The Manhattan Project

by Cynthia C. Kelly

  The roof had been blown off as well, and we could see the sky. The pillars and the walls were embedded with large numbers of sharp-edged fragments of broken glass. The other houses in the neighborhood were in the same state of destruction. Across the harbor, the central part of the city was covered in clouds of dust.

  The two of us evacuated to the bomb shelter in our yard where we waited for our father and older brother to come home. About an hour had passed when our brother arrived home from his factory. At that time, he said that it was too dangerous to stay in that tiny bomb shelter and that we should move to a larger one nearby.

  That bomb shelter, which was like a tunnel carved into the cliffside, was filled with mothers and their children. The children, who had been showered in the heat rays while outside, had suffered burns to any exposed skin. Other children were crying because their bodies had been stabbed by shards of glass and other fragments that had been thrown by the blast. If my twin brother and I had left the veranda to go to the sitting room five minutes later, we most likely would have suffered horrible wounds from the heat rays and blast.

  We spent that entire night waiting anxiously for our father to come back. By the next morning, however, he still hadn’t returned. At that point, the three of us brothers headed off to find him.

  As we walked toward his factory, the damage grew worse and worse. The houses at the roadside had all burned to the ground and the trees and electric poles were scorched, although they remained standing.

  The factories on the other side of the river now looked like masses of clustered wire with only the largest of their columns remaining standing. There were many dead bodies among the debris littering the roads. Their faces, arms, and legs had swollen up, making them look like black rubber dolls. When our shoes touched these bodies, the skin would come peeling off just like that of an overripe peach, exposing the white fat underneath. There were many dead bodies floating in the river as well. Feeling nauseous, we turned our eyes away and hurried off again in the direction of our father’s factory.

  Our father’s factory had also been reduced to nothing but scorched metal framing. Through the demolished walls, we caught a glimpse of the factory and saw three men working with shovels. Overjoyed, we called out, “Our name is Yamawaki. Where is our father?”

  One of the men glanced over and said, “Your father is over there.” He pointed in the direction of the demolished office building. The three of us dashed off in the direction he had pointed to. What we saw there, however, was our father’s corpse, swollen and scorched just like all the others. We stood there, stunned.…

  I think that all people who lost family members and others close to them in the atomic bombing went through experiences similar to this. There were 70,000 people who were killed in an instant by a single atomic bomb.

  When I was 35, I began to have liver and kidney troubles. Because of this, I have been admitted to Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Hospital fifteen times. I was given interferon and other treatment, which I am still receiving. Unfortunately, in September 2008, my doctor informed me that I had stomach cancer. In October, I underwent surgery at Nagasaki University Hospital. In January 2010, I had surgery again. I should add that my older brother and my twin brother are also victims of cancer.

  One university professor has written that the atomic bomb killed people three times over. I think those words truly represent the horrific nature of the three destructive forces of the atomic bomb: its heat rays, its explosion blast, and its radiation rays. I pray that no one else will ever experience the brutal tragedy that I witnessed at the age of 11.

  When I look back to Japanese history, it’s very regrettable. Japan had the chance to avoid the atomic bomb. The Allies had issued the Potsdam Declaration [with terms for surrender] for Japan on July 26, 1945. However, the [Kantarō] Suzuki Cabinet issued a statement that it would “kill it with silence.” This rejection gave the best chance of the atomic bombing by the United States. If the Suzuki Cabinet had accepted this, 200,000 people would not have been killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  Undoubtedly, nuclear weapons lead to disaster. Please lend us your strength to eliminate nuclear weapons from the face of the earth and make sure that Nagasaki is the last place on earth to suffer an atomic bombing. Let us all work together to build a peaceful world, free of war.

  Courtesy of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

  The ruins of the Mitsubishi Arms Works on the Urakami River after the Nagasaki atomic bombing of August 9, 1945.

  The World Was Forever Changed Here

  As the first U.S. President to visit Hiroshima, President Barack Obama called for people to embrace the “radical and necessary notion that we are part of a single human family” and to “look directly into the eye of history and ask what we must do differently to curb such suffering again.”

  BY PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA AT THE HIROSHIMA PEACE MEMORIAL

  May 27, 2016

  Seventy-one years ago, on a bright cloudless morning, death fell from the sky and the world was changed. A flash of light and a wall of fire destroyed a city and demonstrated that mankind possessed the means to destroy itself.

  Why do we come to this place, to Hiroshima? We come to ponder a terrible force unleashed in a not-so-distant past. We come to mourn the dead, including over 100,000 Japanese men, women and children, thousands of Koreans, a dozen Americans held prisoner.

  Their souls speak to us. They ask us to look inward, to take stock of who we are and what we might become.

