HIROSHIMA

Sixty years ago, the nuclear age was born.

It ended the most horrific war in human history. World War II killed more people and involved more nations than any other war ever.

The bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and then the bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, led the Japanese to surrender. The war was over. Finally. Peace.

Although the end of World War II meant the end of hostilities and suffering, in a real sense, there was no peace. When World War II ended, the race for nuclear weapons was on. I think the hope of a true and lasting peace was killed with that atomic blast in Hiroshima.

Starting at 8:15AM on August 6, 1945, the threat of nuclear annihilation became real. It exists and always will.

I honestly don't expect to see nuclear weapons used in my lifetime. Maybe that's because the thought is just too frightening to imagine. Maybe it's because I so badly want to believe that no one would prefer mutual destruction to life. Maybe I'm kidding myself.

The anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima causes me to reflect on the uncertainty and the fragility of being. It heightens my feelings of uneasiness. The very existence of nuclear weapons casts a shadow of impending doom.

For me, sometimes it's more palpable than at other times; but it's always there, like evil.
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Studs Terkel's August 2002 interview with Paul Tibbets, pilot of the Enola Gay, is an interesting read.

(Excerpt)
Terkel: You came back, and you visited President Truman.

Tibetts: We're talking 1948 now. I'm back in the Pentagon and I get notice from the chief of staff, Carl Spaatz, the first chief of staff of the air force. When we got to General Spaatz's office, General Doolittle was there, and a colonel named Dave Shillen. Spaatz said, "Gentlemen, I just got word from the president he wants us to go over to his office immediately." On the way over, Doolittle and Spaatz were doing some talking; I wasn't saying very much. When we got out of the car we were escorted right quick to the Oval Office. There was a black man there who always took care of Truman's needs and he said, "General Spaatz, will you please be facing the desk?" And now, facing the desk, Spaatz is on the right, Doolittle and Shillen. Of course, militarily speaking, that's the correct order: because Spaatz is senior, Doolittle has to sit to his left.

Then I was taken by this man and put in the chair that was right beside the president's desk, beside his left hand. Anyway, we got a cup of coffee and we got most of it consumed when Truman walked in and everybody stood on their feet. He said, "Sit down, please," and he had a big smile on his face and he said, "General Spaatz, I want to congratulate you on being first chief of the air force," because it was no longer the air corps. Spaatz said, "Thank you, sir, it's a great honour and I appreciate it." And he said to Doolittle: "That was a magnificent thing you pulled flying off of that carrier," and Doolittle said, "All in a day's work, Mr President." And he looked at Dave Shillen and said, "Colonel Shillen, I want to congratulate you on having the foresight to recognise the potential in aerial refuelling. We're gonna need it bad some day." And he said thank you very much.

Then he looked at me for 10 seconds and he didn't say anything. And when he finally did, he said, "What do you think?" I said, "Mr President, I think I did what I was told." He slapped his hand on the table and said: "You're damn right you did, and I'm the guy who sent you. If anybody gives you a hard time about it, refer them to me."

Terkel: Anybody ever give you a hard time?

Tibbets: Nobody gave me a hard time.

Terkel: Do you ever have any second thoughts about the bomb?

Tibbets: Second thoughts? No. Studs, look. Number one, I got into the air corps to defend the United States to the best of my ability. That's what I believe in and that's what I work for. Number two, I'd had so much experience with airplanes... I'd had jobs where there was no particular direction about how you do it and then of course I put this thing together with my own thoughts on how it should be because when I got the directive I was to be self-supporting at all times.

On the way to the target I was thinking: I can't think of any mistakes I've made. Maybe I did make a mistake: maybe I was too damned assured. At 29 years of age I was so shot in the ass with confidence I didn't think there was anything I couldn't do. Of course, that applied to airplanes and people. So, no, I had no problem with it. I knew we did the right thing because when I knew we'd be doing that I thought, yes, we're going to kill a lot of people, but by God we're going to save a lot of lives. We won't have to invade [Japan].

