Everyone won’t agree on this, by any means, but I’m glad that President Barack Obama will be making a stop at Hiroshima during his imminent trip to Japan.
I’m less concerned about whether such a visit would look like an apology to Japan than I am about our willingness to use the brutal deaths of many thousands of people as part of an argument, 71 years later, about who was right and who was wrong.
That fact is, the mass destruction of a large civilian population, such as the one that occurred at Hiroshima, ought to be considered -- and commemorated -- apart from the political and military circumstances in which it occurred.
I decline to take a position on whether Hiroshima was justified or necessary, or whether the deaths of 140,000 mostly noncombatant civilians balances with the many thousands or hundreds of thousands of American and Japanese lives that would probably have been lost during an invasion of Japan.
Ghastly calculations such as this one distract from the breathtaking event itself. On Aug. 6, 1945, the Enola Gay, a B-29 based in Tinian, reached Hiroshima after a six-hour flight and dropped “Little Boy,” a small atomic bomb by today’s standards, at 8:15 a.m.
The bomb detonated about 610 meters above the city’s center. The classic account of the explosion’s impact is in John Hersey’s short book, “Hiroshima,” published in 1946. Hersey interviewed survivors of the blast and recounted the stories of six of them, ordinary people attending to ordinary tasks on an ordinary day.
In some respects, Hiroshima was an experiment. During the war, the city had been largely spared from bomb damage, and the atomic bomb itself had been rushed through development. No one could be certain precisely what would happen when it was used for the first time against a target.
But even the comparatively small “Little Boy” was surprisingly effective: the city’s center was essentially flattened; 80,000 people were killed almost immediately; within a few months the death toll reached 140,000; and after another atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki a few days later, the long war with Japan came to an end.
And who’s to say this wasn’t a fitting ending to our global history’s most brutal and destructive war?
Hiroshima gets special consideration because of the first use of the atomic bomb, but it wasn’t the most destructive episode of the war, even for a single air raid. On March 9, 1945, 300 B-29s dropped 1,665 tons of incendiary bombs on Tokyo, producing an immense firestorm that killed, by some estimates, 200,000 people.
When it comes to mass destruction of civilians, the Japanese, of course, aren‘t entirely innocent. In a prequel to World War II, during six weeks in 1937, Japanese soldiers killed an estimated 300,000 unarmed Chinese civilians in Nanking.
In fact, given enough time, the human capacity for the destruction of other humans is impressive. During World War II, the Nazis killed 6 million Jews. As the time frame gets longer and the numbers get higher, estimates of the destruction get hazier: Over the several centuries of the “conquest” of North America by Europeans, the death toll for American Indians soars into the uncountable tens of millions.
My point isn’t that all of these genocides were necessarily equivalent.
But at the time the destruction was being carried out, it had a rationale, whether good or bad, and few of the perpetrators were spending much time wondering if their actions, decades or centuries later, would be something that future generations would regret or need to apologize for.
As much as anything, Hiroshima says that we should be careful with the enormous destructive capacity that lies at our fingertips, which is why presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s cavalier attitude toward the proliferation and use of nuclear weapons is particularly worrisome.
So, yes, I’m happy that President Obama is visiting Hiroshima. If the opportunity arises, so should Donald Trump. And Hillary Clinton.
So should we all.
John M. Crisp, an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service, teaches in the English Department at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas. Readers may send him email at
jcrisp@delmar.edu. –Ed.
(Tribune Content Agency)
