Nagasaki: Fat Man incinerates thousands

Paul Tibbits and the bomber
he named for his mother

Why would anyone name a bomb?

For centuries men have given their ships and airships the names of women.  They love these toys, even when they are designed to be killers.

Starting in 1944-45, men began giving pet names to atomic bombs themselves.

Today is August 9, the day Nagasaki was blasted with a nuclear explosion.  We are now 75 years past that bloodless death day.  Humans were incinerated, flesh to ashes in seconds.   

"Fat Man" the men called their bomb. It killed between 39,000 and 80,000 humans in Nagasaki within four months.  No one really knows how many were killed instantly--there were no remains, no bones, no way to count.

"Little Boy" they called the bomb that killed humans in Hiroshima.  It killed  between 90,000 and 146,000 people in one blow, not counting those who took years to die.  It killed many little boys.

Wikipedia reports calmly:

On August 6, one of the modified B-29s dropped a uranium gun-type bomb ("Little Boy") on Hiroshima. Another B-29 dropped a plutonium implosion bomb ("Fat Man") on Nagasaki three days later. 

We call ourselves civilized, so mass murder of thousands must be a mark of civilization.  Giving tender names to our weapons of murder must be the modern equivalent of naming a sword.

I feel sorry for Enola Gay Tibbits.  

What woman would want her name on the B-29 bomber that dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima?  

Her son Paul Tibbits named the bomber for his mother, Enola Gay.  Maybe she was a bummer of a woman.  A bomber. 

That death-laden plane could have been named "Mary Louise" or "Susan Marie."  "Suzy Q."

The B-29 that carried "Fat Man" was given the ugly name Bockscar, from the surname of pilot Frederick C. Bock.

If we stop to think about these things--as we should at least once a year--we may go crazy.  Death tied up in a bow with cute names. 

If we don't stop to think about the tens of thousands needlessly murdered by our own country--America, the Beautiful--we accept being morally bankrupt.

We are complicit.  We are the children of those who chose to kill, and by not crying out against this atrocity, we allow it to happen again.

A British band called Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark wrote a song in 1980 to remind us:

Enola Gay, you should have stayed at home yesterday
We got your message on the radio, conditions normal and you're coming home
These games you play, they're gonna end in more than tears someday
Uh huh Enola Gay, it shouldn't ever have to end this way

It's 8:15, that's the time that it's always been
We got your message on the radio, conditions normal and you're coming home

Enola Gay, is mother proud of little boy today
Uh huh, this kiss you give, it's never ever gonna fade away

Enola Gay, you should have stayed at home yesterday
We got your message on the radio, conditions normal…

See also:

NY Times:   Hiroshima Survivors Worry that World Will Forget

LA Times:   Hiroshima's lasting shadow on the world by Nicholas Goldberg

"      "           Art: survivors carrying the dead of Hiroshima

Science:     Aftermath - radiation's health effects by Dennis Normile

                    Avoiding another Hiroshima by Madeleine K. Albright

Hiroshima: an unneeded atrocity

Left: photo of mushroom cloud
above Hiroshima by George R. Caron;
Right: above Nagasaki. Wikipedia.

The horror of Hiroshima stands undiminished though 75 years have passed.  

August 6 dawns, and forever it carries the mark of humanity's worst single sin.  August 6 and its twin, August 9, bring tears to my eyes.  

And it was my country--not Germany, not Russia--that needlessly killed 200,000-300,000 humans.

"U.S. leaders knew we didn’t have to drop atomic bombs on Japan to win the war. We did it anyway," 

reads the headline in the opinion article by Gar Alperovitz and Martin J. Sherwin in yesterday's Los Angeles Times.  Alperovitz wrote The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (New York: Knopf, 1995).

"...the overwhelming historical evidence from American and Japanese archives indicates that Japan would have surrendered that August, even if atomic bombs had not been used — and documents prove that President Truman and his closest advisors knew it."

General MacArthur called the use of atomic bombs "inexcusable."  Former president Herbert Hoover and future president Dwight Eisenhower opposed the use of these bombs.  

Read about this.  You have no right to remain ignorant, not when "the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock warns us, the world is now closer to nuclear annihilation than at any time since 1947."

The atomic bomb exploded 1800 ft. above Hiroshima, killing 80,000 people instantly, mothers and fathers and children going about their daily lives at 8:15 am.  Another 62,000 died later of radiation poisoning or injuries.  For additional statistics, see "How Many People Died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki?" by Seren Morris in Newsweek magazine on August 3, 2020. 

Due to crosswind, the bomb missed the aiming point, the Aioi Bridge, by approximately 800 ft (240 m) and detonated directly over Shima Surgical Clinic.^[140] It released the equivalent energy of 16 ± 2 kilotons of TNT (66.9 ± 8.4 TJ).^[137] The weapon was considered very inefficient, with only 1.7 percent of its material fissioning.^[141] The radius of total destruction was about 1 mile (1.6 km), with resulting fires across 4.4 square miles (11 km²).^[142]    (from Wikipedia)

Everyone should read about these two massacres once a year.  Read a newspaper. Watch a television report.   Search the internet or read Wikipedia: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki

Many victims were eating breakfast; some were children at school.  Others were soldiers.

Since Mayor Senkichi Awaya had been killed while eating breakfast with his son and granddaughter at the mayoral residence, Field Marshal Shunroku Hata, who was only slightly wounded, took over the administration of the city, and coordinated relief efforts.

Most elements of the Japanese Second General Army headquarters were undergoing physical training on the grounds of Hiroshima Castle, barely 900 yards (820 m) from the hypocenter. The attack killed 3,243 troops on the parade ground.^[163]

American citizens were told about the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, "a military base," 18 hours later with the spin that it was done "in order to save thousands and thousands of young American lives."  My parents believed that story completely.   

I don't believe it.  There had to be another way to end the war with Japan.  Research cited above shows that negotiations were already underway and that the Soviet invasion of Manchuria on August 8 convinced Japan's generals that they needed to negotiate a surrender. 

In the same speech, President Harry Truman said, "We have won the race of discovery against the Germans." Cheer, everybody!  It was a race, and we won.  Don't think about the innocent civilians who died. 

But before the bombing, "Truman knew that the Japanese were searching for a way to end the war; he had referred to Togo’s intercepted July 12 cable as the “telegram from the Jap emperor asking for peace.”

My father was in the Army, stationed in the Aleutian Islands, at the time.  My mother was a Navy nurse, one of the WAVES (Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service), serving at Camp Elliott near San Diego.  They met in Boulder, Colorado, early in 1947, married in October, and I was born on August 19, 1948, 

My birthday has always been close to the death day of tens of thousands of people.  

Truman and those who insisted on this brutal demonstration of power have not only killed hundreds of thousands of humans and wounded many more.  

They have also scarred the minds of every human on earth with the knowledge and photos of these two nuclear massacres and with fear of the future. 

On every American then and now they have imposed indelible shame.  We are ugly Americans.

For further reading:

Continued effects on Masaaki Takano, age 82, and others: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/atomic-bomb-dropped-japan-s-hiroshima-75-years-ago-still-n1235849

Letters to the editor on 75th anniversary of Hiroshima https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-08-08/hiroshima-wasnt-the-start-of-the-nuclear-age-building-the-bomb-at-all-was

Pilot turned anti-nuclear activist  https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/06/magazine/hiroshima-claude-eatherly-antinuclear.html

Folded cranes and other facts  https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-08-06/5-things-to-know-hiroshima-atomic-bomb-anniversary