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Created by WCPHS English Dept. H (Kavanagh, Alt, Hailey 2013) 1

HiroshimaStudent Packet

Created by WCPHS English Dept. H (Kavanagh, 2011) 2

Unit Assessment

SWBAT:Grammar, Mechanics, and Usage:• Use sentence-combining techniques, effectively avoiding problematic comma splices, run-on

sentences, sentence fragments, especially in sentences containing compound subjects or verbs (5)• Determine the need for punctuation and conjunctions to avoid awkward-sounding sentence

fragments and fused sentences (2)• Recognize and correct marked disturbances of sentence flow and structure (e.g., participial

phrase fragments, missing or incorrect relative pronouns, dangling or misplaced modifiers) (3)• Delete commas that disturb the sentence flow (e.g., between modifier and modified element)

(2)• Solve such grammatical problems as whether to use an adverb or adjective form, how to

ensure straightforward subject-verb and pronoun-antecedent agreement, and which preposition to use in simple contexts (5)

• Use apostrophes to indicate simple possessive nouns (3)Style:• Apply an awareness of the focus and purpose of a fairly involved essay to determine the

rhetorical effect and suitability of an existing phrase or sentence, or to determine the need to delete plausible but irrelevant material (4)

• Determine the need for conjunctive adverbs or phrases to create subtle logical connections between sentences (e.g., therefore, however, in addition (4)

• Use the word or phrase most appropriate in terms of the content of the sentence and the tone of the essay (3)

• Correct redundant material that involves sophisticated vocabulary and sounds acceptable as conversational English (e.g., “an aesthetic viewpoint” versus “the outlook of the aesthetic viewpoint”

Writing Prompt

Hersey intentionally created Hiroshima as a relatively objective, non-judgmental account of the bombing. His purpose was to jar the American reading public, upon whom an atmosphere of complacency had descended in the days and months following the blast. Hersey attempted to counteract this reaction by portraying the Japanese people as human beings, not as just an enemy in war. The book's message is fundamental: Grave consequences follow grave acts. Having read Hiroshima, the primary accounts, and the analysis, analyze when, if ever, is it right for a nation to carry out such an act?


Grading Criteria:See attached rubric.

k-w-lTopic: Hiroshima


What I Know What I Want to Know What I Have Learned

An Ethics ProbePrivacyWhat are the appropriate limits of privacy? Is it unethical to break a confidence if the behavior that is known involves something really destructive to the person or others–e.g., suicide or murder?

A. What about self-mutilation, cutting; or driving while intoxicated?

B. Should there be more boundaries on group pressures for intimacy:


(1) What about church ministers who encourage people to hug each other?

(2) In groups, being encouraged to disclose more about one's life than is comfortable. (This could apply to this class, too– so check it out.)

C. Recent moves toward a standard or pooled electronic health records opens them to hackers and insurance administrators who then can use this information to deny health care coverage to the people. Claims that these records can be made secure are of dubious validity, even if they are naively sincere.

Age Limits: What should be the proper age limits for driving, drinking, smoking, voting, going into the military, getting married without a parent's consent, having an abortion without a parent's consent, and other age-limitations.

A. Should there be any routine age limitations on the older age side? For which roles or skills?

Language Dialect and Accent: Is it all right to discriminate among people because of dialect, when that mode of speech may not be understood by a significant portion of the community?

A. Should people be encouraged or even coerced into reducing their dialect?

B. Or should dialects be granted equal status?

What about jobs or roles in which being understood clearly is an important role component, such as in offering tech support by phone, or other service-related dealing-with-people roles?

International ObligationsAre wealthier nations obliged to help other nations or governments, not just with humanitarian aid, but with military aid, or even more, are we obliged to intervene if those governments institute or enable or condone massive human rights abuses?

A. What if the governments collapse in civil war? Or become chaotic and ineffective? Or allow or encourage genocide ("ethnic cleansing")?

(Some have advocated a return to colonialism as being more ethical and benign than our self- righteous claims to non-interference in the service of promoting democracy)

Appealing to an Audience


Ethos (Authority)

Logos (Logic) Pathos (Emotions)

Authority: Questions to Consider:

How is the author proving that he or she knows what he or she is talking about?

What resources is the writer referring to? For example, if you want to find out what that weird looking growth on your arm is, which source would you refer to: Wikipedia or the University of Chicago Hospital? Whereas, the University of Chicago Hospital has a reputable and accredited history and is trusted by many other reputable and accredited institutions, Wikipedia has a public authorship and has been criticized as a source because anyone can contribute.

TIP:

When trying to determine if the writer is appealing to a reader’s judgment of his or her credibility, look for sources: other writers, public and private institutions, dates of publication, direct quotes, and proper citation.

Logic:Questions to Consider:

What evidence is the author offering? An author who is appealing to your sense of logic, will probably offer you a point of entry into the conversation by stating something that you and most others agree with. The author then proceeds to offer evidence in order to build his or her case. The purpose of the offered evidence is to assist you in reaching the same conclusion that the author has reached.

TIP:

Look for SFEQ (statistics, facts, examples, quotations)

Emotions:Questions to Consider:

What do you feel as you read the text? If you are having an emotional response (happy, angry, sad, sympathetic), the author is most likely appealing to your emotions in order to get you to agree with him or her.

TIP:

Look for punctuation (exclamation points are an automatic give-away), word choice (is it factual or biased), repetition in word or phrase patterns, sentence length (short and choppy or long and complex?)


Focus Question: What appeal(s) do(es) Einstein use in this letter? What evidence supports your conclusion?

Letter from Albert Einstein to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt about nuclear physicist Dr. Leo Szilard, 1945.112 Mercer Street

Princeton, New Jersey

March 25, 1945

The Honorable Franklin D. Roosevelt

The President of the United States

The White House

Washington, D.C.

Sir:

I am writing to you to introduce Dr. L[eo]. Szilard who proposes to submit to you certain considerations and recommendations. Unusual circumstances, which I shall describe further below, induce me to take this action in spite of the fact that I do not know the substance of the considerations and recommendations which Dr. Szilard proposes to submit to you.

In the summer of 1939 Dr. Szilard put before me his views concerning the potential importance of uranium for national defense. He was greatly disturbed by the potentialities involved and anxious that the United States Government be advised of them as soon as possible. Dr. Szilard, who is one of the discoverers of the neutron emission of uranium on which all present work on uranium is based, described to me a specific system which he devised and which he thought would make it possible to set up chain reactions in unseparated uranium in the immediate future. Having known him for over twenty years, both for his scientific work and personally, I have much confidence in his judgement and it was on the basis of his judgement as well as my own that I took the liberty to approach you in connection with this subject. You responded to my letter dated August 2, 1939 by the appointment of a committee under the chairmanship of Dr. Briggs and thus started the Government's activity in this field.

The terms of secrecy under which Dr. Szilard is working at present do not permit him to give me information about his work; however, I understand that he now is greatly concerned about the lack of adequate contact between scientists who are doing this work and members of your Cabinet who are responsible for formulating policy. In the circumstances I consider it my duty to give Dr. Szilard this introduction and I wish to express the hope that you will be able to give his presentation of the case your personal attention.

Very truly yours,

(A. Einstein)

STOP and THINK:

Which of the following best describes the writer’s immediate concern to the number of interactions Dr. Szilard has had with the members of President Truman’s cabinet?


a. Envy of the position Dr. Szilard has in the white house

b. Serious unease at the limited meetings between scientists and the military who plan to apply the science.

c. Excitement about the venture between science and politics.

d. Awe and amazement that the field of science can play such an important role in government.

NUCLEAR PHYSICS

Option A

Role: Albert Einstein

Audience: President Truman

Format: A science report

Topic: You once said, “Concern for man and his fate must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavors. Never forget this in the midst of your diagrams and equations.” In a science report, research atomic energy. Explain how it works and the effects in an attempt to convince President Truman that the Atomic Bomb should not be used as a weapon on citizenry.

Focus Questions: What appeal(s) do(es) Truman use in this diary? What evidence supports your conclusion?

Does his choice of words surprise you? Explain.

Hiroshima: President Truman’s Diary and Papers The following are excerpts from President Truman's diary and papers that

have relevance to the atomic bombing of Japan. Mr. Truman contributed the full versions of these items to the public domain. They can be found in the Harry S. Truman Library in Independence, MO. Except where otherwise noted, the excerpts on this site can also be found in:

Robert Ferrell, ed., Off the Record: The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman

Robert Ferrell, ed., Dear Bess: The Letters from Harry to Bess Truman, 1910-1959

[I have included some explanatory and contextual comments for the excerpts. My writing is in brackets and italics, as I have done with this paragraph.] - Doug Long


[4/12/45: President Franklin Roosevelt dies. Vice-President Harry Truman becomes President.]

6/17/45 Diary Entry:

"I have to decide Japanese strategy - shall we invade Japan proper or shall we bomb and blockade? That is my hardest decision to date. But I'll make it when I have all the facts."

[7/16/45: The first atomic bomb was successfully tested. That night Truman, who was in Potsdam, Germany at a conference with Churchill and Stalin, received a brief secret notification that the atomic bomb test had "exceeded expectations".


"I told Stalin that I am no diplomat but usually said yes & no to questions after hearing all the argument. It pleased him. I asked him if he had the agenda for the meeting. He said he had and that he had some more questions to present. I told him to fire away. He did and it is dynamite - but I have some dynamite too which I'm not exploding now."

"He'll [Stalin and Russia] be in the Jap War on August 15th. Fini Japs when that comes about."

[7/18/45: Truman received another brief message confirming the success of the a-bomb test. Later that day he wrote his wife a letter.]

7/18/45 Letter to Bess Truman:

"...I've gotten what I came for - Stalin goes to war [against Japan] August 15 with no strings on it. He wanted a Chinese settlement [in return for entering the Pacific war, China would give Russia some land and other concessions] - and it is practically made - in a better form than I expected. [Chinese Foreign Minister] Soong did better than I asked him. I'll say that we'll end the war a year sooner now, and think of the kids who won't be killed! That is the important thing."


"P.M. [Prime Minister Winston Churchill] & I ate alone. Discussed Manhattan [atomic bomb] (it is a success). Decided to tell Stalin about it. Stalin had told P.M. of telegram from Jap Emperor asking for peace. Stalin also read his answer to me. It was satisfactory. Believe Japs will fold up before Russia comes in. I am sure they will when Manhattan appears over their homeland. I shall inform Stalin about it at an opportune time."



"Stalin was a day late in arriving. It was reported that he was not feeling up to par. He called on me as soon as he arrived. It was about 11 A.M. He, Molotov, Vishinski and Pavlov stayed for lunch. We had a most pleasant conference and Stalin assured me that Russia intended to carry out the Yalta agreements and to enter the war against Japan in August." (William Hillman, "Harry S. Truman: In His Own Words", pg. 123).


"I have to make it perfectly plain to them [Russia and Great Britain] at least once a day that so far as this President is concerned Santa Claus is dead and that my first interest is U.S.A., then I want the Jap war won and I want 'em both in it. Then I want peace - world peace and will do what can be done by us to get it."

STOP and THINK:Which of the following best describes the function of the phrase, “Santa Clause is dead and that my first interest is U.S.A., then I want the Jap war won and I want ‘em both in it.”

A. It assures Russian and Great Britain leaders that the rest of Truman’s energy will be spent on protecting the United States first and foremost.

B. It proves the argument the Truman was a benevolent man and a strategic military leader.

C. It introduces the main thesis of the diary.

D. It signals that the ideas that follow are disturbing.

[7/21/45: This afternoon Truman received his first detailed report of the successful atomic bomb test of 7/16/45.]

7/21/1948 Truman confided some other private thoughts on the atomic bomb to his staff. Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission David Lilienthal recorded Truman's words in his diary that night, along with Lilienthal's own observations in parentheses: "I don't think we ought to use this thing [the A-Bomb] unless we absolutely have to. It is a terrible thing to order the use of something that (here he looked down at his desk, rather reflectively) that is so terribly destructive, destructive beyond anything we have ever had. You have got to understand that this isn't a military weapon. (I shall never forget this particular expression). It is used to wipe out women and children and unarmed people, and not for military uses." (David Lilienthal, The Journals of David E. Lilienthal, Vol. Two, pg. 391) [my


emphasis]. Truman's candid comments underscored the indiscriminate power of the atomic bomb that causes it to kill people we don't want to kill.

[7/22/45: Truman was informed that the first atomic bomb for use on Japan "...will be ready for final operation first good break in August. Complicated preparations for use are proceeding so fast we should know not later than July 25 if any change in plans." (U.S. Dept. of State, "Foreign Relations of the U.S., The Conference of Berlin (Potsdam) 1945, vol. 2", pg. 1372); the date Truman was informed comes from the Henry Lewis Stimson Papers, 7/22/45 Diary entry, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.]


"He [Stalin] talked to me confidentially at the dinner [on 7/21/45] and I believe things will be all right in most instances. Some things we won't and can't agree on - but I have already what I came for [see the 7/18/45 letter to Bess Truman]. Hope I can break it off in a few days." [i.e., leave the Potsdam Conference].

[7/24/45: Truman was given more specific dates for when an atomic bomb would be ready to drop on Japan: "...some chance August 1 to 3, good chance August 4 to 5 and barring unexpected relapse almost certain before August 10." (U.S. Dept. of State, "Foreign Relations of the U.S., The Conference of Berlin (Potsdam) 1945, vol. 2", pg. 1374); the date Truman was informed comes from the Henry Lewis Stimson Papers, 7/24/45 Diary entry, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.]

[7/25/45: Sec. of War Henry Stimson and Army Chief of Staff George Marshall approved and sent the order to drop atomic bombs on Japan "after about 3 August 1945" (Leslie Groves, "Now It Can Be Told", pg. 308.]


"We met at 11 A.M. today. That is Stalin, Churchill and the U.S. President. But I had a most important session with Lord Mountbattan & General Marshall before than. We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world. It may be the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley Era, after Noah and his fabulous Ark.

"Anyway we 'think' we have found the way to cause a disintegration of the atom. An experiment in the New Mexican desert was startling - to put it mildly. Thirteen pounds of the explosive caused the complete disintegration of a steel tower 60 feet high, created a crater 6 feet deep and 1,200 feet in diameter, knocked over a steel tower 1/2 mile away and knocked men down 10,000 yards away. The explosion was visible for more than 200 miles and audible for 40 miles and more.

"The weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th. I have told the Sec. of War, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as


the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop this terrible bomb on the old capital or the new [Kyoto or Tokyo].

"He [Stimson] and I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement [known as the Potsdam Proclamation] asking the Japs to surrender and save lives. I'm sure they will not do that, but we will have given them the chance. It is certainly a good thing for the world that Hitler's crowd or Stalin's did not discover this atomic bomb. It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful."

[Privately, Truman later expressed misgivings about the mass killing of civilians in Hiroshima; see the "Didn't the Japanese Deserve It?" section in Random Ramblings on Hiroshima.]

[7/26/45: The U.S., Great Britain, and China issued the Potsdam Proclamation, which called for Japan's "unconditional surrender". It made no reference to the future status of the Emperor, Russia's secret agreement to declare war on Japan, or the atomic bomb. It was rejected by Japan's Prime Minister Suzuki.]


"He [Stalin] doesn't know it but I have an ace in the hole and another one showing - so unless he has threes or two pair (and I know he has not) we are sitting all right." [A possible reference to the atomic bomb, possessed at the time by the U.S. but not by Russia.]

[8/6/45: An atomic bomb was dropped on the people of Hiroshima.]

Aug. 10th, "Truman said he had given orders to stop atomic bombing. He said the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible. He didn't like the idea of killing, as he said, 'all those kids'." (John Blum, ed., The Price of Vision: the Diary of Henry A. Wallace, 1942-1946, pg. 473-474).

http://www.doug-long.com/rambling.htm#deserveit


Visual Literacy:

1. What do you see in this image?

2. What else do you see?

3. What is the artist implying through this image?

4. What complications exist as a result of this situation?

ARTISTIC RENDERING

Option B

Role: Gallery Owner and Artist

Audience: Attendees at the opening of your show: “Hiroshima: Never Forget”

Format: Photographs (don’t forget to include citation)


Topic: Research images from Hiroshima before and after the dropping of the Atomic bomb. You may create a drawing, a collage, a three-dimensional image, a painting, etc. to illustrate a theme of your choice from this event. Include a works cited page and a paragraph reflecting on the choices you made in depicting the event.

