Kai Erikson and accidental slaughters

It's now been 65 years since the United States, on two out of four consecutive August mornings in 1945, dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in Japan, achieving in two instants a six-figure civilian body count and bringing World War II to an end.  I join Amy Davidson in linking to an op-ed, published August 5 in The New York Times, by the Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe. He recalls how his mother, hearing of the hospitalization of a friend in Hiroshima, traveled there from their home on the island of Shikoku with a small care package.  On her return, she described for her son, the future novelist, what the friend had seen on the morning of August 6:

Moments before the atomic bomb was dropped, my mother’s friend happened to seek shelter from the bright summer sunlight in the shadow of a sturdy brick wall, and she watched from there as two children who had been playing out in the open were vaporized in the blink of an eye. “I just felt outraged,” she told my mother, weeping.

That the atomic bombings are still broadly supported by Americans is not a good advertisement for us.  But whom to blame for these horrific events?  I think the best analysis of the decision to use the atomic bomb is the essay, by the Yale social scientist Kai Erikson (who is the son of psychologist Erik Erikson), "Of Accidental Judgments and Casual Slaughters."  Erikson's view is that the "decision to drop" was not the result of rational analysis or moral choice but, rather, of bureaucratic momentum.  It was not possible, given all the small decisions already made along the way of developoment, that war-weary leaders would in the end decline to use this awesome new weapon.  The question of whether it is wise to take the last few steps cannot arise if the road already travelled is very far. 

Truman and his war council appear in this light not as monsters but as ordinary blokes.  It is I think a strong argument for disarmament.  We should be very afraid of what we might do without even really thinking about it, if we have the means.  (Alcoholics, if they are really recovering, do not keep liquor in the garage.)  Erikson took the title for his essay from a speech of Horatio's as Hamlet draws to its close:

And let me speak to th' yet unknowing world
How these things came about. So shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause,
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook. . . .

Something like 200,000 people, hardly any of them soldiers, were killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

 

Comments

[JoeP]

Someone's lying here.

No one who had just stepped "in the shadow of a sturdy brick wall" could have seen two children "vaporized in the blink of an eye" without also dying.

She would have never survived the shock wave if she had been close enough to observe something like that.

Hiroshima is tragic enough without fairy tales like this.