By Marian Wright Edelman
This week was the solemn 80th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the first and only time nuclear weapons have been used in war. In 1962, Trappist monk and social justice and peace activist Thomas Merton published the prose poem “Original Child Bomb,” the title using a rough translation of the root characters in the Japanese term for atom. This work inspired the searing 2004 documentary with the same name.
Merton subtitled his “anti-poem” “Points for meditation to be scratched in the walls of a cave,” and it consists of a numbered list of 41 comments on the bomb’s creation, the decision to drop the first bomb on Hiroshima, and the aftermath, including these:
“3: President Truman formed a committee of men to tell him if this bomb would work, and if so, what he should do with it. Some members of this committee felt that the bomb would jeopardize the future of civilization. They were against its use. Others wanted it to be used in demonstration on a forest of cryptomeria trees, but not against a civil or military target. Many atomic scientists warned that the use of atomic power in war would be difficult and even impossible to control. The danger would be very great. Finally, there were others who believed that if the bomb were used just once or twice, on one or two Japanese cities, there would be no more war. They believed the new bomb would produce eternal peace.”
“32: The bomb exploded within 100 feet of the aiming point. The fireball was 18,000 feet across. The temperature at the center of the fireball was 100,000,000 degrees. The people who were near the center became nothing. The whole city was blown to bits and the ruins all caught fire instantly everywhere, burning briskly. 70,000 people were killed right away or died within a few hours. Those who did not die at once suffered great pain. Few of them were soldiers.”
“33: The men in the plane perceived that the raid had been successful, but they thought of the people in the city and they were not perfectly happy. Some felt they had done wrong. But in any case they had obeyed orders. ‘It was war.’”
It was war, and despite the reaction U.S. Air Force bomber Enola Gay co-pilot Captain Robert Lewis wrote in his log after dropping the bomb on Hiroshima—“My God, what have we done?”—pilots and crew members stressed again and again they believed they did what they had to do. But the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not produce eternal peace. Instead, they opened a Pandora’s box that can never be fully locked back up. I have visited Hiroshima with my family, and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial (Genbaku Dome), created from the ruins of the only structure left standing near the bomb’s hypocenter, is a reminder of how far we still have to go to make this a world worthy of and safe for all of our children.
In 1945, Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and University of Chicago scientists who helped develop the technology used in the atomic bomb founded the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and two years later they created the “Doomsday Clock,” a metaphorical countdown to midnight that warns the public about how close we are to destroying our world with dangerous technologies of our own making. Beginning that year, the clock’s hands were moved every January based on scientists’ evaluation of whether global events were pushing humanity closer to or further from nuclear apocalypse; since 2007, they have also considered climate change and other manmade threats that might lead to global catastrophe. This January brought an ominous message: it is just 89 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been. The Bulletin says: “The 2025 Clock time signals that the world is on a course of unprecedented risk, and that continuing on the current path is a form of madness. The United States, China, and Russia have the prime responsibility to pull the world back from the brink. The world depends on immediate action.”
The same year “Original Child Bomb” was published, Thomas Merton also wrote this in the essay “Nuclear War and Christian Responsibility”: “there can be no doubt that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, though not fully deliberate crimes, nevertheless crimes. And who was responsible? No one. Or ‘history.’ We cannot go on playing with nuclear fire and shrugging off the results as ‘history.’ We are the ones concerned. We are the ones responsible. History does not make us, we make it—or end it.” The young people writing the world’s next chapter will have the chance to make new choices.