The Apocalypse Factory

by Steve Olson

  He met another nurse that he knew and a former student. The student did not seem to be injured, though he was using a cane for support. The nurse’s face was covered with blood, and she was wounded at the hip. Go up the hill, he told them; he would join them later. Now he needed to get to his surgery building and help any of the staff who might still be inside to get out.

  Walking across the tennis court behind the hospital, he met Professor Hasegawa. The professor was staggering and had a laceration between his eyes, but other than that he looked fine. Next he saw Professor Ishizaki. He had severe burns on his face and upper body. The skin on his arms had come loose and was hanging in long, flapping shreds.

  After the atomic bomb exploded above the Urakami Valley, Shirabe and other survivors from Nagasaki Medical College Hospital climbed the slope behind the hospital to escape the devastation. Map courtesy of Matt Stevenson; drawing courtesy of Sarah Olson.

  “Where were you?” Shirabe asked.

  “I was in my office,” Ishizaki responded.

  “You’ll be all right. Wait with Professor Hasegawa.”

  Near the surgery building he came across Dr. Kido and Head Nurse Murayama, who was also burned, though not as severely as Dr. Ishizaki. They told him that the nurses from his department were safe. Relieved, Shirabe turned to climb the hill with the others fleeing the hospital. A few minutes ago, this slope had been covered with the stems and leaves of sweet potato plants, which people had been growing to make up for the disastrous food shortages in Japan. Now the hillside was bare and brown. Nothing was left except the broken-off stems of the plants. The people making their way up the steep paths looked like tattered streamers against the muddy soil.

  All around him, in a half-light of smoke and dust, were people who had been burned and injured. Many were naked, bleeding, blackened. They staggered, crawled, lay motionless on the ground. “Water,” they called out. “Help me.” “Mother.” There was nothing Shirabe could do for them except call out encouragement. He kept climbing.

  He heard his name being called. The president of the medical college, Susumu Tsuno’o, had been injured in the blast. Several faculty members and nurses had carried him up the hillside, and they were calling to Shirabe for help. When he joined them, he saw that the president’s face had a bluish tint, and his shirt was covered with blood. “Where are your wounds?” asked Shirabe.

  “My left arm and leg have small injuries,” Tsuno’o answered in a weak voice. “I’ll be okay.”

  Shirabe bandaged a wound on the president’s leg with a piece of cloth. Tsuno’o looked uncomfortable in his bloodstained shirt, so Shirabe took off the president’s shirt and replaced it with his own.

  He turned to look at the hospital. Fires had broken out in the shattered buildings. They needed to get farther away. An instructor at the college lifted the president onto his back, and they resumed climbing. The president said, “I feel nauseated by brain ischemia when moved,” and he vomited several times as he was being carried. By the time they got to a level spot by a boys’ reformatory, which also was in flames, it was about one o’clock.

  Then the wind changed direction and Shirabe could see beyond the hospital. It couldn’t be. The entire valley, home to perhaps 100,000 people, was a sea of fire. Everything had been destroyed. Except for the reinforced concrete buildings of the hospital, designed to be resistant to earthquakes, not a structure seemed to be standing. No bomb could have done this.

  Most of the people between the hospital and the center of the valley were already dead. Among those who were still living, scenes of unimaginable horror were taking place. One of the students at the medical college, having survived the blast, decided that he would make his way to another hospital several miles northeast of the medical school. Partway there he encountered an infant boy crying next to a demolished house. He heard the voice of a woman calling from under the fallen wood and tiles. “Help my child! Save him!” He could see part of the woman’s legs but knew he could not pull her from the debris. “Don’t worry,” he shouted. “I’ll take care of your child!” He picked up the infant and carried him away. Near the cathedral north of the medical school, where more than a hundred worshippers died when the ceiling and walls fell in, he and the infant child had to cross a small stream that traveled through a concrete-lined canal. It was choked with bodies. A woman and her newborn child, both dead, were still connected by an umbilical cord—she must have given birth when she entered the water. The medical student and child climbed up the far wall of the canal and continued walking. As they passed crumbled houses, they could hear the cries of pinned-down people burning to death.

