EDITORIAL -- The Common Legacy Of the Hiroshima Bomb
FOR MORE THAN a year, Americans have been celebrating the 50th anniversaries of the heroic events leading up to the end of World War II: from D-Day to the liberation of Paris, the fall of Berlin, the liberation of the concentration camps, V-E Day, the signing of the U.N. Charter, the battles of Iwo Jima, Okinawa and now -- finally, fatefully and with more ambivalence than pride -- the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, followed by Japan's unconditional surrender.
Unlike the earlier observances, this anniversary is not a day for flag- waving celebrations but for soul- searching reflections. It is an occasion to confront the meaning of what happened half a century ago when "the basic power of the universe," in President Truman's words, was used to inflict such massive death and carnage as to irrevocably alter human history.
The single "Little Boy" bomb that exploded over Hiroshima at 8:15 a.m. on Aug. 6, 1945 -- incinerating 70,000 Japanese, mostly women and children, in a blinding flash of heat that is said to have ignited birds in flight -- left in its irradiated winds a new world born in anxiety and denial. Suddenly, though the realization would only come later, mankind possessed a thing it could not acknowledge: the means of its own mass extinction.
Learning to confront and live with that awful truth, or hide from it, has shaped the history of the last half century. It has defined both the order and disorder of relations among nations; it has occupied the best minds of two generations of scientists, philosophers, statesmen, artists and moral teachers; it has shaded the meanings of the very words we speak with irony, self-deceit and existential doubt.
The 50-year struggle to confront the legacy of Hiroshima has involved enormous costs -- political, financial, environmental and personal -- without achieving much in the way of understanding. Witness the raging controversy over this year's Smithsonian exhibit of the Enola Gay B-29 that dropped the bomb. The same questions that a group of scientists and politicians struggled over in 1945 -- Was the bomb necessary to end the war? Were the targets appropriate? Was the "power of the universe" containable? -- are still raging 50 years later.
Today, according to a Gallup poll, Americans are almost evenly divided on whether the bomb should have been dropped on Japan, with a small plurality saying other means should have been used to force a Japanese surrender. Yet popular sentiment against the future use of nuclear weapons -- or even the threat of their use -- has grown steadily, especially since the end of the Cold War, which suggests that we may gradually be coming to terms with the past.
Whether or not the bomb shortened the war or saved more lives than it cost may ultimately be irrelevant. The more vital lesson of 50 years of living in the nuclear age may be the dawning recognition that we are all "hibakusha" -- all scarred survivors of the atomic bomb. Acknowledging that legacy may be the most appropriate way to observe this fateful anniversary.