We'll Meet Again Godzillasan

Tsutomu Yamaguchi died a couple of days ago. He was 93 years old. For those who don’t know, Mr. Yamaguchi gained notoriety by virtue of having been present in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki when they were attacked with nuclear explosives by the United States in 1945. He was in Hiroshima on August 6th on a business trip representing the Mitsubishi Corporation when the uranium powered “Little Boy” was detonated with an explosive force of approximately 15 kilotons of TNT. The bomb killed approximately 140,000 people, but, while seriously burned, Mr. Yamaguchi was not among them. He made his way back to his hometown of Nagasaki just in time to be slightly less than two miles from the detonation on August 9th of the plutonium powered “Fat Man” which exploded with a force of approximately 21 kilotons of TNT and which killed approximately 39,000 people. Again, Mr. Yamaguchi was not among them, but he and his wife both suffered radiation poisoning which, one can only assume, shortened his impressive life-span considerably.

In addition to being a tale of O. Henry-esque irony, Mr. Yamaguchi’s story is a quintessential example of the “been there, done that, bought the tee-shirt” wisdom that comes from personally experiencing human failure writ large. Having been near the epicenter of the two most deliberately destructive acts in human history, he had gained a unique perspective on suffering and loss. In the last decades of his life he became an outspoken critic of the world’s thirst for nuclear weaponry and basically concluded that we were (I paraphrase) all nuts for failing to rid the world of our vast arsenals of nuclear death. Yamaguchi, a Buddhist, had resigned himself to the fact that his accidental celebrity was his intended fate and that he should use his remaining time to educate the world’s people on how really inconvenient a nuclear explosion could be.

There are currently 21,500 nuclear weapons on Planet Earth, give or take, with around 20,000 of those equally divided in the possession of Russia and the United States. The rest are spread around among other such reliable democratic and pluralistic societies as Pakistan, Israel, India and China. Virtually all of these weapons are many hundred to many thousands of times more powerful than the two tiny scraps of hell we unleashed on Mr. Yamaguchi in World War Two. The fundamental technology that underlies these weapons is readily available on the Internet and manufacture is primarily limited by access to fissionable material and the equipment necessary to machine components to fine tolerances. The probability that some vengeance-minded ignoramus or spirit filled religious lunatic will lay their hands on a nuclear explosive increases daily, and the likelihood that a cynical, sociopathic and power hungry douche-bag will buy, steal or create such a device is more of an inevitability than a possibility.

Ever since the Soviet Union went out of business we have largely had an unrealistically apathetic attitude about nuclear disarmament, almost certainly because we no longer fear the world-wide, massive nuclear exchange that would in thirteen minutes obliterate all life on Earth. We now complacently fret about beturbaned terrorists taking us out one airplane-load at a time. While the fear of nuclear terrorism may keep many a CIA operative up at night, it is something so abstract that the mind of the average citizen cannot adequately imagine the scale of destruction it implies. We, therefore, dream fitfully of underwear bombs and hooded martial artists beating old ladies at bingo parlors while the United States, and a dozen other countries, continue to manufacture enriched uranium and plutonium and to export to all manner of suspicious characters the electronic and engineering technology necessary to ignite a star.

In August of 1939, Albert Einstein, along with physicists Leó Szilárd, Eugene Wigner and Edward Teller, sent then President Roosevelt a letter suggesting that it would be possible to use nuclear fission to create a powerful weapon and that Nazi Germany was probably already undertaking the research to accomplish such a feat. The resulting Manhattan Project produced the two city-smashing wonders Mr. Yamaguchi had the pleasure of witnessing. Einstein had always been something of a pacifist and his out-of-character admonition to Roosevelt not to be beaten to the nuclear punch was indicative of his fear of the horror that would result if such power fell unchecked into the hands of paranoid and delusional pricks. He and his fellow physicists reasoned that it was acceptable to pervert science to destructive aims if the alternative meant subjugation of the world by poisonous, misanthropic philosophies. It’s a hard point to argue against.

Unfortunately for Mr. Yamaguchi, Japan never made any significant progress in nuclear research and by 1945 they were pretty much bereft of any ability to credibly threaten America. Most of Japan’s population aimlessly drank saki, hid in their basements and waited for the Emperor to perform a divine miracle. No such miracle was forthcoming, however, and Harry Truman’s two-fisted punch in the soul was all Japan got for its troubles. Truman, who had little tolerance for moral ambiguity, figured 250,000 Japanese lives were worth well less than any number of American ones and apparently never lost a minute of sleep over being midwife to the age of nuclear anxiety. From the perspective of sixty-plus years, some of us may take exception to such an attitude, but at the time there were probably not four people in America who thought poorly of the President for vaporizing Mr. Yamaguchi’s quiet little seaside neighborhood.

Now, like all the apples humanity has eaten over the eons, we are stuck with the knowledge of the power of the atom. In light of such knowledge, we are constantly reminded that all our crowning achievements, from molecular biology to robotics, from aerospace engineering to quantum mechanics, and from artificial intelligence to medicine, can be easily turned upon ourselves with more power to destroy than they would ever have to mend. Tsutomu Yamaguchi got a front row seat to the darkness that lurks in the human psyche and he would probably tell us that beating our swords into plowshares will be inadequate if we cannot hammer open our hearts, and that when we gaze sadly at the devastation wrought by evil, we are only looking into a shattered mirror.