Hiroshima Nagasaki Quotes

If the radiance of a thousand suns Were to burst at once into the sky That would be like the splendour of the Mighty One... I am become Death, The shatterer of worlds. [Quoted from the Bhagavad Gita after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.]

The only people who should be allowed to govern countries with nuclear weapons are mothers, those who are still breastfeeding their babies."--Tsutomu Yamaguchi, the only survivor of both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings.

The uranium for the atom bombs dropped by America on Hiroshima and Nagasaki came from a mine in Katanga, and it was Katanga’s vast copper deposits that really powered the colony’s growth when the reconstruction of Europe and Japan after the Second World War drove a surge in demand for copper.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were atomized at a time when the Japanese were suing desperately for peace.

Will dropped the Hiroshima of awkward,” Niall explained, “and Pippa followed up with Nagasaki.

I returned to civilization shortly after that and went to Cornell to teach, and my first impression was a very strange one. I can't understand it any more, but I felt very strongly then. I sat in a restaurant in New York, for example, and I looked out at the buildings and I began to think, you know, about how much the radius of the Hiroshima bomb damage was and so forth... How far from here was 34th street?... All those buildings, all smashed — and so on. And I would go along and I would see people building a bridge, or they'd be making a new road, and I thought, they're crazy, they just don't understand, they don't understand. Why are they making new things? It's so useless. But, fortunately, it's been useless for almost forty years now, hasn't it? So I've been wrong about it being useless making bridges and I'm glad those other people had the sense to go ahead.

He was the only person making his way into the city; he met hundreds and hundreds who were fleeing, and every one of them seemed to be hurt in some way. The eyebrows of some were burned off and skin hung from their faces and hands. Others, because of pain, held their arms up as if carrying something in both hands. Some were vomiting as they walked. Many were naked or in shreds of clothing. On some undressed bodies, the burns had made patterns—of undershirt straps and suspenders and, on the skin of some women (since white repelled the heat from the bomb and dark clothes absorbed it and conducted it to the skin), the shapes of flowers they had had on their kimonos. Many, although injured themselves, supported relatives who were worse off. Almost all had their heads bowed, looked straight ahead, were silent, and showed no expression whatsoever.

More than 80 percent of the uranium in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs came from the heavily guarded Congo mine of Shinkolobwe. The

Check your environment and be sure that it is supportive. Some environments do not support progress. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not fertile lands for a farmer’s dream seeds. Change location.

Seventy years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were obliterated by atomic bombs, the world is still here even though many nations have atomic weapons, even though primitive human emotions still hold sway over rational thought and superstition masquerading as religion still guides the course of human politics.

There were people who escaped Hiroshima and rushed to Nagasaki to see that their loved ones were safe. Arriving just in time to be incinerated. He went there after the war with a team of scientists. My father. He said that everything was rusty. Everything looked covered with rust. There were burnt-out shells of trolleycars standing in the streets. The glass melted out of the sashes and pooled on the bricks. Seated on the blackened springs the charred skeletons of the passengers with their clothes and hair gone and their bones hung with blackened strips of flesh. Their eyes boiled from their sockets. Lips and noses burned away. Sitting in their seats laughing. The living walked about but there was no place to go. They waded by the thousands into the river and died there. They were like insects in that no one direction was preferable to another. Burning people crawled among the corpses like some horror in a vast crematorium. They simply thought that the world had ended. It hardly even occurred to them that it had anything to do with the war. They carried their skin bundled up in their arms before them like wash that it not drag in the rubble and ash and they passed one another mindlessly on their mindless journeyings over the smoking afterground, the sighted no better served than the blind. The news of all this did not even leave the city for two days. Those who survived would often remember these horrors with a certain aesthetic to them. In that mycoidal phantom blooming in the dawn like an evil lotus and in the melting of solids not heretofore known to do so stood a truth that would silence poetry a thousand years. Like an immense bladder, they would say. Like some sea thing. Wobbling slightly on the near horizon. Then the unspeakable noise. They saw birds in the dawn sky ignite and explode soundlessly and fall in long arcs earthward like burning party favors. p.116

I cannot conceive that the man who dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a machine. He also had a heart, just like you. He also had his wife and children, his old mother and father. He was as much a human being as you are—with a difference. He was trained to follow orders without questioning, and when the order was given, he simply followed it.

Nova Express begins with the blistering Last Words of the mysterious Hassan i Sabbah because time is running out: the book is not just a call-to-arms against those who brought us Hiroshima and Nagasaki, mentioned several times, but a manifesto for global resistance against the 1 percent who run our planet like an alien colony. --Oliver Harris, Introduction William S. Burroughs, Nova Express: The Restored Text

Rome was not built in a day, but Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed in a day.

Is my socialism a religious faith? That’s a longstanding critique, most famously expressed in The God That Failed, a book written by disillusioned former Communist Party supporters after World War II. I’m not sure why socialism was the only god singled out by the authors for failure. What grade did the regular God get in the wake of the Nazis and the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a C+?

Large quantities of fine graphite were also used to build the chain-reaction piles at the Los Alamos atomic weapons programme and within 48 hours of the capture of the island's capital, and while the opposing forces were still fighting, arrangements were made to ship 8,000 tons of graphite from Madagascar to the USA and UK. Little can the Japanese have realized that their failure to capture Madagascar before the Allies could intervene in 1942 would lead to the cataclysmic events at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 which brought the Second World War to such a violent and dramatic conclusion.

(If God wills it)... the number of angels... may be infinite... Blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed. Once upon a time, atoms did not exist. There was no Dalton, no Rutherford. Albert Einstein was nothing more than a theorist, but you only have to look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki to know that things invisible exist and bear great power. The power to destroy. Or the power to create... Atoms and angels, reason and faith... One without the other is less than half as strong and can be a danger to our vitality. Reason is subject to the tests of logic and observable, demonstrable phenomena. Faith is tested by our desire and will. One cannot see faith, just as one cannot pour out hope or love from a beaker. Self-sacrifice and devotion escape the strongest microscope, but such qualities of spirit can be shown and known by us all... And so with God's messengers, more believed than seen, more felt than touched, our angel's exist in open hearts, if we have but faith.

The most powerful reason given for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was that they saved the lives of those who would have died in an invasion of Japan. But the official report of the Strategic Bombing Survey, which interrogated seven hundred Japanese officials right after the war, concluded that the Japanese were on the verge of surrender and would “certainly” have ended the war by December of 1945 even if the bombs had not been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and even without an invasion of Japan. Furthermore, the United States, having broken the Japanese code, knew the Japanese were on the verge of surrender.

