FIRE IN THE SKY¹

The atomic age began on the morning of July 16, 1945, with the detonation of the world’s first nuclear weapon in the Jornada del Muerto desert in New Mexico. As the mushroom cloud bloomed in the desert sky, J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–67), the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory that designed the weapon, remembered a haunting utterance attributed to the god Vishnu in the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Oppenheimer and his team of physicists had unlocked a new, unprecedented destructive power. Three weeks later, on August 6 and 9, 1945, American forces unleashed this power by detonating weapons of similar design over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, incinerating tens of thousands of people instantly, mostly civilians, and killing many tens of thousands more in the months thereafter due to burns, radiation sickness, and other injuries.

No country has ever employed atomic weapons in warfare after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the specter of the fear that nuclear fire could rain from the sky has haunted every nation on earth ever since. The creation of this killing technology is one of the most frightening ways that modern human beings have enabled themselves to render whole cities into the burning hellscapes imagined by Christian authors throughout history. The infernal analogy was not lost on critics of nuclear weapons. In a lecture presented after winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–68) identified war as one of the great evils confronting the world: “A world war—God forbid!—will leave only smoldering ashes as a mute testimony of a human race whose folly led inexorably to ultimate death. So if modern man continues to flirt unhesitatingly with war, he will transform his earthly habitat into an inferno such as even the mind of Dante could not imagine.”

Japanese survivors experienced firsthand the reality of a nuclear holocaust that Western authors could only shudder to contemplate. Among them was Yoshitaka Kawamoto, who was thirteen years old when the atomic bomb detonated a kilometer away from his school in the Zakoba-cho district of Hiroshima. His escape from the concussive force of the initial explosion and the collapse of his school is nothing short of miraculous. Kawamoto’s firsthand account of the human carnage and personal suffering caused by a nuclear blast is far more harrowing to read than historical accounts of the torments awaiting sinners in Hell because it actually happened. Marking the seventy-second anniversary of the bombing in August 2017, Hiroshima mayor Kazumi Matsui warned his audience: “This hell is not a thing of the past. As long as nuclear weapons exist and policymakers threaten their use, their horror could leap into our present at any moment. You could find yourself suffering their cruelty.”

One of my classmates, I think his name is Fujimoto, he muttered something and pointed outside the window, saying, “A B-29 is coming.” He pointed outside with his finger. So I began to get up from my chair and asked him, “Where is it?” Looking in the direction that he was pointing toward, I got up on my feet, but I was not yet in an upright position when it happened. All I can remember was a pale lightning flash for two or three seconds. Then, I collapsed. I don’t know much time passed before I came to. It was awful, awful. The smoke was coming in from somewhere above the debris. Sandy dust was flying around. I was trapped under the debris and I was in terrible pain and that’s probably why I came to. I couldn’t move, not even an inch. Then, I heard about ten of my surviving classmates singing our school song. I remember that. I could hear sobs. Someone was calling his mother. But those who were still alive were singing the school song for as long as they could. I think I joined the chorus. We thought that someone would come and help us out. That’s why we were singing a school song so loud. But nobody came to help, and we stopped singing one by one. In the end, I was singing alone. Then I started to feel fear creeping in. I started to feel my way out pushing the debris away little by little, using all my strength. Finally, I cleared the things around my head. And with my head sticking out of the debris, I realized the scale of the damage. The sky over Hiroshima was dark. Something like a tornado or a big fireball was storming throughout the city. I was only injured around my mouth and around my arms. But I lost a good deal of blood from my mouth, otherwise I was OK. I thought I could make my way out. But I was afraid at the thought of escaping alone. We had been going through military drills every day, and they had told us that running away by oneself is an act of cowardice, so I thought I must take somebody along with me. I crawled over the debris, trying to find someone who was still alive. Then, I found one of my classmates lying alive. I held him up in my arms. It is hard to tell, his skull was cracked open, his flesh was dangling out from his head. He had only one eye left, and it was looking right at me. First, he was mumbling something, but I couldn’t understand him. He started to bite off his finger nail. I took his finger out from his mouth. And then, I held his hand. Then he started to reach for his notebook in his chest pocket, so I asked him, I said, “You want me to take this along to hand it over to your mother?” He nodded. He was going to faint. But still I could hear him crying out, saying “Mother, Mother.” I thought I could take him along. I guess that his body below the waist was crushed. The lower part of his body was trapped, buried inside of the debris. He just refused to go; he told me to go away. And by that time, another wing of the school building, or what used to be the school building, had caught on fire. I tried to get to the playground. Smoke was filling in the air, but I could see the white sandy earth beneath. I thought this must be the playground, then I started to run in that direction. I turned back and I saw my classmate Wada looking at me. I still remember the situation and it still appears in my dreams. I felt sorry for him, but it was the last time I ever saw him. As I was running, hands were trying to grab my ankles. They were asking me to take them along. I was only a child then. And I was horrified at so many hands trying to grab me. I was in pain, too. So all I could do was to get rid of them—it’s terrible to say—but I kicked their hands away. I still feel bad about that. I went to Miyuki Bridge to get some water. At the riverbank, I saw so many people collapsed there. And the small steps to the river were jammed, filled with people pushing their way to the water. I was small, so I pushed on to the river along the small steps. The water was full of dead people. I had to push the bodies aside to drink the muddy water. We didn’t know anything about radioactivity at that time. I stood up in the water and so many bodies were floating away along the stream. I can’t find the words to describe it. It was horrible. I felt fear. Instead of going into the water, I climbed up the riverbank. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t find my shadow. I looked up. I saw the cloud, the mushroom cloud growing in the sky. It was very bright. It had so much heat inside. It caught the light and it showed every color of the rainbow. Reflecting on the past, it’s strange, but I could say that it was beautiful. Looking at the cloud, I thought I would never be able to see my mother again. I wouldn’t be able to see my younger brother again. And then, I lost consciousness. When I came to, it was about seven in the evening. I was in the transportation bureau at Ujina. I found myself lying on the floor of the warehouse and an old soldier was looking in my face. He gave me a light slap on the cheek and he said, “You are a lucky boy.” He told me that he had gone with one of the few trucks left to collect the dead bodies at Miyuki Bridge. They were loading bodies, treating them like sacks. They picked me up from the riverbank and then threw me on top of the pile. My body slid off and when they grabbed me by the arm to put me back onto the truck, they felt that my pulse was still beating, so they reloaded me onto the truck carrying the survivors. I was really lucky.