  On the hillside behind the hospital, Shirabe treated President Tsuno’o’s wounds with a first aid bag that someone had retrieved. The president’s back was full of glass fragments, but Shirabe could do nothing about these. It began to rain. Shirabe thought about his son Koji, a student at the medical college. He would have been at a lecture when the bomb went off. Leaving the cluster of nurses, students, and doctors on the hillside, Shirabe made his way back down the slope. Near the medical school he again came across Dr. Ishizaki, who was lying on the ground and not moving. Someone had covered him with a quilt. Shirabe went to the burning lecture hall where his son would have been and began calling “Koji, Koji.” But there was no reply. Other wounded students and faculty members were by the building. Some were near death, others barely injured. One helped him look for Koji, but they found nothing.

  He heard a voice calling his name from the hillside. “Dr. Nagai’s bleeding won’t stop, please come.” Takashi Nagai, later to become famous as the author of The Bells of Nagasaki, was lying on the hillside, with a deep cut on his right temple. Two assistants from the radiology department had been trying unsuccessfully to stop the bleeding. The only way Shirabe could stanch the wound was by pressing a sanitary napkin into the cut and suturing Nagai’s skin over it. “I sensed a kind of godliness in the attitude of Dr. Nagai, who did not as much as frown during the operation without anesthesia,” Shirabe later wrote.

  Nagai, too, had witnessed horrific scenes that day. “Two children dragging the body of their dead father,” he later recalled. “A young woman running frantically with the headless body of her baby in her arms; an elderly couple climbing the hillside hand in hand, panting; a young woman rolling, transformed into a fire ball when her scorched trousers were fanned into flames.”

  Through the smoke, the sun began to descend toward the hills on the other side of the valley. They would have to spend the night on the hillside. The survivors built fires and began to cook rice and radishes dug from the makeshift farms. Shirabe thought about the other members of his family. His oldest son, Seiichi, must have been working at the Ohashi ammunition factory in the northern part of the valley. Had the devastation extended that far? What about his wife, mother, and three daughters? The family had evacuated from the central part of the Urakami Valley a few months earlier to a rural area north of the city. Were they safe, or had they been killed, too?

  The clouds above Nagasaki had cleared over the course of the day. As the sun sank in the west and the fires in the valley subsided, stars began to appear in the nighttime sky.

  GIVEN THE INTENT of destroying as much of Nagasaki as possible, Kermit Beahan could not have dropped the bomb containing Hanford’s 13 pounds of plutonium in a much better place. It exploded 1,650 feet above the center of the Urakami Valley in a neighborhood of homes and small businesses halfway between two large Mitsubishi arms factories, both of which were destroyed. If he had dropped the bomb 15 seconds earlier or 15 seconds later, it would have gone off over the mountains on either side of the valley—still with devastating effects, but causing only part of the destructiveness that occurred.

  In his office at the Nagasaki Medical College Hospital, Shirabe was 2,460 feet from the hypocenter, the point on the ground directly beneath the bomb’s explosion. That means he was standing 2,960 feet—a little more than a half-mile—from the world’s third nucl
ear explosion. From his office, the bomb exploded at an angle of 34 degrees above the horizon—about that of the mid-afternoon sun.

  Shirabe was incredibly lucky. He later calculated that the radiation from the bomb went through two to three 12-inch-thick concrete walls to reach his office, which greatly reduced its intensity. Also, some of the gamma rays from a nuclear explosion arrive after the initial flash of light because they are generated by secondary reactions in the air surrounding the bomb. By crouching down next to the sink in his office when he saw the flash, Shirabe further reduced his body’s exposure.