  It is not the fact of war that sets Hiroshima apart. Artifacts tell us that violent conflict appeared with the very first man. Our early ancestors having learned to make blades from flint and spears from wood used these tools not just for hunting but against their own kind. On every continent, the history of civilization is filled with war, whether driven by scarcity of grain or hunger for gold, compelled by nationalist fervor or religious zeal. Empires have risen and fallen. Peoples have been subjugated and liberated. And at each juncture, innocents have suffered, a countless toll, their names forgotten by time.

  The world war that reached its brutal end in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was fought among the wealthiest and most powerful of nations. Their civilizations had given the world great cities and magnificent art. Their thinkers had advanced ideas of justice and harmony and truth. And yet the war grew out of the same base instinct for domination or conquest that had caused conflicts among the simplest tribes, an old pattern amplified by new capabilities and without new constraints.

  In the span of a few years, some 60 million people would die. Men, women, children, no different than us. Shot, beaten, marched, bombed, jailed, starved, gassed to death. There are many sites around the world that chronicle this war, memorials that tell stories of courage and heroism, graves and empty camps that echo of unspeakable depravity.

  Yet in the image of a mushroom cloud that rose into these skies, we are most starkly reminded of humanity’s core contradiction. How the very spark that marks us as a species, our thoughts, our imagination, our language, our toolmaking, our ability to set ourselves apart from nature and bend it to our will—those very things also give us the capacity for unmatched destruction.

  How often does material advancement or social innovation blind us to this truth? How easily we learn to justify violence in the name of some higher cause.

  Every great religion promises a pathway to love and peace and righteousness, and yet no religion has been spared from believers who have claimed their faith as a license to kill.

  Nations arise telling a story that binds people together in sacrifice and cooperation, allowing for remarkable feats. But those same stories have so often been used to oppress and dehumanize those who are different.

  Science allows us to communicate across the seas and fly above the clouds, to cure disease and understand the cosmos, but those same discoveries can be turned into ever more efficient killing machines.

  The wars of the modern age teach us this truth. Hiroshima teaches thi
s truth. Technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us. The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution as well.

  That is why we come to this place. We stand here in the middle of this city and force ourselves to imagine the moment the bomb fell. We force ourselves to feel the dread of children confused by what they see. We listen to a silent cry. We remember all the innocents killed across the arc of that terrible war and the wars that came before and the wars that would follow.

  Mere words cannot give voice to such suffering. But we have a shared responsibility to look directly into the eye of history and ask what we must do differently to curb such suffering again.

  Someday the voices of the hibakusha will no longer be with us to bear witness. But the memory of the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, must never fade. That memory allows us to fight complacency. It fuels our moral imagination. It allows us to change.

  And since that fateful day, we have made choices that give us hope. The United States and Japan have forged not only an alliance but a friendship that has won far more for our people than we could ever claim through war. The nations of Europe built a union that replaced battlefields with bonds of commerce and democracy. Oppressed people and nations won liberation. An international community established institutions and treaties that work to avoid war and aspire to restrict and roll back and ultimately eliminate the existence of nuclear weapons.

  Still, every act of aggression between nations, every act of terror and corruption and cruelty and oppression that we see around the world shows our work is never done. We may not be able to eliminate man’s capacity to do evil, so nations and the alliances that we form must possess the means to defend ourselves. But among those nations like my own that hold nuclear stockpiles, we must have the courage to escape the logic of fear and pursue a world without them.

  We may not realize this goal in my lifetime, but persistent effort can roll back the possibility of catastrophe. We can chart a course that leads to the destruction of these stockpiles. We can stop the spread to new nations and secure deadly materials from fanatics.

  And yet that is not enough. For we see around the world today how even the crudest rifles and barrel bombs can serve up violence on a terrible scale. We must change our mind-set about war itself. To prevent conflict through diplomacy and strive to end conflicts after they’ve begun. To see our growing interdependence as a cause for peaceful cooperation and not violent competition. To define our nations not by our capacity to destroy but by what we build. And perhaps, above all, we must reimagine our connection to one another as members of one human race.

  For this, too, is what makes our species unique. We’re not bound by genetic code to repeat the mistakes of the past. We can learn. We can choose. We can tell our children a different story, one that describes a common humanity, one that makes war less likely and cruelty less easily accepted.

  We see these stories in the hibakusha. The woman who forgave a pilot who flew the plane that dropped the atomic bomb because she recognized that what she really hated was war itself. The man who sought out families of Americans killed here because he believed their loss was equal to his own.

  My own nation’s story began with simple words: All men are created equal and endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Realizing that ideal has never been easy, even within our own borders, even among our own citizens. But staying true to that story is worth the effort. It is an ideal to be strived for, an ideal that extends across continents and across oceans. The irreducible worth of every person, the insistence that every life is precious, the radical and necessary notion that we are part of a single human family—that is the story that we all must tell.

