Eighty years ago today, at around 8:15 on the morning of 6 August 1945, the world’s first atomic weapon detonated in the skies above Hiroshima. Survivors used a grimly understated bit of onomatopoeia to describe what happened. They called it pika-don: a blinding flash of light (pika), bleaching the whole world white, followed by a thunderous explosion (don).
Hiroshima was transformed in an instant. The bomb exploded around 600 metres above the city’s industrial district, and most of that area either disappeared completely or began to be consumed by fire. Some 70,000 buildings in total were destroyed.
Soon after the explosion, people began journeying into the city centre to look for relatives, pushing carts in the hope of carrying home the injured. What they saw reminded them of images of Buddhist hell. The artwork at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, which I visited in recent days, captures these real-life scenes in unforgiving detail. In one drawing, people are slumped over the sides of a large fire cistern, with bright-red burn marks across their backs. Desperately seeking water, they made it to the cistern and then died or passed out when they got there. In another, ghoulish figures stagger along the road, heads bowed and arms outstretched. Their clothes are in tatters; their flesh drips from their bodies.
Elsewhere in the city, bizarre sights could be picked out through the blood-coloured smoke: the pattern from someone’s kimono imprinted on a wall; a pink cavalry horse standing alone in the street, its hide stripped away by the blast. The steps running up to the Hiroshima branch of Sumitomo Bank were bleached white, save for a patch where someone had been sitting when the bomb went off. Those steps are now kept behind glass in the museum, and you can see the dark patch marking the spot where that person was incinerated. Nearby, a photo reveals the bathos of wartime Japanese bureaucracy carrying on despite it all: just hours after the bomb was dropped, a policeman sits at a table in improvised bandages issuing disaster certificates to people who have suffered property damage in the blast.
At this point, of course, no one knew what was coming next: vomiting, hair loss, rapidly worsening skin conditions and hopeless attempts by bewildered relatives to stop their loved ones slipping away — all signs of the enormous quantities of radiation released by the bomb. Most people on 6 August naturally put the blast down either to a very powerful conventional weapon or, given that American B-29s had not been sighted in the numbers required to inflict carnage of this kind, some kind of devastating accident.
“At this point, of course, no one knew what was coming next: vomiting, hair loss, rapidly worsening skin conditions”
Japanese scientists were swiftly dispatched to Hiroshima to investigate. They soon concluded, based on tests of sand and bone, that the Allies had beaten Japan to an atomic weapon. The “prompt and utter destruction” threatened in the Allies’ ultimatum to Japan just a few days earlier took on a terrifying new dimension. A single bomb had done all this. And who knew how many more the Allies possessed?
Eight decades on, the question of whether or not the United States ought to have resorted to using its new weapon at this late stage of the war is as far as ever from being resolved. The most compelling argument in favour was, and remains, the enormous loss of life — both Allied and Japanese — thought likely to occur if a ground invasion of the Japanese home islands went ahead as planned in the autumn of 1945.
Projected casualties were sometimes exaggerated after the war, as a way of justifying Hiroshima and Nagasaki amidst worldwide revulsion. Nevertheless, the ferocity with which minor Pacific islands and other territories were defended by the Japanese naturally pointed to an enormous death toll if the Japanese military and ordinary civilians decided to defend their country to the very last. It seemed plausible that a threat of prompt and utter destruction, combined with a taste of its awful reality, might tip even Japan’s military hardliners into agreeing to the surrender terms set out by the allies at Potsdam.
Instead, in the hours and days after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, those hardliners argued that if Japan could withstand firebombing then it could — and must — withstand atomic bombings, too. Stalemate within the Japanese leadership, split between would-be peace-makers — who still held out hope of persuading the Soviets to act as intermediaries with the other Allies — and military officers who refused to countenance surrender, remains perhaps the best argument against the use of the atomic bomb in August 1945.
The Allies were aware of the somewhat uncertain position of the Emperor in Japan’s modern constitution. He was, in theory, the supreme authority in every area of Japanese life. At the same time, his elevated status — descended from the gods — meant that he was not to be troubled with everyday decision-making. A relatively late convert to the cause of peace, Emperor Hirohito had always preferred to give his blessing to decisions made by civilian and military leaders rather than force his will upon them. He tended to make his feelings known by asking pointed questions or by employing strategic silences. After the Soviet declaration of war against Japan and invasion of Manchuria on 8 August, and the bombing of Nagasaki a day later, the emperor’s subordinates still had to make two requests for a seidan — “sacred decision” — before he broke the ministerial deadlock by calling decisively for the war to be discontinued.
It was far from clear at the time that the use of an atomic weapon could somehow overcome these institutional barriers to peace-making in Japan. Then again, would any of the alternative options, including an extended naval blockade, have fared better? How hungry would people in Japan have needed to become before their leaders — who had, so far, regarded ordinary citizens more as raw material for achieving strategic objectives than as human beings whose lives were precious — decided that enough was enough?
There is some merit to the claim that Hiroshima was partly about showing the Soviet Union what America was now capable of. It is true, too, that the Americans feared the Soviets getting their hands on large chunks of Japan, if the war was not concluded swiftly and on terms favourable to the United States. But that doesn’t change the fact that, for America, there was no obviously superior means of ending the war in the summer of 1945.
Reluctant supporters of America’s decision to use an atomic weapon might add that, distasteful though such arguments may be, it is difficult to draw a clear moral distinction between napalm — itself a relatively new weapon, used to devastating effect against Japan’s wood and paper buildings in the spring and summer of 1945 — and an atom bomb. The latter is vastly more powerful and has after-effects that dwarf those of firebombing in their horror and longevity. And yet it remains the case that far more Japanese people died, suffered injuries or were rendered homeless by firebombs in the Second World War than by atomic weapons.
The arguments over Hiroshima and Nagasaki will no doubt change in the decades to come, depending on the role that nuclear weapons play in shaping our world. Up until now, it has been possible to argue that the sort of devastation to which the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum bears grisly witness served as the clearest possible warning against allowing conflicts ever to go nuclear. But 80 years from now, people may look back and conclude that we simply got lucky for a while: proliferation was limited and, among powers who possessed atomic weapons, a combination of cool heads and good fortune prevented the unthinkable.
Already, memories of the disaster are fading. The numbers of hibakusha — people directly affected by the atomic bomb — are dwindling, their stories in danger of vanishing with them. The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum is already advertising talks both by the families of survivors and by “successors”. The classics of Japanese cinema and literature that the bomb helped to inspire are meanwhile now firmly in the past, from the first Godzilla film — whose eponymous monster was envisaged as atomic disaster “made flesh” — to the harrowing animated movie Barefoot Gen.
Does Hiroshima still have the power to shock us, and to stop people with access to nuclear buttons from pushing them if they feel they really must? We must hope so. Perhaps another 80 years of relative peace between the world’s great powers is possible. But no one should underestimate the potential of nuclear brinksmanship gone wrong, or the steadily escalating deployment of tactical nuclear weapons to take us to a point where the extraordinary suffering visited on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki breaks the bounds of history and comes for us all.