Text A.

‘I Thought My Last Hour Had Come...’

An eyewitness account of the atom bomb explosion at Hiroshima

By Robert Guillain

Monday, August 6, 1945, in Hiroshima. A few seconds after 8:15 A.M., a flash of light, brighter than a thousand suns, shredded the space over the city's center. A gigantic sphere of fire, a prodigious blast, a formidable pillar of smoke and debris rose into the sky: an entire city annihilated as it was going to work, almost vaporized at the blast's point zero, irradiated to death, crushed and swept away. Its thousands of wooden houses were splintered and soon ablaze, its few stone and brick buildings smashed, its ancient temples destroyed, its schools and barracks incinerated just as classes and drills were beginning, its crowded streetcars upended, their passengers buried under the wreckage of streets and alleys crowded with people going about their daily business. A city of 300,000 inhabitants—more, if its large military population was counted, for Hiroshima was headquarters for the southern Japan command.

Among the thousand accounts was this one by a Hiroshima housewife, Mrs. Futaba Kitayama, then aged thirty-three, who was struck down 1900 yards—just over a mile—from the point of impact.

"It was in Hiroshima, that morning of August 6. I had joined a team of women who, like me, worked as volunteers in cutting firepaths against incendiary raids by demolishing whole rows of houses. My husband, because of a raid alert the previous night, had stayed at the Chunichi (Central Japan Journal), where he worked.

"Our group had passed the Tsurumi bridge, Indianfile, when there was an alert; an enemy plane appeared all alone, very high over our heads. Its silver wings shone brightly in the sun. A woman exclaimed, 'Oh, look—a parachute!' I turned toward where she was pointing, and just at that moment a shattering blast filled the whole sky.

"Was it the flash that came first, or the sound of the explosion, tearing up my insides? I don't remember. I was thrown to the ground, pinned to the earth, and immediately the world began to collapse around me, on my head, my shoulders. I couldn't see anything. It was completely dark. I thought my last hour had come. I thought of my three children, who had been evacuated to the


country to be safe from the raids. I couldn't move; debris kept falling, beams and tiles piled up on top of me.

"Finally I did manage to crawl free. There was a terrible smell in the air. Thinking the bomb that hit us might have been a yellow phosphorus incendiary like those that had fallen on so many other cities, I rubbed my nose and mouth hard with a tenugui (a kind of towel) I had at my waist. To my horror, I found that the skin of my face had come off in the towel. Oh! The skin on my hands, on my arms, came off too. From elbow to fingertips, all the skin on my right arm had come loose and was hanging grotesquely. The skin of my left hand fell off too, the five fingers, like a glove.

"I found myself sitting on the ground, prostrate. Gradually I registered that all my companions had disappeared. What had happened to them? A frantic panic gripped me, I wanted to run, but where? Around me was just debris, wooden framing, beams and roofing tiles; there wasn't a single landmark left.

"And what had happened to the sky, so blue a moment ago? Now it was as black as night. Everything seemed vague and fuzzy. It was as though a cloud covered my eyes and I wondered if I had lost my senses. I finally saw the Tsurumi bridge and I ran headlong toward it, jumping over the piles of rubble. What I saw under the bridge then horrified me.

"People by the hundreds were flailing in the river. I couldn't tell if they were men or women; they were all in the same state: their faces were puffy and ashen, their hair tangled, they held their hands raised and, groaning with pain, threw themselves into the water. I had a violent impulse to do so myself, because of the pain burning through my whole body. But I can't swim and I held back.

STOP and THINK:

In the paragraph above, the narrator offers details about the bomb most likely to:

a. present one of the terrifying sights she saw on that day.

b. illustrate that the bomb was devastating.

c. illustrate that she was in pain.

d. support her claim that she believed she was going to die.

"Past the bridge, I looked back to see that the whole Hachobori district had suddenly caught fire, to my surprise, because I thought only the district I was in had been bombed. As I ran, I shouted my children's names. Where was I going? I have no idea, but I can still see the scenes of horror I glimpsed here and there on my way.


"A mother, her face and shoulders covered with blood, tried frantically to run into a burning house. A man held her back and she screamed, 'Let me go! Let me go! My son is burning in there!' She was like a mad demon. Under the Kojin bridge, which had half collapsed and had lost its heavy, reinforced-concrete parapets, I saw a lot of bodies floating in the water like dead dogs, almost naked, with their clothes in shreds. At the river's edge, near the bank, a woman lay on her back with her breasts ripped off, bathed in blood. How could such a frightful thing have happened? I thought of the scenes of the Buddhist hell my grandmother had described to me when I was little.

"I must have wandered for at least two hours before finding myself on the Eastern military parade ground. My burns were hurting me, but the pain was different from an ordinary burn. It was a dull pain that seemed somehow to come from outside my body. A kind of yellow pus oozed from my hands, and I thought that my face must also be horrible to see.

"Around me on the parade ground were a number of grade-school and secondary-school children, boys and girls, writhing in spasms of agony. Like me, they were members of the anti-air raid volunteer corps. I heard them crying 'Mama! Mama!' as though they'd gone crazy. They were so burned and bloody that looking at them was insupportable. I forced myself to do so just the same, and I cried out in rage, 'Why? Why these children?' But there was no one to rage at and I could do nothing but watch them die, one after the other, vainly calling for their mothers.

STOP and THINK:

It can be most reasonably inferred that Mrs. Futaba Kitayama asks the rhetorical question (a question to which she expects no answer) “Why? Why these children?” in order to:

a. prove that the cost of dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima was higher than the estimated predictions the United States government made.

b. demonstrate her belief that the debate about dropping the bomb on Hiroshima cannot be assessed in purely military terms.

c. educate readers about the effects of the atomic bomb.

d. test readers’ knowledge about the physical impact on the victims she lists, since she believes this can be determined.

"After lying almost unconscious for a long time on the parade ground, I started walking again. As far as l could see with my failing sight, everything was in flames, as far as the Hiroshima station and the Atago district. It seemed to me that my face was hardening little by little. I cautiously touched my hands to my cheeks. My face felt as though it had doubled in size. I could see less and less clearly. Was I going blind, then? After so much hardship, was I going to die? I kept on walking anyway and I reached a suburban area.

"In that district, farther removed from the center, I found my elder sister alive, with only slight injuries to the head and feet. She didn't recognize me at first, then she burst into tears. In a handcart, she wheeled me nearly three miles to the first-aid center at Yaga. It was night when we arrived. I later learned there was a pile of corpses and countless injured there. I spent two nights there, unconscious; my sister told me that in my delirium I kept repeating, 'My children! Take me to my children!'


"On August 8, I was carried on a stretcher to a train and transported to the home of relatives in the village of Kasumi. The village doctor said my case was hopeless. My children, recalled from their evacuation refuge, rushed to my side. I could no longer see them; I could recognize them only by smelling their good odor. On August 11, my husband joined us. The children wept with joy as they embraced him.

"Our happiness soon ended. My husband, who bore no trace of injury, died suddenly three days later, vomiting blood. We had been married sixteen years and now, because I was at the brink of death myself, I couldn't even rest his head as I should have on the pillow of the dead.

"I said to myself, 'My poor children, because of you I don't have the right to die!' And finally, by a miracle, I survived after I had again and again been given up for lost.

"My sight returned fairly quickly, and after twenty days I could dimly see my children's features. The burns on my face and hands did not heal so rapidly, and the wounds remained pulpy, like rotten tomatoes. It wasn't until December that I could walk again. When my bandages were removed in January, I knew that my face and hands would always be deformed. My left ear was half its original size. A streak of cheloma, a dark brown swelling as wide as my hand, runs from the side of my head across my mouth to my throat. My right hand is striped with a cheloma two inches wide from the wrist to the little finger. The five fingers on my left hand are now fused at the base...."

Byron, William S. trans. :http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1980/08/-lsquo-i-thought-my-last-hour- had-come-rsquo/6349/ . 2011. The Atlantic Monthly Group.

Text B:

Source: http://www.inicom.com/hibakusha/

Testimony of Hiroshi Sawachika

Mr. Hiroshi Sawachika was 28 years old when the bomb was dropped. He was an army doctor stationed at the army headquarters in Ujina. When he was exposed, he was inside the building at the headquarters, 4.1 km from the hypocenter. Being rather far from the hypocenter, he was not seriously injured. Afterwards, he was very busy getting medical treatment to the survivors.

MR. SAWACHIKA: I was in my office. I had just entered the room and said "Good morning." to colleagues and I was about to approach my desk when outside it suddenly turned bright red. I felt very hot on my cheeks. Being the chief of the room, I shouted to the young men and women in the room that they should evacuate. As soon as I cried, I felt weightless as if I were an astronaut. I was then unconscious for 20 or 30 seconds. When I came to, I realized that everybody including myself was lying at one side of the room. Nobody was standing. The desks and chairs had also blown off to one side. At the windows, there was no window glass and the window frames had been blown out as well. I went to the windows to find out where the bombing had taken place. And I saw the mushroom cloud over the gas company. The sound and shock somehow suggested that the bomb had been dropped right over the gas company. I still had no idea what had happened. And I kept looking towards the gas company. After a while, I realized that my white shirt was red all over. I thought it was funny because I was not injured at

http://www.inicom.com/hibakusha/

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1980/08/-lsquo-i-thought-my-last-hour-had-come-rsquo/6349/

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1980/08/-lsquo-i-thought-my-last-hour-had-come-rsquo/6349/


all. I looked around and then realized that the girl lying near by was heavily injured, with lots of broken glass stuck all over her body. Her blood had splashed and made stains on my shirt. In a few minutes, I heard my name called. I was told to go to the headquarters where there were lots of injured persons waiting. I went there and I started to give treatment with the help of nurses and medical course men. We first treated the office personnel for their injuries. Most of them had broken glass and pieces of wood stuck into them. We treated them one after another.

Afterwards, we heard the strange noise. It sounded as if a large flock of mosquitoes were coming from a distance. We looked out of the window to find out what was happening. We saw that citizens from the town were marching towards us. They looked unusual. We understood that the injured citizens were coming towards us for treatment. But while, we thought that there should be Red Cross Hospitals and another big hospitals in the center of the town. So why should they come here, I wondered, instead of going there. At that time, I did not know that the center of the town had been so heavily damaged.

After a while, with the guide of the hospital personnel, the injured persons reached our headquarters. With lots of injured people arriving, we realized just how serious the matter was. We decided that we should treat them also. Soon afterwards, we learned that many of them had badly burned. As they came to us, they held their hands aloft. They looked like they were ghosts. We made the tincture for that treatment by mixing edible peanut oil and something.

We had to work in a mechanical manner in order to treat so many patients. We provided one room for the heavily injured and another for the slightly injured. A treatment was limited to the first aid because there were no facilities for the patients to be hospitalized. Later on, when I felt that I could leave the work to other staff for a moment, I walked out of the treatment room and went into the another room to see what had happened.

When I stepped inside, I found the room filled with the smell that was quite similar to the smell of dried squid when it has been grilled. The smell was quite strong. It's a sad reality that the smell human beings produce when they are burned is the same as that of the dried squid when it is grilled. The squid - we like so much to eat. It was a strange feeling, a feeling that I had never had before. I can still remember that smell quite clearly.

Afterwards, I came back to the treatment room and walked through the roads of people who were either seriously injured or waiting to be treated. When I felt someone touch my leg, it was a pregnant woman. She said that she was about to die in a few hours. She said, "I know that I am going to die. But I can feel that my baby is moving inside. It wants to get out of the room. I don't mind if I had died. But if the baby is delivered now, it does not have to die with me. Please help my baby live." There were no obstetricians there. There was no delivery room. There was no time to take care of her baby. All I could do was to tell her that I would come back later when everything was ready for her and her baby. Thus I cheered her up and she looks so happy. But I have to return to the treatment work.

So I resumed to work taking care of the injured one by one. There were so many patients. I felt as if I was fighting against the limited time. It was late in the afternoon towards the evening. And image of that pregnant woman never left my mind. Later, I went to the place where I had found her before, she was still there lying in the same place. I patted her on the shoulder, but she said nothing. The person lying next to her said that a short while ago, she had become silent. I still recalled this incident partly because I was not able to fulfill the last wish of this dying young woman. I also remember her because I had a chance to talk with her however short it was.


INTERVIEWER: How many patients did you treat on August 6?

ANSWER: Well, at least 2 or 3 thousand on that very day if you include those patients whom I gave directions to. I felt that as if once that day started, it never ended. I had to keep on and on treating the patients forever. It was the longest day of my life. Later on, when I had time to reflect on that day, I came to realize that we, doctors learned a lot through the experience, through the suffering of all those people. It's true that the lack of medical knowledge, medical facilities, integrated organization and so on prevented us from giving sufficient medical treatment. Still there was a lot for us, medical doctors to learn on that day. I learned that the nuclear weapons which gnaw the minds and bodies of human beings should never be used. Even the slightest idea using nuclear arms should be completely exterminated the minds of human beings. Otherwise, we will repeat the same tragedy. And we will never stop being ashamed of ourselves.

STOP and THINK:

Which of the following best describes the function of the phrase, “And we will never stop being ashamed of ourselves”?

a. It assures readers that history will repeat itself if we do not learn from our mistakes.

b. It proves that the bombing will always produce devastating results.

c. It introduces the thesis that humanity disgraced itself by using this weaponry against citizenry.

d. It signals a shift in tone from factual to opinionated.

Text C:

Testimony of Yosaku Mikami

Next is Mr. Yosaku Mikami. He was 32 years old when he was exposed. When the bomb was exploded, he was on a streetcar which was running in Sendamachi, 1.9 km from the hypocenter. He was a fireman. On the morning of August 6, he was on his way back from the night duty to Ujina going to his home in Sakaemachi. The rest of his family was all evacuated one day before.

I was stationed at Ujina fire station. Our duty was to work 24 hours from 8 o'clock in the morning to 8 o'clock in the following morning. We were divided into 2 groups for the shifts. On that day, August 6, I was just about to leave work and go home at 8 o'clock in the morning. Shortly before it, the all clear was sounded. So I started to go home to Sakaemachi. When I reached the streetcar stop, I found out that I had missed the car by just a few minutes. So I had to wait about ten minutes more before I got on the next car. The car passed through Miyuki Bashi and was approaching the train office, when I saw the blue flash from the window. At the same time, smoke filled the car which prevented me even from seeing person standing directly in front of me. In about half an hour, I went out of the car. I noticed that the fire was burning everywhere. The sky was dull as it covered by clouds. I decided to go back to work and I ran back to the fire station. There was nothing to drink at all. Can you see there is a streetcar over there near the


fire station? When I reached that corner, I jumped onto the fire truck with my colleagues who were on duty on that day. I joined them. We drove along the trouble way but we had to return to the fire station soon because there was too much fire and we couldn't do anything at all. When we were on our way back to the station, and approaching the office of the Tobacco and Salt Public Corporation, we found that the warehouse was on fire. So we stopped there and went inside to put out the fire. When the fire had come down, we decided to go to the main fire station to find out what had happened. We passed by the Miyuki Bridge. It was so hot as the result of the heat produced by the fire. The electric-light poles burned down. All of us wore raincoats to protect us from the fire. We also wore caps for the same purpose. Using buckets, we threw water over ourselves when we reached the water tanks. Finally, we reached the main fire station. I guess that about 5 or 6 of my coworkers were there already. Then we were told to take care of the seriously injured. We drove a chief to a hospital and then we drove towards Miyuki Bridge and Takano Bridge, where we found a lot of people dying. There were about 4 or 5 firemen on the fire truck. The men in good condition were clinging to the side of the car. We heard many people swearing, screaming, shouting, asking for help. Since our order was to help the most heavily injured, we searched for them. We tried to open the eyes of the injured and we found out they were still alive. We tried to carry them by their arms and legs and to place them onto the fire truck. But this was difficult because their skin was peeled off as we tried to move them. They were all heavily burned. But they never complained but they felt pain even when their skin was peeling off. We carried the victims to the prefectural hospital. Soon afterwards, the hospital was full, so then we carried the injured to the Akatsuki Military Hospital. On the following day, we decided to visit the small fire stations throughout the town. I believe there were about 20 or 30 small stations with only 7 or 8 firemen each. Those small stations were temporary place near police stations and city halls during war time. The workers stationed at the important places were all killed. I visited one of the fire stations and inside the burned fire engine, I found a man who was scorched to death. He looked as if he was about to start the fire engine to fight the fire. Inside the broken building, I also found several dead men. I guess they were trapped inside the building. Many of my colleagues who survived on that day died one month later. Some of them lost their hair before their death. Yes. There were lots of firemen who died one or one and half months later. I feel very sorry for them. I also feel deeply sorry for those who lost their families. I sincerely hope that there would be no more nuclear war.

