IT
IS THE 70TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE ATOMIC BOMBINGS OF JAPAN
For the
31st year, the Hiroshima-Nagasaki Commemoration Committee will remember the
atomic bombings of Japan on August 6 & 9, 1945, which killed more than
250,000 people. Other organizations involved in the commemorations are
the Baltimore Quaker Peace and Justice Committee of Homewood and Stony Run
Meetings, Chesapeake Physicians for Social Responsibility, Crabshell Alliance
and Pledge of Resistance-Baltimore.
The HIROSHIMA COMMEMORATION on
August 6 was a wonderful event starting with a demonstration against Johns
Hopkins University’s weapons contracts, including research on killer drones,
the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and the nuclear energy disaster at Fukushima,
Japan. Then we marched to Homewood Friends Meetinghouse to hear two Hiroshima
Hibakusha [survivors], Mr. Goro Matsuyama [86] and Ms. Takako Chiba
[73]. Both stories were mournful and hopeful. Then Ms. Yukie Ikebe, on
piano, guided the Heartful Chorus in a soaring medley of songs, including
Amazing Grace. More than thirty of us enjoyed dinner and conversation at
Niwana Restaurant. Before leaving, the Chorus led us in singing We Shall
Overcome.
The
NAGASAKI COMMEMORATION takes place on Sunday, August 9, 2015 at Homewood
Friends Meeting, 3107 N. Charles Street. It begins at 6 PM with a
potluck dinner. At 7 PM some members of “By Peaceful Means” city camp, led by
their teacher, Taleah Edwards, will perform. Then the organizer of this
camp, Ralph Moore, will speak. The death of Freddie Gray ignited a
movement to seek positive social change. Ralph, a civil rights icon, once
said “Economic justice is the one [issue] I’ve focused on most over the years.
Various issues spill out from that; it’s been housing, it’s been hunger, it’s
been education, it’s been jobs and it’s been anti-war.”
After Ralph’s address, there will be
a Q & A. Then participants can share through verse, poetry or song
how to cure the ill of poverty in Baltimore. The suggestions will be sent to the
mayor and the City Council. Contact Max at 410-366-1637
or mobuszewski at verizon.net.
Published on Portside (https://portside.org)
Entering the Nuclear Age, Body by Body -- The Nagasaki
Experience
Susan Southard
Thursday, August 6, 2015
Tom Dispatch
This essay has been adapted from chapters 1 and 2 of Susan Southard’s new
book, Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War
[1], with the kind
permission of Viking.
Korean and Chinese workers, prisoners of war, and mobilized adults and
students had returned to their work sites; some dug or repaired shelters,
others piled sandbags against the windows of City Hall for protection against
machine-gun fire. In the Mitsubishi sports field, bamboo spear drills in
preparation for an invasion had just concluded. Classes had resumed at Nagasaki
Medical College. Streetcars meandered through the city.
Hundreds of people injured in the air raids just over a week earlier
continued to be treated in Nagasaki’s hospitals, and at the tuberculosis
hospital in the northern Urakami Valley, staff members served a late breakfast
to their patients. One doctor, trained in German, thought to himself, Im
Westen nichts neues (All quiet on the western front). In the concrete-lined
shelter near Suwa Shrine that served as the Nagasaki Prefecture Air Defense
Headquarters, Governor Nagano had just begun his meeting with Nagasaki police
leaders about an evacuation plan. The sun was hot, and the high-pitched,
rhythmic song of cicadas vibrated throughout the city.
Six miles above, the two B-29s approached Nagasaki. Major
Sweeney and his crew could hardly believe what they saw: Nagasaki, too, was
invisible beneath high clouds. This presented a serious problem. Sweeney’s
orders were to drop the bomb only after visual sighting of the aiming point --
the center of the old city, east of Nagasaki Harbor. Now, however, a visual
sighting would likely require numerous passes over the city, which was no
longer possible due to fuel loss: Not only had a fuel transfer pump failed
before takeoff, rendering six hundred gallons of fuel inaccessible, but more
fuel than expected had been consumed waiting at the rendezvous point and while
circling over Kokura.
Bockscar now had only enough fuel to pass over Nagasaki once and
still make it back for an emergency landing at the American air base on Okinawa.
Further, Sweeney and his weaponeer, Navy commander Fred Ashworth, knew that not
using the bomb on Japan might require dumping it into the sea to prevent a
nuclear explosion upon landing. Against orders, they made the split-second
decision to drop the bomb by radar.
Air raid alarms did not sound in the city -- presumably because Nagasaki’s
air raid defense personnel did not observe the planes in time or did not
recognize the immediate threat of only two planes flying at such a high
altitude. When antiaircraft soldiers on Mount Kompira finally spotted the
planes, they jumped into trenches to aim their weapons but didn’t have time to
fire; even if they had, their guns could not have reached the U.S. planes.
