Splitting the atom

@RANDOM

This week in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, thousands of people gathered to honour the memory of the dead on the 60th anniversary of the world's first atomic-bomb attack.

Little Boy, the bomb that dropped on Hiroshima from Enola Gay on August 6, 1945 killed between 1,00,000 and 1,80,000 citizens. Fat Man was dropped on Nagasaki three days later; it killed an estimated 1,50,000 citizens.

My virtual walk through Hiroshima and Nagasaki six decades on starts with two raspy audio files. President Truman's voice is clear and firm: "The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base.... We have used it in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans."

The next clip in the list is far more tired, almost anguished, as Robert Oppenheimer, the man who's known as the father of the atom bomb says: "'Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that one way or another."
(http://www.nuclearfiles.org/menu/library/media-gallery/audio/ )

At 'Prey from Peace City', photographs and text document the spreading mushroom cloud, an image so familiar that we no longer look on it with dread, and down below, the effects of Little Boy. The earth is scorched; the landscapes speak of absence initially, just that: missing buildings, ashes and dust where there should be people.
(http://www.nvccom.co.jp/abomb/indexe.html )

Among the exhibits at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum is the hair that fell from Hiroko Yamashita's head. There are pictures of twisted bridge girders; pictures of the city before and after; pictures of people desperate for elusive, hopelessly inadequate medical help.

There is Shinichi Tetsutani's tricycle. The boy was a month short of four years, riding his bike when the flash came. The tricycle was buried with him and dug up forty years later by his father.
(http://www.pcf.city.hiroshima.jp/virtual/index.html )

After Hiroshima, the target was Kokura, but the city was hidden under a haze. Bockscar detoured slightly to drop Fat Man on Nagasaki instead. At the Exploratorium, Yosuke Yamahata's photographs capture the devastation.

"The worst was when electric wires got twisted around people's legs and they couldn't escape "" they died in that position, fallen to their knees," he recalled. He shot meticulously, caught in the middle of a disaster on a scale that was too large for him to absorb.
(http://www.exploratorium.edu/nagasaki/ )

The Atomic Bomb museum at Nagasaki has horrifying photographs; it also points to the poetry of bombing survivor Sumako Fukuda, to trees before and after the blast.
(http://www1.city.nagasaki.nagasaki.jp/na-bomb/museum/museume01.html )

A year after the bombs had wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the New Yorker devoted an entire issue to a story that tracked six of the survivors. John Hersey's Hiroshima shook the conscience of the world; in commemoration, the Guardian has carried an abridged version of the original article.
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/secondworldwar/story/0,14058,1532197,00.html )

For 25 years after Hiroshima, very little footage or news photographs could be found. In an explosive investigative article at Editor & Publisher, Greg Mitchell explored the reasons why the US deliberately suppressed images of the blasts.
(http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001001583)

You might want to flip back and forth between Hersey's classic piece, Mitchell's report and Hiromi Tsuchida's Hiroshima picture gallery. One section is devoted to objects: melted sake bottles, a lunch box whose contents, rice and peas, were carbonized by the blast, a damaged contact lens, taken from the burned head of a young girl.
(http://www.lclark.edu/~history/HIROSHIMA/gallery.html )

Or read some of the transcripts from the accounts of the "hibakusha", literally, those who returned from hell "" the survivors of the blasts.
(http://www.inicom.com/hibakusha/ )

Before you log out, remember Sadako Sasaki, who was two when the bombs dropped; at eleven, she was diagnosed with leukemia, the "atom bomb disease". She'd heard an old Japanese tale to the effect that anyone who folded a thousand paper cranes would get well; she had folded more than a thousand when she died, just twelve years old.

Her story was told again and again, and paper cranes began to arrive in Japan from all over the world. Folded clumsily or with perfect creases, sixty years after Hiroshima, the cranes still arrive.

(http://www.sadako.org/ )