They had already put together an entire committee to choose the best targets, but it was actually von Neumann who convinced them that they shouldn’t detonate the devices at ground level, but higher up in the atmosphere, since that way the blast wave would cause incomparably larger damage. He even calculated the optimal height himself—six hundred meters, about two thousand feet. And that is exactly how high our bombs were when they exploded above the roofs of those quaint wooden houses in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In the writings of many contemporary psychics and mystics (e.g., Gopi Krishna, Shri Rajneesh, Frannie Steiger, John White, Hal Lindsay, and several dozen others whose names I have mercifully forgotten) there is a repeated prediction that the Earth is about to be afflicted with unprecedented calamities, including every possible type of natural catastrophe from Earthquakes to pole shifts. Most of humanity will be destroyed, these seers inform us cheerfully. This cataclysm is referred to, by many of them, as "the Great Purification" or "the Great Cleansing," and is supposed to be a punishment for our sins. I find the morality and theology of this Doomsday Brigade highly questionable. A large part of the Native American population was exterminated in the 19th century; I cannot regard that as a "Great Cleansing" or believe that the Indians were being punished for their sins. Nor can I think of Hitler's death camps, or Hiroshima or Nagasaki, as "Great Purifications." And I can't make myself believe that the millions killed by plagues, cancers, natural catastrophes, etc., throughout history were all singled out by some Cosmic Intelligence for punishment, while the survivors were preserved due to their virtues. To accept the idea of "God" implicit in such views is logically to hold that everybody hit by a car deserved it, and we should not try to get him to a hospital and save his life, since "God" wants him dead. I don't know who are the worst sinners on this planet, but I am quite sure that if a Higher Intelligence wanted to exterminate them, It would find a very precise method of locating each one separately. After all, even Lee Harvey Oswald -- assuming the official version of the Kennedy assassination -- only hit one innocent bystander while aiming at JFK. To assume that Divinity would employ earthquakes and pole shifts to "get" (say) Richard Nixon, carelessly murdering millions of innocent children and harmless old ladies and dogs and cats in the process, is absolutely and ineluctably to state that your idea of God is of a cosmic imbecile.

Nations tend to see the other side's war atrocities as systemic and indicative of their culture and their own atrocities as justified or the acts of stressed combatants. In my travels, I sense a smoldering resentment towards WWII Japanese behavior among some Americans. Ironically, these feelings are strongest among the younger American generation that did not fight in WWII. In my experience, the Pacific vets on both sides have made their peace. And in terms of judgments, I will leave it to those who were there. As Ray Gallagher, who flew on both atomic missions against Hiroshima and Nagasaki argues, "When you're not at war you're a good second guesser. You had to live those years and walk that mile.

Avanzó hacia mí con Hiroshima en el ojo derecho y Nagasaki en el izquierdo

Perhaps one of the most heinous examples of this was the dropping of nuclear bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, which constituted by far the two worst individual acts of terrorism and mass murder in history. Together, they resulted in the deaths of around two hundred thousand civilians—about seventy times worse than the number of deaths from the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. The admitted goal was to inflict fear, pain and death on the population of an entire country, in order to coerce the ruling class of that country to bend to the will of another ruling class.

One man, who had dug into the ruins of his Hiroshima home to find the bones of his wife, now walked through the streets of Nagasaki carrying a washbasin filled with her ashes to give to her parents.

New York Times military analyst Hanson Baldwin wrote, shortly after the war: The enemy, in a military sense, was in a hopeless strategic position by the time the Potsdam demand for unconditional surrender was made on July 26. Such then, was the situation when we wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Need we have done it? No one can, of course, be positive, but the answer is almost certainly negative.

Nothing new about death, nothing new about deaths caused militarily. We scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo on that night of March 9-10 than went up in vapor at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

In other nightmares, in his everyday reality, Victor watched his father take a drink of vodka on a completely empty stomach. Victor could hear that near-poison fall, then hit, flesh and blood, nerve and vein. Maybe it was like lightning tearing an old tree into halves. Maybe it was like a wall of water, a reservation tsunami, crashing onto a small beach. Maybe it was like Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Maybe it was like all that. Maybe. But after he drank, Victor’s father would breathe in deep and close his eyes, stretch, and straighten his neck and back. During those long drinks, Victor’s father wasn’t shaped like a question mark. He looked more like an exclamation point.

A specific new fear—that a whole city could just disappear in an instant—permeated the American consciousness in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Writer E. B. White captured that new fear in New York: “The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of a plane no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy,” he wrote. “All dwellers in cities must live with the stubborn fact of annihilation.” •

Just like the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, any future attack by a single tactical nuclear weapon near a densely populated area would kill tens to hundreds of thousands of noncombatants, as those did. Thus, virtually any threat of first use of a nuclear weapon is a terrorist threat. Any nation making such threats is a terrorist nation. That means the United States and all its allies, including Israel, along with Russia, Pakistan, and North Korea.

The descent to barbarism had begun with Rotterdam. It ended with Dresden and then with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Whatever moral differences had existed when the war began were erased by its end. The victors had been morally conquered by the enemy.

Sobbing wildly, he rose above the grain and hewed to left and right over and over and over! He sliced out huge scars in green wheat and ripe wheat, with no selection and no care, cursing, swearing, the blade swinging up in the sun and falling with a singing whistle! Bombs shattered London, Moscow, and Tokyo. The kilns of Belsen and Buchenwald took fire. The blade sang, crimson wet. Mushrooms vomited out blind suns at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The grain wept in a green rain, falling. Korea, Indo-China, Egypt, India trembled; Asia stirred, Africa woke in the night . . . And the blade went on rising, crashing, severing, with the fury and the rage of a man who has lost and lost so much that he no longer cares what he does to the world.

Einstein observed after the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that nuclear weapons have “changed everything except our way of thinking.” Yet over time the thinking of those who have shouldered responsibility for nuclear weapons has been changing

It is from these cold, hard facts that Truman’s advisers estimated that between 250,000 and 1 million American lives would be lost in an invasion of Japan.59 General Douglas MacArthur estimated that there could be a 22:1 ratio of Japanese to American deaths, which translates to a minimum death toll of 5.5 million Japanese.60 By comparison (cold though it may sound), the body count from both atomic bombs—about 200,000 to 300,000 total (Hiroshima: 90,000 to 166,000 deaths, Nagasaki: 60,000 to 80,000 deaths61)—was a bargain.

Not every environment accepts the dream shaping progress you want to put across. Take a second look at what you dream about, be sure it can progress very well where you are; Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not fertile grounds for a farmer’s dream seeds. Go and relocate!

