Sleeping through Hiroshima Day

As an aging hippie with roots in the 1960s and 1970s peace movement, Hiroshima Day (6th August) has always been important to me. My regular correspondents have gotten used, over the years, to my recurrent "today is Hiroshima Day" in the first conversation of that day each year. Yet I let yesterday's 60th anniversary pass without comment. Perhaps this is a sign of age, though I don't feel noticeably older than this time last year. Perhaps it's that I feel the dynamics of the world have changed, though the passing of the cold war in which I grew up has not made it noticeably safer. Perhaps I was thinking about Jim Putnam's post of the day before, Hiroshima Anniversary. I don't honestly know why it is. I just know that I passed yesterday thinking about the anniversary but saying nothing.

I was always apart from many of my friends in not seeing the Hiroshima attack as a uniquely horrible event. I don't see that it much matters to the thousands of dead whether they were killed by a nuclear explosion in Hiroshima or a barrage of high explosive and incendiaries in Tokyo or Dresden, . I don't see a moral step change between the thousands more left as walking dead from radiation poisoning or genetic damage and the similar numbers maimed by fire or chemical toxins elsewhere.

Nagasaki is a slightly different matter. There, the suspicion has always remained that the bomb was dropped as research rather than warfare: because somebody wanted to compare and contrast data from uranium and plutonium devices.

No – to me the significance of Hiroshima, beyond itself, is historiotechnological. It was on that day that a new time started in which belligerents could fry whole populations rather than just portions of them – though with little chance of destroying enemy military capacity for counterattack.

That in itself is, of course, only a continuation of an old trend. Since such records started to be kept, the death rates in wars have shown a relative shift from military to civilian populations. But if a trend is already worrying, its "mere" continuation is sufficient reason for alarm – and snuffs out hopes that the trend might, as previous technologies reach their practical limits, come to an end .

Jim mentions his days as a targetter of nuclear weapons. I was at one time in another place with some knowledge of how that targetting was done on all five sides of the standoff we dubbed (as Jim recalls) "MAD", and saw with sickness in my heart how amoral the whole thing was. But that was nothing new ... when was war ever anything but sickeningly amoral? I often catch myself thinking that I would not have done that job that Jim did; but I know that to be hypocritical of me. I did other things, believing them to be for the best of intentions, and in the light of hindsight did far more harm to far more people.