Several minutes earlier, some citizens had heard a brief radio announcement
that two B-29s had been seen flying west over Shimabara Peninsula. When they
heard the planes approaching, or saw them glistening high in the sky, they
called out to warn others and threw themselves into air raid shelters, onto the
ground, or beneath beds and desks inside houses, schools, and workplaces. A
doctor just about to perform a pneumothorax procedure heard the distant sound
of planes, pulled the needle out of his patient, and dived for cover. Most of
Nagasaki’s residents, however, had no warning.
By this time, the crews on both planes were wearing protective welders’
glasses so dark that they could barely see their own hands. Captain Kermit
Beahan, Bockscar’s bombardier, activated the tone signal that opened the
bomb bay doors and indicated 30 seconds until release. Five seconds later, he
noticed a hole in the clouds and made a visual identification of Nagasaki.
“I’ve got it! I’ve got it!” he yelled. He released the bomb. The instrument
plane simultaneously discharged three parachutes, each attached to metal
canisters containing cylindrical radiosondes to measure blast pressure and
relay data back to the aircraft. Ten thousand pounds lighter, Bockscar lurched
upward, the bomb bay doors closed, and Sweeney turned the plane an intense 155
degrees to the left to get away from the impending blast.
“Hey, Look! Something’s Falling!”
On the ground below, 18-year-old Wada had just arrived at Hotarujaya
Terminal at the far eastern corner of the old city.
Nagano was at work in the temporary Mitsubishi factory in Katafuchimachi,
on the other side of the mountains from her family’s home.
Taniguchi was delivering mail, riding his bicycle through the hills of a
residential area in the northwestern corner of the city.
Sixteen-year-old Do-oh was back at her workstation inside the Mitsubishi
weapons factory, inspecting torpedoes and eagerly awaiting her lunch break.
On the side of a road on the western side of the Urakami River, Yoshida was
lowering a bucket into the well when he looked up and, like others across the
city, noticed parachutes high in the sky, descending through a crack in the
clouds.
“Rakka-san, they were called back then,” he remembered. Descending
umbrellas. “I just thought that they were regular parachutes -- that maybe
soldiers were coming down.”
“Hey, look! Something’s falling!” he called out to his friends. They all
looked up, putting their hands to their foreheads to block the sun so they
could see.
“The parachutes floated down, saaatto,” he said. Quietly, with no
sound.
A Deafening Roar
The five-ton plutonium bomb plunged toward the city at 614 miles per hour.
Forty-seven seconds later, a powerful implosion forced its plutonium core to
compress from the size of a grapefruit to the size of a tennis ball, generating
a nearly instantaneous chain reaction of nuclear fission. With colossal force
and energy, the bomb detonated a third of a mile above the Urakami Valley and
its 30,000 residents and workers, a mile and a half north of the intended target.
At 11:02 a.m., a superbrilliant flash lit up the sky -- visible from as far
away as Omura Naval Hospital more than 10 miles over the mountains -- followed
by a thunderous explosion equal to the power of 21,000 tons of TNT. The entire
city convulsed.
At its burst point, the center of the explosion reached temperatures higher
than at the center of the sun, and the velocity of its shock wave exceeded the
speed of sound. A tenth of a millisecond later, all of the materials that had
made up the bomb converted into an ionized gas, and electromagnetic waves were
released into the air. The thermal heat of the bomb ignited a fireball with an
internal temperature of over 540,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Within one second, the
blazing fireball expanded from 52 feet to its maximum size of 750 feet in
diameter. Within three seconds, the ground below reached an estimated 5,400 to
7,200 degrees Fahrenheit. Directly beneath the bomb, infrared heat rays
instantly carbonized human and animal flesh and vaporized internal organs.
As the atomic cloud billowed two miles overhead and eclipsed the sun, the
bomb’s vertical blast pressure crushed much of the Urakami Valley. Horizontal
blast winds tore through the region at two and a half times the speed of a
category five hurricane, pulverizing buildings, trees, plants, animals, and
thousands of men, women, and children. In every direction, people were blown
out of their shelters, houses, factories, schools, and hospital beds;
catapulted against walls; or flattened beneath collapsed buildings.
Those working in the fields, riding streetcars, and standing in line at
city ration stations were blown off their feet or hit by plummeting debris and
pressed to the scalding earth. An iron bridge moved 28 inches downstream. As
their buildings began to implode, patients and staff jumped out of the windows
of Nagasaki Medical College Hospital, and mobilized high school girls leaped
from the third story of Shiroyama Elementary School, a half mile from the
blast.
