost uncharacteristic of humans.

We suspect that Laurence reveres the bomb as an elevation of mankind, as resounding proof of human superiority on our planet. His writing comes across as almost completely devoid of any human feeling and his tone is that of a seasoned, science-savvy reporter who is fazed by very few things. He calmly speculates that if one atomic bomb does not bring the war to a close, then more will, as if atomic bombs can be dropped without guilt. He discusses the preparation leading up to the mission and then the mission itself, using straightforward, matter-of-fact language, casually tossing in the occasional esoteric term and nonchalantly juggling statistics that quantify death, wreckage, and grief. If the reader begins to question whether or not he harbors any guilt for his close involvement in the bomb mission, he deftly eradicates all doubt with a vengeful recollection of Pearl Harbor and the Death March on Bataan.

By using language that is considered unorthodox in describing an event as horrific as an atomic bombing--for example, he compares the mushroom cloud and accompanying fire to a flower and to rainbows--he seizes the reader's attention and forces him or her to consider the eccentricity of such metaphors. Laurence notes that a solemn, even emotional, chaplain-led prayer closes the mission briefing at the airbase. A prayer? For whom? Surely not for Hatsuyo and her neighbors in Hiroshima. Could it be a prayer that asks for divine pity on the unknowing victims, because human pity no longer exists?

Like Hatsuyo, who fails to recognize the heartless human involvement in the bombing, Laurence places the ultimate blame for the destruction on destiny. In a way he is justified: the bomb is so powerful that it has outsmarted its human creators and now dances out of our control. The decision to target Nagasaki is not man-made, but rather one made by destiny and nature. Apparently humans could not possibly have played any part in this assault. But if the atomic bombing is not the work of humans, then whose work is it? Clearly the development of the atomic bomb represents an incredible intellectual achievement, one that pushes technology farther than perhaps ever before. We are accustomed to equating technology with advancement; the sophisticated civilization is marked by government, social structure, culture, and scientific and technological knowledge. However, it is not so much the level of our technology that determines progress as the direction of our technology, its use and its purpose. Progress denotes moving forward. Traditionally, we humans have progressed when we have conquered one aspect of nature at a time--when we gained control over fire, over land, and over water. But with the atomic bomb, even though we ostensibly gained control over the mighty energy of the atom, did we really? If we did, then did we predict its full effects? Why did Hatsuyo blame nature and fate and not her fellow human beings? Why was Laurence so struck with the immensity and bizarreness of the bombing itself? Why doesn't my grandfather like to talk about it?

Did we take our technology too far--so far, in fact, that the momentum threw us backward, back a little closer to where we came from? In our eagerness to push the boundaries that nature gave us, we momentarily forgot about our moral responsibility as rational and sensitive human beings to respect and identify with each other. When we sacrificed our compassion for a chance to destroy more life than was really necessary, we sacrificed our humanity. It was a decision made by some primal instinct of ours, a remnant of our evolutionary past that suited a world of bestial risk and fear. Wise men and women acknowledge these instincts but soften them with reason and understanding, those hallmarks of the human existence. And the rest of the men and women? Sometimes they are tempted to give in.

And sometimes they do give in. I wonder about myself. Why am I so ashamedly happy to be alive? I am alive, and my grandfather's wife, his daughter (six years old), and his son (four years old) are not. While that doesn't satisfy my human morals, it does satisfy my animalistic instinct for survival, that same primal instinct that drove humans to drop the atomic bombs in the first place in August of 1945. That instinct is in me, too.

I will see my grandfather again this winter, after three years of separation. After the usual chats about school and relatives and home and life, maybe I will tell him about the stories I have read--the stories of Hatsuyo Nakamura and of the birth of the atomic bomb. Maybe he will tell me his own story himself (everything that I know now about it I have heard from my mother). And maybe, maybe I will tell him what I think. And maybe he will want to talk.

Hersey, J. (1946) Hiroshima. New York: Knopf.

Laurence, W. L. (1945, September 9) "Atomic Bombing of Nagasaki as Told by Flight Member," The New York Times, 1 and 35.