Here is the story of a survivor of the blast, 73-year-old Tomiko Morimoto West. Considering what she went through, it amazes me that she says, "I never, never, never hated the Americans."

(Excerpts)

She was just 13. The horrific atomic blast on Aug. 6, 1945, all but wiped out her hometown in an instant. Her widowed mother was killed, and her grandparents would die later in agony.

"They left me all by myself," she said.

All alone, she suffered the effects of radiation sickness, which may have contributed to her inability to have children. But she is not bitter.

West, now 73 and a retired Vassar College lecturer, believes the atomic bomb that robbed her of her family and her innocence saved countless lives - Japanese and American.

...On the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, West was in a factory courtyard with other girls her age, where they worked to support the war. She recalled how they all looked up at the American plane in the cloudless sky.

"Suddenly, there was a flash," she said.

She wouldn't know until much later that a 5-ton atomic bomb had been dropped on her city. Forty thousand people were killed instantly. Another 100,000, including her grandparents, would die by the end of the year from wounds and radiation sickness.

After the flash, she saw a brilliant orange orb, the color of the sun as it sets in the ocean, erupt in the sky - and she hit the ground.

When she looked up, the buildings around her and much of the city were on fire. The students ran up a small mountain to escape the flames.

Her teacher told the students, "You have to stay until somebody comes to pick you up."

But no one came for West. So when morning came, the teacher told her to go home.

West was stunned by the hellish ruins of Hiroshima. Burned soldiers, their skin dripping off their arms, begged her for water. Wailing mothers stopped her to ask if she had seen their children. A charred trolley car was packed with lifeless passengers still hanging onto the handrail. As she crossed a bridge over a river, she looked down and saw "a sea of dead people."

When West finally reached her home, she found it flattened. "I didn't know where to go," she said.

West tracked down her grandparents in a mountain cave surrounded by other wounded survivors. "I remember the horrible smell," she said. Her grandfather was hurt, with shards of glass embedded in his back.

About a week later, she went back to her house and found her mother's body crumpled in the rubble. "I guess [the house] came down on her."

Another survivor, Shigeko Sasamori, became an activist, trying to raise awareness about the horrors of the bomb. Like West, she doesn't blame Americans for her personal suffering.

(Excerpts)

Shigeko Sasamori hopes her scarred body and gnarled fingers put a human face on the suffering caused by the creation of the atomic bomb, a weapon that was first tested 60 years ago in the New Mexico desert.

The 73-year-old woman was a schoolgirl on Aug. 6, 1945, when an American warplane dropped over Hiroshima the first of two nuclear bombs used against Japan.

She traveled to New Mexico this past week for the 60th anniversary of the atomic tests at Trinity to ask scientists to stop nuclear warfare.

"I want to talk to their hearts and beg them not to do it," she said Friday.

When the bomb exploded, Sasamori said she and a friend were preparing to join a work crew to clear a city street less than a mile from ground zero. Her 13-year-old companion was killed in the blast.

"I saw that everybody looked so terrible, just like they came from hell," she said. "No one was talking. No one was screaming."

She believes now that she was in shock as she followed the crowd to escape the burning city. Five days later, Sasamori's mother found her in a nearby school.

One-fourth of Sasamori's body was burned. Her fingers were scorched to the bone, and she had as many as 30 operations to repair the damage. Three years ago, she underwent surgery for intestinal cancer. Doctors now suspect she has thyroid cancer.

...Sasamori, who now lives in Marina del Rey, Calif., said she is not angry with Americans for how World War II ended, but hates war itself and is saddened by the actions of those who made the bomb.

Sunao Tsuboi shares Sasamori's feelings about war and nuclear weapons.

He believes it is crucial for people who lived through the bombing to share their stories.
Survivors, whose average age is now over 73, worry that as many of them pass away, so will memories of the bombing.

Sunao Tsuboi, an 80-year-old survivor who heads a group of victims, said passing on the experience is his greatest concern.

"As we get old, even among victims the anger, that raging feeling towards the A-bomb, has waned ... August 6 is being played up this year as it's the 60th anniversary, but I wonder about next year."