The blazing heat melted iron and other metals, scorched bricks and concrete
buildings, ignited clothing, disintegrated vegetation, and caused severe and
fatal flash burns on people’s exposed faces and bodies. A mile from the
detonation, the blast force caused nine-inch brick walls to crack, and glass
fragments bulleted into people’s arms, legs, backs, and faces, often puncturing
their muscles and organs. Two miles away, thousands of people suffering flesh
burns from the extreme heat lay trapped beneath partially demolished buildings.
At distances up to five miles, wood and glass splinters pierced through
people’s clothing and ripped into their flesh. Windows shattered as far as
eleven miles away. Larger doses of radiation than any human had ever received
penetrated deeply into the bodies of people and animals. The ascending fireball
suctioned massive amounts of thick dust and debris into its churning stem. A
deafening roar erupted as buildings throughout the city shuddered and crashed
to the ground.
“The Light Was Indescribable”
“It all happened in an instant,” Yoshida remembered. He had barely seen the
blinding light half a mile away before a powerful force hit him on his right
side and hurled him into the air. “The heat was so intense that I curled up
like surume [dried grilled squid].” In what felt like dreamlike
slow motion, Yoshida was blown backward 130 feet across a field, a road, and an
irrigation channel, then plunged to the ground, landing on his back in a rice
paddy flooded with shallow water.
Inside the Mitsubishi Ohashi weapons factory, Do-oh had been wiping
perspiration from her face and concentrating on her work when PAAAAAHT TO!
-- an enormous blue-white flash of light burst into the building, followed
by an earsplitting explosion. Thinking a torpedo had detonated inside the
Mitsubishi plant, Do-oh threw herself onto the ground and covered her head with
her arms just as the factory came crashing down on top of her.
[1]In
his short-sleeved shirt, trousers, gaiters, and cap, Taniguchi had been riding
his bicycle through the hills in the northwest corner of the valley when a
sudden burning wind rushed toward him from behind, propelling him into the air
and slamming him facedown on the road. “The earth was shaking so hard that I
hung on as hard as I could so I wouldn’t get blown away again.”
Nagano was standing inside the school gymnasium-turned-airplane-parts
factory, protected to some degree by distance and the wooded mountains that
stood between her and the bomb. “A light flashed -- pi-KAAAAH!” she
remembered. Nagano, too, thought a bomb had hit her building. She fell to the
ground, covering her ears and eyes with her thumbs and fingers according to her
training as windows crashed in all around her. She could hear pieces of tin and
broken roof tiles swirling and colliding in the air outside.
Two miles southeast of the blast, Wada was sitting in the lounge of
Hotarujaya Terminal with other drivers, discussing the earlier derailment. He
saw the train cables flash. “The whole city of Nagasaki was -- the light was
indescribable -- an unbelievably massive light lit up the whole city.” A
violent explosion rocked the station. Wada and his friends dived for cover
under tables and other furniture. In the next instant, he felt like he was
floating in the air before being slapped down on the floor. Something heavy
landed on his back, and he fell unconscious.
Beneath the still-rising mushroom cloud, a huge portion of Nagasaki had
vanished. Tens of thousands throughout the city were dead or injured. On the
floor of Hotarujaya Terminal, Wada lay beneath a fallen beam. Nagano was curled
up on the floor of the airplane parts factory, her mouth filled with glass
slivers and choking dust. Do-oh lay injured in the wreckage of the collapsed
Mitsubishi factory, engulfed in smoke. Yoshida was lying in a muddy rice paddy,
barely conscious, his body and face brutally scorched. Taniguchi clung to the
searing pavement near his mangled bicycle, not yet realizing that his back was
burned off. He lifted his eyes just long enough to see a young child “swept
away like a fleck of dust.”
Sixty seconds had passed.
“A Huge, Boiling Caldron”
The enormous, undulating cloud ascended seven miles above the city. From
the sky, Bockscar’s copilot Lieutenant Frederick Olivi described it as
“a huge, boiling caldron.” William L. Laurence, the official journalist for the
Manhattan Project who had witnessed the bombing from the instrument plane,
likened the burgeoning cloud to “a living thing, a new species of being, born
right before our incredulous eyes.” Captain Beahan remembered it “bubbling and
flashing orange, red and green... like a picture of hell.”
Outside the city, many people who saw the flash of light and heard the
deafening explosion rushed out of their homes and stared in wonder at the
nuclear cloud heaving upward over Nagasaki. A worker on an island in Omura Bay,
several miles north of the blast, described it as “lurid-colored... curling
like long tongues of fire in the sky.” In Isahaya, five miles east of the city,
a grandmother feared that “the sun would come falling down,” and a young boy
grabbed at ash and paper falling from the sky, only to realize that they were
scraps of ration books belonging to residents in the Urakami Valley.