Under one or another Democratic administration, 120,000 Japanese Americans were torn from their homes and livelihoods and thrown into detention camps; atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki with an enormous loss of innocent life; the FBI was given authority to infiltrate political groups; the Smith Act was used to imprison leaders of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party and later on leaders of the Communist party for their political beliefs; detention camps were established to round up political dissidents in the event of a “national emergency”; during the late 1940s and 1950s, eight thousand federal workers were purged from government because of their political associations and views, with thousands more in all walks of life witchhunted out of their careers; the Neutrality Act was used to impose an embargo on the Spanish Republic that worked in favor of Franco’s fascist legions; homicidal counterinsurgency programs were initiated in various Third World countries; and the Vietnam War was pursued and escalated. And for the better part of a century, the Congressional leadership of the Democratic party protected racial segregation and stymied all antilynching and fair employment bills. Yet all these crimes, bringing ruination and death to many, have not moved the liberals, the social democrats, and the “democratic socialist” anticommunists to insist repeatedly that we issue blanket condemnations of either the Democratic party or the political system that produced it, certainly not with the intolerant fervor that has been directed against existing communism.

Japan. “One can only imagine,” Blackett wrote, “the hurry with which the two bombs—the only two existing—were whisked across the Pacific to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki just in time, but only just, to insure that the Japanese Government surrendered to American forces alone.

When private bands of fanatics commit atrocities we call them "terrorists," which they are, and have no trouble dismissing their reasons. But when governments do the same, and on a much larger scale, the word "terrorism" is not used, and we consider it a sign of our democracy that the acts become subject to debate. If the word "terrorism" has a useful meaning (and I believe it does, because it marks off an act as intolerable, since it involves the indiscriminate use of violence against human beings for some political purpose), then it applies exactly to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Ever since the news of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had first reached him in California, Brecht had connected Galileo's caving-in before the Inquisition as the great and perhaps ineradicable moral blot on the history of physics and the developments in modern physics that led to the atomic and hydrogen bombs.

Mrs. Winterson didn't want her body resurrected because she had never, ever loved it, not even for a single minute of a single day But although she believed in End Time, she felt that the bodily resurrection was unscientific. When I asked her about this she told me she had seen Pathé newsreels of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and she knew all about Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. She had lived through the war. Her brother had been in the air force, my dad had been in the army -- it was their life, not their history. She said that after the atomic bomb you couldn't believe in mass any more, it was all about energy. 'This life is all mass. When we go, we'll be all energy, that's all there is to it.' I have thought about this a lot over the years. She had understood something infinitely complex and absolutely simple. For her, in the Book of Revelation, the 'things of the world' that would pass away, 'heaven and earth rolled up like a scroll,' were demonstrations of the inevitable movement from mass to energy. Her uncle, her beloved mother's beloved brother, had been a scientist. She was an intelligent woman, and somewhere in the middle of the insane theology and the brutal politics, the flamboyant depression and the refusal of books, of knowledge, of life, she had watched the atomic bomb go off and realised that the true nature of the world is energy not mass. But she never understood that energy could have been her own true nature while she was alive. She did not need to be trapped in mass.

History's long rhythm of challenges and response, of solutions that breed new crises, is not to be interrupted. But the Cold War left one shining example of human wisdom as a legacy for the future. Fifty years after the first use of atomic weapons, the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain unique and poignant shrines to the inspiring fact that they have no successor. The long confrontation of the Cold War, a struggle to the death between two systems for the mastery of human destiny, was managed and resolved without that nuclear war which lurked in the monstrous imminence in silos and submarines around the globe. That was the real victory.

On October 30, 1961, the Soviet Union detonated the largest, most powerful nuclear weapon the world had ever known. Called the Tsar Bomba, the hydrogen bomb had an unbelievable yield of fifty megatons, roughly ten times the amount of all the explosives used in seven years of war during World War II, including both nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Wells recognized that these crude novels correctly foresaw modern warfare as aiming at the massive destruction of the physical structures of an enemy civilization and the terrorizing if not annihilating of its noncombatant population. His Martians anticipate with uncomfortable accuracy, for example, American bombings of Dresden and Tokyo, followed by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and boastful proclamations of “shock and awe” tactics against Iraq.

Patriotism July 4 ALL “ISMS” RUN OUT IN the end, and good riddance to most of them. Patriotism for example. If patriots are people who stand by their country right or wrong, Germans who stood by Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich should be adequate proof that we’ve had enough of them. If patriots are people who believe not only that anything they consider unpatriotic is wrong but that anything they consider wrong is unpatriotic, the late Senator Joseph McCarthy and his backers should be enough to make us avoid them like the plague. If patriots are people who believe things like “Better Dead Than Red,” they should be shown films of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, respectively, and then be taken off to the funny farm. The only patriots worth their salt are the ones who love their country enough to see that in a nuclear age it is not going to survive unless the world survives. True patriots are no longer champions of Democracy, Communism, or anything like that but champions of the Human Race. It is not the Homeland that they feel called on to defend at any cost but the planet Earth as Home. If in the interests of making sure we don’t blow ourselves off the map once and for all, we end up relinquishing a measure of national sovereignty to some international body, so much the worse for national sovereignty. There is only one Sovereignty that matters ultimately, and it is of another sort altogether.

History reveals that groups of human beings are capable of systematically killing members of other human groups. Humans have killed other humans: six million Jews, hundreds of thousands of Native Americans, and over 110,000 Japanese, the latter within a matter of seconds at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. John Hodge (1975) estimates that 150 million lives were lost in the slave trade of blacks from Africa. More than 5,000 blacks were lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1939. Just as a child who witnesses her mother being battered by her father feels physically threatened, women who witness male-male violence also feel physically threatened. The observation of violence among others creates fear of physical violence and thus constitutes emotional violence.

What was your family life like, Savannah?" I asked, pretending I was conducting an interview. "Hiroshima," she whispered. "And what has life been like since you left the warm, abiding bosom of your nurturing, close-knit family?" "Nagasaki," she said, a bitter smile on her face. "You're a poet, Savannah," I said, watching her. "Compare your family to a ship." "The Titanic." "Name the poem, Savannah, you wrote in honor of your family." "'The History of Auschwitz.'" And we both laughed. "Now, here's the important question," I said, leaning down and whispering softly in her ear. "Whom do you love more than anyone in the world?" Savannah's head lifted up from the pillow and her blue eyes blazed with conviction as she said between cracked, pale lips, "I love my brother, Tom Wingo. My Twin.

