Humanity's terrible warning shot against itself

This weekend is the 77th anniversary of the U.S. dropping the first atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

We don't usually live in daily terror of The Bomb these days, though maybe we should.

We've been reminded this week that we (most immediately Ukrainians and other Europeans) live in danger of explosive nuclear discharge as Russia and Ukraine trade artillery blasts in the vicinity of Europe's largest nuclear power plant at Zaporizhzhia. The plant has been occupied by invading Russians but is still run by its Ukrainian technicians. When it comes to blowing up a nuke plant, who is at fault is less important than just not taking the risk!

Meanwhile in Japan, citizens observe the terrible anniversary. In the memory of ultimate terror, quiet and prayer seem what is left to humanity. 

Even after the war against fascism in Europe and the even more brutal race war in the Pacific, there were voices in the United States that cried out against the news of The Bomb. 

Here's what Dwight MacDonald wrote on August 9, 1945:

At 9.15 on the morning of August 6, 1945, an American plane dropped a single bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Ex­ploding with the force of 20,000 tons of TNT, The Bomb destroyed in a twinkling two-thirds of the city, including, presumably, most of the 343,000 human beings who lived there. No warning was given. This atrocious action places “ us” , the defenders of civilization, on a moral level with “them” , the beasts of Maidanek. And “we”, the American people, are just as much and as little responsible for this horror as “they", the German people.  

So much is obvious. But more must be said. For the “atomic” bomb renders anticlimactical even the ending of the greatest war in history.  

(1) The concepts, “war” and “progress”, are now obsolete. Both suggest human aspirations, emotions, aims, consciousness. “The greatest achievement of organized science in history,” said President Truman after the Hiroshima catastrophe—which it probably was, and so much the worse for organized science.  

(2) The futility of modern warfare should now be clear. Must we not now conclude, with Simone Weil, that the technical aspect of war today is the evil, regardless of political factors? Can one imagine that The Bomb could ever be used “in a good cause” ? Do not such means instantly, of themselves, corrupt any cause?  

(3) The bomb is the natural product of the kind of society we have created. It is as easy, normal, and unforced an expression of the American Way of Life as electric ice-boxes, banana splits, and hydromatic-drive automobiles. We do not dream of a world in which atomic fission will be “harnessed to constructive ends”. The new energy will be at the service of the rulers; it will change their strength but not their aims. The underlying populations should regard this new source of energy with lively interest— the interest of victims.  

(4) Those who wield such destructive power are outcasts from humanity. They may be gods, they may be brutes, but they are not men.  

(5) We must “get” the national State before it “gets” us. Every individual who wants to save his humanity— and indeed his skin— had better begin thinking “dangerous thoughts” about sabotage, resistance, rebellion, and the fraternity of all men everywhere. The mental attitude known as “negativism” is a good start.

Some of this has not aged well. But most has. There are truths that war-ravaged people knew in 1945 that we may have forgotten.