Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount."
― General Omar N. Bradley
The Norwegian Nobel Committee has awarded the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize to the Japanese organization Nihon Hidankyo, a grassroots movement of atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No one can know for certain the Committee's deliberations behind closed doors, but it seems obvious that the Doomsday Clock has inched further to midnight this year. The "taboo" against using nuclear weapons is "under pressure," the Committee wrote in their announcement, an understatement. And though conventional weapons can wreak destruction beyond all imagining—Vietnam, Israel, Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine and now Beirut—it is the specter of a nuclear explosion, and various disarmament treaties that for the last 80 years have acted as a deterrent to the annihilation of all humankind.
Survivors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima have become living witnesses to the nightmare scenario of nuclear holocaust. Having met a few of them, I was particularly gratified to read about the Nobel announcement as many are aging out of recognition for their efforts to work for a sustaining peace in our troubled world.
I first met then 83-year-old Sueichi Kido from Nagasaki in May of 2015. He was one of twenty survivors of the atomic blasts who traveled to New York for the opening of an exhibit in the UN lobby, and discussions about the world's nuclear arsenal. A small man with a cherubic face, badly burned, Mr. Kido, a retired history professor, has devoted his retirement years to telling his story. Miraculously, he is still alive, and still working for peace. "There aren't many of us left. We are getting old, we are sick," he says. Five-years-old at the time of the blast and living within the 2 km epicenter, his mother carried him away from the wind and flames in search of shelter. Flesh was melting off their bodies, they were thirsty. There was no water, no shelter, no medical facility. The city had been incinerated. Needless to say, there was no question of a normal childhood for Mr. Kido after this holocaust. He didn't stop trembling until he was ten-years-old, or laugh, or play. PTSD doesn't describe the implosion in his body and his soul.
The survivors of the bombings are called hibakusha, a Japanese word that literally translates to "explosion-affected people." Hibakusha and their children have been stigmatized in Japan and it is only recently that the government has recognized their medical complaints as a consequence of the blasts. My husband's uncle, Norman Cousins, the editor of The Saturday Review used the platform of the magazine for a post-blast adoption program. Subscribers sponsored orphans and later brought twelve disfigured "Hiroshima Maidens" to the United States for reconstructive surgery.
You can read about the project here:
https://hibakushastories.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Hiroshima-Maidens.pdf
There is a plaque set in a stone dedicated to Norman Cousins at the Peace Park in Hiroshima, and members of our family still attend ceremonies there every year. President Truman and his advisers censored the press after the blasts and suppressed the stories of the military witnesses and survivors. Even General MacArthur doubted the wisdom of dropping the bombs, and feared it. He argued that the saturation bombing of Tokyo—200, 000 killed—just prior to the nuclear blasts, would end the war just as quickly.
"We knew the world would not be the same," J. Robert Oppenheimer said after the first test blast on July 16, 1945. "A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita... "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
This post is dedicated to President Barack Obama, the first American president to pay his respects at the Peace Park in Hiroshima.