The anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing

60 years ago today, a bomb was dropped on Hiroshima that changed the nature of war everywere. No longer were the soldiers and those who actually fought the war at risk, the threat of war escalating with the use of nuclear weapons was in the air and every crisis was further tainted with this risk. Nor would the deaths stop with the end of the war, in fact it was far worse for those who survived and had to live with the pain of radiation poisoning, everyday, a slow death.The stakes are so much higher, now that there are so many countries with the ability to destroy the world with the press of one finger.

I cannot accept the reasoning that the bombs hadn't been used the war would have continued for much longer. Perhaps it would have taken longer to end the war.But there is a survey that concluded that the war in an case would have ended before November of the same year. But how many more people died, and these were civilians, there were children there! And once they saw how destrucive the atom bomb was, how could they bring themselves to use it a second time, on Nagasaki?It is as though, they got carried away with the power at their finger tips. It seems more like the threats made by a Bond villain, and less lke the actions of a responsible govetnment.

How ironic that it is to the Americans that we now justify our own nuclear program; it is to gain their approval and for the lifting of sanctions they had imposed that we separate reactors used for military purposes from those used for civilian purposes, at ggreat cost to us.

And how ironic that the Japanese have apologised for the second world war, but the Americans government has not breathed a word of apology for the horror it created. Perhaps it is because no apology would be sufficient to those who died, and for those who survived in that attack? There was a passage in our 11th standard English text that I remember, which describes the survivors of the bombings; people with eyes melting out of sockets, skin burnt off exposing the flesh underneath, truly the stuff of horror stories; and even now we hear of malformed babies and genetic diseases that affect those living in that area.

I have to wonder at the people who worked on the bomb. Surely they could not have been completely unaware of its potential for destruction. These were some of the greatesr minds of their day... had genius so removed them from the concerns of ordinary people that they saw only numbers and figures, and became blind to the fact that people were going to be killed when the bomb was used! Oppenheimer who watched the first nuclear test said " I am become death, the destroyer of worlds". That is true I think...the monster was not so much what they created in the bomb, but the monster within them that allowed them so callously to calculate the optimum height to detonate the bomb to cause maximum amount of destruction.

And what can justify the fact that even after witnessing Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we have developed weapons even more powerful, powerful enough to destroy the world several times over. How many times have come close to annihilating ourselves. Are we living on borrowed time? Have we already dug ourselves a grave so deep that there is no way to climb out?