Death Fell From The Sky

"I could hear schoolchildren screaming: 'Help me! Help me!"
"It was too pitiful, too horrible. Even now it fills me with emotion."
Kinuyo Ikegami, 82, Hiroshima survivor

"The suffering, such as illness, gets carried on over the generations -- that is what I want President Obama to know."
"I want him to understand our sufferings."
Han Jeongsoon, 58, daughter of Korean survivor

"Death fell from the sky and the world was changed. [Use of atomic bombs] demonstrated that mankind possessed the means to destroy itself."
"We stand here[Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park monument] in the middle of this city and force ourselves to imagine the moment the bomb fell ... we listen to a silent cry."
"We must have the courage to escape the logic of fear and pursue a world without them [nuclear weapons]."
U.S. President Barack Obama

President Obama and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan took part in a wreath-laying ceremony at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial on Friday. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times

"At any place in the world, this tragedy must not be repeated", said his Japanese counterpart, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. These are words that have been spoken countless times, emotionally and with full intent to ensure that they are a prophecy that will be fulfilled. Hiroshima and Nagasaki represent crimes against humanity, no less and no more than the meticulously-carried out, far more time-consuming measures of the Final Solution.

The Holocaust took years to reach its intended target, falling short when it reached six million Jews and additional political prisoners, gypsies, homosexuals and others unfortunate enough to become temporary residents of death camps. The decision to bomb two Japanese cities with a device whose full potential was not yet fully realized led to two events each of which took minutes as the bombs dropped on an unsuspecting citizenry.

Death harvested 150,000 men, women and children in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and an additional 70,000 three days later when a second bomb hit Nagasaki. True, it is this president singularly most capable of empathizing with the enormity of the decision and the outcome. Yet he treads a fine line between empathy and the rigour of acknowledging that history gives us dual accounts and interpretations.

It was significant as an exchange between human beings who always have far more in common with another than the vain trifles that set them belligerently apart from one another in preparation to doing great harm, that it would be this man expressing himself before survivors of the atrocities. For definitions of need and response aside, even those who promote the message of 'no other choice', must call the dropping of those bombs atrocities.

The sane among us long for a resolution and the determination to carry forward the destruction of all nuclear weapons. But sane people too are sometimes carried away on the seas of passion and anger and conflict between nations. Calling for a nuclear-free world is a sentiment of passion and righteousness.

But it must also be acknowledged that gunpowder was never eschewed because of its destructiveness, and the powerful destructive devices we call nuclear bombs are a genie outgrown its original container.