To the day, that is today 8/5 on this side of the International Date Line and that is tomorrow 8/6 on the other side of it. As a U.S. citizen (nee, American), I am aghast that August 5th is not a national holiday, a day of remembrance of the first time that one set of human beings dropped an atomic bomb on another set of human beings. I imagine that August 9th (8/8 on this side of the Date Line) should and could be another day of remembrance, a national day for amends, for the second atomic bomb dropped by the U.S. Air Foce on Nagasaki in the same week — in order to compel the men of the Japanese military and Emperor Hirohito’s government to surrender to the might of the men in the U.S. military and scientists.
In the early pages of M.G. Sheftall’s Hiroshima: the last witnesses, I read that the multi-year Manhattan Project to build and refine the atomic bomb, the physics, the technology, the nuclear fission had a budget of $2B, or the equivalent of $35B in 2025 dollars. So, to read that last month’s legislation out of Congress allocated somewhere around $65B (according to Ken Klippenstein) or maybe $75B (according to CBS News) translates into the federal government will spend twice as much on ICE as they did the Manhattan Project. (I don’t know how many years the $2B was spread over; the $65B to $75B figure may be an appropriation for the next decade.)
As Michael Chabon wrote in the Introduction of the 2005 edition of D’Aulaires’ Book of Nordic Mythology by Ingri and Edgar Parin D’Aulaire (originally published in 1967):
We all grew up–all of us, from the beginning–in a time of violence and invention, absurdity and Armageddon, prey and witness to the worst and the best in humanity, in a world ruined and made interesting by Loki. I took comfort, as a kid, in knowing that things had always been as awful and as wonderful as they were now, that the world was always on the edge of total destruction, even if, in Maryland in 1969, as today, in seemed a little more true than usual.
The extent of what the airmen who would carry the bombs knew was that “the gadget” or “the gizmo” was that their cargo was:
- top secret
- very expensive
- would make a very large explosion
- create a lot of fire
- kill a lot of people
It’s bizarre to sit and read about a bomb that killed 100,000s of people within seconds, and killed, cancered, and maimed 100,000s more for decades afterwards. There is no justifying the use of an atomic bomb, not even the hypotheticals of how the Second World War may have gone on for another 10 or 20 years.
My imagination also looks at the history of the occupation from 1945 to 1952 and ensuing influencing, if infiltration, of Japanese political and economic institutions and I wonder how the rebuilding of a former enemy nation could happen for a few years and continue for decades in the second half of the 20th Century. My imagination cannot fathom how such reconciliation could happen in Afghanistan or Iraq or Congo or Sudan in the 21st Century. Clearly, my cynicism and skepticism about bitterness, entrenched interests, greed accompanied by manipulation are all perversions that make people want to hoard, covet and plunder. And I figure that some American titans profited mightily from the reindustrialization of Japan after World War 2. We just don’t know those names or haven’t listened to that history.
The world is on the edge of total destruction. The end of the world as we knew it in 1999, in 2019, and certainly as they knew of it in September 1945.
washing dishes: a father’s glimpses 