Oppie had found the time to coauthor a paper with Hans Bethe, published in Physical Review, on electron scattering. That year he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in physics—but the Nobel committee evidently hesitated to give the award to someone whose name was so closely associated with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Over the next four years, he published three more short physics papers and one paper on biophysics. But after 1950, he never published another scientific paper. “He didn’t have Sitzfleisch,” said Murray Gell-Mann, a visiting physicist at the Institute in 1951. “Perseverance, the Germans call it Sitzfleisch, ‘sitting flesh,’ when you sit on a chair. As far as I know, he never wrote a long paper or did a long calculation, anything of that kind. He didn’t have patience for that; his own work consisted of little aperçus, but quite brilliant ones. But he inspired other people to do things, and his influence was fantastic.

Turing was offered a choice: imprisonment or probation contingent on receiving hormone treatments via injections of a synthetic estrogen designed to curb his sexual desires, as if he were a chemically controlled machine. He chose the latter, which he endured for a year. Turing at first seemed to take it all in stride, but on June 7, 1954, he committed suicide by biting into an apple he had laced with cyanide. His friends noted that he had always been fascinated by the scene in Snow White in which the Wicked Queen dips an apple into a poisonous brew. He was found in his bed with froth around his mouth, cyanide in his system, and a half-eaten apple by his side. Was that something a machine would have done? I. Stirling’s formula, which approximates the value of the factorial of a number. II. The display and explanations of the Mark I at Harvard’s science center made no mention of Grace Hopper nor pictured any women until 2014, when the display was revised to highlight her role and that of the programmers. III. Von Neumann was successful in this. The plutonium implosion design would result in the first detonation of an atomic device, the Trinity test, in July 1945 near Alamogordo, New Mexico, and it would be used for the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, three days after the uranium bomb was used on Hiroshima. With his hatred of both the Nazis and the Russian-backed communists, von Neumann became a vocal proponent of atomic weaponry.

I do not know the substance of the considerations and recommendations which Dr. Szilárd proposes to submit to you,” Einstein wrote. “The terms of secrecy under which Dr. Szilárd is working at present do not permit him to give me information about his work; however, I understand that he now is greatly concerned about the lack of adequate contact between scientists who are doing this work and those members of your Cabinet who are responsible for formulating policy.”34 Roosevelt never read the letter. It was found in his office after he died on April 12 and was passed on to Harry Truman, who in turn gave it to his designated secretary of state, James Byrnes. The result was a meeting between Szilárd and Byrnes in South Carolina, but Byrnes was neither moved nor impressed. The atom bomb was dropped, with little high-level debate, on August 6, 1945, on the city of Hiroshima. Einstein was at the cottage he rented that summer on Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks, taking an afternoon nap. Helen Dukas informed him when he came down for tea. “Oh, my God,” is all he said.35 Three days later, the bomb was used again, this time on Nagasaki. The following day, officials in Washington released a long history, compiled by Princeton physics professor Henry DeWolf Smyth, of the secret endeavor to build the weapon. The Smyth report, much to Einstein’s lasting discomfort, assigned great historic weight for the launch of the project to the 1939 letter he had written to Roosevelt. Between the influence imputed to that letter and the underlying relationship between energy and mass that he had formulated forty years earlier, Einstein became associated in the popular imagination with the making of the atom bomb, even though his involvement was marginal. Time put him on its cover, with a portrait showing a mushroom cloud erupting behind him with E=mc2 emblazoned on it. In a story that was overseen by an editor named Whittaker Chambers, the magazine noted with its typical prose flair from the period: Through the incomparable blast and flame that will follow, there will be dimly discernible, to those who are interested in cause & effect in history, the features of a shy, almost saintly, childlike little man with the soft brown eyes, the drooping facial lines of a world-weary hound, and hair like an aurora borealis… Albert Einstein did not work directly on the atom bomb. But Einstein was the father of the bomb in two important ways: 1) it was his initiative which started U.S. bomb research; 2) it was his equation (E = mc2) which made the atomic bomb theoretically possible.36 It was a perception that plagued him. When Newsweek did a cover on him, with the headline “The Man Who Started It All,” Einstein offered a memorable lament. “Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb,” he said, “I never would have lifted a finger.”37 Of course, neither he nor Szilárd nor any of their friends involved with the bomb-building effort, many of them refugees from Hitler’s horrors, could know that the brilliant scientists they had left behind in Berlin, such as Heisenberg, would fail to unlock the secrets. “Perhaps I can be forgiven,” Einstein said a few months before his death in a conversation with Linus Pauling, “because we all felt that there was a high probability that the Germans were working on this problem and they might succeed and use the atomic bomb and become the master race.”38

..reincarnation is a truth, because in existence nothing dies. Even the physicist will say, about the objective world, that nothing dies. You can destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki but you cannot destroy a single drop of water. You cannot destroy. Physicists have become aware of this impossibility. Whatever you do, only the form changes. But nothing can be destroyed in the objective world. The same is true about the world of consciousness, of life. There is no death. Death is only a change from one form into another form, and ultimately from form to formlessness. Only Gautam Buddha has given the right word for this experience. In English it is difficult to translate it, because languages develop only after experience. It is just arbitrarily that I am calling it "enlightenment." But it is very arbitrary; it does not really give you the sense that Buddha's word gives. He calls it nirvana. Nirvana means ceasing to be. Strange... ceasing to be. Not to be is nirvana. That does not mean that you are no more; it simply means you are no longer an entity, embodied. The dewdrop drops into the ocean. Now it is the whole ocean. Existence is alive at every stage. Nothing is dead. Even a stone - which you think seems to be completely dead - is not dead. So many living electrons are running so fast inside it that you cannot see them, but they are all living beings. Their bodies are so small that nobody has seen them; we don't even have any scientific instrument to see the electron, it is only guesswork. We can see the effect; hence we think there must be a cause. The cause has not been seen, only the effect has been seen. But the electron is as alive as you are. The whole existence is synonymous with life. Here nothing dies. Death is an impossibility. Yes, things change from one form to another form till they become mature enough that they need not go to school again. Then they move into a formless life, then they become one with the ocean itself.