What is the author’s intention in sharing this perspective?

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Identify three supporting details that support the main idea identified above.

1. __________________________________________________________________________

2. __________________________________________________________________________

3. __________________________________________________________________________

Text D:


Testimony of Isao Kita

Next is Mr. Isao Kita. He was 33 years old when the bomb fell. He was working for the Hiroshima District Weather Bureau 3.7 km from the hypocenter. He was the chief weather man and his shift fell on August 5 to 6. He kept observing the weather even after he was exposed.

MR. KITA: Well, at that time, I happened to be receiving the transmission over the wireless. I was in the receiving room and I was facing northward. I noticed the flashing light. It was not really a big flash. But still it drew my attention. In a few seconds, the heat wave arrived. After I noticed the flash, white clouds spread over the blue sky. It was amazing. It was as if blue morning-glories had suddenly bloomed up in the sky. It was funny, I thought. Then came the heat wave. It was very very hot. Even though there was a window glass in front of me, I felt really hot. It was as if I was looking directly into a kitchen oven. I couldn't bear the heat for a long time. Then I heard the cracking sound. I don't know what made that sound, but probably it came from the air which suddenly expanded in the room. By that time, I realized that the bomb had been dropped. As I had been instructed, I pushed aside the chair and lay with my face on the floor. Also as I had been instructed during the frequent emergency exercises, I covered my eyes and ears with hands like this. And I started to count. You may feel that I was rather heartless just to start counting. But for us, who observed the weather, it is a duty to record the process of time, of various phenomena. So I started counting with the light flash. When I counted to 5 seconds, I heard the groaning sound. At the same time, the window glass was blown off and the building shook from the bomb blast. So the blast reached that place about 5 seconds after the explosion. We later measured the distance between the hypocenter and our place. And with these two figures, we calculated that the speed of the blast was about 700 meters per second. The speed of sound is about 330 meters per second, which means that the speed of the blast was about twice as fast as the speed of sound. It didn't move as fast as the speed of light but it moved quite rapidly. There is a path which leads by here over there. And on that day, a large number of injured persons walked this way along the path toward the Omi Hospital. They were bleeding all over and some of them had no clothes. Many of them were carrying people on their shoulders. Looking at the injured, I realized how seriously the town had been damaged. The fire was its peak at around that time. It thundered 10 times between 10 and 11 o'clock. The sound of thunder itself was not so great but still I could see the lightning over the fire. When I looked down on the town from the top of that hill, I could see that the city was completely lost. The city turned into a yellow sand. It turned yellow, the color of the yellow desert.

INTERVIEWER: Was this before the fire broke out?

ANSWER: Yes. The town looked yellowish. The smoke was so thick that it covered the entire town. After about 5 minutes, fire broke out here and there. The fire gradually grew bigger and there were smoke everywhere and so we could no longer see towards the town. The cloud of the smoke was very tall, but it didn't come in this direction at all. The cloud moved in that direction from the ocean towards Hiroshima Station. It moved towards the north.The smoke from the fire, it was like a screen dividing the city into two parts. The sun was shining brightly just like it was a middle of the summer over here on this side. And behind the cloud on the other side, it was completely dark. The contrast was very much. So about 60 or 70 % of the sky was covered by the cloud and the other 30 % was completely clear. It was a bright clear blue sky. The condition had remained like this for some time. From Koi, looking towards Hiroshima Station, you could see the black rain falling. But from here, I couldn't judge how much rain was


falling. But based on the information I heard later, it seems that the rain fell quite heavy over a period of several hours. It was a black and sticky rain. It stuck everything. When it fell on trees and leaves, it stayed and turned everything black. When it fell on people's clothing, the clothing turned black. It also stuck on people's hands and feet. And it couldn't be washed off. I couldn't be washed off. I couldn't see what was taking place inside the burning area. But I was able to see the extent of the area which was on fire. Based on the information which came later, it seems that the center of the town suffered the worst damage. The atomic bomb does not discriminate. Of course, those who were fighting may have to suffer. But the atomic bomb kills everyone from little babies to old people. And it's not an easy death. It's a very cruel and very painful way to die. I think that this cannot be allowed to happen again anywhere in the world. I don't say this just because I'm a Japanese atomic bomb survivor. I feel that people all over the world must speak out.

STOP and THINK:

Sequence the major events below in the proper order.

a. The sound of the blast was heard.

b. The narrator felt the building shake.

c. Rain began to fall.

d. A very bright light was seen in the sky.

e. The Atomic bomb was dropped.

1. ____

2. ____

3. ____

4. ____

5. ____

Identify three effects the Atomic bomb had as it detonated.

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Testimony of Kinue Tomoyasu

Ms. Kinue Tomoyasu was 44 years old at the time of the A-bomb attack. She was at home, 5 kilometers from the hypocenter. She then entered Hiroshima City to search for her daughter. Previously her husband had died of illness and her only son was sent to a battle field. She was living with her only daughter. Ms. Tomoyasu was admitted to the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Victims Nursing Home thirteen years ago.

TOMOYASU: That morning I left home with my daughter. She was working at the industrial Research Institute. Then an air-raid warning was issued. I went back home, but my daughter insisted, ``I'm going to the office.'' even though the air-raid warning had been issued. She reached the train station. The trains were always late in the morning, but they were on time that day. She took the train and when she got off at the station, she was hit by the A-bomb. I went inside my home since the warning was still on. I tucked myself in bed and waited for the warning to be lifted.

After the warning was lifted, I got up and folded the bedding, put it back into the closet, and opened the window. As I opened the window, there came the flash. it was so bright, a ten or hundred or thousand times brighter than a camera flash bulb. The flash was piercing my eyes and my mind went blank. The glass from the windows was shattered all over the floor. I was lying on the floor, too. When I came to, I was anxious to know what happened to my daughter, Yatchan. I looked outside the window and saw one of my neighbors. He was standing out there. I called, ``Mr. Okamoto, what was that flash?'' He said, ``That was a killer beam.'' I became more anxious. I thought, ``I must go, I must go and find her.'' I swept up the pieces of glass, put my shoes on, and took my air-raid hood with me. I made my way to a train station near Hiroshima. I saw a young girl coming my way. Her skin was dangling all ever and she was naked. She was muttering, ``Mother, water, mother, water.'' I took a look at her. I thought she might be my daughter, but she wasn't. I didn't give her any water. I am sorry that I didn't. But my mind was full, worrying about my daughter. I ran all the way to Hiroshima Station. Hiroshima Station was full of people. Some of them were dead, and many of them were lying on the ground, calling for their mothers and asking for water. I went to Tokiwa Bridge. I had to cross the bridge to get to my daughter's office. But there was a rope for tote across the bridge. And the people there told me, ``You can't go beyond here today.'' I protested, ``My daughter's office is over there. Please let me go through.'' They told me, ``No.'' Some men were daring to make the way through, but I couldn't go beyond it. I thought she might be on a way back home. I returned home, but my daughter was not back yet.

INTERVIEWER: Did you see the large cloud?

TOMOYASU: No, I didn't see the cloud.

INTERVIEWER: You didn't see the mushroom cloud?

TOMOYASU: I didn't see the Mushroom cloud. I was trying to find my daughter. They told me I couldn't go beyond the bridge. I thought she might be back home, so I went back as far as Nikitsu Shrine. Then, the black rain started falling from the sky. And I wondered what it was. And it was what's called the black rain.

INTERVIEWER: Can you tell us what was the black rain like?


TOMOYASU: It was like a heavy rain. And I had my air-raid hood on, so I didn't get it on my head fortunately, but it fell on my hands. And I ran and ran. I waited for her with the windows open. I stayed awake all night waiting and waiting for her, but she didn't come back. About six thirty on the morning of the 7th, Mr. Ishido, whose daughter was working at the same office with my daughter, came around. He called out asking for the Tomoyasu's house. I went outside calling to him, `Ìt's here, over here!'' Mr.Ishido came up to me and said, ``Quick! Get some clothes and go for her. Your daughter is at the bank of the Ota River.'' I said, ``Thank you, thank you very much. Is she still alive?'' He said, ``She is alive,'' and added, `Ì'll show you the way.'' I took a yukata with me. My neighbors offered me a stretcher. And I started running at full speed. People followed me and said, ``Slow down! Be careful not to hurt yourself!'' But still, I hurried as fast as I could. When I reached the Tokiwa Bridge, there were soldiers lying on the ground. Around Hiroshima Station, I saw more people lying dead, more on the morning of the 7th than on the 6th. When I reached the river bank, I couldn't tell who was who. I kept wondering where my daughter was. But then, she cried for me, ``Mother!'' I recognized her voice. I found her in a horrible condition. Her face looked terrible. And she still appears in my dreams like that sometimes. When I met her, she said, ``There shouldn't be any war.'' The first thing she said to me was ``Mother, it took you so I couldn't do anything for her. My neighbors went back home. They had wounded family members as well. I was all by myself, and I didn't know what to do. There were maggots in her wounds and a sticky yellowish pus, a white watery liquid coming out her wounds and a sticky yellowish liquid. I didn't know what was going on.

INTERVIEWER: So you tried to remove the maggots from your daughter's body?

TOMOYASU: Yes. But her skin was just peeling right off. The maggots were coming out all over. I couldn't wipe them off. I thought it would be too painful. I picked off some maggots, though. She asked me what I was doing and I told her, `Òh, it's nothing.'' She nodded at my words. And nine hours later, she died.

INTERVIEWER: You were holding her in your arms all that time?

TOMOYASU: Yes, on my lap. I had had bedding and folded on the floor, but I held her in my arms. when I held her on my lap, she said, `Ì don't want to die.'' I told her, ``Hang on Hang on.'' She said, `Ì won't die before my brother comes home.'' But she was in pain and she kept crying, ``Brother. Mother.'' On August 15th, I held her funeral. And around early October, my hair started to come out. I wondered what was happening to me, but all my hair was disappearing. In November, I become bald. Then, purple spots started to appear around my neck, my body and my arms, and on the inner parts of my thighs, a lot of them, all over, the purple spots all over my body. I had a high fever of forty degrees. I was shivering and I couldn't consult the doctor. I still had a fever when I was admitted here for a while, but now I don't have a fever so often.

INTERVIEWER: After your son returned home from the war, what did he do?

TOMOYASU: He came back in February of 1946, and he took care of me. When he heard how his sister died, he said he felt so sorry for her. He told me he hated war. I understand. Many of his friends had died in the war. He told me he felt sorry that he survived. He was just filled with regret. My son got malaria during the war, also. He suffered a lot. I don't know why, but he became neurotic and killed himself, finally, by jumping in front of a train in October. I was left alone. I had to go through hardships, living alone. I have no family. I joined the white chrysanthemum organization at Hiroshima University, pledging to donate my body upon death for medical education and research. My registration number is number 1200 I'm ready. I'm


ready now to be summoned by God at any moment. But God doesn't allow me to come his side yet. If it were not for the war, my two children would not have died. If it were not for the war, I wouldn't have to stay at an institution like this. I suppose the three of us would have been living together in happiness. Ah, it is so hard on me.

STOP and THINK:

Identify and sequence three events from the description above.

1.

2.

3.

How has the Atomic bomb affected Ms. Tomoyasu?

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Testimony of Toshiko Saeki

Ms. Toshiko Saeki was 26 at the time of the bombing. She was at her parents home in Yasufuruichi with her children. Returning to Hiroshima on the afternoon of August 6th, she searched for her other relatives for many days, but wasn't able to find them. Ms. Saeki lost thirteen members of her family in the A-bomb attack.

SAEKI: I remember an airplane appeared from behind the mountains on my left. I thought it was strange to see an airplane flying that time all by itself. I looked at it and it was a B-29. It seemed very strange since there were on anti aircraft guns firing at it. I watched it for a while, then it disappeared. As soon as it disappeared, another airplane appeared from the same direction. It seemed very, very strange. I was still wondering what would happen. Then, suddenly there came a flash of light. I can't describe what it was like. And then, I felt some hot mask attacking me all of a sudden. I felt hot. I lay flat on the ground, trying to escape from the heat. I forgot all about my children for a moment. Then, there came a big sound, sliding wooden doors and window were blown off into the air. I turned around to see what had happened to the house, and at one part of the ceiling, it was hanging in the air. At some parts, the ceiling was caved in, burying my sister's child and my child as well. When I saw what the blast had done to my house which was far away from Hiroshima, I thought that Hiroshima too must have been hit very hard. I begged my sister to let me go back to Hiroshima to rescue my family. But by that time, things and flames were falling from the sky. I was scared because I thought that the debris might start fires in the mountains. By the time, I managed to prepare lunch to take along. It has started to


rain, but I was glad to have some rain. I went out to the main road, about five or six people were coming the direction of Hiroshima. And they were in a horrible condition. They looked much worse than the actual exhibits today at the Peace Memorial Museum. They were helping each other. But they were barely making their way. I cried, ``Which part of Hiroshima attacked?'' Everyone of them was only muttering, ``Hiroshima was attacked. Hiroshima was badly hit.'' I began to run towards Hiroshima at full speed. As I was running, I saw a mad naked man running from the opposite direction. This man held a piece of iron over his head as if to hide his face since he had nothing on his body, I felt embarrassed. And I turned my back to him. The man was passing by me, then, I don't know why, But I ran after him and I asked him to stop for a moment. I asked him, ``Which part of Hiroshima was attacked?'' Then the man put down the piece of iron and he started at me. He said, ``You're Toshiko, aren't you?'' He said, ``Toshiko!''

INTERVIEWER: Who was this man?

SAEKI: Oh, I couldn't tell who he was right away. His face was so swollen I couldn't even tell whether his eyes were open. He called me, he said, ``It's me! It's me, Toshiko! You can't tell?'' Then I recognized him. He was my second eldest brother. He was heavily wounded.

INTERVIEWER: His body was covered with burns?

SAEKI: Yes, and he looked awful. He told me he'd been engulfed by flames and barely made his way out. He said that mother had woken him up in that morning, and that he was washing up when it happened. He told me that mother was on the third floor, and might have been blown away with the blast. He told me he thought that she must have died. I finally reached Hiroshima, well, afternoon I supposed.

INTERVIEWER: What was it like then in Hiroshima?

SAEKI: The whole town of Hiroshima was just in a mess. People were trying to find shelter, shelter elementary school building, anywhere. When I reached the local elementary school, people were even jammed in the hallways. Everywhere was filled with mourns and groans and sobs and cries. Those of us who could move around were not treated the injured, but we were carrying dead bodies out of the building. I couldn't identify people by their faces. Trying to find my family, I had to take a look at their clothing, the clothes of the people who were still in the building. I couldn't find any of my family, so I went out to the playground. There were four piles of bodies and I stood in front of them. I just didn't know what to do. How could I find the bodies of my beloved ones. When I was going through the classrooms, I could take a look at each person, but these were mounds. If I tried to find my beloved ones, I would have to remove the bodies one by one. It just wasn't possible. I really felt sad. There were all kinds of bodies in the mounds. Not only human bodies but bodies of birds, cats and dogs and even that of a cow. It looked horrible. I can't find words to describe it. They were burned, just like human bodies, and some of them were half burnt. There was even a swollen horse. Just everything was there, everything.

STOP AND THINK:

Why do you think there was such chaos in Hiroshima after the Atomic bomb was dropped?

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INTERVIEWER: Ms. Saeki, how long did you search for your kin?

SAEKI: I went to Hiroshima to search on the 6th and the 7th, but on the 8th, they told me that there would be a big air-raid, so I didn't go on the 8th. And I didn't go on the 15th, but I went out almost everyday. I searched for mother for a long time. But I couldn't find her. I just couldn't find her. And finally on September 6th, my elder brother told us together in a living room. He called all the family members there together. He put something wrapped in a cloth. And he put it on the table which we used to take meals. My brother said, ``Toshiko, unwrap Mother yourself. You've been out there looking for her everyday.'' So, I did as he told me and undid the wrapping expecting to find pieces of her bones. But it was the half of the burnt head of my mother. No eyes, no teeth, only a small portion of flesh was left on the back with some hair. And there were also her glasses. The glasses are exhibited near the exit of the Peace Memorial Museum as if to tell something to the people now.