  That is why we come to Hiroshima. So that we might think of people we love. The first smile from our children in the morning. The gentle touch from a spouse over the kitchen table. The comforting embrace of a parent. We can think of those things and know that those same precious moments took place here, 71 years ago.

  Those who died, they are like us. Ordinary people understand this, I think. They do not want more war. They would rather that the wonders of science be focused on improving life and not eliminating it. When the choices made by nations, when the choices made by leaders, reflect this simple wisdom, then the lesson of Hiroshima is done.

  The world was forever changed here, but today the children of this city will go through their day in peace. What a precious thing that is. It is worth protecting, and then extending to every child. That is a future we can choose, a future in which Hiroshima and Nagasaki are known not as the dawn of atomic warfare but as the start of our own moral awakening.

  “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything… A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move towards higher levels.”

  —ALBERT EINSTEIN

  The Threat of Nuclear War Is Still with Us

  From the Wall Street Journal, April 11, 2019

  BY GEORGE P. SHULTZ, WILLIAM J. PERRY AND SAM NUNN

  The U.S., its allies and Russia are caught in a dangerous policy paralysis that could lead—most likely by mistake or miscalculation—to a military confrontation and potentially the use of nuclear weapons for the first time in nearly 74 years. A bold policy shift is needed to support a strategic re-engagement with Russia and walk back from this perilous precipice. Otherwise, our nations may soon be entrenched in a nuclear standoff more precarious, disorienting and economically costly than the Cold War. The most difficult task facing the U.S. is also the most important—to refocus on America’s most vital interests even as we respond firmly to Russia’s aggressions.

  The three of us experienced the low points of U.S. relations with the Soviet Union, and the nuclear dangers that arose. The 1962 Cuban missile crisis, the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the 1981–83 confrontation over intermediate-range nuclear missiles were periods of increased tensions, reduced trust and rising nuclear risks. With Henry Kissinger, we wrote in 2007 that although the world escaped the nuclear knife’s edge of the Cold War through a combination of diligence, professionalism and good luck, reliance on nuclear weapons for deterrence is becoming increasingly hazardous and decreasingly effective as more states gain nukes of their own. The U.S. and other nuclear states have yet to take decisive steps toward the goal of a world without nuclear weapons, and the dangers continue to mount.

  Deterrence cannot protect the world from a nuclear blunder or nuclear terrorism. Both become more likely when there is no sustained, meaningful dialogue between Washington and Moscow. The risks are compounded by the rising possibility that cyberattacks could target nuclear warning and command-and-control systems, as well as the continuing expansion of global terrorist networks. Since the crises broke out in Ukraine and Syria in the past few years, U.S. and Russian forces have again been operating in proximity, increasing the risk that an act of aggression, followed by an accident or miscalculation, will lead to catastrophe.

  A new comprehensive approach is required to decrease the risks of conflict and increase cooperation, transparency, and security. This will require a united effort in Washington and with U.S. allies on a Russia policy that reduces the unnecessary nuclear danger we are currently courting, while maintaining our values and protecting our vital interests.

  The U.S. must first address its own dysfunctional Russia policy, and Congress must lead the way. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell should convene a new bipartisan liaison group of legislative leaders and committee chairmen to work with senior administration officials on strengthening the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and renewing dialogue with Russia. This model was used in the arms-control observer group led by Sens. Robert Byrd and Bob Dole in the 1980s. The group was able to build bipartisan consensus for a defense modernization program that strengthened America’s defenses and bolstered NATO’s d
eterrence, as well as a Russia policy that led to negotiations eliminating missiles in Europe. These policies helped end the Cold War.

  Second, Presidents Trump and Vladimir Putin should announce a joint declaration reaffirming that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. This would renew the 1985 Reagan-Gorbachev statement that Americans and Russians received positively as the beginning of an effort to reduce risk and improve mutual security. A joint statement today would clearly communicate that despite current tensions, leaders of the two countries possessing more than 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons recognize their responsibility to work together to prevent catastrophe. This could also lead other nuclear states to take further steps to reduce nuclear risk. The timing of such a statement would also signal Washington and Moscow’s commitment to build on past progress toward disarmament, as next year will mark the 50th anniversary of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

  Third, the U.S. and Russia must discuss a broad framework for strategic stability—including increasing decision time for leaders—in a period of global destabilization and emerging military technologies. In a positive step, Presidents Trump and Putin apparently agreed in Helsinki last summer to open a dialogue on strategic stability, focused on nuclear dangers that threaten both nations. Yet their inability to follow up by empowering their military and civilian professionals to follow through underlines how dangerously dysfunctional relations have become.

  This effort must begin now. America’s leaders cannot call a “time out” to wait for the aftermath of the Robert Mueller investigation or other issues to play out in Congress or the courts. Nor is there time to await a new U.S. administration, a new leader in the Kremlin, or the gradual resolution of current international disputes. The risks are simply too grave to put America’s vital interests on hold.