From the Author Matthew 16:25 says, “For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”  This is a perfect picture of the life of Nate Saint; he gave up his life so God could reveal a greater glory in him and through him. I first heard the story of Operation Auca when I was eight years old, and ever since then I have been inspired by Nate’s commitment to the cause of Christ. He was determined to carry out God’s will for his life in spite of fears, failures, and physical challenges. For several years of my life, I lived and ministered with my parents who were missionaries on the island of Jamaica. My experiences during those years gave me a passion for sharing the stories of those who make great sacrifices to carry the gospel around the world. As I wrote this book, learning more about Nate Saint’s life—seeing his spirit and his struggles—was both enlightening and encouraging to me. It is my prayer that this book will provide a window into Nate Saint’s vision—his desires, dreams, and dedication. I pray his example will convince young people to step out of their comfort zones and wholeheartedly seek God’s will for their lives. That is Nate Saint’s legacy: changing the world for Christ, one person and one day at a time.   Nate Saint Timeline 1923 Nate Saint born. 1924 Stalin rises to power in Russia. 1930 Nate’s first flight, aged 7 with his brother, Sam. 1933 Nate’s second flight with his brother, Sam. 1936 Nate made his public profession of faith. 1937 Nate develops bone infection. 1939 World War II begins. 1940 Winston Churchill becomes British Prime Minister. 1941 Nate graduates from Wheaton College. Nate takes first flying lesson. Japan attacks Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. 1942 Nate’s induction into the Army Air Corps. 1943 Nate learns he is to be transferred to Indiana. 1945 Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan by U.S. 1946 Nate discharged from the Army. 1947 Nate accepted for Wheaton College. 1948 Nate and Marj are married and begin work in Eduador. Nate crashes his plane in Quito. 1949 Nate’s first child, Kathy, is born. Germany divided into East and West. 1950 Korean War begins. 1951 Nate’s second child, Stephen, is born. 1952 The Saint family return home to the U.S. 1953 Nate comes down with pneumonia. Nate and Henry fly to Ecuador. 1954 The first nuclear-powered submarine is launched. Nate’s third child, Phillip, is born. 1955 Nate is joined by Jim Elliot, Ed McCully, Peter Fleming and Roger Youderian. Nate spots an Auca village for the first time. Operation Auca commences. 1956 The group sets up camp four miles from the Auca territory. Nate and the group are killed on “Palm Beach”.

From history I learnt that progress is not inherent in history. Dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is not a sign of ‘progress’. Two deadly world wars in a generation are melancholy examples of ‘progress’.

In a future war the victorious side will dictate the peace to the defeated side in the exact manner described above. This stems from the nature of modern weapons. Such weapons are made to produce decisive results. They are made to engender capitulation and stop all arguments, all negotiations, all half-measures. Atomic bombs were used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The result was the surrender of Japan. Diplomatic power is weak when compared to atomic power. In fact, the illusions of diplomatic power must work against those states that favor negotiation over and above measures strictly undertaken to assure military success.

No photograph could describe the spectacle. Even television images failed to encompass the panoramic quality of the disaster, the sense within the plane of destruction of being surrounded by it on all sides, sometimes as far as the eye could see. “It was hell,” Hitomi said. “Everything had disappeared. It was as if an atomic bomb had fallen.” This comparison, for which many people reached, was not an exaggeration. Only two forces can inflict greater damage than a tsunami: collision with an asteroid or nuclear explosion. The scenes along four hundred miles of coast that morning resembled those of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, but with water substituted for fire, mud for ash, the stink of fish and ooze for scorched wood and smoke.

If the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had seemed to inaugurate a brand-new chapter in the history of warfare, supposedly making all other weapons obsolete and creating a world where military power rested only with the richest, most technologically advanced nations, then the Korean battlefield defeats of early July 1950 shattered that belief

Just recently, Charles Sweeney (the pilot who dropped the bomb on Nagasaki) died. His obituary told the story of his return to Japan, alongside Paul Tibbets (the pilot who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima), many years later. Both men expressed great sorrow for the devastation and the lives lost. But when asked if they felt regret, both men said. “No, dropping the bombs ended the war.

The question of whether the atomic bombs should have been exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki is a subject for another time, and for people to debate. This is simply the story of what happened to people and objects under the bombs, and it is dedicated to the slim hope that no one will ever this way again. As we move toward the precipice of runaway nuclear proliferation and even nuclear terrorism, we must remember that Hiroshima and Nagasaki represent the approximate destructive power of the weapons we are likely to see again. The hope that past is not prologue may indeed slim, but I've never known the angel Hope when she as not looking a bit anorexic.

Hitler looked at me with gleaming, feverish eyes: "Do you know, Skorzeny, if the energy and radioactivity released through nuclear fission were used as a weapon, that would mean the end of our planet?" "The effects would be frightful..." "Naturally! Even if the radioactivity were controlled and then nuclear fission used as a weapon, the effects would still he horrible! When Dr. Todt was with me, I read that such a device with controlled radioactivity would release energy that would leave behind devastation which could only be compared with the meteors that fell in Arizona and near Lake Baykal in Siberia. That means that every form of life, not only human, but animal and plant life as well, would be totally extinguished for hundreds of years within a fadius of forty kilometers. That would be the apocalypse. And how could one keep such a secret? Impossible! No! No country, no group of civilized men can consciously accept such a responsibility. From strike to counterstrike humanity would inevitably exterminate itself. Only tribes in the Amazon district and in the jungles of Sumatra would have a certain chance of surviving." These marginal notes by Hitler lasted scarcely more than a few minutes, but I remember those minutes precisely. At the beginning of my time as a prisoner of war, in August 1945, I heard that two atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Unnecessary bombs, by the way, for the Japanese emperor had already asked the Americans for their peace terms. While a prisoner American officers constantly asked me the same question, "How did you bring Hitler out of Berlin at the end of April 1945 and where have you hidden him?" I can still see the consternated expressions of the American officer before me, when, disgusted with the question, I answered: "Adolf Hitler is dead, but he was right when he said that you and I would be the survivors of the Amazon.

Avanzó hacia mí con Hiroshima en el ojo derecho y Nagasaki en el izquierdo.

When Mrs. Kondo spoke to me in 1989, her daughter was forty-five years old and living far away on Hokkaido in northern Japan. The younger woman suffered the classic symptoms of fetal exposure: microcephaly and mental retardation. With her mother’s constant support, she had finished basic schooling, had married, and had borne two children of her own. The children showed no symptoms of abnormality; as in so many other cases, there was no evidence of a genetic effect. But Mrs. Kondo’s daughter cannot function as a normal mother in her state of limited mental capability. So she relates to her children much as a sister, and others bear the responsibility of parenthood.

For a moment I was assaulted by the nightmare vision of DC as a wrecked, blackened graveyard of twisted steel girders and crumbling concrete. It had happened to Nagasaki and to Hiroshima. People, normal families, couples, children, had been going about their daily lives. A plane had appeared far above them, in the sky; most of them hadn’t even seen it. Its payload dropped from its belly while the children played and people chatted, and it never even reached the ground. ​The transition from “normal everyday” to total annihilation had happened in fractions of a second.