INTERVIEWER: Your older brother, he also passed away?

SAEKI: Yes, after seeing the half burned head of our mother, my brother started to say funny things. He told us to bandage him well to cover the pores of his skin with white cloths. I asked what for and he said he was going to try to do some experiment to extract the radioactivity built up in his body. He told us to bandage him well, except for his eyes and his mouth. So even his nose was covered. Before he started the experiment, he drank a lot of water. He drank more than he could actually take, so, water was dripping from his nose and from his mouth. Then he said he was ready. He told us just to leave him alone and not to enter the room unless he cried out for help. He told us to go away and to keep away from him. And after a while, I peeped in the room. My brother was completely naked. He had stripped all the bandage cloths away. He was just lying still in the corner. I didn't know what was wrong with him. I thought he was dead. I banged at the door and I cried, ``Brother! Brother, don't die!'' He woke up and sat on the floor. He told me that the experiment had failed. He cried that it was a pity.'' He looked all right, but he was going crazy. He said, ``I've grown bigger. Make an opening in the ceiling. This room is too small and I can't even stand up.'' After the horrible bomb hit Hiroshima, my brother's mind was shattered into pieces. War does not only destroy things, killing people, but shatters the hearts of people as well. This is war. And during the course of my life, I learned this on many various occasions. I know this now.

INTERVIEWER: Ms.Saeki, have you experienced any trouble concerning your health?

SAEKI: Yes, I have . By the end of August, maybe around, oh, the 28th or so, my hair started to fall out, I vomited blood. My teeth were coming out. And I had a fever of about 40 degrees. Nuclear war has nothing good. Whether you win or lose, it leaves your feeling futile with only


your rage and with fear about the aftereffects of a radioactivity. The survivors have to live with this fear. At times I have thought I should have died then, it would have been better. But I must live for the sake of the people, all the people who lost their lives then. So I relate my experiences hoping that my talk would discourage people from making war. Our experience must not forgotten. What we believed in during the war turned out to be worth nothing. We don't know to whom we should turn our rage. I went through hell on earth of Hiroshima should not be repeated again. That is why I keep telling the same old story over and over again. And I'll keep repeating it.

STOP AND THINK:

What does Ms. Saeki mean when she says, “I relate my experiences hoping that my talk would discourage people from making war.” How do you think Ms. Saeki hopes to accomplish this?

Testimony of Taeko Teramae

Ms. Taeko Teramae was 15 years old when the bomb was dropped. She was in the central telephone office, 0.5 kilometers away from the hypocenter. Many mobilized students were working in the central telephone center that day. Some 7000 mobilized students were killed by the A-bomb in the city of Hiroshima.

TERAMAE: When the bomb fell, I was 15 years old. I was a third grader at the girls' junior high school. I saw something shining in the clear blue sky. I wondered what it was, so I stared at it. As the light grew bigger, the shining thing got bigger as well. And at the moment when I spoke to my friend,there was a flash, far brighter than one used for a camera. It exploded right in front of my eyes. There was a tremendous noise when all the buildings around me collapsed. I also heard people crying for help and for their mothers. I was caught under something which prevented me from moving freely. I was so shocked that I couldn't believe what had happened. I thought maybe I was having some kind of nightmare, but of course, I wasn't. I felt pain when I pinched myself to see if it was real. I thought the bomb had been dropped on the central telephone office. The dust was rising and something sandy and slimy entered my mouth. I couldn't figure out what it was since I couldn't move or see. I couldn't see anything in the dark. A little later, I smelt something like sulfur. It smelt like the volcano, Mt. Aso and I threw up. I heard more voices calling ``Mother! Mother!'' But when our class teacher, Mr.Wakita, told us to behave like good students and stop crying, all the cries for help and for Mother stopped all of a sudden. We began to calm down and try to behave as Mr. Wakita told us to. I tried very hard to move my arms and my legs and finally I was able to move a little. I was so surprised to see the dark sky with all the red flames through the window because it was only a few minutes before when the sky was blue and clear. It was all quiet and the city was wrapped, enveloped in red flames. Mr. Wakita came to help me. He asked me if I wanted to swim across the river. The bridge was burning and the river was very high. I had no choice. I could barely see by then, though. And Mr. Wakita took my arms and told me to swim across the river together with him, so together we went into the river and began to swim. When we reached the middle of the river, I could no longer see anything and I was starting to feel faint. And as I began to feel faint, I also began to lose control. Mr. Wakita encouraged me and helped me to reach the other side of the river. Finally, we reached the other side. What surprised me so much was that all the cries of the students for help and for their mothers. It just didn't stop. I couldn't see anything. All I could do was listen to their cries. I asked my teacher, I asked him what was going on. Mr. Wakita explained to me how the high school students were burnt and crouching in pain in the streets. I


couldn't see anything. There were many students who were mobilized to destroy buildings to widen the streets and the area of Tsurumi Bridge, City Hall and the Chugoku Newspaper on that day. And since they were outside, they were directly exposed to the bomb. Many of them died, many of them died right there. Someone called for help in vain, and some jumped into the river and drown to death. If my teacher, Mr. Wakita had not come to help me, I would have died in the river.

INTERVIEWER: How were your wounds?

TERAMAE: If my wounds had been on my arms or my legs, I would have known it was, but my wounds were on my face, so I had no idea for some time. I just didn't know. I asked my parents how I looked, but they just said that I had only minor wounds. They didn't tell me the truth. After I got better, I found a piece of mirror and looked into it. I was so surprised I found my left eye looked just like a pomegranate, and I also found cuts on my right eye and on my nose and on my lower jaw. It was horrible. I was very shocked to find myself looking like a monster. I even wished I had died with my sisters. I was just overcome with apprehension when I thought about it.

INTERVIEWER: What is your biggest hope or dream now that you want to realize?

TERAMAE: Well, my hope is to have a comprehensive meeting of A-bomb survivors. That's what I want. We had such a meeting the other day and in that meeting, both male and female A-bomb survivors repeatedly said that they wanted their health back again, even for just one day. They said they can't even wear short sleeve shirts because of the scars on their arms left from the bomb. Lonely A-bomb survivors include those who lost their families and also the mobilized students who have remained single because of the wounds caused by the A-bomb. There are great many of them. So, I do hope to do something to support always lonely people.

STOP AND THINK:

What is the topic of Teramae’s description?

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What is Teramae implying about the Atomic bombs effects on the survivors?

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What complications have arisen because of these effects?

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Testimony of Hatchobori Streetcar Survivors

Seven hundred and fifty meters from ground zero, these are the testimonies of the passengers who were on the same streetcar in a Hatchobori area when the atomic bomb fell. A little after eight in the morning on August 6, the streetcar for Koi left Hiroshima Station. And at 8:15 it approached Hatchobori Station, 780 meters from the hypocenter and an intense flash and blast engulfed the car, instantly setting it on fire. It is said that seventy cars were running in the city at the same time. They were an important means of transportation for the citizens, and all the trains were packed with people since it was the morning rush hour. Nearly 100 passengers are said to have been on board on the streetcar which was near Hatchobori. But the survival of only ten have been confirmed to date. Seven out of ten have recorded their testimonies on this video tape.

Tomiko Sasaki, 17 on that day, was on her way to her friend's house in Funairi with two classmates as it was their holiday from student mobilization labor. Approximately two weeks after the bombing, her two classmates died.

INTERVIEWER: Were three of you on the same part of the car?

SASAKI: Yes. I was standing in front here and the others were next to me. There was the flash and darkness. I think I was unconscious for a while. We came to and called each other's names. My friends complained of the heat and terrible pain. I saw that one side of her body had been badly burned. There was a water tank for fire prevention, but the water wasn't clear due to all the dust. I put my handkerchief in the water and I put it over her burns, but she went on crying in pain. Both of my friends were burned. As for myself, flesh was hanging from my whole face was bloody. Fortunately I escaped from being burnt. I think it made a big difference that I was not burned. In fact, I think that saved my life.

Eiko Taoka, then 21, was heading for Funairi with her one year old son to secure wagon in preparation for her move out of the building which was to be evacuated. Her son died of radiation sickness on August 28.

TAOKA: When we were near in Hatchobori and since I had been holding my son in my arms, the young woman in front of me said, "I will be getting off here. Please take this seat." We were just changing places when there was a strange smell and sound. It suddenly became dark and before I knew it, I had jumped outside.

INTERVIEWER: What about your son?

TAOKA: I held him firmly and looked down on him. He had been standing by the window and I think fragments of glass had pierced his head. His face was a mess because of the blood flowing from his head. But he looked at my face and smiled. His smile has remained glued in my memory. He did not comprehend what had happened. And so he looked at me and smiled at my face which was all bloody. I had plenty of milk which he drank all throughout that day. I think my


child sucked the poison right out of my body. And soon after that he died. Yes, I think that he died for me.

Tsutaichi Matsuzaka, then a 37 years old factory worker in Mukaihara, was on his way to the main office of his company in Hatsukaichi to get woodwork materials with three of his coworkers. His three coworkers died one after another within two or three weeks after the bombing.

MATSUZAKA: My hair fell off. I had a fever and spots appeared on my body. I heard all kinds of talk in those days, for instance, that the one was doomed if these spots appeared. So I was in constant fear for my life.

INTERVIEWER: Two out of your three coworkers died?

MATSUZAKA: No, No. three.

INTERVIEWER: All three?

MATSUZAKA: Yes, Hayashi died the following week. The next man died two weeks later and the third, a little after that. I pray that there never be another nuclear war like that. It was a living hell.

Shizuno Tochiki, 23 at that time, was on her way to her office in Kogo. Immediately after the bombing, she had a high fever which lasted for ten days. She's suffered the symptoms of radiation sickness, the purple spots appeared all over her body and her hair fell out. It was only after one month that she was finally able to get up.

TOCHIKI: I think the air-raid warning had been lifted, so I left for Hatchobori without worrying. Then, there was a flash and a big sound which is known as ``Pika-don''. The train shock and it seemed to me as if a flash had directly entered my eyes. It was extremely hot. Because of the jolt, people fell right on top of each other. I think I was at a very bottom. I thought I would be crashed to death in a little while because I was so small and had the weight of all those people on top of me. But one by the people on top finally left the car. They ran with all their might along the railroad tracks. I could hear someone shout, ``Another hit and we're finished.'' But I could only see people's shadows. When I gained consciousness, I was in a bed. I don't remember how many days it took until I could walk again. One day I asked for a cane, but I couldn't walk straight since my legs were so thin and so shaky. I staggered towards a mirror and I fell utterly, completely miserable as I had no hair, all my hair was gone. But just being able to walk to the next room made me so happy.

Keiko Matsuda, then 14, on her way to Miyajima with two friends since they had no mobilized labor on that day. One of her friends who had been closest to the front and received the worst burns died in the first-aid station in Nukushina.

MATSUDA: It was very, very hot. I touched my skin and it just peeled right off. The driver of the streetcar was not in sight. I thought he had been quick to run away but now I think that he was probably hurled outside in the blast. It was around August 25 that a pile of my hair just fell off all at once. I had a high fever and maggots infested in my eyes.

INTERVIEWER: In your eyes?


MATSUDA: Yes. I was afflicted with erysipelas as well. I had two children, but I had not told them about this experience. And I don't want to talk about it. But this time many people are testifying together and since I've been asked, I will talk. But I have tried to avoid it until now.

Takeo Watanabe, 16 at that time, was working in a telephone office and he was heading toward the Chugoku Newspaper Office. He has speech difficulties since he has cerebral thrombosis. His wife is together with him today.

WATANABE: How, how can I say it? Well, I, I don't know just what to say. I got off the car and, and then, (His wife speaks for him.) it was dark so he groped his way toward an air-raid shelter he knew nearby. You know when I married him, I didn't know that my husband was a victim of A-bomb until I read a diary that he had kept at that time. He would not tell me about experience himself. He just didn't want to talk about it. Every year from the end of July to the beginning of August, he would have a fever or become ill.

INTERVIEWER: So you do not want to talk about your experience?

WATANABE: Hmm...Those day, it was, it was a burden, it was tough, but I guess now I just, I just have no more choice.

INTERVIEWER: And you finally decided to speak out?

WATANABE: Yeah.

Akira Ishida, then a 17 year old junior air man in the army, had the day off and was going to Miyajima with his elder brother to pray for good luck in the war. His elder brother died in September 1945 of radiation sickness.

ISHIDA: Several months later, I can remember, I remember a cold morning, I don't know why but my mother always kept a round hand mirror by my pillow, which I picked up without thinking. I looked at my face and I saw something so shiny on the corner of my head. Using all my energy, I called out to my mother who was in the kitchen, and I said, ``Mother! My hair is growing back!'' She was so happy that she held me and she cried. I'll never forget that day and the feel of the tears that my mother shed for me while she held me in her arms. It still comes back to me even though the people here are of different ages, we are also all of the same age. On August 6th, 1945, all of us died once and then, we were brought back to life. We were all born again. And we're in our second life now. Everyone gathered here today is now 41 years old if you count the number the years from the bombing. It's like a class reunion. I feel that we must testify in the hope that our experience will help to keep mankind from perishing.

STOP and THINK:

Which of the following is NOT a similarity found among the victims recorded above?

a. a feeling of trepidation to share the experience

b. a feeling of pride in having survived the bombing

c. infection as indicated by high fever and immobility

d. severe burns


Peace MuseumOption C

Role: Peace Museum Curator

Audience: American citizens only vaguely aware of the events surrounding the dropping of the Atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Format: A display (the only limits are your imagination)

Topic: Offer an informational tribute to the victims of the Atomic Bomb. Your display should help your audience connect with the material as well as understand the impact the bombing had on the victims.

Truman informs the nation that an atomic weapon has been detonated in Japan.August 6, 1945THE WHITE HOUSE

Washington, D.C.

STATEMENT BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima and destroyed its usefulness to the enemy. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of TNT. It had more than two thousand times the blast power of the British "Grand Slam" which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare.

The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid many fold. And the end is not yet. With this bomb we have now added a new and revolutionary increase in destruction to supplement the growing power of our armed forces. In their present form these bombs are now in production and even more powerful forms are in development.

It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.

Before 1939, it was the accepted belief of scientists that it was theoretically possible to release atomic energy. But no one knew any practical method of doing it. By 1942, however, we knew that the Germans were working feverishly to find a way to add atomic energy to the other engines of war with which they

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hoped to enslave the world. But they failed. We may be grateful to Providence that the Germans got the V-1's and V-2's late and in limited quantities and even more grateful that they did not get the atomic bomb at all.

The battle of the laboratories held fateful risks for us as well as the battles of the air, land, and sea, and we have now won the battle of the laboratories as we have won the other battles.

Beginning in 1940, before Pearl Harbor, scientific knowledge useful in was pooled between the United States and Great Britain, and many priceless helps to our victories have come from that arrangement. Under that general policy the research on the atomic bomb was begun. With American and British scientists working together we entered the race of discovery against the Germans.

The United States had available the large number of scientists of distinction in the many needed areas of knowledge. It had the tremendous industrial and financial resources necessary for the project and they could be devoted to it without undue impairment of other vital war work. In the United States the laboratory work and the production plants, on which a substantial start had already been made, would be out of reach of enemy bombing, while at that time Britain was exposed to constant air attack and was still threatened with the possibility of invasion. For these reasons Prime Minister Churchill and President Roosevelt agreed that it was wise to carry on the project here. We now have two great plants and many lesser works devoted to the production of atomic power. Employment during peak construction numbered 125,000 and over 65,000 individuals are even now engaged in operating the plants. Many have worked there for two and a half years. Few know what they have been producing. They see great quantities of material going in and they see nothing coming out of these plants, for the physical size of the explosive charge is exceedingly small. We have spent two billion dollars on the greatest scientific gamble in history -- and won.