From the top of Mount Tohakkei four miles southeast of Nagasaki, a man
loading wood into his truck was “stunned speechless by the beauty of the
spectacle” of the giant rising cloud exploding over and over again as it
transformed from white to yellow to red. In neighborhoods at the edge of the
city, people peered out of windows and stepped outside to see the atomic cloud
rising above them, only to bolt back inside or to nearby shelters in
anticipation of a second attack.
Inside the city, the bomb’s deadly gale quieted, leaving Nagasaki enveloped
in a dark, dust-filled haze. Nearest the hypocenter (the point on the ground
above which the bomb exploded), almost everyone was incinerated, and those
still alive were burned so badly they could not move. In areas beyond the
hypocenter, surviving men, women, and children began extricating themselves
from the wreckage and tentatively stood, in utter terror, for their first sight
of the missing city. Twenty minutes after the explosion, particles of carbon
ash and radioactive residue descended from the atmosphere and condensed into an
oily black rain that fell over Nishiyama-machi, a neighborhood about two miles
east over the mountains.
Nagano pulled herself up from the floor of the airplane parts factory and
stood, quivering, rubbing debris from her eyes and spitting dust and glass
fragments from her throat and mouth. Around her, adult and student workers lay
cowering on the ground or rose to their feet, stunned and bewildered. Opening
her eyes just a bit, Nagano sensed it was too dangerous to stay where she was.
She ran outside and squeezed herself into a crowded mountain air raid shelter,
where she crouched down and waited for another bomb to drop.
“The whole Urakami district has been destroyed!” one of the male workers
called out to her. “Your house may have burned as well!” Nagano fled from the
bomb shelter and ran toward the Urakami Valley. Outside, the neighborhood
around the factory was almost pitch-dark and hauntingly still. Large trees had
snapped in half, tombstones had fallen in a cemetery nearby, and streets were
filled with broken roof tiles and glass. Small birds lay on the ground,
twitching. Compared to what she had imagined, however, the damages around her
seemed minimal, and Nagano -- who could not see the Urakami Valley -- half
believed that her family might be safe after all.
She hurried through the streets to the southern end of Nishiyamamachi
toward Nagasaki Station, over a mile to the east, pressing past partially
collapsed wooden houses and people fleeing the blast area. As the road curved
west, Nagano rushed by the 277-step stone staircase leading up to the
seventeenth-century Suwa Shrine, still intact, and Katsuyama Elementary School,
just next to City Hall. Forty-five minutes later, Nagano finally passed the
mountains that had stood between her and the expanse of atomic destruction.
In front of her, the main building of Nagasaki Station had collapsed. But
it was the view to her right that shocked her into finally realizing that the
rumors she had heard about the Urakami Valley were true. Where the northern half
of Nagasaki had existed only an hour before, a low heavy cloud of smoke and
dust hovered over a vast plain of rubble. Nothing remained of the dozens of
neighborhoods except tangled electrical wires and an occasional lone chimney.
The huge factories that had lined the river near Nagasaki Station were crumpled
into masses of steel frames and wooden beams, and the streetcar rails were, in
one survivor’s words, “curled up like strands of taffy.”
No trace of roads existed beneath miles of smoking wreckage. Blackened
corpses covered the ground. Survivors were stumbling through the ruins moaning
in pain, their skin hanging down like tattered cloth. Others raced away,
shrieking, “Run! Escape!” A barefoot mother in shredded clothes ran
through the wreckage screaming for her child. Most people, however, were
silent. Many simply dropped dead where they stood.
Nagano’s house was just over a half mile to the north and west, a 10-minute
walk on any other day. She faced in that direction to scan the area, but there
was nothing -- no buildings, no trees, and no sign of life where she had last
seen her mother and younger brother and sister. Her eyes searched frantically
for a way home, but the flames spreading through the ruins prevented access
from all directions. Paralyzed and confused, Nagano stood in front of Nagasaki
Station, alone, with no idea what to do next.
Susan Southard’s first book, Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War
[1] (Viking Books), was a
finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, sponsored by Harvard
University’s Nieman Foundation and the Columbia School of Journalism. Southard
lives in Tempe, Arizona, where she is the founder and artistic director of Essential
Theatre. This essay is adapted from her book.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook [2]. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Nick Turse’s Tomorrow’s Battlefield: U.S. Proxy
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Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World
[4].
From Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War
[1] by Susan Southard.
Reprinted by arrangement with Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.
Copyright © 2015 by Susan Southard
Links:
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The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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