“Why do we come to this place, to Hiroshima?” President Barack Obama asked that question publicly on his visit on May 27, 2016. He was the first sitting U.S. president to visit the city.
On Aug. 6, 1945, an American B-29 bomber with escort aircraft traversed the clear skies over Hiroshima, Japan. No Japanese interceptor aircraft rose to challenge the intruder. The once substantial sea and air forces of Imperial Japan were by then largely destroyed.
The bomb bay doors opened, and a single bomb dropped.
Then, quite literally, hell on earth unleashed. A blinding flash, unbearable light as well as heat introduced a gigantic, utterly devastating explosion. In an instant, the city of Hiroshima was quite literally destroyed.
The new atomic bomb, used for the first time against people in war, worked according to plan. Even scientists, military personnel and others involved in the mammoth Manhattan Project were uncertain what they had created. To provide clarity, there was one test in advance.
On July 16, an atomic bomb detonated successfully in Alamogordo, New Mexico. The experts calculated the odds favored a gigantic but limited explosion, but no one knew for sure what would happen. J. Robert Oppenheimer, a project leader, thought of lines in the “Bhagavad Gita,” Hindu scripture, referencing “a thousand suns” and “Now I am become death.”
On Aug. 9, a second atom bomb fell on Nagasaki, unleashing more devastation and massive killing. An estimated 130,000 people perished from the Hiroshima bombing, approximately half during the explosion, most of the rest soon thereafter.
The comparable estimate for Nagasaki is 80,000 people. Victims of these terrible weapons continued to die because of radiation and other lingering after effects.
Obama deserves credit for visiting Hiroshima. Two other U.S. presidents have visited this special city, Richard Nixon in 1964 before he was elected to the White House and Jimmy Carter in 1984 following his presidency.
Obama was particularly eloquent in answering his own important question:
“We come to ponder a terrible force unleashed in a not so distant past. We come to mourn the dead, including over 100,000 in Japanese men, women and children; thousands of Koreans; a dozen Americans held prisoner.”
Since World War II, nuclear weapons have been part of our dangerous world, but have never been used again in war. President Harry Truman refused to employ them during the Korean War, despite public advocacy by Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Truman instead fired the insubordinate MacArthur.
In 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower came under intense pressure to use nuclear weapons to support our ally France, beleaguered and losing to revolutionary forces in Indochina. Ike firmly, skillfully resisted.
These courageous, successful presidents created precedents that provided an increasingly strong foundation for later efforts to rein in the nuclear arms race, especially but not exclusively between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
There was promising progress during the Obama administration, in particular with the signing in April 2010 of a strategic arms reduction treaty with Russia. Since then, both nations have moved away from cooperation and begun aggressively developing new weapons programs.
These include conventional as well as nuclear weapons. Powerful military lobbies operate in both nations. We need leadership that can restrain these extremely dangerous trends, plus public discussion and debate.
McGeorge Bundy, national security adviser to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, provides “Danger and Survival — Choices About the Bomb During the First Fifty Years.” Read this excellent book.
Arthur I. Cyr is Clausen Distinguished Professor at Carthage College and author of “After the Cold War.” Contact: acyr@carthage.edu.