The Sermon: Brighter Than 1000 Suns

Greetings,

I wanted to write a short post today to commemorate the anniversary of the nuclear attack on Japan in 1945. Hiroshima was bombed on August 6th, 1945, and Nagasaki was bombed three days later.

In April of 1996 I visited Japan with a group of students from my high school. I was president of the school's Japanese club, and Japanese culture has been very dear to me since that time. On our trip we visited the bomb museum

in Hiroshima and it had a very profound impact on me.

I think that most Americans have a very hard time imagining the impact of these events. What I mean is, everyone can imagine a mushroom cloud, everyone can logically register an entire city in absolute ruin, but it is very hard to imagine the personal, human impact of something like this. It really hit home for me when I saw an actual section of sidewalk in the museum that had the shadow of a bicycle burned into it.

Here are some facts about the explosion in Hiroshima:

Temperatures in the initial blast reached approximately 3980 degrees celsius, which is about 3/4 the temperature of the surface of the sun.
Within a 1 mile radius or ground zero, even non-flammable materials like glass and sand were turned to molten glass - similar to the obsidian produced by volcanoes.
Approximately 70,000 to 80,000 people died instantaneously in the blast, and another 70,000 were injured.
Over 90% of the city's doctors and 93% of its nurses were killed or injured.
Some estimates put the overall death toll from blasts and radiation at over 200,000 people.

As I said before, these facts are easy to intellectualize, but they don't give you a feel for the human impact of these attacks. Imagine, if you will, a bustling industrial city with approximately 350,000 people in it. Hiroshima was chosen as a target, in part, because it was a major industrial center. This means that most of the population would have been working class families living out their daily lives. At 8:15 in the morning, in a city this size, fathers would have been on their way to work. Mothers would have been feeding their children. Husbands and wives kissing one another, children playing games in yards, dogs barking, birds singing. Then, in an instant, 70,000 of them are vaporized - literally reduced to shadows on the sidewalks.

I'm not a World War II expert. I have heard from many historians that Truman had no other choice but to use the bomb. They say that we were losing the war in the Pacific and that the Imperial Japanese Army was ruthless and unmerciful. To me, however, no matter how we justify it, the use of these weapons is something we can never do again. We saw the effects of this unfathomable weapon, and what did we do? We made even more unfathomable ones. I mentioned earlier that the Hiroshima blast reached temperatures or approximately 3/4 of those on the surface of the sun. The blasts of modern hydrogen bombs can reach temperatures of ten billion degrees, which is 1000 times hotter than the core of the sun.