But the greatest marvel is not the size of the enterprise, its secrecy, nor its cost, but the achievement of scientific brains in putting together infinitely complex pieces of knowledge held by many men in different fields of science into a workable plan. And hardly less marvelous has been the capacity of industry to design and of labor to operate, the machines and methods to do things never done before so that the brainchild of many minds came forth in physical shape and performed as it was supposed to do. Both science and industry worked under the direction of the United States Army, which achieved a unique success in managing so diverse a problem in the advancement of knowledge in an amazingly short time. It is doubtful if such another combination could be got together in the world. What has been done is the greatest achievement of organized science in history. It was done under pressure and without failure.

We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city. We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications. Let there be no mistake; we shall completely destroy Japan's power to make war.

It was to spare the Japanese people from utter destruction that the ultimatum of July 26 was issued at Potsdam. Their leaders promptly rejected that ultimatum. If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth. Behind this air attack will follow sea and land forces in such number that and power as they have not yet seen and with the fighting skill of which they are already well aware.

The Secretary of War, who has kept in personal touch with all phases of the project, will immediately make public a statement giving further details.

His statement will give facts concerning the sites at Oak Ridge near Knoxville, Tennessee, and at Richland, near Pasco, Washington, and an installation near Santa Fe, New Mexico. Although the workers at the sites have been making materials to be used producing the greatest destructive force in history they have not themselves been in danger beyond that of many other occupations, for the utmost care has been taken of their safety.

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The fact that we can release atomic energy ushers in a new era in man's understanding of nature's forces. Atomic energy may in the future supplement the power that now comes from coal, oil, and falling water, but at present it cannot be produced on a bases to compete with them commercially. Before that comes there must be a long period of intensive research. It has never been the habit of the scientists of this country or the policy of this government to withhold from the world scientific knowledge. Normally, therefore, everything about the work with atomic energy would be made public.

But under the present circumstances it is not intended to divulge the technical processes of production or all the military applications. Pending further examination of possible methods of protecting us and the rest of the world from the danger of sudden destruction.

I shall recommend that the Congress of the United States consider promptly the establishment of an appropriate commission to control the production and use of atomic power within the United States. I shall give further consideration and make further recommendations to the Congress as to how atomic power can become a powerful and forceful influence towards the maintenance of world peace.

Source: Harry S. Truman Library, "Army press notes," box 4, Papers of Eben A. Ayers.

STOP and THINK:What is President Truman talking about in this speech?____________________________________________________________________________

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What is his opinion on this topic?____________________________________________________________________________

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Identify five supporting details that Truman offers to support this opinion. ____________________________________________________________________________

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Copyright © 2002 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.

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The Atlantic Monthly; July 1995; Was It Right?; Volume 276, No. 1; pages 20–23.

Was It Right? Most of the debate over the atomic bombing of Japan focuses on the unanswerable question of whether it

was necessary. But that skirts the question of its morality.

by Thomas Powers

.....

Imagine that the persistence of that question irritated Harry Truman above all other things. The atomic bombs that destroyed the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki fifty years ago were followed in a matter of days by the complete surrender of the Japanese empire and military forces, with only the barest fig leaf of a condition—an American promise not to molest the Emperor. What more could one ask from an act of war? But the two bombs each killed at least 50,000 people and perhaps as many as 100,000. Numerous attempts have been made to estimate the death toll, counting not only those who died on the first day and over the following week or two but also the thousands who died later of cancers thought to have been caused by radiation. The exact number of dead can never be known, because whole families—indeed, whole districts—were wiped out by the bombs; because the war had created a floating population of refugees throughout Japan; because certain categories of victims, such as conscript workers from Korea, were excluded from estimates by Japanese authorities; and because as time went by, it became harder to know which deaths had indeed been caused by the bombs. However many died, the victims were overwhelming civilians, primarily the old, the young, and women; and all the belligerents formally took the position that the killing of civilians violated both the laws of war and common precepts of humanity.

Truman shared this reluctance to be thought a killer of civilians. Two weeks before Hiroshima he wrote of the bomb in his diary, "I have told [the Secretary of War] Mr. Stimson to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. … " The first reports on August 6, 1945, accordingly described Hiroshima as a Japanese army base.

Stop and Think:What tone best describes Truman’s perspective on using the atomic bomb on Japan?

A. indifferentB. vengefulC. nurturingD. deceptive

Explain why you selected this answer. Enter checkmarks next to any supporting details that defend your selection.

This fiction could not stand for long. The huge death toll of ordinary Japanese citizens, combined with the horror of so many deaths by fire, eventually cast a moral shadow over the triumph of ending the war with two bombs. The horror soon began to weigh on the conscience of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the secret research project at Los Alamos, New Mexico, that designed and built the first bombs. Oppenheimer not only had threatened his health with three years of unremitting overwork to build the bombs but also had soberly advised Henry Stimson that no conceivable demonstration of the bomb could have the shattering psychological impact of its actual use.

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Oppenheimer himself gave an Army officer heading for the Hiroshima raid last minute instructions for proper delivery of the bomb.

Don't let them bomb through clouds or through an overcast. Got to see the target. No radar bombing; it must be dropped visually. ... Of course, they must not drop it in rain or fog. Don't let them detonate it too high. The figure fixed on is just right. Don't let it go up or the target won't get as much damage.

These detailed instructions were the result of careful committee work by Oppenheimer and his colleagues. Mist or rain would absorb the heat of the bomb blast and thereby limit the conflagration, which experiments with city bombing in both Germany and Japan had shown to be the principal agent of casualties and destruction. Much thought had also been given to finding the right city. It should be in a valley, to contain the blast; it should be relatively undamaged by conventional air raids, so that there would be no doubt of the bomb's destructive power; an educated citizenry was desired, so that it would understand the enormity of what had happened. The military director of the bomb project, General Leslie Groves, thought the ancient Japanese imperial capital of Kyoto would be ideal, but Stimson had spent a second honeymoon in Kyoto, and was afraid that the Japanese would never forgive or forget its wanton destruction; he flatly refused to leave the city on the target list. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed instead.

On the night of August 6 Oppenheimer was thrilled by the bomb's success. He told an auditorium filled with whistling, cheering, foot-stomping scientists and technicians that he was sorry only that the bomb had not been ready in time for use on Germany. The adrenaline of triumph drained away following the destruction of Nagasaki, on August 9. Oppenheimer, soon offered his resignation and by mid-October had severed his official ties. Some months later he told Truman in the White House, "Mr. President, I have blood on my hands."

Stop and Think:

The phrase, “I have blood on my hands” most likely means:A. Others find me guilty of a crime and are prosecuting me.B. I am resigning my position because I don’t enjoy my job anymore.C. I am guilty and I am prosecuting myself.D. I am never going to feel innocent again.

Truman was disgusted by this cry-baby attitude. "I told him," Truman said later, "the blood was on my hands—let me worry about that."

Stop and Think:Compare Oppenheimer’s intention to Truman’s intention in saying, “I have blood on my hands.”

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Till the end of his life Truman insisted that he had suffered no agonies of regret over his decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the pungency of his language suggests that he meant what he said. But it is also true that he ordered a halt to the atomic bombing on August 10, four days before the Japanese Emperor surrendered, and the reason, according to a Cabinet member present at the meeting, was that "he didn't like the idea of killing ... 'all those kids.' "


Stop and Think:What is the author’s primary intention for including this information about President Truman?____________________________________________________________________________

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Was it right? Harry Truman isn't the only one to have disliked the question. Historians of the war, of the invention of the atomic bomb, and of its use on Japan have almost universally chosen to skirt the question of whether killing civilians can be morally justified. They ask instead, Was it necessary?

Those who say it was necessary argue that a conventional invasion of Japan, scheduled to begin on the southernmost island of Kyushu on November 1, 1945, would have cost the lives of large numbers of Americans and Japanese alike. Much ink has been spilled over just how large these numbers would have been. Truman in later life sometimes said that he had used the atomic bomb to save the lives of half a million or even a million American boys who might have died in an island-by-island battle to the bitter end for the conquest of Japan.

Where Truman got those numbers is hard to say. In the spring of 1945, when it was clear that the final stage of the war was at hand, Truman received a letter from former President Herbert Hoover urging him to negotiate an end to the war in order to save the "500,000 to 1 million American lives" that might be lost in an invasion. But the commander of the invasion force, General Douglas MacArthur, predicted nothing on that scale. In a paper prepared for a White House strategy meeting held on June 18, a month before the first atomic bomb was tested, MacArthur estimated that he would suffer about 95,000 casualties in the first ninety days—a third of them deaths. The conflict of estimates is best explained by the fact that they were being used at the time as weapons in a larger argument. Admirals William Leahy and Ernest J. King thought that Japan could be forced to surrender by a combination of bombing and naval blockade. Naturally they inflated the number of casualties that their strategy would avoid. MacArthur and other generals, convinced that the war would have to be won on the ground, may have deliberately guessed low to avoid frightening the President.

Stop and Think:The author’s purpose in including this statement, “MacArthur and other generals, convinced that the war would have to be won on the ground, may have deliberately guessed low to avoid frightening the president” is most likely NOT to accomplish which goal?

A. Criticize the actors involved in the dropping of the atomic bombs.B. Critique the decisions made by the US military in their advisory roles.C. Demonstrate total communication between MacArthur and TrumanD. Prove that Truman and MacArthur knew the devastation the atomic bombs would cause.

It was not easy to gauge how the battle would go. From any conventional military perspective, by the summer of 1945 Japan had already lost the war. The Japanese navy mainly rested on the bottom of the ocean; supply lines to the millions of Japanese soldiers in China and other occupied territories had been severed; the Japanese air force was helpless to prevent the almost nightly raids by fleets of B-29 bombers, which had been systematically burning Japanese cities since March; and Japanese petroleum


stocks were close to gone. The battleship Yamato, dispatched on a desperate mission to Okinawa in April of 1945, set off without fuel enough to return.

But despite this hopeless situation the Japanese military was convinced that a "decisive battle" might inflict so many casualties on Americans coming ashore in Kyushu that Truman would back down and grant important concessions to end the fighting. Japan's hopes were pinned on "special attack forces," a euphemism for those engaged in suicide missions, such as kamikaze planes loaded with explosives plunging into American ships, as had been happening since 1944. During the spring and summer of 1945 about 8,000 aircraft, along with one-man submarines and "human torpedoes," had been prepared for suicide missions, and the entire Japanese population had been exhorted to fight, with bamboo spears if necessary, as "One Hundred Million Bullets of Fire." Military commanders were so strongly persuaded that honor and even victory might yet be achieved by the "homeland decisive battle" that the peace faction in the Japanese cabinet feared an order to surrender would be disobeyed. The real question is not whether an invasion would have been a ghastly human tragedy, to which the answer is surely yes, but whether Hoover, Leahy, King, and others were right when they said that bombing and blockade would end the war.

Stop and Think:What is the main idea of the five paragraphs above?

Identify five supporting details that support your answer by writing checkmarks next to each point. Summarize them below.

1. ______________________________________________________________________________

2. ______________________________________________________________________________

3. ______________________________________________________________________________

4. ______________________________________________________________________________

5. ______________________________________________________________________________

Here the historians are on firm ground. American cryptanalysts had been reading high-level Japanese diplomatic ciphers and knew that the government in Tokyo was eagerly pressing the Russians for help in a negotiated peace. The sticking point was narrow: the Allies insisted on unconditional surrender; the Japanese peace faction wanted assurances that the imperial dynasty would remain. Truman knew this at the time.

What Truman did not know, but what has been well established by historians since, is that the peace faction in the Japanese cabinet feared the utter physical destruction of the Japanese homeland, the forced removal of the imperial dynasty, and an end to the Japanese state. After the war it was also learned that Emperor Hirohito, a shy and unprepossessing man of forty-four whose first love was marine biology, felt pressed to intervene by his horror at the bombing of Japanese cities. The devastation of Tokyo left by a single night of firebomb raids on March 9–10, 1945, in which 100,000 civilians died, had been clearly visible from the palace grounds for months thereafter. It is further known that the intervention of the Emperor at a special meeting, or gozen kaigin, on the night of August 9–10 made it possible for the government to surrender.

The Emperor's presence at a gozen kaigin is intended to encourage participants to put aside all petty considerations, but at such a meeting, according to tradition, the Emperor does not speak or express any opinion whatever. When the cabinet could not agree on whether to surrender or fight on, the Premier, Kantaro Suzuki, broke all precedent and left the military men speechless when he addressed Hirohito, and said, "With the greatest reverence I must now ask the Emperor to express his wishes."


Of course, this had been arranged by the two men beforehand. Hirohito cited the suffering of his people and concluded, "The time has come when we must bear the unbearable." After five days of further confusion, in which a military coup was barely averted, the Emperor broadcast a similar message to the nation at large in which he noted that "the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb. ... "

Stop and Think:A “gozen kaigin” is most likely:

A. A meeting of advisors to discuss the best outcome for the country. B. A community based organization with limited powersC. A forum of world leaders to weigh the pros and cons of an issue.D. A summit for all the participants of a government to voice their opinion.

Was it right? The bombing of cities in the Second World War was the result of several factors: the desire to strike enemies from afar and thereby avoid the awful trench-war slaughter of 1914–1918; the industrial capacity of the Allies to build great bomber fleets; the ability of German fighters and anti-aircraft to shoot down attacking aircraft that flew by daylight or at low altitudes; the inability of bombers to strike targets accurately from high altitudes; the difficulty of finding all but very large targets (that is, cities) at night; the desire of airmen to prove that air forces were an important military arm; the natural hardening of hearts in wartime; and the relative absence of people willing to ask publicly if bombing civilians was right.

No nation could long resist destruction on such a scale—a conclusion formally reached by the United States Strategic Bombing Survey in its Summary Report (Pacific War): "Japan would have surrendered [by late 1945] even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war [on August 8], and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated."

Was it right? There is an awkward, evasive cast to the internal official documents of the British and American air war of 1939–1945 that record the shift in targets from factories and power plants and the like toward people in cities. Nowhere was the belief ever baldly confessed that if we killed enough people, they would give up; but that is what was meant by the phrase "morale bombing," and in the case of Japan it worked. The mayor of Nagasaki recently compared the crime of the destruction of his city to the genocide of the Holocaust, but whereas comparisons—and especially this one—are invidious, how could the killing of 100,000 civilians in a day for a political purpose ever be considered anything but a crime?

Fifty years of argument over the crime against Hiroshima and Nagasaki has disguised the fact that the American war against Japan was ended by a larger crime in which the atomic bombings were only a late innovation—the killing of so many civilians that the Emperor and his cabinet eventually found the courage to give up. Americans are still painfully divided over the right words to describe the brutal campaign of terror that ended the war, but it is instructive that those who criticize the atomic bombings most severely have never gone on to condemn all the bombing. In effect, they give themselves permission to condemn one crime (Hiroshima) while enjoying the benefits of another (the conventional bombing that ended the war).

Ending the war was not the only result of the bombing. The scale of the attacks and the suffering and destruction they caused also broke the warrior spirit of Japan, bringing to a close a century of uncontrolled militarism. The undisguisable horror of the bombing must also be given credit for the following fifty years in which no atomic bombs were used, and in which there was no major war between great powers. It is this combination of horror and good results that accounts for the American ambivalence about Hiroshima. It is part of the American national gospel that the end never justifies the means, and yet it is undeniable that the end—stopping the war with Japan—was the immediate result of brutal means.

Stop and Think:What topics did the author address in this article?


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So What? What is the author’s opinion on these topics?

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Peace Declaration

August 6, 1990

A summer day, a solitary bomb, a single instant; and Hiroshima was transformed into a raging inferno and a hell on earth.

Countless precious lives were tragically lost, and even those who somehow managed to survive have lived in constant fear of radioactivity's grim after effects.

Over the last 45 years, Hiroshima has risen from the agony of its bombing and, firm in the determination that the evil never be repeated, has constantly pressed for lasting world peace and called for the abolition of nuclear weapons and the renunciation of war. Today, Hiroshima's prayer has become the world's prayer.

The long history of distrust and discord is drawing to a close, and there are finally signs of a new era of trust and cooperation.

Long the symbol of East-West discord, even the Berlin Wall has come down, the Cold War structures are fated to end, the quest is on for a new world order of peace, and mankind is taking the first steps toward altering its history.

The leaders of United States and the Soviet Union concurred this June on the first real reduction ever in their nuclear arsenals, and agreement has been reached on negotiating further nuclear disarmament. Protocols have also been signed toward the abolition of chemical weapons and there is promise of an early agreement on reductions in conventional forces as well. Hiroshima has the highest regard for this tide of disarmament changing the fate of mankind from one of annihilation to one of survival. All of the nuclear powers should heed this global call and move immediately to ban all nuclear tests and to abolish nuclear weapons, and all countries everywhere should make greater efforts for total disarmament across the board.

