Original Child Bomb
05/27/2016 11:35 am ET | Updated 7 hours ago
Marian Wright Edelman
President, Children’s Defense Fund
President Obama’s historic visit to Hiroshima this week offers an opportunity to take a clear-eyed look back to the first and only time nuclear weapons have been used in war. Germany had surrendered on May 8, 1945. Japan refused to surrender and continued to wage the Pacific War. President Harry S. Truman faced a decision on whether or not to drop the world’s first atomic bomb in Japan.
“3: President Truman formed a committee of men to tell him if this bomb would work, and if so, what he should do with it. Some members of this committee felt that the bomb would jeopardize the future of civilization. They were against its use. Others wanted it to be used in demonstration on a forest of cryptomeria trees, but not against a civil or military target. Many atomic scientists warned that the use of atomic power in war would be difficult and even impossible to control. The danger would be very great. Finally, there were others who believed that if the bomb were used just once or twice, on one or two Japanese cities, there would be no more war. They believed the new bomb would produce eternal peace.”
This fragment is from Trappist monk and social justice and peace activist Thomas Merton’s 1962 prose poem “Original Child Bomb.” Its title is a rough translation of the root characters in the Japanese term for the atom. Merton subtitled his “anti-poem” “Points for meditation to be scratched in the walls of a cave,” and it includes a numbered list of 41 points about the atomic bomb’s creation, the decision to drop the first one on Hiroshima, and its aftermath:
“32: The bomb exploded within 100 feet of the aiming point. The fireball was 18,000 feet across. The temperature at the center of the fireball was 100,000,000 degrees. The people who were near the center became nothing. The whole city was blown to bits and the ruins all caught fire instantly everywhere, burning briskly. 70,000 people were killed right away or died within a few hours. Those who did not die at once suffered great pain. Few of them were soldiers.
33: The men in the plane perceived that the raid had been successful, but they thought of the people in the city and they were not perfectly happy. Some felt they had done wrong. But in any case they had obeyed orders. ‘It was war.’”
It was war, and despite the initial reaction by co-pilot Captain Robert Lewis as he witnessed the devastation — “My God, what have we done?” — pilots and crew members stressed over and over again that they believed they did what they had to do. But the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki have not produced eternal peace. Instead they opened a Pandora’s box that can never be fully locked back up.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marian-wright-edelman/original-child-bomb_b_10164816.html
https://inaspaciousplace.wordpress.com/2012/08/06/hiroshima-original-child-bomb-by-thomas-merton/
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