Ban the bomb

The city we’re staying in is very pleasant. It’s bright, buzzing and modern. The sun smiles down on wide tree-lined avenues, where trams trundle past, carrying beachgoers down to sandy beaches dotted along the bay. Herons and egrets hunt along rivers which spread throughout the city like outstretched fingers, whilst kites wheel overhead and palms sway gently in the warm sea breeze.

But something is wrong, very wrong about this city - it holds a terrible past.

This city is Hiroshima.

63 years ago, this city, then of little global significance was suddenly, unwillingly, propelled in the pages of history, becoming the first city to experience the horrors of nuclear attack.

On 6th September 1945, at 8.15am, the Enola Gay, an American B29 bomber dropped ‘Little Boy’, an atom bomb, on the heart of Hiroshima.

The resulting explosion, equivalent to 15,000 tonnes of TNT, obliterated an entire city, destroying 70,000 buildings and killing hundreds of thousands of its inhabitants.

And whilst this attack, combined with the subsequent atom bombing of Nagasaki three days later, ended the Second World War, Japan, and the world, would never be the same again.

Strolling along the river, flanked by all the trappings of a modern Japanese metropolis, I initially found it very hard to grasp the enormity of this single event.

But as we drew closer to ‘ground zero’, which was directly under the hypocentre of the blast, the pleasant surroundings became overshadowed by the ghostly apparition ahead of us. We faced a shell of a large building, its brick walls crumbling and decayed, it’s domed roof reduced to a bare, rusting frame of girders.

This was once the Hiroshima Prefectural Commercial Exhibition Hall, where the region’s goods were proudly displayed and business bustled. Somehow, when the bomb dropped close by it survived, albeit now reduced from its former splendour into a withered skeleton. Post-attack it quickly became reborn as ‘The ‘A Bomb Dome’, a globally recognised symbol of the terror of ‘the bomb’.

Across the river, in the monument-strewn Peace Park, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum left me in no doubt as to the grim reality of nuclear weapons, grimly describing in great detail the events and after effects of the attack.

When Little Boy exploded, some 600 feet above the city, it sent out a shockwave which reduced the city to rubble. Grainy photos show grid-pattern streets, their white dusty lines dividing up the great piles of piles of charred concrete into neat squares. The flattened landscape looks as if a tsunami has hit it, relieved only by the odd blackened tree, defunct telegraph pole or reinforced concrete ruin.

Immediately following the shockwave came extreme heat rays, so hot they melted roof tiles.

Where they met people they left little trace. On part of a building left standing by the blast, one can make out the darkened form of person, sat on the steps of a bank as they waited for it to open. One moment they were here, the next they were gone , instantly vapourised, leaving behind nothing but their shadow, seared into the stone by the heat.

Later that day black rain fell. Thirsty victims, struggling through the levelled streets, drank it out of desperation, seeking to quench their thirst. Where it fell on walls the rain left eerie marks as the radioactive black liquid dribbled to the ground.

As the massive numbers of casualties poured in to whatever makeshift medical facilities could be provided, those doctors that survived became the first medics to witness the gruesome effects of atomic radiation on the human body.

The exhibition stands resembled a house of horror, some pictures too grotesque to bear. Mutilated bodies, unspeakable suffering.

Some say the death toll stands at 200,000. To me it seemed rather pointless, almost ghoulish, to try and establish a precise figure of how may people died that day, or suffered and expired from the effects of radiation in the years after.

Even today, many are still living with the physical and emotional pain. We met one of these ‘hibakushas‘, survivors of the bomb, of which there are some 95,000 still living in Hiroshima.

Mito approached us outside the A-Bomb Dome. A bright and lively chap in his early 60s, he was a four month old foetus in his mother’s womb when the bomb dropped. She was 10km from the hypocentre and so he was spared the physical pain suffered by some many of his fellow citizens.

Now he joins in the efforts to educate the rest of the world about the horrors of nuclear weapons, becoming a ‘peace navigator’ and giving up his time in order to engage with and give free tours to Hiroshima’s many visitors.