In line with the relaxation of world tensions, it is incumbent upon the government of Japan, in keeping with the pacifist ideals underpinning its Constitution, to curtail military spending, to pass the three non-nuclear principles into law so as to prevent the mooting of these national tenets, and to take the initiative in making the Asia-Pacific region a nuclear-free zone of disarmament, as well as to undertake vigorous diplomatic efforts for the building of a world order of peace.

This March, the renovation of the Atomic Bomb Dome was completed with the generous contributions and the fervent wishes for peace from all over the world. Annual admissions to the Peace Memorial Museum


topped 1.5 million last year. And the number of cities sympathizing with the Program to Promote the Solidarity of Cities towards the Total Abolition of Nuclear Weapons has grown to 287 cities in 50 countries worldwide. All of this is testimony to the depths of the popular longing for peace.

Today, we will host the 1990 Women's International Peace Symposium in Hiroshima with its vigorous discussions of what women can do to bring about peace and the abolition of nuclear weapons.

Hiroshima will continue to lay the grim realities of nuclear attack before the world, and we are promoting the establishment here of an international peace research institute to make the world more aware of the need for nuclear disarmament.

Hiroshima renews its appeal:

For an immediate and complete end to nuclear testing and the abolition of nuclear arms.

For the United States, the Soviet Union, and the other nuclear countries to reveal the full truth of the harm caused by their obstinate nuclear testing over the last forty-plus years and to promptly implement restitution measures for the environment and the people.

For the world leaders and those young people who will guide future generations to visit Hiroshima and to see for themselves the horror of nuclear war.

Hiroshima's heart also goes out to all of the oppressed people everywhere who are victims of starvation, poverty, the suppression of human rights, refugee status, regional conflicts, global environmental devastaion, and other problems, and we earnestly hope that the international community will cooperate for the earliest possible solution of these problems.

Today, in this Peace Memorial Ceremony to commemorate the 45th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, we express our heartfelt condolences to all of the victims of that bombing. We strongly appeal to the government of Japan to use the Survey of Atomic Bomb Victims in promptly instituting a systematic program of support for the hibakusha grounded upon the principle of national indemnification. At the same time, we earnestly hope that positive efforts will be made to promote support for those hibakusha resident on the Korean Peninsula, in the United States, and elsewhere, and we rededicate ourselves to the cause of peace.

Delivered by Takeshi Araki, Mayor of Hiroshima City

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Co-chairs of the Historians' Committee for Open Debate on Hiroshima’s Letter to the Secretary of the Smithsonian

Mr. I. Michael HeymanSecretaryThe Smithsonian InstitutionWashington, D.C. 20560July 31, 1995

Dear Secretary Heyman:

Testifying before a House subcommittee on March 10, 1995, you promised that when you finally unveiled the Enola Gay exhibit, "I am just going to report the facts."[1]

Unfortunately, the Enola Gay exhibit contains a text which goes far beyond the facts. The critical label at the heart of the exhibit makes the following assertions:

* The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki "destroyed much of the two cities and caused many tens of thousands of deaths." This substantially understates the widely accepted figure that at least 200,000 men, women and children were killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (Official Japanese records calculate a figure of more than 200,000 deaths--the vast majority of victims being women, children and elderly men.)[2]

STOP and THINK:

What is the author implying in the assertion above?

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What complications exist through this act?

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* "However," claims the Smithsonian, "the use of the bombs led to the immediate surrender of Japan and made unnecessary the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands." Presented as fact, this sentence is actually a highly contentious interpretation. For example, an April 30, 1946 study by the War Department's Military Intelligence Division concluded, "The war would almost certainly have terminated when Russia entered the war against Japan."[3] (The Soviet entry into the war on August 8th is not even mentioned in the exhibit as a major factor in the Japanese surrender.) And it is also a fact that even after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed, the Japanese still insisted that Emperor Hirohito be allowed to remain emperor as a condition of surrender. Only when that assurance was given did the Japanese agree to surrender. This was precisely the clarification of surrender terms that many of Truman's own top advisors had urged on him in the months prior to Hiroshima. This, too, is a widely known fact.[4]

Why might it be problematic for the Smithsonian Institute to imply that the “use of the bombs led to the immediate surrender of Japan?

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In your opinion, should the curators of a museum be entitled to share their perspectives on history with the public? Why or why not?

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* The Smithsonian's label also takes the highly partisan view that, "It was thought highly unlikely that Japan, while in a very weakened military condition, would have surrendered unconditionally without such an invasion." Nowhere in the exhibit is this interpretation balanced by other views. Visitors to the exhibit will not learn that many


U.S. leaders--including Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower[5], Admiral William D. Leahy[6], War Secretary Henry L. Stimson[7], Acting Secretary of State Joseph C. Grew[8] and Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy[9]--thought it highly probable that the Japanese would surrender well before the earliest possible invasion, scheduled for November 1945. It is spurious to assert as fact that obliterating Hiroshima in August was needed to obviate an invasion in November. This is interpretation--the very thing you said would be banned from the exhibit.

STOP AND THINK:

What is the author accusing the Smithsonian of doing? Locate three pieces of evidence from the paragraph above that supports your conclusion and draw checkmarks next to them.

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* In yet another label, the Smithsonian asserts as fact that "Special leaflets were then dropped on Japanese cities three days before a bombing raid to warn civilians to evacuate." The very next sentence refers to the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, implying that the civilian inhabitants of Hiroshima were given a warning. In fact, no evidence has ever been uncovered that leaflets warning of atomic attack were dropped on Hiroshima. Indeed, the decision of the Interim Committee was "that we could not give the Japanese any warning."[10]

STOP AND THINK:

If leaflets had been dropped, then what might have been different in the dropping of the Atomic bomb?

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Because leaflets were NOT dropped, the author finds fault with the Smithsonian for claiming that they were. Why is this claim significant?

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* In a 16 minute video film in which the crew of the Enola Gay are allowed to speak at length about why they believe the atomic bombings were justified, pilot Col. Paul Tibbits asserts that Hiroshima was "definitely a military objective." Nowhere in the exhibit is this false assertion balanced by contrary information. Hiroshima was chosen as a target precisely because it had been very low on the previous spring's campaign of conventional bombing, and therefore was a pristine target on which to measure the destructive powers of the atomic bomb.[11] Defining Hiroshima as a "military" target is analogous to calling San Francisco a "military" target because it has a port and contains the Presidio. James Conant, a member of the Interim Committee that advised President Truman, defined the target for the bomb as a "vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers' houses."[12] There were indeed military factories in Hiroshima, but they lay on the outskirts of the city. Nevertheless, the Enola Gay bombardier's instructions were to target the bomb on the center of this civilian city.

The few words in the exhibit that attempt to provide some historical context for viewing the Enola Gay amount to a highly unbalanced and one-sided presentation of a largely discredited post-war justification of the atomic bombings.

Such errors of fact and such tendentious interpretation in the exhibit are no doubt partly the result of your decision earlier this year to take this exhibit out of the hands of professional curators and your own board of historical advisors. Accepting your stated concerns for accuracy, we trust that you will therefore adjust the exhibit, either to eliminate the highly contentious interpretations, or at the very least, balance them with other interpretations that can be easily drawn from the attached footnotes.

Sincerely,

Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin

Co-chairs of the Historians' Committee for Open Debate on Hiroshima

(see the attached sheet for additional signatories)

List of Signatories

Kai Bird, co-chair of the Historians' Committee for Open Debate on Hiroshima

Martin Sherwin, co-chair of the Historians' Committee for Open Debate on Hiroshima

Walter LaFeber, Professor of History, Cornell University

Stanley Hoffman, Dillon Professor, Harvard University

Mark Selden, Chair, Department of Sociology, State University of New York at Binghamton

Jon Wiener, Professor of History, University of California, Irvine

William O. Walker III, Ohio Wesleyan University

Dr. E.B. Halpern, Lecturer in American History, University College London

John Morris, Professor, Miyagi Gakuin Women's Junior College, Sendai, Japan

Gar Alperovitz, historian and author of The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb

Stanley Goldberg, historian of science and biographer of Gen. Leslie Groves

James Hershberg, historian and author of James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age


Greg Mitchell, author of Hiroshima in America

Gaddis Smith, Professor of History, Yale University

Barton J. Bernstein, Professor of History, Stanford University

Michael J. Hogan, Professor of History, Ohio State University

Melvyn P. Leffler, Professor of History, University of Virginia

John W. Dower, Professor of History, MIT

Priscilla Johnson McMillan, Author and Fellow of the Russian Research Center, Harvard University

Bob Carter, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, Worcester College of Higher Education, England.

Douglas Haynes, Associate Professor of History, Dartmouth College

Bruce Nelson, Department of History, Dartmouth College

Walter J. Kendall, III, The John Marshall School of Law, Chicago

Patricia Morton, Assistant Professor, University of California, Riverside

Michael Kazin, Professor of History, American University

Gerald Figal, Asst. Professor of History, Lewis & Clark College, Portland, Oregon

R. David Arkush, Professor of History, University of Iowa, Iowa City

Barbara Brooks, Professor of Japanese and Chinese History, City College of New York

Dell Upton, Professor, University of California, Berkeley

Eric Schneider, Assistant Dean, College of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania

Janet Golden, Assistant Professor of History, Rutgers, Camden

Bob Buzzanco, Assistant Professor of History, University of Houston

Lawrence Badash, Professor of History of Science, University of California, Santa Barbara

Kanno Humio, Asociate Professor of Iwate University, Japan

Robert Entenmann, Associate Professor of History, St. Olaf College, Northfield, MN

Mark Lincicome, Assistant Professor, Department of History, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA

Kristina Kade Troost, Duke University, Durham NC

Peter Zarrow, Assistant Professor of History, Vanderbilt University

Michael Kucher, University of Delaware

Lawrence Rogers, University of Hawaii at Hilo

Alan Baumler, Piedmont College


Timothy S. George, Harvard University

Ronald Dale Karr, University of Massachusetts, Lowell

Kikuchi Isao, Professor of Japanese History, Miyagi Gakuin Women's College, Sendai, Japan

Ohira Satoshi, Associate Professor of Japanese History, Miyagi Gakuin Women's College, Sendai, Japan

Inoue Ken'Ichiro Associate Professor of Japanese Art History, Miyagi Gakuin Women's College, Sendai, Japan

Yanagiya Keiko, Associate Professor of Japanese Literature, Siewa Women's College, Sendai, Japan

Sanho Tree, Research Director, Historians' Committee for Open Debate on Hiroshima

Eric Alterman, Stanford University

Jeff R. Schutts, Georgetown University

Gary Michael Tartakov, Iowa State University

W. Donald Smith, University of Washington, currently at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo

STOP and THINK:After examining the list of signatories endorsing the petition to the Smithsonian, what type of appeal stands out to you? If you were the curator of the Smithsonian, would this appeal persuade you to address the “bias” of the exhibit? Explain your reasoning. ____________________________________________________________________________

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Connecting to ScienceFrom Atlantic Unbound: The Atlantic Monthly | February 1971

Precautions Are Being Taken By Those Who Know An inquiry into the power and responsibility of the Atomic Energy Commission

by Paul Jacobs

.....

EARLY in 1957, Dr. Linus Pauling suggested that I might want to investigate a dispute between the editor of a small weekly paper in Tonopah, Nevada, and the Atomic Energy Commission. Pauling told me that the editor was troubled about the weapons-testing program conducted by the Atomic Energy Commission at the Nevada Test Site, not far from Tonopah. The editor, Robert Crandall, was convinced that the Atomic Energy Commission had been less than candid about the effects of radioactive fallout from the weapons testing on the people of his community and the surrounding areas.

It was very difficult to research an article about the Atomic Energy Commission at that time. In 1957, the cold war was still on, the United States was in a bitter nuclear weapons race with the Soviet Union, and the Atomic Energy Commission was considered sacred, the guardian of the only weapon that stood between us and the Communists. Scientists like Pauling, who were predicting wide-scale genetic damage


from radiation, were derided and vilified. In those years, too, almost everything about the Atomic Energy Commission's activities was protected by security provisions. The Commission effectively controlled all information about itself.

Nevertheless, I went to Nevada to interview Crandall, and as I got into the story, talking with him and the people around Tonopah, I became as involved in it as Crandall himself. Gradually, as I drove from ranch to ranch in the wild Nevada mesas and to quiet Mormon villages in Utah and Arizona, the pieces of the story began to fit together. And then I managed to obtain a document which verified, in precise detail, many of the charges made by Crandall and other residents of the area.

Stop and Think:What is most likely the author’s purpose for writing paragraphs 1 - 3?

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If this information was NOT included, what effect might it have on the article as a whole?____________________________________________________________________________

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The document was a report prepared by the U.S. Public Health Service on the Atomic Energy Commission's monitoring activities in the areas around the test site during the 1953 series of weapons tests. It revealed that while the AEC was saying publicly that there was no health hazard from the Nevada tests and that radiation levels were being adequately monitored and recorded, in fact there was great uncertainty within the Public Health Service over the effects of the tests. The report also indicated that the spread of fallout had been unpredicted in many cases, simply because the wind had shifted in a way that the AEC had not expected. The result of the wind shift was that large numbers of people had received doses of radiation in differing amounts.

The unit for measuring the amount of radiation to which the whole body, as opposed to a single organ, is exposed is called a "rad"; the present standards are that the average exposure of a given population should not exceed 0.17 rads and that no individual should be exposed to more than 0.5 rads. The current bitter controversy over nuclear reactors focuses on the 0.17 rad figure (sometimes given as 170 millirads). Those who oppose the AEC maintain that the 0.17 figure is much too high, while the AEC insists that it is low enough to protect public health adequately and that, in any case, the general population would never receive the 0.17 dosage, even from the operations of all the reactors now in existence or planned.

Stop and Think:What is most likely the author’s purpose including this information?


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Who appears to be this author’s audience?

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What appeal does the author appear to be using (ethos, pathos, or logos)? How do you know? Put a checkmark next to any supporting details that defend your conclusion.

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In my article "Clouds From Nevada," which appeared in the Reporter magazine May 16, 1957, I criticized the AEC for poor monitoring work, secrecy, the disguise of health hazards, and the Atomic Energy Commission's unrestrained use of its power. A few newspapers and wire services noted the story; the Washington Post printed an editorial praising it, and the Atomic Energy Commission blasted it and me. But the effect of the article was short-lived.

One day in late 1969, a newspaper in San Francisco, where I live now, carried a small item about the widow of an Air Force officer who had won a case against the Veterans Administration. Her husband had been one of the pilots who flew planes that monitored for radioactivity in the weapons tests about which I had written. He had died of leukemia. She lived in Santa Cruz, California, according to the article, and her name was Mrs. William Wahler.

Mrs. Wahler is a short, slender, energetic woman. Over a cup of coffee and a sandwich, she told me of her life with Bill Wahler and of his death from leukemia. Wahler had flown in the Eighth Air Force during World War II and had been awarded seven Air Medals. After his discharge in 1945, he reenlisted so he could continue flying. In 1951, he was assigned to Kirtland Air Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico, as a member of a special group of pilots trained to fly radiation monitoring and surveillance missions during the secret tests of nuclear weapons at Eniwetok, in the Pacific, and in Nevada. Some of the pilots in the group were trained also to drop the nuclear bombs used in the tests, both in Nevada and in the Pacific.

I asked Mrs. Wahler what kind of precautionary measures had been taken to guard the pilots against any overexposure to radioactivity.

"Well, they all wore film badges, but it was sort of haphazard in Nevada. The pilots didn't really have confidence in the men who were doing the tabulating; sometimes they'd skip taking the radiation exposure that day because the people weren't around at the right time or something like that. I guess everybody felt the levels they were exposed to were perfectly harmless. They didn't know enough at that time to realize they build up.

"When Bill was at Eniwetok, he had rest and recuperation in October, 1956, in Hawaii, and I noticed while we were together for ten days that he wasn't well. He seemed pale and listless, had no pep."


But after Wahler returned to the United States, he seemed completely recovered from whatever had caused his listlessness in Hawaii. In 1961, he retired from active duty, and the family moved to Santa Cruz, where he got a job as a social worker.

