On the day I intended to post this blog I named it “Happy Hiroshima Day.”
It was August 6, the birthday of my eldest daughter and the 70th anniversary of the day America, sweet land of liberty, dropped an atom bomb. But on that day I could neither finish nor post the blog because a hacker sabotaged my email, creating mayhem, frustration and a mountain of useless work.
Jan Fuller is the senior chaplain at Elon University in N.C. I prepared for her day by sending her a book of poems by one of our favorite poets. I am immensely proud of who she is and the work she does, overseeing an interfaith program that helps students of all religions to live out their faith while learning to respect others. A million such programs might give us peace on earth.
I was totally unprepared for an attack by crooks and the two days of fruitless work they left me.
As for the atom bomb, I prepared for its day by reading several conflicting opinions, all designed to tell me how to think about this monster that we keep trying to put back into its cage.
First, I read Paul Russell’s long essay, “Thank God for the Atom Bomb.” He wrote it in 1989, but I was at that moment in a particularly bad period of the Lebanese civil war and I never saw it until 2015. The very title started to make me mad, but I was determined to know what this man thought, and he built a case I didn’t know how to refute. He told me how many divisions of the United States Army were poised to invade Japan, how many men that included (of which he was one), how many of those we expected to lose, how long it would take to conquer the mainland. He added to these numbers all the American captives whom the Japanese would promptly kill and then the number of Japanese, soldiers and civilians, we expected to kill. The total of all this was several hundred thousand, so Russell convinced me that the atom bomb had saved many lives. Then he spoke of the unspeakable suffering of soldiers and civilians, the wounded and the grieved, making me glad that we did not have to go through all of that. Finally, he persuaded me that President Truman did what he thought was right.
Then I read an article by Christian Appy, published by Truthdig. Appy assured me that six of the seven five-star generals we had at the time felt that there was no need to use the bomb, because Japan was very close to surrendering. Several military leaders, including Dwight Eisenhower objected on moral grounds. The president, according to Appy, actually asked the generals how many soldiers we should expect to lose in an invasion, and they told him 40,000, though later Truman wrote in his memoirs that it was half a million.
While leaders pondered, to use the bomb or not, I was being taught in a high school class that the atom was the smallest division of matter; it could not be split. Four hundred miles away it was being split!
It worries me to think that I still live with a worm’s eye view of the world, as I did along with so many others, in the civil war in Lebanon. In Lebanon for fifteen years we civilians received daily messages from different sources and tried to put them all together and understand who was shooting at us and why. The obvious thing was the lack of trust, the fear that kept the fighting going. Now, in 2015, we can locate information on anything that interest us, in different versions that never quite add up, and distrust is the most obvious factor in world affairs.
I tend to read the conflicting assertions and then wonder what I, down here in the dirt, can know about either history or today, the reasons for bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the wisdom of the deal with Iran that now occupies our minds.
In Paul Russell’s essay he reasons that understanding history requires pretending that we don’t understand today. True. And we should not have to pretend, because in so many ways we really don’t understand. I grant him this, that it would not be fair to judge Truman or the American people of 1945 by the realities of today. Using this same logic, I insist that we can’t use the apparent exigencies of today, such as the politics of the Middle East, to threaten the future of the world.
It is time, past time, to build trust instead of bombs, and it appears to me that the deal with Iran is an effort to do that, not a world-saving solution, but a step in the right direction. In the words of Tom Fletcher, outgoing British ambassador to Lebanon, in his farewell letter, “The driving quest of diplomacy is for imperfect ways to help people not kill each other.”
What I know for sure is that I hate the bomb. I hate that my country built it and used it. I hate that I distrust my country, because I understand that we played with the future of this planet. I hate that the USA is the bully that controls the bomb. I hate that we quietly put it into the Middle East, making sure that our friend Israel had it but no one else. I hate that we are quibbling among ourselves over details of deals with other countries instead of facing the enormous question of why we, the USA, should own this power to annihilate the world.
Even without all the facts, I know this much…..On August 6, 1945, the world began to understand, though slowly, that we humans might destroy ourselves. On August 6, 1956, I gave birth to a peacemaker (not that I knew at the time what I was doing). On August 6, 2015, hackers proved that the impulse to destroy is not the private property of rulers and politicians and armies, but is active down here in the dirt where we worms live.
The most believable part of Appy’s essay is the anecdotal evidence of the American peoples’ unwillingness to admit many years afterward that we did anything wrong by developing and using the bomb. And, if this is a democracy, everything starts with what we want.