I found meeting a hibukusha not only very moving but also a frightening jolt of reality. We are living in a nuclear-armed age, characterised by chaos and uncertainty. Speaking to a survivor of a nuclear attack shook me out of my comfortable Western complacency and shattered any lingering illusions I might have had about the need for a nuclear deterrent.

You can try it for yourself and listen to some of the survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings here.

Aside from the horrific impact of nuclear weapons our visit to Hiroshima provided us with an enlightening insight into the reasons being the atomic bombings.

From books and school lessons I had been informed that dropping the bomb was a necessary evil, an act which may have killed hundreds of thousands of people but saved even more by shortening the war.

Now, learning about things from the other side of the fence the doubts I harboured have turned into fully-fledged scepticism.

Before the bomb was dropped Hiroshima, although of major military significance, was curiously spared the airborne onslaught suffered by other Japanese cities. There is considerable evidence that this was a deliberate policy by the Pentagon, in which Hiroshima, alongside a handful of other Japanese cities, had long been earmarked as a kind of testbed for the US’s new fearful weapon.

Concerned about the Soviet Union’s expansionist ambitions, and anticipating the arms race of the Cold War, the hawks in the US administration might have been anxious to test it ‘in the field’.

Despite all this, it is strange to witness how strong is the US influence in this country: 'convenience stores', 'parking lots', a major American military presence and, irony of ironies, a baseball stadium standing opposite the A-Bomb Dome.

One thing I am now certain of is that by dropping Little Boy, many of those responsible acheived the direct opposite of what they may have hoped, at least in the long term.

This bomb didn’t end all bombs; instead it created more, ushering in a new era where death and destruction could be wreaked on a far greater scale.

Bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki may be argued to have been the right thing for world peace in the short term, but it was surely disastrous in the longer term.

Hiroshima’s legacy is a frightening dangerous one - a nuclear-armed world, in which the citizens of the countries possessing them have been duped that their nuclear deterrent is the only guarantee of a secure and stable world.

Today these weapons are sought by the warlords and fundamentalists, from Washington and Moscow to North Korea and the Middle East. Ever since the 6th September 1945 the world has never been further from peace and harmony.

I consequently came away from Hiroshima sad at the inhumanity we all seem capable of, and uncomprehending of the apathy in which many of us back in Britain seem to be mired. I felt like a fifteen year old again, all tie-die, Doc Martens, CND badges and hopeless idealism. A hardened peacenik.

It’s encouraging therefore to see that the struggle for a nuke-free world continues, and Hiroshima plays a full part in these efforts. Its citizens seek to educate the rest of the world about the folly of going nuclear, sharing their experiences with people from across the world and never losing the faith that one day there will be a world without nukes.

This is symbolised by the flame of peace, burning in the centre of the Peace Park, a flame which will only be extinguished when the final nuclear weapon on earth has been destroyed.

Every time a nuclear weapon is tested the Mayor of Hiroshima sends a letter of protest, calling on the nation responsible to cease such activity. These go on display in the museum.

I found one addressed to a certain Mr Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, dated as recently as 2006, the same year that our (then) Dear Leader committed the UK to spending up to £20 billion on a replacement for the Trident submarines which currently carry its nuclear missiles.

Walking through the galleries of the Peace Memorial Museum, confronted by the reality of a nuclear attack, it is hard to comprehend such a decision, or even justify the millions spent every year on maintaining the UK’s current ‘deterrent’, each warhead many times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

But amidst all this madness there is hope. You need only to look at modern Hiroshima to see this: within one year of the attack trees were blossoming; within ten the ground had been cleaned up and the city rebuilt.

Today it is a bustling, attractive home to over one million inhabitants. Despite the horrific events of sixty-odd years ago life has returned.

Back in the Peace Park the flame continues to burn. It might sound trite but surely we all owe it to the people of Hiroshima, who keep it burning, to work together to abolish nukes so that one day soon they have to keep watch over it no more.