"He began to slow down, and he just seemed to be aging rapidly," Mrs. Wahler said. "Between Christmas and New Year's of 1966, we went to visit his brother in San Diego, and his brother said Bill looked like he'd aged a lot in the year since he'd seen him. A week later, he woke up in the middle of the night with a severe headache, and he said he'd had a terrible, wild dream. This went on for a week or two, and he'd have these dreams and these unexplained bruises on his arms and legs. So he went to the hospital, and three weeks later he was dead."

He was dead, but his wife and children were alive, without any income. At the time, Mrs. Wahler hadn't made any connection between her husband's leukemia and radiation, until another pilot, who had come to the funeral, told her that some people thought such a connection existed.

Stop and Think:What might be the author’s purpose in including this anecdotal evidence? Is it an effective inclusion in your opinion? Why or why not?____________________________________________________________________________

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"I started researching it then, and the more I got into it, the more convinced I was that radiation was involved." She applied for a pension, claiming her husband's death was service-incurred. The Veterans Administration denied her claim because the Atomic Energy Commission maintained that her husband had not received enough radiation to cause the leukemia. So she had appealed, been denied again, appealed again, and finally, after two years, was given the opportunity to present her case in person to a VA appeals board. The board reversed the previous denials after getting an opinion from an independent medical expert: enough doubt existed, they said, to warrant making the decision in her favor. The Atomic Energy Commission continues to insist, however, that Major Wahler could not have received enough radiation to have caused his death.

Before I left Mrs. Wahler that day, I asked if she knew what had happened to the other pilots in her husband's outfit. She mentioned a flier named Marvin Speer, who she had heard had leukemia. And she remarked, "I kind of hesitated when I wrote to some of my husband's former buddies, because I was putting fears in them, and this was brought to my attention, and I stopped writing."

In the case of Marvin Speer, Mrs. Wahler need not have worried about arousing fears. As I discovered weeks later, Colonel Speer had died in September, 1968, also from leukemia.

A third pilot in the group, Major Richard Partrick, talked to me in Albuquerque of the monitoring flights he'd made. Major Partrick's words are difficult to understand because the left side of his jaw and part of his larynx were removed in 1968 after it was discovered that he had cancer.

And still another pilot from the group, who wishes not to be identified, repeated many of the same details about the radiation missions, his hand occasionally reaching up to touch the suppurating lesions on his head, lesions which he has had for more than ten years and which do not respond to treatment.

The Atomic Energy Commission insists no connection exists between the deaths from leukemia of Major Wahler and Colonel Speer, nor between Major Partrick's cancer, and the radiation to which they were exposed. No one can assert positively, at this time, that these deaths and injuries are from the radiation.


Neither is there any unassailable scientific evidence that the abnormal number of deaths from leukemia in the quiet Mormon villages of Parowan, Paragonah, and Pleasant Grove, Utah, and Fredonia, Arizona, were the result of the fallout from the tests to which the towns had been exposed. The death rate from leukemia in Pleasant Grove is approximately 6 times higher than normal, while in Paragonah and Parowan, neighboring towns, 4 cases were diagnosed in a period when only 1.4 should have been anticipated. Fredonia and its neighboring town, Kanab, Utah, suffered what one medical expert described as a leukemia "epidemic."

But neither can the AEC accurately claim, as it does, that no possible connection exists between these events and its activities. It cannot justify such an assertion because (a) no one knows, including the AEC, the exact amount or the type of radiation to which these pilots and communities have been exposed and (b) not enough knowledge exists about the effects of low-level radiation. The AEC continues to make such statements as the one it issued in 1970 in response to a critical NBC-TV program: "Small doses produce no damage which scientists have been able to detect." Many eminent scientists would worry over the implications of such a pronouncement. Nobel Prize winners Dr. Joshua Lederberg and Dr. Linus Pauling both warn that if the present permissible dose occurred it would kill thousands of people every year, and they argue, amongst other things, that it may be too early to detect damage already caused by small doses of radiation. Even the AEC's staunchest supporters in the scientific community tend to put the case cautiously. Thus, Dr. Victor Bond, of the AEC's Brookhaven Laboratory, said in November, 1970, that "for purposes of radiation protection, in the absence of well-defined data otherwise, the cautious assumption must be made that any amount of exposure carries some probability of harm to a population, however small that probability may be."

Elmer Jackson, who was born in Fredonia, Arizona, and now lives in Kanab, Utah, a few miles away, knows lack of monitoring to be a fact. He was caught in a radioactive cloud, and burned by it: his doctor believes that the thyroid cancer Jackson later developed results from the experience.

Early in the morning of March 17, 1953, at 5:20 A.M., a 16-kiloton bomb was exploded from the top of a metal tower at the test site. On the basis of the pre-shot weather forecasts, mobile monitoring units had been sent into the communities in the area around the test site. The cloud bearing the particles of radioactive metal drifted further east than the Atomic Energy Commission had anticipated, into an area more than a hundred miles away from where any monitoring team was stationed:

"Suddenly the cloud seemed to move just a little, and it started going in a southerly direction, so I thought, 'Well, it won't come this way,' so I continued on out, about three miles out. I gathered up about fifty head of cattle that were in the area and started moving with them, when the wind changed and blew that cloud swiftly. It just came with a rush and engulfed me and the cattle in the valley, and within just minutes my eyes started burning, the water was running out of them, and my face started burning....

"I think it's taken at least ten years off my life, and I've suffered for ten or fifteen years as a result of those burns, so I'd like to go back to the days when we didn't have that kind of trouble."

Other men and women living in Fredonia and Kanab would also like to go back to the "days when we didn't have that kind of trouble." Maureen Tait's husband died of leukemia in 1965, leaving her with five children. Mr. Tait was a crane operator, who worked in areas where fallout has been recorded. Rosemary Mackelprang's husband, who was school superintendent for ten years in Fredonia, died of leukemia in 1964. He, too, was out of doors a great deal, collecting rocks. Before he died, his widow says, "He often wondered if maybe some of the rocks had radiation in them that could have caused the leukemia. And we used to watch the atomic bombs go off and see the big flare, and we often wondered if maybe radiation carried out this far, if it had any effect on us. But the people from the bomb tests told us, 'You're so far away from everything, you don't have to worry.'"

Jessie Mackelprang's son, Graham, was fourteen when he died, in 1955, of leukemia. The family was living in Kanab at the time, but went away to their ranch, also located in a fallout area, as often as possible. In the summers, Graham lived outside from early dawn till dark. Mrs. Mackelprang is convinced


that the weapons tests "started the leukemia in this country, but what can we do about it? We're just helpless; we're just small people. We have no money to pay an investigator to try and find out if that was true and if the government does it, what's the people to do? They're higher than we, so we just sit here and take it."

The government did investigate the leukemia outbreak in Fredonia, although it has never told the people the results of the investigation. The inquiry began after Dr. Richard Riley, who had been treating the cases, discussed them with a leukemia specialist in Salt Lake City, who felt the number of cases represented an epidemic. Riley, who is a radiologist, told an AEC doctor that he was convinced the cancer and leukemia cases were the result of fallout radiation. A team of specialists from the U.S. Public Health Service Communicable Disease Center in Atlanta came into the area, took blood samples from everybody in Fredonia and from a sample of the Kanab population. In January, 1970, a report on the investigation appeared in Hospital Practice: the Public Health Service was not able to pinpoint the cause of the leukemia and could state no more than that the leukemia epidemic was not the result of chance.

Ample evidence exists of the direct and immediate effects of large doses of radiation of the order inflicted upon the population of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But only now are some important data coming to light revealing the consequences of much lower doses of radiation: a recent report published in the Journal of the American Medical Association points out that a small group of Marshall Islands people exposed to lower doses of radiation from unexpected fallout after a Pacific weapons test are just today developing thyroid disorders. And the report concludes that now is the critical period to begin analyzing these disorders. Twenty-eight Americans were also exposed to unanticipated fallout during the test. No long-term study has been made of them. When I asked why, the doctor in charge of the Marshall Islands study replied that it would have been too difficult to keep track of the men.

Clearly there is a need for studies on a mass scale over a long period of time. And after the possible relationship between iodine 131 in milk and thyroid cancer in young people appeared in the forefront of scientific consciousness, the U.S. Public Health Service did begin a study, financed by the Atomic Energy Commission, of children's thyroids in St. George, Utah, where the heavy fallout of iodine 131 had taken place from the weapons-testing program.

Initially, the study indicated an increase in thyroid difficulties, but as the study progressed, through the high school years of the children, the data began to become very inconclusive. Now the young people involved have graduated from high school and the study is ending. But the teenagers ought to be watched for many more years; if their expectancy of developing thyroid cancer has been increased, even slightly, because of weapons testing, they are owed a continuous appraisal of their health by the government.

Admittedly, to move the people from their homes into new residences would be very expensive; the government insists the risks are very small and therefore no action need be taken.

Part IICopyright © 1971 by Paul Jacobs. All rights reserved.The Atlantic Monthly; February 1971; Precautions Are Being Taken By Those Who Know; Volume 227, No. 2; p. 45-56.

The most controversial, and potentially, perhaps, the most dangerous, of the AEC's current programs is its commitment to nuclear power reactors. Seventeen nuclear reactors are operating now, fifty-four are under construction, thirty-eight more are far along in the planning, and nine additional plants have been

http://www.theatlantic.com/about/legal.htm


scheduled to be built. Within the next thirty years, the AEC expects to license 950 nuclear power installations, all dependent upon radioactive materials.

The proponents of nuclear reactors as a source of energy insist that the country faces a severe power crisis. In what the AEC sees as a dangerous diminution of conventional power sources, the agency sees itself as standing between the country and disaster: thus, it rejects any serious criticisms of its enthusiasm for building nuclear reactors. But serious criticism abounds.

"In principle, nuclear reactors are dangerous," Dr. Edward Teller, no foe of atomic energy, said in 1965 and again in 1970. "They are not dangerous because they may blow up. The explosion of a nuclear reactor is not likely to be as violent as an explosion of a chemical plant. But a powerful nuclear reactor which has functioned for some time has radioactivity stored in it greatly in excess of that released from a powerful nuclear bomb. There is one difference, and this difference makes the nuclear bomb look like a relatively safe instrument. In the case of an atmospheric nuclear explosion, the radioactivity ascends into the stratosphere.... A gently seeping nuclear reactor can put its radioactive poison under a stable inversion layer and concentrate it onto a few hundred square miles in a truly deadly fashion. This is why we must be exceedingly careful in constructing nuclear reactors. By being careful and also by good luck, we have so far avoided all serious nuclear accidents.... Nuclear reactors do not belong on the surface of the earth. Nuclear reactors belong underground."

But reactors are being built above ground. The Enrico Fermi reactor at Lagoona Beach, Michigan, experienced difficulties from the moment it began test operations. The plant, an experimental one, had been built despite the objections of the Commission's Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards.

"There is insufficient information available at this time," warned the committee in 1956, to assure that the reactor could be operated "without public hazard." But Lewis Strauss, then Chairman of the AEC, suppressed that warning, which might never have been made public except for its disclosure by another AEC commissioner, Thomas Murray.

The AEC's decision to sanction the Fermi reactor created a tremendous controversy, but all efforts to halt the construction failed. Then, in October, 1966, while the plant was going through a series of operating tests, a serious accident occurred. A portion of the reactor's uranium fuel source overheated and melted; radiation was released within the plant, and the reactor was immediately shut down. For a month scientists debated how to investigate the accident, fearing that any disturbance of the uranium could set off a runaway chain reaction culminating in an explosion, an event that could have released enough radioactive gas (according to one study commissioned by the AEC) to kill as many as 133,000 people living in the Detroit area.

After the accident, an official of the company operating the reactor said, "It's one of those accidents the consequences [of which] are so terrible, the probability has to be very, very small." But that "very, very small" probability did become a reality.

The Fermi reactor is now being tested again after being shut down for four years.

Obama's Nuclear Summit: The Big Truth That's MissingThere can be no nuclear security without nuclear disarmament.

By David Corn | Tue Apr. 13, 2010 8:40 AM PDT, http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/04/obamas-nuclear-summit-big-truth-thats-missing

http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/04/obamas-nuclear-summit-big-truth-thats-missing

http://motherjones.com/authors/david-corn


At the historic gathering, one fundamental is sidestepped: there can be no nuclear security without nuclear disarmament.

President Barack Obama's nuclear security summit confronts the most important issue facing the world's leaders: the possibility of a nuclear attack. Global challenges do not come more serious and immediate than this. And Obama has made history by being the first leader to convene such a gathering—47 nations are participating—to address the profound threat of nuclear terrorism. He has placed this harrowing matter at the top of the global to-do list. But despite the ambition of preventing a nuclear attack—by controlling nuclear materials and inhibiting the proliferation of nuclear weapons—the scope of the summit has been limited, purposefully.

The summit has produced important results. Ukraine announced it would get rid of all of its highly enriched uranium (HEU)—the material needed for a nuclear bomb—by the time of the next summit in 2012. The former Soviet republic also said it will convert its civilian nuclear research facilities to low-enriched uranium, which cannot be used for nuclear weapons. (In 1994, Ukraine, along with Kazakhstan and Belarus, agreed to remove all nuclear weapons from its territory and eventually eliminated about 5,000 nuclear munitions.) Right before the summit, Chile gave up its secret hoard [2] of HEU and shipped it to the United States. On Tuesday afternoon, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov were scheduled to sign a protocol governing the implementation of an agreement for the United States and Russia to dispose [3] of enough weapons-grade plutonium to make several thousand nuclear weapons. And Obama administration officials have been claiming that high-level talks accompanying the summit—particularly Obama's meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao—are bolstering support for imposing sanctions against Iran, which has been moving in the direction of developing nuclear weapons.

Yet there is something missing from the grand event: a sweeping vision of what must be done to avert the worst nightmare. At the opening plenary session on Tuesday morning, Obama laid out the danger:

Two decades after the end of the Cold War, we face a cruel irony of history—the risk of a nuclear confrontation between nations has gone down, but the risk of nuclear attack has gone up. Nuclear materials that could be sold or stolen and fashioned into a nuclear weapon exist in dozens of nations. Just the smallest amount of plutonium—about the size of an apple—could kill and injure hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

He noted that al Qaeda and other terrorist networks have tried to acquire material for a nuclear weapons, declaring "it is increasingly clear that the danger of nuclear terrorism is one of the greatest threats to global security—to our collective security." (During recent briefings, White House officials have sidestepped the question of whether al Qaeda has made any progress on this front in recent years.) And the president said that the nuclear security initiative is "one part of a broader, comprehensive agenda that the United States is pursuing—including reducing our nuclear arsenal and stopping the spread of nuclear weapons—an agenda that will bring us closer to our ultimate goal of a world without nuclear weapons."

But there is an important connection the president neglected to mention. Nuclear security is not the path to nuclear disarmament. Nuclear disarmament is the path to nuclear security. The nuclear weapons complex depends on highly-enriched uranium. As long as there are nuclear weapons, there will be HEU. As long as there is HEU, there will be the possibility of HEU theft and smuggling.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article7095705.ece


The most effective way—really, the only way—to block nuclear terrorism is to stop terrorists from obtaining HEU. Unfortunately, a nuclear bomb is relatively easy to make. Plans are available. A standard test for science grad students is to ask them to design a rudimentary nuclear bomb; they usually can do it. But a bomb needs a lump of HEU the size of a grapefruit, and HEU is hard to come by. While the technology of enriching uranium is not that complex, the manufacturing logistics are tough: thousands of centrifuges spinning away in a single facility. It's a task that can only be done on a governmental level. A terrorist cell is not able to enrich its own uranium in a basement or in a mountain hide-away. Reduce the demand for HEU—that is, get rid of nuclear weapons—and there will be less HEU that could fall into the wrong hands. This demand reduction would also have to include an effort to end the use of HEU in civilian research reactors and medical isotope production [4]. (Nearly 800 kilograms of HEU are used each year for these civilian functions, and that's enough for 40 Hiroshima-style bombs.)

