Hiroshima and Nagasaki/Unforgettable Fire

...One is left with many strong impressions after plying through these emotionally and intellectually draining volumes...

...Although only twenty percent of the medical personnel survived in each of the Japanese cities, at least in 1945 there was a shred of society left standing and a remnant of medical capability in the two cities after the bombings...

...John O. Pastere Hakushima-cho, I saw an infant boy leaning against the gate and heard him crying...

...Books: IN THE MARROW & THE MEMORY IN THIS AGE of heightened sensitivity to the risk of nuclear war, the lesson to be learned from Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that for the survivors of the atomic bombings in 1945 the suffering has never ended...

...Robert Lifton in his important psychological treatise on the survivors of Hiroshima has referred to their continued existence after all had collapsed around them as a "death in life...

...thirtyseven distinguished Japanese scientists, named only in a fine-print "Postscript," are responsible for its authorship...

...the numbers are somewhat lower for Nagasaki...

...For-Japanese youth and for all of us, they have assembled all that is of importance regarding the bombings and their effects...

...The pain of the survivors, linking past and future, is a warning to us all...

...In addition, the rebuilding of Hiroshima and Nagasaki becomes meaningless and even misleading in today's context...

...These books are eloquent calls from the past for a future without the threat of nuclear war...

...It has been known for some time that although the Nagasaki bomb contained more fire power than the Hiroshima weapon, the immediate and delayed radiation effects were greater in Hiroshima...

...Several of the pictures are detailed recollections of the crowded medical evacuation centers that sprang up all over the city and its suburbs within hours of the Hiroshima bombing...

...There was a higher percentage of radioactivity released as neutrons in Hiroshima, a fact to keep in mind when evaluating arguments for the deployment of the neutron bomb...

...Having lived in Hiroshima for two years, I felt after viewing the drawings a sense of renewed awareness that many "ordinary" citizens in that now thriving city - geta-shod in traditional dress or carrying briefcases - continue to carry quietly with them the searing memory of that horrible day...

...Thus, the scientists excoriate the right-wing in Japan for promulgating the war, the perceived anti-Soviet motivation of the American government in deciding to use the bombs on Japan, the American occupation policy of suppressing Japanese investigation of the bombs' effects, the failure of the Japanese government after the lifting of the occupation in 1951 to support the hibakusha adequately, and the ABCC for failing to investigate fully the psychological effects of the bombings...

...There is no event in the history of warfare with which to compare the pervasiveness through time and memory of the effects of the bombings on those who experienced them...

...Officials at the sta-tipn, impressed and moved by the quiet emotion of his drawing, asked over the air for similar contributions from other Hibakusha (survivors...

...In the first few days and months, the loss of hair and the formation of deforming burn scars (keloids) gave highly irradiated survivors an early sense that there was "poison" in their bodies and that they had been tainted by their exposure to radioactivity...

...Emotion does break through, most notably when they describe the unfortunate microcephalies...

...Many of these color drawings are accompanied by simple texts as moving as the pictures themselves...

...Since then, data has been published revealing the dose-related radiation induction of lung, breast, and salivary gland cancers...

...To think that he might have been my son made my heart ache...

...Among the contributors are many leaders from the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (since 1975, The Radiation Effects Research Foundation), a joint Japanese and American effort to study and publish the delayed medical effects of the bombing...

...The authors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were concerned that a consciousness of the history and the meaning for posterity of the atomic bombings seems to be fading away among the youth of Japan...

...UNFORGETTABLE FIRE Edited by Japan Broadcasting Corporation Pantheon, $15.95, 110 pp...

...The authors provide evidence that by the end of 1945 140,000 Hiroshima residents (approximately one-half the population of the city) had died as a result of the bombing, most of them immediately...

...One of the now more famous is from an anonymous survivor and depicts a child leaning against a gate...

...However, the significant medical fact is that in each city as many people as had been killed in the acute phase remained alive to anticipate the delayed effects...

...A further reflection...

...In May of 1974, seventy-seven-year-old Iwakichi Kobayashi brought to a television station in Hiroshima a picture drawn from memory of the suffering he had witnessed eight hours after the Hiroshima bombing...

...These excellent books, each of which comes to us from a committee of Japanese, are reminders of the impossibility of eradicating from the minds of the survivors the image of the nuclear holocausts which destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945...

...Nearly a thousand pictures were submitted, and Unforgettable Fire is a selection of over a hundred from that outpouring...

...Nevertheless, the intent of this volume is clearly not to assign blame, and where criticism is made it is doled out even-handedly...

...From 1950-55, the leukemia rate was found by the ABCC to be nearly forty times baseline in those who had been heavily exposed to the radiation...

...Because of the "improvements" made in the destructive power of these weapons in the intervening thirty-six years, the medical communities of all nations would be powerless today to ease the suffering caused by a nuclear attack...

...Their message should be dominating the current nuclear weapons debate...

...However, the scope of this new book is much broader than any previously published work and includes photographs, maps, and references from hundreds of sources, most of them the work of independent Japanese scientists...

...Perhaps the most significant aspect of its publication is its thorough Japaneseness...

...The map-like precision of some of these drawings testifies to the vividness of the memory of that awful day thirty years earlier...

...In addition, chromosome defects have been identified in many survivors who were heavily irradiated, but not in their children...

...There are extensive sections on the blast damage to buildings and on the extreme social disruption caused by the unprecedented, instantaneous obliteration of the two cities...

...As of 1972, the ABCC had identified in two cities sixty-three people who were born with small heads, many of them retarded, after having been exposed to bomb radiation while-in utero...

...Today there could be no repetition of the medical relief which streamed into both cities only hours after the bombings from the countryside and suburbs...

...One who meets these unfortunate microcephalies has no alternative but to consider the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to have been a crime...

...The caption reads, "Walking around the back gate of Shukkeien Garden of the HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI Edited by The Committee For The Compilation Of Materials On Damage Caused By The Atomic Bombings In Hiroshima and Nagasaki Basic Books, $37.50, 706 pp...

...The reader must also reflect that the chaos and devastation so vividly memorialized in these books results from bombs which had less than 1/1000 the explosive power of a modern twenty-megaton nuclear device...

...The authors, for the most part, report these data with great objectivity...

...Although quite different in method - the one encyclopedic and scientific, the other artistic and especially pictorial - each focuses on the lastingness of the effects of nuclear war...

...Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Physical, Medical and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings is quite simply the key reference work on the subject...

...Among these is the image of the "black rain," a radioactive soot which covered many of the survivors in both cities on the days of the bombing and which came to symbolize for them the taint of radioactive contamination, always ready to show itself in some hideous delayed effect...

...Besides a scholarly compilation of what is known of the immediate and delayed medical effects of the radiation, there is a detailed analysis of the lasting psychological and social characteristics which separate hibakusha from the non-exposed...

...When I approached and then touched him, I found that he was dead...

...Their clearly stated intention, however, is to establish the Hiroshima and Nagasaki experience as the cornerstone of a movement for the abolition of all nuclear weapons...

...The final impression left by these works is that nuclear weapons are not simply larger conventional weapons - that there is something special and hideous about the perception of a nuclear time bomb in one's marrow and chromosomes and memory...

...Indeed, the ABCC-RERF data which had previously been published in thousands of separate reports over the last thirty years are well summarized in this volume...

...Help came from surrounding prefectures in 1945: all of the society would be laid waste following a modern nuclear "exchange...