Rethinking the Bomb
It was Aug. 6, 1945, and Setsuko Iwamoto had just gotten to school. The morning bell rang, and the 13-year-old girl was running to assemble on the school grounds, when from the corner of her eye she saw a very bright flash-and her world changed forever. When she regained consciousness, she was trapped under a collapsed building and could hear the screams of classmates nearby. She somehow crawled out from the rubble, stood up, and looked around. Her world was dark, the sun blocked by soot and dust whirling in the air. Aside from the weakening screams, the city was eerily silent, and Iwamoto thought for a minute that she might be the last living creature on Earth.
All her life, Iwamoto, now 74, has tried to keep alive the memory of that day. But she is losing confidence that the world still remembers-and understands-the full horror of the atomic bomb. Just under two months ago, North Korea broke into the nuclear weapons club with a test explosion, which, though weak, sent political shock waves throughout the region. In reaction, pacifist Japan is cautiously opening a debate on a subject long taboo: whether to start its own nuclear weapons program. "I strongly believe that nuclear weapons and humans cannot coexist," Iwamoto says. "I'm very concerned about the direction Japan is heading in now."
Ever since its defeat in World War II, which ended with the American atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan has been governed by a constitution-written by U.S. occupation forces-that renounces war as a sovereign right and allows for only limited self-defense. Japan's hawkish new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, is seeking constitutional revisions expanding the definition of self-defense, in part because of regional threats such as North Korea. Then, too, Japan's potential shift is itself causing unease in a region that remembers brutal Japanese occupation during World War II. Inevitably, some politicians-including Foreign Minister Taro Aso-say Japan also should re-examine its rejection of nuclear weapons. However, at the end of the recent Asian economic summit in Vietnam, Abe vowed to keep Japan nonnuclear and a leading voice for nuclear disarmament. "Japan," he said, "is different from other countries in that it has suffered a nuclear attack."
This week, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, visits Japan to talk about efforts to turn back the North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs and to step up international nonproliferation efforts.
Memorials. Some six decades after its nuclear devastation, Hiroshima is a sparkling city, with wide boulevards and the newest department stores. But the past is remembered and marked by the small shrines to the dead that dot the city, built by different work groups, civic organizations, or individuals. At the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, a perky, matter-of-fact narrator tells the story of the B-29 Superfortress bomber Enola Gay and the fireball that exploded roughly 1,900 feet above the city at 8:15 a.m. on Aug. 6, 1945, releasing heat of over 1 million degrees Celsius. In the background are images of women and children with skin melting off their bodies, hair standing on end.
The official number of dead at Hiroshima, as given at the museum, is "140,000 (plus or minus 10,000)." That takes into account both the estimated 80,000 people who died instantly and the 60,000 more who died by the end of the year from burns, wounds, and other radiation-related causes. For years, many survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, known as hibakusha, did not talk about their memories-both out of fear of discrimination and because they felt a deep-seated guilt for having survived when so many did not. Many also simply wanted to bury the memory of that day along with the remains of their family and friends.
But a legacy of that horrifying past is that this city of 1.2 million people remains deeply pacifist. The just-retired director of the museum, Minoru Hataguchi, was in his mother's womb when the bomb hit. He ticks off a list of the world's nuclear weapons countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia, China, India, Pakistan-and, perhaps, North Korea, Israel, and Iran. "The world is moving not toward nuclear disarmament but nuclear development," he says. "And of course, that is not the wish of Hiroshima.... If you forget this experience, the impact of nuclear weapons, that will eventually lead to the extinction of human beings."
However, the question of which nuclear countries pose the greatest threat to the rest of the world elicits a reply that may surprise many in the West. When asked, Iwamoto and her friends reply, "North Korea." And after that? "America."
This story appears in the December 4, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.