Writing in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, former Ambassador Richard Burt, who was President George H.W. Bush's chief arms negotiator and a Reagan State Department official, pointed out [5] that the "elimination of all nuclear weapons world-wide" is essential to nuclear security: "in an era when nuclear arms know-how and technology are increasingly available around the world, nuclear weapons don't serve the interests of the United States, but those of rogue nations, failing states and terrorists." That is, the balance of power has changed—to the disadvantage of nuclear states. In the post-Cold War years, the odds are low that the United States, Russia or any other nation will use nuclear weapons in a military conflict. Yet as long as they maintain an active international nuclear weapons complex, an opportunity exists for terrorists who would use these weapons. Put simply, the continued existence of nuclear weapons are of no practical use for the superpowers but keep hope alive for the evildoers.

Obama has done more than any other world leader to highlight the urgent need for enhancing nuclear security. But this is the big connect-the-dots reality: the world cannot be free of nuclear terrorism unless it is free of nuclear weapons. That fundamental truth is not clear and present at this historic summit.

Implications and Complications

What topic(s) is the author addressing?

What is the author implying about this topic?

What complications exist within this topic? In other words what are some issues that lie within this topic?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303828304575180534143543938.html?KEYWORDS=richard+burt

http://thebulletin.org/web-edition/columnists/fissile-materials-working-group/reduce-the-civilian-use-of-heu-now

http://thebulletin.org/web-edition/columnists/fissile-materials-working-group/reduce-the-civilian-use-of-heu-now


WEEKLY READER

Becoming Compassionately Numb

By BENEDICT CAREY

Benedict Carey is a science reporter for The New York Times.

ABOUT the only thing tanking faster than consumer confidence and the Greek economy would be the global compassion index, if such a measure existed.

Consider just a few recent news items: Americans are balking at extending unemployment benefits, and even disaster relief was in doubt for a time last week in another of Washington’s budget skirmishes; Europeans are cutting payments to pensioners; and “there’s no mood for intervention” to avert famine in Somalia, according to one diplomat.

At a recent Republican presidential debate, the audience erupted into cheers upon hearing Texas’s nation-leading rate of executions.

Behind such sentiments lie genuine concerns, be they for law and order or personal responsibility, not to mention limited resources and a struggling economy. After all, a lowering tide grounds a lot of rescue boats, literally and psychologically.

Yet psychologists and primatologists have been arguing for years that compassion is an evolved instinct, rooted in the brain’s circuitry. In a new book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” the psychologist Steven Pinker calls empathy “the latest fashion in human nature.” Chimpanzees show evidence of compassion, as do some monkeys; even mice seem to feel the pain of close peers. But if current trends continue, rats might become a more appropriate subject of study.

Are people today — are societies — really becoming somehow more callous?

The answer is no, of course not — at least not in any fundamental sense. But compassion is a limited resource, a system rooted in cognitive networks that tire and need refueling. And it’s not always rational.

What does the author mean by the global compassion index?

a. the level of concern individuals have for others in their country

b. how people care about the world

c. the amount of empathy civilians have for those outside of their immediate circle

d. a quantity of feeling

The author’s intention for including this paragraph is most likely NOT:a. to explain the connection

between humans and primatesb. to prove that compassion

is an inherent traitc. to compare humans, rats,

and primatesd. to demonstrate that

compassion is learned

Have you ever been surprised at your reaction to an event that others seem bothered by?

http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/people/p/steven_pinker/index.html?scp=1-spot&sq=steven%20pinker&st=cse

http://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0670022950

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjKTHHTIXOU

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/16/world/africa/famine-hits-somalia-in-world-less-likely-to-intervene.htm

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/benedict_carey/index.html?inline=nyt-per


Those in the so-called helping professions know as much about the limits of empathy as they do about its merits. Studies of oncology nurses, trauma workers and even marriage counselors, among others, have documented a common “compassion fatigue” that seems directly related to the amount of emotion shared. “In particular, listening to people who are suffering and not being able to do enough for them puts a tremendous weight” on caregivers, said Dr. Charles Figley, a psychologist at Tulane University.

In just the past decade, he said, professional organizations have begun to give guidelines to offset fatigue, like urging counselors to take time off, seek support from colleagues, even engage in therapy themselves.

Therapists quickly learn to recognize the signs.

Fatigue often results “when you’re seeing the same problems repeatedly, when they’re chronic, and when the outcomes are not good,” said Bret A. Moore, a former Army psychologist and co-author of “Wheels Down: Adjusting to Life After Deployment.” “One sign that you’re there is that you start hoping your appointments cancel.”

The public has a similar reaction to mass joblessness and starving countries alike: the problems sap the imagination in part simply because they are daunting and have not responded well to previous efforts. We have already pumped billions into each, with little visible effect. If only they would cancel their next emergency.

Still, even when rested and ready, people generally find it far harder to extend empathetic concern to a nation than to a neighbor. The helping instinct evolved to protect the household, the clan. Some psychologists make a distinction between moral intuition, the physical horror at seeing someone hit by a car or the tears of a parent whose son is kidnapped; and moral reason, the more intellectual process of grasping larger tragedies, like floods and famine.

THE former is a stronger, more emotionally visceral reaction, which is why people often show far more compassion for an individual victim than for a dozen, or 100, or an entire region.“I sometimes make the analogy to vision,” said Paul Slovic, a psychologist at the University of Oregon and president of a nonprofit company called Decision Research. “We have this sophisticated capability that’s rational and works well most of the time; but it can also be misleading” — in the same way the eye is fooled by optical illusions.

In a recent study, Dr. Slovic and two colleagues, Daniel Vastfjall and Ellen Peters, tested this relationship directly. They found that when study participants saw a picture of a single victim, a 7-year-old girl named Rokia, they donated twice as much money to a hunger charity than when told only that the organization was working to save millions.

How does the author define “compassion fatigue”?a. tiring of hearing people

sufferb. worrying over someone

without being able to assistc. growing weary of caring

for othersd. recognizing symptoms

before they become traumatic

ALL of the following are cited as sources of compassion fatigue EXCEPT:a. listening to other

people’s sufferingb. canceled appointmentsc. marital counselingd. working with victims of

trauma

According to the author, which tool would be MOST effective for evoking widespread empathy?

a. footage of flood victimsb. a fundraiser for an ill

neighborc. a blog raising money for

a child stricken with cancerd. a news report on recent

unemployment numbers

According to the author, what is the MOST likely explanation for why the answer you identified above is predicted to be more effective than the others?


Another group of participants was presented with both the photo and the statistics, the single fragile soul along with the larger context. They made significantly lower contributions than those presented with just a picture of Rokia. Other studies have picked up the same pattern, a falling off of concern after people respond to the suffering of a single individual. “This is one of those results that, when people see it, they recognize it in themselves,” Dr. Slovic said. “But it’s one thing to recognize it and another to confront it directly.”

Dr. Slovic calls this nearsightedness in compassion “psychic numbing” and blames it for much of the West’s inertia in response to atrocities and genocide in places like Rwanda and Darfur.

Yet a strange thing happens once the action starts. Human compassion, like all highly evolved social responses, is not always helpful. Yes, it can and does move people to concern. But to be helpful on the ground amid real suffering, it may be necessary, paradoxically, to blunt empathetic instincts.

In a 2010 study, Chinese and American researchers took brain-wave readings from participants as they watched another person prick himself with a pin, or dab himself with a cotton swab. Half of the people in the study showed clear differences in their reactions to the pinprick and the swab — a measure of their “pain empathy response,” as the authors describe it.

But the other half did not. They were doctors, with long experience managing sickness and pain. “We believe they learned to inhibit this reaction somewhat,” said Jean Decety of the University of Chicago, one of the authors. “This frees up cognitive resources, we think,” allowing them to do their jobs better.

In his book “Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima,” the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton argued that rescue workers at Hiroshima were able to function at all only because they succeeded in “turning off” their feelings of compassion. He called that process “psychic numbing,” too, and it’s a reminder that empathy may be a limited resource for a reason.

Real action, when it’s called for, often requires a cool heart, if not a cold one.

According to the author, is it psychologically helpful or hurtful to emotionally respond to the trauma experienced by others?

Define “psychic numbing.”

http://home.uchicago.edu/decety/publications/Decety_NI2010.pdf


Learning about 9-11 by a Visit to HiroshimaAired August, 2002

KUFM Radio Commentary, Montana Public Radio

Paul Martin Lester, University of Montana

Fifty-seven years ago this month at 8:15 on a bright morning, a B-29 "Superfortress" piloted by Col. Paul Tibbets and named the Enola Gay after his mother, dropped an atomic bomb for the first time in human history. This 9,700-pound bomb ironically nicknamed "Little Boy" exploded about 2,000 feet over the center of the sleepy port city of Hiroshima, Japan where about 300,000 people lived.The result was a civilian loss from a single bomb that was unequalled in the history of warfare. Tibbets would later write in his personal journal, "My God, what have we done?"A strong wind generated by the blast bounced off the surrounding mountains. The result was that almost all buildings within a 3-mile diameter were destroyed while humans in the area were incinerated. Subsequent fires completed the destruction. It was estimated that the initial blast and radiation effects killed almost half of the population of the city.Two days after the bombing, the US joined the United Nations. The following day, the US bombed Nagasaki with another atomic blast, "Fat Man" that destroyed about one-third of the city and caused about 70,000 deaths.Although there were military installations in Hiroshima-a few army supply depots, a communications center, and a naval base-it was later revealed that the choice to bomb the city was not made for military reasons. In fact, prior to this one instance, US forces never bombed Hiroshima during the entire war. Hiroshima was chosen because it was a pristine laboratory to study the power of the explosion and to demonstrate to the world that the US had and would use this new terrible weapon of mass destruction.Soon after the attacks on 9-11, many commentators and concerned citizens initially compared the surprise attacks with the surprise attack by Japanese military forces on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawai'i that began the US involvement in World War II.But it is more relevant to compare the surprise attack of Hiroshima with New York City. That's because of the 2,403 people killed during the Pearl Harbor attack, only 68 were civilians who were mostly killed through "friendly fire," anti-aircraft shells that landed in Honolulu by mistake. Those killed in Hiroshima and New York City were almost all civilians.But when objectively compared, the terrorism that was 9-11 pales against the terrorism inflicted upon the civilian population of Hiroshima. The aerial attacks on the World Trade Center were the equivalent of 200 tons of TNT while the bomb exploded over Hiroshima was the equivalent of 15,000 tons of TNT. A little over one city block in lower Manhattan was destroyed while two-thirds of Hiroshima was destroyed. About 3,000 innocent people were killed in the 9-11 attacks vs. about 140,000 innocent people killed in Hiroshima.One outgrowth of the tragedy of 9-11 is perhaps ability for Americans to look at the bombing of Hiroshima in a new light.All these facts and more were running through my mind recently as I traveled by train through the sunny countryside of Japan on my way from Tokyo to Hiroshima.To my delighted surprise, modern Hiroshima is a thriving, vibrant city. Over a million people now live in the metropolis that was entirely rebuilt from the ashes, which is why Hiroshima is sometimes called the "phoenix of Japan." For example, across the street from the "A-Bomb Dome," originally constructed in 1915 as an exhibition hall, the one skeleton of a building that remained after the bombing and is preserved as a reminder for future generations, there is a large professional baseball stadium where the Hiroshima Carp play to enthusiastic fans who bring drums and trumpets.But I felt immense sadness, guilt, and some shame for my country in the hours I spent touring the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum with its graphic exhibits that detailed the destruction and the cost in human lives.


However, when I returned to the sunshine of the streets and traveled to the Hondori shopping district on a Sunday afternoon, I found it filled with lively shoppers as with any major town. When I arrived in a yakitori-style restaurant, I was asked where I was from. When I said America, the waitress smiled, clapped, and asked if I had been to the peace museum.Perhaps that is the greatest lesson to learn from 9-11. With forgiveness, not forgetfulness, humans find a way to overcome extreme adversity and forge a better way for ourselves.The trip helped to remind me that the media images in my head from the past are not the images that are found in the present. I can only hope that media images in the future will show "ground zero" in lower Manhattan as having the same mix of reverence to those killed, an understanding of why such a tragedy happened, and a celebration of life that is borne from forgiveness. That's the lesson I discovered at "ground zero" in Hiroshima.

From Hiroshima to 9/11, a girl's origami lives onDecember 17, 2009|By Wayne Drash, CNN

When Sadako Sasaki lay in her hospital bed sick with leukemia, she showed her father origami cranes from local school girls. "When you fold 1,000 paper cranes, you will get well," her dad responded.

Sadako was just 12. Hoping to get better, she began folding tiny origami cranes, using paper from get-well gifts and wrappers from medicine. She had survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Yet 10 years later, her fragile body suffered the effects of exposure to radiation.

"Please treasure the life that is given to you," Sadako said before her death on October 25, 1955. "It is my belief that my small paper crane will enable you to understand other people's feelings, as if they are your own."

Sadako's death inspired a memorial in Japan's Hiroshima Peace Park, complete with a statue of her holding a golden crane. Now, one of her last origami cranes resides in a new memorial thousands of miles away, in the country that dropped the bomb.

It was given to the Tribute WTC Visitor Center in New York by her aging brother.

"I thought if Sadako's crane is placed at Ground Zero, it will be very meaningful," says Masahiro Sasaki, in an education program produced by the tribute center and the Japan Society. "Commonly, in Japan, the crane is regarded as a symbol of peace. But for us, in the Sasaki family, it is the embodiment of Sadako's life, and it is filled with her wish and hope."

"I hope by talking about that small wish for peace, the small ripple will become bigger and bigger."

The delicate red crane, smaller than a fingernail, is on display at the center. Hanging near it are origami cranes that were placed on the fence around Ground Zero after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Another 10,000 cranes from families and colleagues of Japanese victims of 9/11 surround Sadako's.

"This little girl believed that the world could be made better if we all worked together," says Lee Ielpi, the co-founder of the center, whose grown son, Jonathan, was killed on September 11.

"It sends that beautiful message: Even in death, we're going to carry on that little girl's wish. ... I'm so tickled we can carry on her wish."

Meriam Lobel, the center's curator, says staffers were speechless when Masahiro Sasaki presented the gift. "He lifted it out with this little, tiny tweezer and there was this beautiful red glistening crane," Lobel says. "It was like a gem, like a little red ruby."

For Tsugio Ito, the symbolism of the crane holds special meaning.

http://cnntweet.appspot.com/articles/http%3A%2F%2Fcnn.com%2F2009%2FLIVING%2F12%2F17%2Forigami.gift%2Findex.html%3Fhpt%3DT2/From%20Hiroshima%20to%209%2F11%2C%20a%20girl%27s%20origami%20lives%20on/tweet/


How to Fold a Paper Crane


Socratic SeminarGuidelines for Participants in a Socratic Seminar

1. Refer to the text when needed during the discussion. A seminar is not a test of memory. You are not "learning a subject"; your goal is to understand the ideas, issues, and values reflected in the text.

2. Do not stay confused; ask for clarification.

5. Stick to the point currently under discussion; make notes about ideas you want to come back to.

3. Don't raise hands; take turns speaking.

4. Listen carefully.

5. Speak up so that all can hear you.

6. Talk to each other, not just to the leader or teacher.

7. Discuss ideas rather than each other's opinions.

8. You are responsible for the seminar, even if you don't know it or admit it.

Expectations of Participants in a Socratic Seminar

When I am evaluating your Socratic Seminar participation, I ask the following questions about participants. Did they….

• Speak loudly and clearly?

• Cite reasons and evidence for their statements?

• Use the text to find support?

• Listen to others respectfully?

• Stick with the subject?

• Talk to each other, not just to the leader?

• Paraphrase accurately?

• Ask for help to clear up confusion?


• Support each other?

• Avoid hostile exchanges?

• Question others in a civil manner?

• Seem prepared?

Socratic Seminar Questions

1. Discuss whether you agree or disagree with the following quote:During wartime, a country is justified in killing enemy civilians to shorten and/or end a war.Be sure to cite evidence from the book to support your position.

2. Hersey admits to having felt both “despair and relief” when he heard that the bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, but we do not know how he felt after he researched and wrote the book. Based on information in “Hiroshima,” make a case for Hersey’s being for or against the decision to drop the bomb.

3. Discuss the relevance of “Hiroshima” to our society today. (HINT: Don’t limit your conversation to just the atomic/nuclear weapon aspect…feel free to branch out.)

Typically we think of light as something positive, invigorating, a moment of clarity, as in “I saw the light.” What is the light in Hiroshima?

newwestinghouse.orgnewwestinghouse.org/ourpages/auto/2013/4/5/66222977... · web view2013/04/05...

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