  Other people in the hospital were not so lucky. They might have been near an open window, or on the side of the hospital closer to the bomb, or in the corner of a room where radiation could reach them through a wooden ceiling rather than a concrete wall. Anyone standing outside the hospital received a lethal dose of both gamma rays and neutrons. The exposure of those inside the hospital varied.

  The bomb’s shock wave destroyed virtually every building within a mile and a half of the hypocenter. The only buildings left standing after the blast were those of the hospital and several reinforced concrete schools likewise built to resist earthquakes. Wood from the demolished homes then provided fuel for fires that sprang up throughout the valley. Though Nagasaki did not experience a cataclysmic firestorm like the one that occurred in Hiroshima, much of the valley eventually burned, and fire even made its way into part of the downtown commercial core.

  Along with its characteristic flash of visible light, an atomic bomb releases immense amounts of infrared radiation, which our bodies feel as heat. In Nagasaki, people near the hypocenter died instantly from the bomb’s thermal radiation, and people as far as two-and-a-half miles from the hypocenter experienced serious burns. Dark colors in clothes absorb infrared radiation while light colors reflect it. Many people in Nagasaki had the colored patterns of their shirts, kimonos, and armbands burned into their skin.

  Only reinforced concrete buildings, including those of Nagasaki Medical College Hospital, remained standing within a mile and a half of the hypocenter, which is in the valley beyond the hospital. Shirabe was in a building at approximately the center of these structures. Getty Images.

  People inside Nagasaki Medical College Hospital were partly protected from the bomb’s radiation and blast. Still, the death toll there was horrendous. Of about 850 students, 650 died, partly because many were in the wooden buildings of the medical school rather than the concrete buildings of the hospital. Even inside the hospital, half the patients died, and almost half the professors. The people who streamed up the hillside after the bombing left many of their friends, colleagues, and family members behind.

  BY TODAY’S STANDARDS, the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki was small. The most powerful weapons in the current US arsenal can release more than 50 times the energy of the bombs dropped on Japan. If a modern hydrogen bomb were exploded above the ridge that separates Nagasaki’s two valleys, it would destroy the entire city, not just part of it.

  Similarly, if a single hydrogen bomb were detonated above any city in the world, it would destroy much of that city. Houses within five miles of the hypocenter would be smashed, and people six-and-a-half miles away would suffer life-threatening burns. Moreover, even with recent reductions in the immense size of the US and Russian nuclear arsenals, multiple warheads target most American and Russian cities. After a large-scale exchange of nuclear weapons between the two superpowers, few people would emerge from those cities alive.

  As with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, cities hit by nuclear weapons would then begin to burn. These massive conflagrations would inject large amounts of soot, smoke, and dust into the upper atmosphere, where the aerosols would block the light from the sun. The most recent studies indicate that a nuclear exchange of even 50 Nagasaki-size bombs would produce climate changes unprecedented in recorded human history and threaten the global food supply. A large-scale exchange of nuclear weapons would so reduce temperatures that most of the humans who survived the initial bombing would starve. Many people are concerned today that climate change poses a threat to human civilization, but the most certain and immediate threat still resides in the nuclear weapons now sitting in missile silos, bombers, and submarines around the world.

  Chapter 17

  THE URAKAMI VALLEY

  WHEN SHIRABE WOKE THE NEXT MORNING ON THE HILLSIDE ABOVE THE hospital, he saw that the fires had died down in the valley below him, though tendrils of smoke still rose from the shattered buildings. It was a clear and warm morning. On an adjacent part of the hill, Nagai, who was a Christian, gathered with the other Christians on the hillside by the small shrine where they had spent the night, faced in the direction of the emperor’s palace, and began to sing hymns. “Their voices were well harmonized,” Shirabe recalled. “I did not go to the group’s assembly line, but I sat up straight and joined the group in my heart.”