The Japanese eat noodles and spicy herbal roasted Chicken meat.

Het verspreiden van gas, is slecht voor de gezondheid.

the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Final Solution, “9-11.” We might even be able to rattle off the dates of these awful events—but the lesson, we haven’t yet absorbed. And until we really learn it, kids will keep getting new dates to memorize for history class.

Elle marcha vers moi, avec Hiroshima dans l'oeil droit et Nagasaki dans l'oeil gauche.

the Second World War every bond between man and man was to perish. Crimes were committed by the Germans, under the Hitlerite domination to which they allowed themselves to be subjected, which find no equal in scale and wickedness with any that have darkened the human record. The wholesale massacre by systematised processes of six or seven millions of men, women, and children in the German execution camps exceeds in horror the rough-and-ready butcheries of Genghis Khan, and in scale reduces them to pigmy proportions. Deliberate extermination of whole populations was contemplated and pursued by both Germany and Russia in the Eastern war. The hideous process of bombarding open cities from the air, once started by the Germans, was repaid twenty-fold by the ever-mounting power of the Allies, and found its culmination in the use of the atomic bombs which obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We have at length emerged from a scene of material ruin and moral havoc the like of which had never darkened the imagination of former centuries. After all that we suffered and achieved, we find ourselves still confronted with problems and perils not less but far more formidable than those through which we have so narrowly made our way.

Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations – ‘When another blames or hates you, or when men say injurious things about you, approach their poor souls, penetrate within, and see what kind of men they are. You will discover that there is no reason to take trouble that these men have a good opinion of you…

The story of mankind was a moral continuum in Truman’s mind,

in order to make a spectacular impression ‘on as many inhabitants as possible’.

A religião e a criação das bombas atômicas é um tema que precisa ser analisado com mais cuidado, e menos acusações. De fato, o Projeto Manhattan, que levou ao desenvolvimento das bombas atômicas lançadas sobre Hiroshima e Nagasaki em 1945, envolveu muitos cientistas de diversas origens religiosas. Robert Oppenheimer, que liderou o projeto, era de origem judaica, e muitos outros cientistas envolvidos tinham diferentes crenças religiosas. Albert Einstein, embora não tenha participado diretamente do Projeto Manhattan, foi um dos que alertaram sobre o potencial desenvolvimento de armas nucleares pela Alemanha nazista. Ele era um deísta, acreditando em um Deus não intervencionista, e enfrentou discriminação na Europa por suas crenças religiosas e sua origem judaica. A questão da religião e da ciência é complexa e multifacetada. A ciência, como um método de investigação, é neutra em relação a crenças religiosas, mas os cientistas, como indivíduos, trazem suas próprias crenças e valores para o seu trabalho. A nova onda de ateísmo ganhou força nas últimas décadas, especialmente com o avanço da ciência e a secularização de muitas sociedades. Então, não, usar a bomba atômica como forma de jogar a bola no terreno da ciência para defender religião não funciona. Menos ainda acusar o ateísmo de ser responsável por mortes em massa como no caso de Putin e Hitler.

atomic bombs should be used: (1) as soon as possible; (2) without warning; and (3) on war plants surrounded by workers’ homes

seething and boiling in a white fury of cream foam’; and finally, ‘a flower-like form, its giant petals curving downward, creamy white outside, rose-coloured inside’.

He put in his key, turned it, and it gave him access to the launch part of the program. He sat down at his computer and began typing in the launch codes. When the computer confirmed that the missiles were now active, Karimi ordered the missiles to launch. Karimi held his breath in anticipation as the ten rockets lifted off towards Israel to hit each major city. The yields were ten times that of the last nuclear weapons that were used to hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki back in World War Two, and Karimi hoped there would be no Israeli’s left alive once the fallout drifted all over the country.

what are we to say about the Catholic military chaplain who administered mass to the Catholic bomber pilot who dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki in 1945? Father George Zabelka, chaplain for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bomb squadrons, later came to repent of his complicity in the bombing of civilians, but his account of that time is a stunning judgment on the church’s acquiescence in violence. To fail to speak to the utter moral corruption of the mass destruction of civilians was to fail as a Christian and as a priest as 1 see it…. I was there, and I’ll tell you that the operational moral atmosphere in the church in relation to mass bombing of enemy civilians was totally indifferent, silent, and corrupt at best—at worst it was religiously supportive of these activities by blessing those who did them…. Catholics dropped the A-bomb on top of the largest and first Catholic city in Japan. One would have thought that I, as a Catholic priest, would have spoken out against the atomic bombing of nuns. (Three orders of Catholic sisters were destroyed in Nagasaki that day.) One would have thought that I would have suggested that as a minimal standard of Catholic morality, Catholics shouldn’t bomb Catholic children. I didn’t. I, like the Catholic pilot of the Nagasaki plane, “The Great Artiste,” was heir to a Christianity that had for seventeen hundred years engaged in revenge, murder, torture, the pursuit of power, and prerogative violence, all in the name of our Lord. I walked through the ruins of Nagasaki right after the war and visited the place where once stood the Urakami Cathedral. I picked up a piece of censer from the rubble. When I look at it today I pray God forgives us for how we have distorted Christ’s teaching and destroyed his world by the distortion of that teaching. I was the Catholic chaplain who was there when this grotesque process that began with Constantine reached its lowest point—so far.4 It is difficult to read such accounts without recalling the story of Jesus’ weeping over Jerusalem, because “the things that make for peace” were hidden from their eyes (Luke 19:41

Eighty-five years after the storms of steel of the German-French fronts, sixty-five years after the peak of the Stalinist mass exterminations, fifty-five years after the liberation of Auschwitz, and just as long after the bombardments of Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, the swinging back of the Zeitgeist to the preference for middling circumstances is to be understood as a tribute to normalization. In this regard, it has an unconditionally affirmative civilizing value. Furthermore, democracy per se presupposes the cultivation of middling circumstances. As is well known, spirit spits what is lukewarm out of its mouth; in contrast, pragmatism holds that the temperature of life is lukewarm. Thus the impulse toward the middle, the cardinal symptom of the fin de siècle, does not have only political motives. It symbolizes the weariness of apocalypse felt by a society that has had to hear too much of revolutions and paradigm shifts. But above all it expresses the general pull toward the conversion of the drama of history into the insurance industry. Insurance policies anchor antiextremism in the routines of the post-radical society. The insurance industry is humanism minus book culture. It brings into shape the insight that human beings as a rule do not wish to be revolutionized, but rather to be safeguarded. Whoever understands this will bank on the fact that in the future contra-innovative revolts from out of the spirit of the insurance claim are most probable of all.

