In July I found myself in the city of Hiroshima in Japan.
This August sees the 70th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on this city from the US bomber named Enola Gay. There is now a Peace Park at the site under where the weapon was detonated 600m above the city. The museum has a scale model where the bomb is represented as a small ‘sun’ – which in some respects it was – exploding in the air at 8.15am on the morning of 6 August 1945. There will no doubt be ceremonies to mark the anniversary of this ghastly event, which in many ways sadly marks the advent of ‘the nuclear age.’
A changed world
Although there were 24 kg of uranium in the Hiroshima bomb, it was only about one kg which underwent fission. The incredible heat, radiation and blast crushed nearly all buildings within two kilometres of the hypocentre. Half an hour afterwards black rain carrying radioactive material poured down. The human cost was indescribable. The bomb killed 140,000 people. In the central square mile of the city nine out of every ten people died. What is also horrific is the fact that nine out of ten of those nine out of ten were children, mothers and old people. At the outbreak of WWII such an attack on civilians would have been unthinkable. Civilised countries did not do that sort of thing. The Allies had gone to war to defend these very values against the barbarous philosophy of Nazism. But the world and civilised society had changed drastically between 1939 and 1945.
Okinawa
In order to understand President Truman’s decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima and a second three days later on Nagasaki, you need to at least consider the battle for the island of Okinawa. As the net closed in around Japan the American forces invaded this island with the intention of making it a base from which the invasion of Japan itself would take place. But with the fanatical Japanese leadership encouraging their soldiers to fight to the last man and to use the native people of Okinawa as ‘human shields’, this battle saw the deaths of a quarter of a million people – American, Okinawan and Japanese. The memorial park in the south of the island which I visited contains what seemed almost endless rows of memorials of the names of the dead.
If this was the human cost of one small island how many lives would be lost in the battle for Japan itself? Thus Truman decided to use the first atomic weapon. And Japan’s leaders were fanatical. One of the reasons so many children were killed at Hiroshima was because these young school boys and girls were being used to build defences for the city.
Civilization facing itself
The BBC Bronowski Lecture for 1981 explained that Professor Jacob Bronowski went, in November 1945, after the war was over, as a member of the British Mission to Nagasaki. Bronowski recalled that as he stood among the ruins of the city his imagination was dwarfed by the catastrophe. He found words inadequate. It was, he said, ‘a universal moment… civilization face-to-face with its own consequences.’ And now we have nuclear weapons far more powerful than the small bombs which fell on these Japanese cities forever to be remembered in history.
This whole anniversary raises questions about the nature of humanity and civilisation itself. From a Christian perspective we are caused to reflect on the sinful heart of man, prepared to inflict such devastation on others and indeed to pursue such atrocities as would seem to make the use of such weapons reasonable.
Where will science take us?
It also raises questions about where mankind is going, led by scientific endeavour. We are not to be Luddites, but even at the dawn of the nuclear age these questions were raised. The first test of a nuclear weapon in the New Mexico desert was given the code name Trinity. It is interesting that the official report of that explosion uses Christian imagery. Here is part of that report, sent to President Truman who was meeting with Churchill and Stalin at Potsdam: ‘It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described…Then came the strong sustained roar which warned of doomsday and made us feel that we puny things were blasphemous to dare tamper with the forces heretofore reserved to the Almighty.’
The frontiers of science are no longer to do with nuclear power. We now are on the verge of enormous strides in bio-engineering and robotics. Robots have begun to appear in the workforce in Japan. Machines are already smarter than humans, though at present only with an intelligence based on programs written by humans, but the talk is that maybe soon there will be programs which, made aware of their environments, will be able to improve themselves independently of human intervention. What then will fallen but ingenious humanity have unleashed upon itself? That would be another ‘universal moment.’
At the end of his essay ‘Science and Human Values’ Jacob Bronowski asks: ‘Has science fastened upon our society a monstrous gift of destruction which we can neither undo nor master, and which like a clockwork automaton is set to break our necks?’
As we reflect on this anniversary let us pray for the churches there and wisdom for world leaders and the scientific community.
