Atomic war

There was no one to write the green-eyed girl
The words that her lover had said
While Mother at home is 'waiting her girl
She'll only know she's dead
                 - "Two Soldiers" (Cowboy Junkies)

The San Francisco Chronicle has been paying a lot of attention to the Hiroshima anniversary.

HIROSHIMA: The birth of nuclear warfare / 50,000 survivors / Some Hiroshima residents still carry the scars of the living hel...  by John Flinn San Francisco Chronicle 07/31/05

Yamaoka and her mother fled toward Hijiyama Hill, where there was a military encampment.

"I passed a friend and she didn't recognize my bloated face. It was then that I started to feel the pain from my burns. When I got to the military base I lay down and someone put tempura oil on my burns. There were so many people on the ground who were dead and dying that you had to call out, 'Help me!' to let them know you were still alive. If you stopped screaming they assumed you were dead. There were people all around me on the brink of death, and already they were covered with maggots.

"I told my mother I wanted to die at home on my tatami mat, not here on the ground. She told me our house was gone. There was nothing to go back to. People told me that if I drank the water I'd die, so I drank lots and lots of it. I wanted to die."

Half an hour after the explosion, a strange rain began falling on the city. Soot and debris from the explosion had risen high into the atmosphere with the mushroom cloud, mixed with radioactive particles and then fallen back onto the city as a thick, oily, sticky black rain. It was highly radioactive. ...

Yamaoka, 75, is still scarred. Her fingernails curve off her fingers at odd angles, and the skin on her hands is puffy and red. She can't twist the plastic cap off a bottle of water, and when someone snaps a picture of her, the flash makes her wince.

"I can't help it," she said. "It always reminds me of that day." She's undergone 27 skin grafts and other operations, in Japan and the United States. Yamaoka developed breast cancer years ago, and now has thyroid cancer. She has chosen to let it run its course. "I just can't go through another operation," she said.

HIROSHIMA: The birth of nuclear warfare / How the U.S. got to Dr. Strangelove / Nuclear weapons changed the world by William S. Kowinski San Francisco Chronicle 07/31/05.

That the second bomb left San Francisco on the day the first was tested suggests the momentum to use it. Whether dropping the bomb was necessary to secure Japan's surrender before an invasion became necessary is still being debated. DeGroot believes that Japan was looking for a way to surrender in June and July. But there were other considerations, mostly to do with demonstrating American power, especially to the Soviet Union.

Using the bomb quickly became a test of patriotism. "For most Manhattan Project scientists the bomb was a deterrent, not a weapon," DeGroot writes. Physicist Leo Szilard had done as much as anyone to try to persuade FDR to develop the bomb because Germany was doing so. But on the day after that first test, he sent government officials a petition signed by 69 project scientists arguing that to use the bomb would ignite a dangerous arms race and damage America's postwar moral position, especially its ability to bring "the unloosed forces of destruction under control."

The petition was ignored, and Gen. Leslie Groves, the senior military official in charge of the project, began making a case that Szilard was a security risk. It's a pattern that would be repeated often.  ...

Hiroshima was selected as the primary target because it had no allied POW camps. However, there were nearly 5,000 American children in the city -- "mainly children sent to Japan after their parents, U.S. citizens of Japanese origin, had been interred." It seems likely some of those children were from San Francisco. ...

This peculiar combination of denial plus the immense power of thousands of bombs contributed to an era of deadly absurdities: the age of Dr. Strangelove. Yet reality was not so different, right down to the preposterously appropriate names: the head of the Strategic Air Command, Gen. Tommy Power, gave his philosophy of nuclear war in 1960: "At the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win!"