Watching either, one knew that the world would never again be the same; the risks everywhere, to which life was heir, had been changed on the morning of a new unclouded day. The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki announced that the United States was henceforth the supreme armed power in the world. The attack of 11 September announced that this power was no longer guaranteed invulnerability on its home ground. The two events mark the beginning and end of a certain historical period. Concerning

Some never got started. With much fanfare Chávez announced Venezuela would build thermonuclear plants with Russian help. “The world needs to know this, and nothing is going to stop us. We’re free, we’re sovereign, we’re independent,” he said in 2010. For strictly peaceful energy generation, he added, and underlined the point by inviting survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Venezuela. Foreign media took it seriously, producing froth in Washington. Chávez with nukes! In reality, Venezuela’s scientific establishment was hollowed, the once prestigious Institute for Scientific Research a husk. Physicists were emigrating, and the country’s only reactor, a small research facility, had closed from neglect. After a tsunami wrecked Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant in March 2011, Chávez closed the curtain on his atomic theater, solemnly halting development for safety reasons and urging other countries to follow his lead in protecting humanity. “It is something extremely risky and dangerous for the whole world.

You're beautiful but you don't know it. You're my sister and I love you but I sometimes think to myself that you don't love me, consider what is important to my soul to be significant to yours. You can't see me. I am invisible to you. We don't share anything anymore like we used to do in childhood. The only things we have in common are our parents, a brother. We're not children anymore. It hurts (the pain). It hurts (this long distance relationship but most of all the separation). For me it hurts. For you, it is only your life that matters. Well, for me, it is going to take a miracle for this to go away. The ingredient required for this miracle is only one thing and it's love. The compulsion of love. The idea of love. The journey towards love. I've realized this. If you live in poverty, that is, if your soul lives in poverty you're forever walking away from it with a hunger (in your soul) but when you have love there is no more Hiroshimas, Nagasakis, Sarajevos, and loneliness. There is only light and with light comes acceptance. There is only breath,.

The career of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who headed the Manhattan Project, draws such questions to a focus that resembles the bead of a laser-gunsight on a victim’s breastbone. It was Oppenheimer whom the public lionized as the brains behind the bomb; who agonized about the devastation his brilliance had helped to unleash; who hoped that the very destructiveness of the new “gadget,” as the bombmakers called their invention, might make war obsolete; and whose sometime Communist fellow-traveling and opposition to the development of the hydrogen bomb — a weapon a thousand times more powerful than the bombs that incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki — brought about his political disgrace and downfall, which of course have marked him in the eyes of some as all the more heroic, a visionary persecuted by warmongering McCarthyite troglodytes. His legacy, of course, is far more complicated.

Nuclear weapons have only been used twice, both times in the war against Japan. In each case it was used by the United States during World War II. The first was used on August 6, 1945, over the Japanese city of Hiroshima and the second was dropped three days later over the Japanese city of Nagasaki. The two bombs resulted in the deaths of nearly a quarter million people! Recently I have heard it said that since we have the second largest arsenal of nuclear bombs, we should use them to teach North Korea a lesson and reduce tensions. Perhaps we are the ones that need to learn a lesson, so let me start by saying that since these first two bombs that have been used in anger, over two thousand tests have been conducted and that it was Russia that tested the largest bomb ever detonated. On 30 October 1961, Russia which was then the Soviet Union, detonated what was called the Tsar Bomb, a hydrogen bomb with a yield of 50 megatons which is more than 3,000 times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Are we and our leaders insane? It is only the “Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons” of which we are a member that can reduce the spread and possible the use of nuclear weapons. Now with North Korea being a player, its effectiveness has been questioned and we are on the brink of engaging in a contest that threatens to kill 2,000,000 people in the first day. Many of these people are American military personnel and their families stationed in in Seoul, South Korea. Following any initiative on our part, including the taunts we are making, all bets will be off and there is the possibility that other countries will see the United States as the enemy that has to be stopped!

The Health and Human Services emergency command post, just a block from the National Mall in Room 313-10 in its headquarters basement, stocked freeze-dried food sufficient to feed three dozen staff for a month, as well radio gear, an infirmary, and, incongruously, an office for the cabinet secretary decorated with photos of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, just in case the cabinet official forgot what the world outside would have looked like. The

They thought the Allies would be desperate to “buy” their reactor research in the postwar era. Apparently they were not moved to check to see whether this arrogance was founded, and the depression and desperation one hears them going through after Hiroshima and Nagasaki reveals their sudden irrelevance. As Otto Hahn chided them right after they learned of Hiroshima: “If the Americans have a uranium bomb, then you’re all second-raters.” The

Left anticommunists find any association with communist organizations morally unacceptable because of the “crimes of communism.” Yet many of them are themselves associated with the Democratic party in this country, either as voters or as members, apparently unconcerned about the morally unacceptable political crimes committed by leaders of that organization. Under one or another Democratic administration, 120,000 Japanese Americans were torn from their homes and livelihoods and thrown into detention camps; atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki with an enormous loss of innocent life; the FBI was given authority to infiltrate political groups; the Smith Act was used to imprison leaders of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party and later on leaders of the Communist party for their political beliefs; detention camps were established to round up political dissidents in the event of a “national emergency”; during the late 1940s and 1950s, eight thousand federal workers were purged from government because of their political associations and views, with thousands more in all walks of life witchhunted out of their careers; the Neutrality Act was used to impose an embargo on the Spanish Republic that worked in favor of Franco’s fascist legions; homicidal counterinsurgency programs were initiated in various Third World countries; and the Vietnam War was pursued and escalated.

No physicist really cares about anything. Last century, when they turned over the formulas and techniques for atomic energy release to engineers and soldiers, then struck a pose of injured innocence at the price paid by Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Such hypocrites. They wanted to see the results, believe me. They wanted a demonstration of the power they had discovered. It was determined by their nature—by our natures.

In August, President Truman made the decision that death had spared Roosevelt from having to make. Truman ordered the dropping of the first atomic bombs on Hiroshima (August 6) and Nagasaki (August 9).

How cruel the atomic bomb is to an innocent child, Sensei.

there are two kinds of courage the courage to die and the courage to live

Six hundred years passed between the moment Chinese alchemists discovered gunpowder and the moment Turkish cannon pulverized the walls of Constantinople. Only forty years passed between the moment Einstein determined that any kind of mass could be converted into energy - that's what E= mc² means - and the moment atom bombs obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki and nuclear power stations mushroomed all over the globe.

