The Atom Bomb Survivors and The Day Today

I went to work on illegal drugs today. I was on Cetirizine Dihydrochloride, as supplied by my Dad. Free scripts for all.

The world is full of happiness and sadness, silliness and seriousness, and today I prescribe all.

For now, it's time to return to the serious matter of nuclear warfare as promised, but later there will be fun in the form of a ‘Fabpants Recommends’.

For those of you new to planet earth and its atrocities, the Twentieth Century was plagued by warfare. Bombs fell from the sky like giant balls of hail. So many nations took to fighting, that two ‘World Wars’ managed to decimate people from earth's four corners and beyond. Everybody wanted a piece of death. Today’s quotes come from survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings; from the people that managed to live.

The First World War was from 1914-1918. 20 million people died. Half of the deaths were civilian.

The Second World War was from 1939-1945. 70 million people died. Most of the deaths were civilian. Dying became increasingly popular. The First World War was a practice run. The Second World War was the real thing.

“You know how to stop a kid from smoking? Make them smoke a whole packet of cigarettes at once. You know how to stop wars? Kill thousands of people at once.”

Sign up here to die for the children that you’ll never be able to have. Oh, you don’t want to? Did you just point at those people over there? Did you just suggest dropping an atomic bomb right on their heads? Oh you.

On August 6, 1945, an atomic bomb fell from a small plane called the Enola Gay. It crash-landed on a city called Hiroshima in Japan. The populace and its property became fodder for a deadly poisonous mushroom cloud that rose 20000 feet into the air and destroyed an entire city. One small bomb killed tens of thousands of civilians. The bomb was born in the USA, and the USA became the biggest superpower of all. Might is right.

Is it right to create hell on earth in the hope that a nation of people might enjoy yet another apple pie? Was it justified? Did it prevent more deaths than it caused?

“The appearance of the people was... well, they all had skin blackened by burns... They held their arms bent (forward),... and their skin – not only on their hands, but on their faces and bodies too - hung down. If there had been only one or two such people... perhaps I would not have had such a string impression. But whenever I walked I met these people... Many of them died along the road – I can still picture them in my mind – like walking ghosts.”
A survivor quoted in Robert Jay Lifton, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (1967).

"Everything I saw made a deep impression-a park nearby covered with dead bodies waiting to be cremated.... very badly injured people evacuated in my direction.... The most impressive thing that I saw was some girls, very young girls, not only with their clothes torn off but with their skin peeled off as well.... My immediate thought was that this was like the hell I had read about.... I had never seen anything which resembled it before, but I thought should that there be a hell, this was it."
A survivor quoted in Robert Jay Lifton, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (1967).

Approximately, 80,000 died immediately from the Hiroshima explosion. Three days later, the United States struck again, this time, on Nagasaki. The world had to see what was possible twice. It was the only way.

“The pumpkin field in front of the house was blown clean. Nothing was left of the whole thick crop, except that in place of the pumpkins there was a woman's head. I looked at the face to see if I knew her. It was a woman of about forty. She must have been from another part of town -- I had never seen her around here. A gold tooth gleamed in the wide-open mouth. A handful of singed hair hung down from the left temple over her cheek, dangling in her mouth. Her eyelids were drawn up, showing black holes where the eyes had been burned out. . . . She had probably looked square into the flash and gotten her eyeballs burned.”
Fujie Urata Matsumoto as quoted in Takashi Nagai, We of Nagasaki: The Story of Survivors in an Atomic Wasteland (1964).

Casualty estimates for immediate deaths in Nagasaki range from 40,000 to 75,000.

The final body counts for two atomic bombings are unknown. Long gruelling deaths are harder to count.

Meanwhile, humankind continued and a species lived in terror. Was there a Third World War just around the corner? A war to wipe out humanity forever?

The last war was in 1945. The liberation of earth from the tyranny of humankind will not be a war. We don’t have wars anymore. We have political conflicts, actions, engagements or affairs. By the time we blow ourselves up, we might be having weddings, dances, fracas’ or scuffles. Whatever we decide to call the bloodbath, it won’t be war. The atomic bomb stopped war forever.

Further Reading:
Robert Jay Lifton, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima
Kyoko Iriye Selden, Kyoko Selden, Mark Selden, The Atomic Bomb: Voices from Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Fabpants Recommends: Man on Wire (2008) – Warning: This film contains beautiful dialogue, inspirational content and a spirit of adventure. If the Twin Towers still existed, I’d be on a tightrope dancing between them right now.