65 Years of Mourning

180° view of Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. The Genbaku Dome can clearly be seen in the center left of the image. The original target for the bomb was the "T"-shaped Aioi Bridge seen in the left of the image.

The 65th anniversary of a retributive response to a covert operation that resulted in the bombing of Pearl Harbour, and Japan's decision to join the Axis countries during World War II.

Japan has the distinction of being the sole nation on Earth to have suffered an atomic attack. The new weapon that was unleashed upon the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki represented weapons of dread magnitude, capable of extinguishing human life and human construction and natural geological features to an extent that no other single armament could ever achieve.

Over 140,000 people died as a result of that bomb dropping on Hiroshima. Although the scientists who worked on the bomb had a fairly good idea of its destructive force, having witnessed more than enough test explosions, it was not until the 13-kiloton bomb, "Little Boy" was launched and exploded over Hiroshima that the full extent of its massive destructive force was exhibited.

People going about their normal daily lives were, in a split-second, entirely obliterated, the city reduced to radioactive rubble.

The survivors of the blast were thought of as monsters by the Japanese public, since so many of these survivors suffered the horrible physical scars left by their close encounter with the effects of radiation. Many died of radiation sickness and cancers that resulted from their exposure to the bomb.

Astonishingly, 227,565 people still live in Japan, registered victims of that horrific occasion. Many of the survivors have never been able to live normal lives, shunned by a frightened society. In the aftermath of the event, people viewed them as carriers of radiation sickness.

A small number of elderly survivors have pledged themselves to spreading the message of the horror of nuclear bombs, revealing to school groups the extent to which their bodies were physically stigmatized by their close encounters with death.

They lived lives of desperate loneliness after the attack; their physical recovery was never complete; their resources were exhausted. The experience and their suffering has left them as steadfast and credible spokespeople for the elimination of all nuclear weaponry.

All succeeding wars, even those pursued by countries which possess nuclear armaments, have been waged with the use of sophisticated but conventional weaponry. No country has been willing to make use of nuclear weaponry, knowing the capability of such explosive devices - all now far more powerful than the relatively 'modest' 13-kiloton bomb dropped on Hiroshima, to destroy on a monumental scale.

Today's fear that totalitarian, rogue, fanatical theocratic countries and even non-state actors like terror groups may be successful in accessing nuclear fissionable materials of a grade readily transformable into arms is not an idle one, without substance. In which instance the dread ravages witnessed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki may be repeated on an even more horrific scale.

It is not very likely that international moves to demolish all existing nuclear devices would ever succeed, much less that the countries currently in possession of such materials would agree to halt their manufacture. The far more worrying prospect is the eventual potential of conscienceless belligerents acquiring such weapons and using them.

Not a future anyone would like to contemplate. Yet it begins to look more and more like the future we may anticipate. Inconceivable, but then the very reality of the existence of nuclear-armed rockets is beyond rational human conception to begin with.