  As the sun rose higher, Shirabe and a group of hospital staff began carrying the injured, including the medical college president, back down the hillside on stretchers. The president thought that patients should be treated at the hospital, where medicines were available. But when Shirabe ran ahead of the group to look for a suitable sickroom, he found that all the buildings, including his own, containing all his books and other possessions, had been gutted by fire. That morning, injured people were still scattered around the former hospital, moving in a daze and calling for help. Shirabe wondered again if his son might have survived the blast. He went to the auditorium where he thought Koji would have been listening to a lecture, which had burned to the ground, but he could tell from the size of the bodies he saw that none was his son.

  He returned to the hospital and began treating patients. He bandaged wounds and injected people who were near death with heart-stimulating drugs. But their needs were endless and supplies soon ran out. He needed to get the injured away from the hospital and to a place where they could be treated properly. A few months earlier, he and his family had moved away from their home near the hospital to a small house in the northern part of the Urakami Valley. If it had not been damaged, he could treat patients there. He had some stores of medical supplies at the house. And he needed to see whether his family was alive.

  Shortly after noon, he began to walk north through the ruined city. In the garden and pond of the house where his family had lived before the war, he saw charred corpses. The road was covered with shattered bricks and roof tiles still hot from the previous day’s fire.

  He began to pass into less damaged areas. The bomb had obliterated most of the Urakami Valley, but the damage was less severe to the north, especially where hills had shielded structures from the bomb’s effects. His own house was on the north side of a hill, about two-and-a-half miles from the hypocenter. As he approached the house, he could see that it had incurred some damage. The glass windows had been blown out, and the sliding doors were broken. But the house was intact.

  As he walked toward it, his wife Sumiko and all three of his daughters came running from the front door, tears in their eyes. He embraced them all. His oldest son, Seiichi, emerged last. He was alive but injured. He had been working in Mitsubishi’s Ohashi ammunition factory in the northern part of the valley when the bomb exploded. His neck, back, and right forearm were severely burned where they had been exposed to the bomb’s radiation through an open window, but that was the extent of his injuries. Doctors have a rule of thumb that if less than one third of the body’s surface is burned, a patient should not die. Shirabe quickly did the calculation and concluded that his son would live.

  Shirabe with his mother Iso, his wife Sumiko, his three daughters Choko, Reiko, and Junko, and his sons Seiichi and Koji. Courtesy of Hitomi Shirabe.

  Toward evening he went in search of a building that could serve as a relief station. A nearby school was too damaged to inhabit, but he found a building called the Iwaya Club that would work if the floor was repaired. He made arrangements with the building’s manager to use it
.

  The next day, he walked back to the hospital and negotiated with two army officers, both graduates of the medical school, to use a truck to transport patients too injured to walk. He was able to find some medical supplies in the burned-out shell of the surgery building, and he used them to treat some of the injured. He also went to see President Tsuno’o, whose condition was worsening. All around the president, people who had not died in the initial blast were dying from their external injuries, from the rupture of their internal organs, and sometimes for seemingly no reason at all. Shirabe did what he could to help them. “I almost choked at the sight of continuous scenes of tragedy,” he recalled.

  There followed a stretch of days that passed in a blur. Shirabe was able to transport many students, nurses, professors, and other patients to the Iwaya Club, where he was able to care for them more effectively than at the hospital. He also was taking care of people in the neighborhood, using what supplies were available. But no matter what he did for them, strangely, many of his patients got worse rather than better. They had severe and bloody diarrhea, so much so that Shirabe thought they might have cholera and tried to isolate them. As his patients continued to sicken and die, the survivors devoutly cremated them in a nearby field.

  On August 15, they heard that the emperor of Japan had ended the war. Shirabe was too busy to care. His son’s condition had deteriorated over the previous days. A thick black substance oozed from Seiichi’s wounds, and his face was darkening. Shirabe and his son both knew that he would soon die. Seiichi thanked his parents and apologized for his early death. He said that if he was reincarnated he would take revenge on their enemy. Though Shirabe knew that his son’s condition was hopeless and that many other people needed his help, he stayed by his bedside. Seiichi died about noon the day after the emperor’s announcement and was cremated on a nearby hill.