70 Years of the Hiroshima Effects

August 6 is the 70th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb by the United States on Hiroshima, Japan. That nuclear explosion continues to reverberate all around us, as much because of what didn’t follow as because of what did.

Today, in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima — where the first bomb was dropped — and Nagasaki — where the second was dropped, on August 15 — people are still dying from radiation and its attendant cancers. Some 200,000 survivors of the two attacks remain alive.

The atomic attacks are stark reminders of a horrible war and of all sorts of inhuman sufferings, both inflicted on the Japanese and inflicted by the Japanese. In the United States, the dropping of the atomic bombs, blithely nicknamed “Little Boy” and “Fat Man,” can still spark heated arguments and nuanced intellectual and moral debates. Many members of the Greatest Generation who fought in the Pacific — and remember the high American casualties at Iwo Jima, Tarawa and Okinawa — see the bombings as a tactic that short-circuited the huge American losses certain to result from a U.S. invasion of Japan.

To American leaders, including President Harry Truman, the bombings ended the war.

To historians, the bombings marked the start of an atomic arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, even the early beginnings of the Cold War.

It wasn’t too long after the bombings that the world’s nuclear powers had enough bombs to destroy life on earth (they still do). The bomb echoes. Witness the heated debate over the U.S.-Iran nuclear treaty and the fear that terrorist groups might get the technology to make a nuclear weapon.

After 50 years, the world is no safer than it was when the mushroom cloud appeared in reality and lingered in our nightmares. The bomb became a part of our cinematic and pop culture dreams.

Amazingly — even with the harrowing Cuban Missile Crisis, which barely avoided nuclear war — nuclear weapons have never been used by any of the nuclear powers. It hasn’t happened.

Which is not to say that it will never happen.

For an instructive portrait of what even such a low-grade bomb as was used in Japan could do, read John Hersey’s classic and emotionally powerful book “Hiroshima.” You’ll feel the emotional heat that remains, even 70 years after the horrific actual heat of that world-changing day.