Hiroshima as a civilisational metaphor

The other was William T. Laurence, a young air force officer — American — on the mission that dropped the atom bomb over Nagasaki, three days later: “Awe-struck we watched it shoot upward like a meteor coming from the earth instead of from outer space, becoming ever more alive as it climbed skyward through the white clouds. It was no longer smoke, or dust, or even a cloud of fire. It was a living thing, a new specieswas being born right before our incredulous eyes.”

Two ways of seeing the same phenomenon. The first account holds the subjective terror of the victim, the second, the cool detachment of the aggressor. Somewhere in his narrative, Laurence poses an important question: “Does one feel any pity or compassion for the poor devils about to die? Not when one thinks of Pearl Harbour and of the Death March on Bataan.”Hida did not have the luxury of dispassionate distance, because the “poor devils” stared him in the face: “The strange figure came up to me, little by little, unsteady on its feet. It surely seemed like the form of a man but it was completely naked, bloody and covered with mud. The body was completely swollen. Rags hung from its bare breast and waist…water dripped from the tips of the rags. Indeed, what I took to be rags were in fact pieces of human skin and water drops were human blood.”

The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was made possible because of a way of seeing the Other as faceless,nameless beings, completely devoid of human qualities. In a remarkable recent anthology edited by Kai Bird and Lawrence Lifschultz, Hiroshima’s Shadow, Paul Fussell, a second lieutenant at that time, recalls how for the average American of that era, the Japanese “the Japs” were really subhuman, they were nothing more than lice, rats, bats, vipers, dogs…little yellow beasts who deserved to be exterminated.

If further confirmation of such thinking was required there was this interesting private note written by President Truman on August 11, 1945, a few days after the bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities: “The only language they seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them. When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him as a beast.”It is this construction of the enemy as “a beast”, and one’s own project as a “just cause” “for the honour of the nation and its people” that sustained and continues to sustain the nuclear age, an age in which nations reserve theright to destroy the human species in a single action.

It was just such a mindset that prompted two powerful global players to justify the obscene stockpiling of nuclear weapons large enough to destroy each other a hundred times over in that bizarre interregnum known as the Cold War.

Over the years, the language of nuclear diplomacy has, of course, become more sophisticated thanks to the sheen lent to it by the end-justifies-the-means sophistry of realpolitik. The theory of deterrence, currently being expounded in the corridors of South Block, is a child of this illegitimate history.

It did not have to be like this. The ugliness of Hiroshima and Nagasaki inspired some of humanity’s greatest thinkers, writers, scientists and statesmen to sign on a joint civilisational petition against nuclear war:* “Remember your humanity,” urged Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell.

* Albert Camus summed it up in one sentence: “Technological civilisation has just reached its final degree of savagery.” And added:“Hiroshima leaves us with the awesome but necessary human task of keeping the world from destroying itself.”

* Lewis Mumford pronounced his verdict: “We in America are living among madmen. Madmen govern our affairs in the name of order and security. The chief madmen claim the titles of general, admiral, senator, scientist, administrator, secretary of state, even President. And the fatal symptom of their madness is this: they have been carrying through a series of acts which will lead eventually to the destruction of mankind under the solemn conviction that they are normal responsible people, living sane lives and working for reasonable ends.”

* Then there was our own Mahatma Gandhi who spoke at length against the nuclear bomb in a public meeting at Pune on the eve of the first anniversary of Hiroshima: “As far as I can see, the atomic bomb has deadened the finest feelings which have sustained mankind for ages.”

Three weeks before the Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombs were dropped, 150 scientists of theManhattan Project, which had made these bombs possible in the first place, sent a petition to Truman discouraging him from deploying them against Japan without seriously considering the moral dimension of the act.As Arundhati Roy put it in her recent impassioned anti-nuclear testament, `The End of Imagination’. “It has all been said before. There’s nothing new to be said about nuclear weapons”. True. But there’s an eloquent two-letter word that Roy uses and which bears repetition as long as there are men and women who believe that national salvation lies in pursuing the nuclear option: No, no, no and again, no!

“Why do we let the madmen go on with the game without raising our voices? Why do we keep our glassy calm in the face of this danger?” asked Mumford. And went on: “There is a reason: we are madmen too…unmoved by the horror that moves swiftly toward us.”

The only option for us is to fight this madness, in Delhi and in Islamabad, on the streets and in the seats of governance, here and now.“If protesting against having a nuclear bomb implanted in my brain is anti-Hindu and anti-national, then I secede,” writes Roy. But where will she go, this woman who loves her country so deeply that she will speak out against the men who have decided for the rest of us that it should go nuclear and who will boast about their nuclear prowess on Independence Day ten days from now? Nowhere, but to her republic of words. Because, ultimately, it is right here that we must do battle against the prospect of another Hiroshima. Here, because as Raj Kapoor sang so many centuries ago, or so it seems: jeena yahaan, marna yahaan/iske siwa, jaana kahaan? It is here one lives. It is here one dies. There is no other place.