Historian Contemplates "Ugly" Reality of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Photograph of a school in Nagasaki shortly after the city was bombed on August 9, 1945. Source: Alex Wellerstein, Restricted Data: The Nuclear Secrecy Blog. 

After a lifetime of obsession with nuclear weapons, I didn’t think I could learn much more about such pivotal events as the U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which took place 70 years ago this week. But historian Alex Wellerstein, who became my colleague at Stevens Institute of Technology last year, has a knack for knocking the dust off nuclear history so I can see it afresh.

I’ve cited him in several recent columns (see ), and now I’m going to cite him again. In June, when I mentioned I was writing , he steered me to his 2013 blog post “,” a meditation on post-bombing photographs.

Some iconic black and white photos of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Wellerstein notes, show the cities after bodies and rubble have been cleared and make them look like “abandoned cities on the moon.” He displays color photos that depict a messier reality. I urge you to check out his illustrated column, but here is the coda, which makes a point worth pondering on this somber anniversary. Bold type is in the original:

An ugly, troublesome, disturbing one; right between those extremes. The atomic bomb was a weapon used to inflict tremendous human suffering. (This is true whether you think its use was justified or not.) If an atomic bomb were to go off over your city, the damage would be horrifying, the death toll staggering. But it’s a level of destruction that people should try to appreciate for what it is — a realistic possibility, not a clean science-fiction ending or a blow to be shrugged off. 

A final point. As Wellerstein would be the first to acknowledge, the photos he displays do not really capture the ugliness of the atomic bombings, because they do not show the victims, dead and alive. You can find photographs of horribly disfigured casualties online. But the best way to appreciate the suffering caused by the atomic bombs is to read John Hersey’s classic work of journalism Hiroshima, published in 1946.

Toward the end of the book, Hersey quotes a Catholic priest raising questions that remain unanswered: “Some of us consider the bomb in the same category as poison gas and were against its use on a civilian population. Others were of the opinion that in total war, as carried on in Japan, there was no difference between civilians and soldiers, and that the bomb itself was an effective force tending to end the bloodshed, warning Japan to surrender and thus to avoid total destruction. It seems logical that he who supports total war in principle cannot complain of a war against civilians. The crux of the matter is whether total war in its present form is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose. Does it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequences which far exceed whatever good might result? When will our moralists give us a clear answer to this question?”

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