The United States – which had just won a painfully earned moral and military victory over the Axis powers – was not eager to “get the reputation for outdoing Hitler in atrocities,” as the country’s secretary of war put it.

The disasters at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were our handiwork,” the Times editorial stated. “They were defended then, and are defended now, by the argument that they saved more lives than they took – more lives of Japanese as well as more lives of Americans. The argument may be sound or it may be unsound. One may think it sound when he recalls Tarawa, Iwo Jima, or Okinawa. One may think it unsound when he reads Mr. Hersey.

But as the document of record – read over years by millions around the world – graphically showing what nuclear warfare truly looks like, and what atomic bombs do to humans, “Hiroshima” has played a major role in preventing nuclear war since the end of World War II. In 1946, Hersey’s story was the first truly effective, internationally heeded warning about the existential threat that nuclear arms posed to civilisation. It has since helped motivate generations of activists and leaders to prevent nuclear war, which would likely end the brief human experiment on earth. We know what atomic apocalypse would look like because John Hersey showed us. Since the release of “Hiroshima,” no leader or party could threaten nuclear action without an absolute knowledge of the horrific results of such an attack.

The few journalists attempting to report on the atomic cities in the weeks immediately following the bombings were threatened with expulsion from Japan, harassed by U.S. officials, and accused of spreading Japanese propaganda…

Without Rebecca West’s kiss H. G. Wells would not have run off to Switzerland to write a book in which everything burns, and without H. G. Wells’s book Leo Szilard would never have conceived of a nuclear chain reaction and without conceiving of a nuclear chain reaction he would never have grown terrified and without growing terrified Leo Szilard would never have persuaded Einstein to lobby Roosevelt and without Einstein lobbying Roosevelt there would have been no Manhattan Project and without the Manhattan Project there is no lever at 8.15 am on 6 August 1945 for Thomas Ferebee to release 31,000 feet over Hiroshima, there is no bomb on Hiroshima and no bomb on Nagasaki and 100,000 people or 160,000 people or 200,000 people live and my father dies. Poetry may make nothing happen, but a novel destroyed Hiroshima and without Hiroshima there is no me and these words erase themselves and me with them.

¡Qué ben, que a bomba ven co seu rebombio! A bomba, ¡bong!, a bomba, bon amigo, A bomba con aramios, con formigas, con fornos pra asar meniños loiros. A bomba ten lombrices, bombardinos, vermes de luz, bombillas fluorescentes, peixes de chumbo, vómitos, anémonas, estrelas de plutonio plutocrático, esterco de cobalto hidroxenado, martelos, ferraduras, matarratos. A bomba, bong. A bomba, bon amigo. Con átomos que estoupan en cadeia e creban as cadeias que nos atan: Os outos edificios. Os outos funcionarios. Os outos fiñanceiros. Os outos ideais. ¡Todo será borralla radioaitiva! As estúpidas nais que pairen fillos polvo serán, mais polvo namorado. Os estúpidos pais, as prostitutas, as grandes damas da beneficencia, magnates e mangantes, grandes cruces, altezas, escelencias, eminencias, cabaleiros cubertos, descubertos, nada serán meu ben, si a bomba ven, nada o amor, e nada a morte morta con bendiciós e plenas indulxencias. ¡Qué ben, que a bomba ven! Nun instantiño amable primavera faise cinza de vagos isotopos placentarios, de letales surrisas derretidas baixo un arco de átomos triunfaes. A bomba, ¡bong! a bomba co seu bombo de setas e volutas abombadas, axiña ven, vela ahí ven, bon amigo. ¡Estános ben! ¡Está ben! ¡Está bon! ¡¡¡Booong!!!

The published images of Hiroshima’s demolished landscape gravely undersold the reality of atomic aftermath.

The name of the lesson is “Look What We Can Do to You Any Time We Fucking Want.” The point of the lesson is self-explanatory.The USA taught the world this lesson when it nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki. GloboCap (and the US military) taught it again when they invaded Iraq and destabilized the entire Greater Middle East. It is regularly taught in penitentiaries when the prisoners start to get a little too unruly and remember that they outnumber the guards. That’s where the “lockdown” concept originated. It isn’t medical terminology. It is penal institution terminology.

don’t know precisely when Tommy came to identify as antiwar, but it was very young. Once it dawned on him that violence was the essence of war, it overthrew his early naïve fascination with military history. I associate this change with his learning the basic facts of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and then about the horrors of the Holocaust. These historical events shook him and kept him up at night, sometimes giving him dreadful nightmares, and when he learned about genocidal violence against Native Americans, he stopped playing war and battle games altogether. After he learned what war actually was, and how it destroyed people’s lives and communities, his fascination with it ended—or, to be more precise, the character of his fascination changed. What he cared about was stopping wars and blocking militarism as a cultural and political obsession.

My interest in the development and control of nuclear weapons goes back to images I once saw of the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I always wonder how we had made it through crisis after crisis without destroying ourselves despite our proclivity to use violence as a problem-solving mechanism.

The first four months of Truman’s presidency saw the collapse of Nazi Germany, the founding of the United Nations, firebombings of Japanese cities that killed many thousands of civilians, the liberation of Nazi death camps, the suicide of Adolf Hitler, the execution of Benito Mussolini, and the capture of arch war criminals from Hitler’s number two, Hermann Göring, to the Nazi “chief werewolf” Ernst Kaltenbrunner. There was the fall of Berlin, victory at Okinawa (which the historian Bill Sloan has called “the deadliest campaign of conquest ever undertaken by American arms”), and the Potsdam Conference, during which the new president sat at the negotiating table with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin in Soviet-occupied Germany, in an attempt to map out a new world. Humanity saw the first atomic explosion, the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the dawn of the Cold War, and the beginning of the nuclear arms race. Never had fate shoehorned so much history into such a short period. “The four months that have elapsed since the death of President Roosevelt on April 12 have been one of the most momentous periods in man’s history,” wrote a New York Times columnist at the time. “They have hardly any parallel throughout

That being said, one person’s “barbarian” is another person’s “just doing what everybody else is doing.” (How many can be expected to do better than that?) The question is, Whom do we wish to blame? More precisely, Whom do we believe we have the right to blame? The children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were no less innocent than the young African-American men (and a few women) who were butchered and hanged from trees in small-town America.

And even though preternaturals routinely preyed on humans when they were alone or in small groups, everyone sane understood that humans in large numbers were both paranoid and extremely dangerous. Even a single lucky human could slay a mighty dragon. As time passed into the modern era their weapons and technology made them even more deadly. The annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had silenced even the insane.