The best argument against nuclear weapons (and warfare)

Read these passages from John Hersey's seminal Hiroshima – which chronicles the hardships of six Hiroshima residents following the US' dropping of the atomic bomb – and tell me that a justifiable reason for using nuclear weapons exists. For clarification, the first passage centers on the efforts of Mr. Tanimoto, a pastor, to help the countless wounded by ferrying them to a safety zone:

"Mr. Tanimoto found about twenty men and women on the sandspit. He drove the boat onto the bank and urged them to get aboard. They did not move and he realized that they were too weak to lift themselves. He reached down and took a woman by the hands, but her skin slipped off in huge, glovelike pieces. He was so sickened by this that he had to sit down for a moment."

"By nightfall, ten thousand victims of the explosion had invaded the Red Cross Hospital, and Dr. Sasaki, worn out, was moving aimlessly and dully up and down the stinking corridors ... Dr. Sasaki had not looked outside the hospital all day; the scene inside was so terrible and so compelling that it had not occurred to him to ask any questions about what had happened beyond the windows and doors. Ceilings and partitions had fallen; plaster, dust, blood, and vomit were everywhere. Patients were dying by the hundreds, but there was nobody to carry away the corpses."

I always find two interesting nuances in our usage of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The first is its relationship with the War in which it was deployed. World War II was, for all intents and purposes the last "good" war the US ever fought, a war with cleanly delineated lines of good and evil and little ambiguity regarding who was on the right side of the battlefront. For World War II, there was no question of our goodness, no question of the purity of the mission, no draft boards, no widespread protests, no PTSD. Only absolute commitment to the cause: stopping Hitler and the Axis powers.

Yet, it was within that war, that good, clean war of honor and privilege, and the US committed the ultimate war crime. More than 100,000 people died in the bombing of Hiroshima, and approximately 80,000 died in Nagasaki. Their skin was burned horribly, beyond imagination. Faces were melted. Women's breasts were seared off their bodies. Clothing disintegrated, and thousands of people, weak and helpless from radiation sickness, were left in the open air to die, their bodies blotched in sickening rainbows of red and yellow. Thousands more were indoors when the bombs dropped, and they too died slowly, painfully, crushed under the weight of their homes, desperately crying for help that never arrived.

Which brings me to nuance number two, which is the relative ease in which so many of us support the notions of war and absolute force.

It's always stupendously easier to support those actions when the empirical, micro details of such decisions are ignored, isn't it? When we remain ignorant of the pain and suffering they cause, pain and suffering that reaches levels of such acuity that they approach wondrous light? As long as we can delude ourselves with the propaganda of the mission, and effectively block the horrors that journalists such as Hersey chronicle, we're peachy creamy.

If, however, we were to actually consider the consequences of our country's actions – to legitimately THINK about the indefatigable amount of lives that are demolished by the politically and ideological decisions of one power hungry, supremely delusional superpower – we may actually achieve an ounce of skepticism the next time the powers that be attempt to convince us of a new military conflict.

Not that it would matter, in the end, but at least we'd have a sense of empathy. And THAT is why journalism – great, effective journalism that is rife with passion and devoid of soulless objectivity – will always provide the finest argument against warfare and absolute force. Journalism exposes, whether we like it or not, the results of such actions, and renders obsolete the perverted worldview that so many of us use to justify military conflicts.

(Flickr design courtesy of Simon Strandgaard)