The Martyrs of Hiroshima

Image from the United States Department of Energy
Interactive History of the Manhattan Project

On this day sixty-three years ago tens of thousands of civilian non-combatants died in the first use of nuclear weapons in an act of war as an atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. By year's end, the death toll from the attack would expand to between 90,000 and 140,000 as survivors of the initial blast succumbed to the lingering effects of radiation.

The war could have ended then and there. But there were two atomic bomb designs that needed to be field-tested. Three days later, the second design was tested over Nagasaki.

The test was a success, and Japan surrendered.

It could have gone differently, very much differently. The bombs were originally intended for use in Germany. Had Germany not already surrendered, what German cities would have been turned to ash? Which Germans now alive would never have been born because their parents and grandparents had been reduced to shadows on concrete and wood?

But instead the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki died by the tens and then the hundreds of thousands.

Their deaths were not without meaning. They were not merely collateral damage in a battle between world powers. The horror of their deaths, of how they died and in what quantities, has stayed with people everywhere for all these decades. And the atomic bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were like children's toys compared to the nuclear weapons which were to follow.

But these weapons, fusion and fission bombs, were never used. Not in violence, not in war, not against people or structures. They were used as playing pieces in a game of state-level terrorism, and as long as the balance of terror was maintained, as long as neither side could let its birds fly without being completely destroyed in a retaliatory strike, they were never used as weapons.

And that was where things stood, until the feint known as the Strategic Defense Initiative tricked the Soviet Union into destroying its economy while trying to respond, and the balance of terror changed forever.

Nuclear terror isn't over. The weapons are still out there, though many of them may now be unusable in their original design configurations. But many others are. And you don't need a fully-functioning nuclear weapon to make a dirty bomb. A radioactive Boy Scout once did it in his mother's garden shed.

But we are here. We are here in part because a bunch of politicians and generals didn't blink when they stared down their counterparts on the other side of the world for half a century. We're here in part because no one has been crazy enough - yet - to use nuclear weapons in another act of war or an act of terror. We're here in part because we have been very, very lucky.

But we are also here in part thanks to the Martyrs of Hiroshima. The horrors of their deaths, both instantaneous and lingering, have helped us to understand the horrors that would come from the decision to engage in nuclear war.