HIROSHIMA, NAGASAKI, AND THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY Dr. Kenneth W. Phifer August 3, 2003 What have we done? What have we done with the knowledge of nuclear power? What have we done with our knowledge of these awesome forces at the very heart of nature? This is what we have done. The first thing we did with this knowledge was to build a bomb. After testing whether such a bomb could be made to explode—it could—we then built two more. The first of these bombs we dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, a non-military target, on Monday, August 6, 1945. It exploded at approximately 8:15 in the morning over this town of several hundred thousand citizens. The first awareness of the bomb came with light, light so intense that 300,000 people were immediately, if temporarily, blinded. Then came heat that left burn marks on 50,000 bodies. Noise followed, of a kind more ferocious than thousands of artillery pieces firing at once, deafening nearly everyone in the city. The wind came next, of such intensity that it blew the clothes off hundreds of thousands of people, knocked them to the ground, sent shards and splinters of glass flying and dust that drove like pellets into the naked bodies. Fire broke out all over the city. The final act of this cataclysm was rain, huge black drops of rain full of radioactivity that would kill, maim, and distort tens of thousands of lives on whom it fell. It is not known how many died that day. American military estimates were 80,000 dead. The Japanese said that 200,000 died that day or afterwards from wounds received on August 6. In London, through five and one-half years of war, 30,000 people perished. August 6, 1945 was and remains the worst single day of slaughter in any of humanity’s wars. On August 9, a second bomb was dropped on a similar civilian target with the same deadly results. At Nagasaki, 40,000 perished and tens of thousands more died through the years as a result of injuries received on that day. The first thing we did with our knowledge of this stupendous force was to build a weapon of mass destruction and then to use it. On non-military targets. Twice. Since that time we have developed various kinds of uses for this knowledge, including the generation of power. But as Three Mile Island and Chernobyl have shown us, there are grave risks involved even in the peaceful applications of our knowledge. Most of our energy and money has not been spent on such peaceful uses. Mostly what we have done is to design, produce, test, deploy, and threaten the use of weapons that carry a destructive force many times greater than the bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At one time there were more than 50,000 nuclear weapons of mass destruction in the world. Many of those weapons were primed to be delivered at a few minutes notice. We lived through the Cold War years with one version or another of a stalemate rightly called M.A.D.—Mutual Assured Destruction. If you try to kill me, I will kill you too. Both of us will suffer losses in the tens of millions of lives and find our cities wiped out. Civilization, whether capitalist or communist, would be horribly damaged, perhaps beyond repair. Test ban treaties were signed—in 1963, in 1974, and in 1996—but as more and more nations began to develop nuclear weapons—France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, and possibly others—the danger only multiplied. The Non- Proliferation Treaty has helped to diminish some of this danger, but not all nations have been willing to sign or to abide by that treaty. In the last decade or so, terrorist groups and rogue nations have been busy trying to obtain materials with which to build a nuclear weapon. The collapse of the Soviet Union has removed some of the tight controls on some of these materials, adding a new level of peril to our circumstances. Last year the White House released a Nuclear Posture Review. This document “embraces the use of nuclear weapons in a first strike and on the battlefield.” Furthermore, it called for the development of new kinds of weapons and indicated a return to testing would soon be needed. A budget request was made to cover this possibility. The president made clear last winter that the fear of weapons of mass destruction—including very specifically nuclear weapons-- was the major reason for his desire to invade Iraq. He also stated several times that he would consider using nuclear weapons if necessary in Iraq. What have we done with our knowledge of nuclear power? What we have mostly done is to put ourselves in grave mortal peril. Viktor Frankl, a survivor of the Nazi death camps, spoke that peril this way: “Since Auschwitz we know what humanity is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.” What is at stake is the future of humanity on this planet. What may also be at stake is the welfare of all life on the earth. Where is hope to be found in this situation? What can we do in the year 2003 and beyond to make our world safe and the lives of our children and their children healthy and reasonably secure? Three suggestions. First, resist the technological imperative. The technological imperative is this: if something can be done, do it; once started, do not stop doing it; change (called upgrading) constantly. The technological imperative begins with our quest for knowledge. We seek to learn how something works—like gravity or electrical energy or the human body. We seek to design and build some device that will assist or improve our living in some way—a windmill, a train, a computer, a refrigerator, a drug. We in America have led the way throughout the late 19th century and all of the 20th in inventing, developing, and marketing remarkable aids to human life, from vaccines to Velcro, from air conditioning to antibiotics, from permanent press clothes to prosthetics, from films to phones. We live in a amazing society that is full of ease and comfort such as humanity has never known. That ease and comfort is slowly making its way around the world, not least because of the dramatic impact of computer technology. There is a sense in our land that we can do anything we want to do, that technologically there are no limits. We will conquer cancer, replace worn out body parts with good ones from other people or artificial ones, and someday learn the mechanism of aging and become immortal. Technology pulls us forward, luring us into the future with new devices, new gadgets, new machines that promise us a life full of health and wealth and well-being. Technology radiates optimism. What technology has not learned is a sense of limits. What technology lacks is a brake, and the knowledge of how to use it, and the willingness to do so. Technology has no interest in the impact of its inventions on the earth or the human soul. Instead the imperative of our technological world makes us captive to a constant upgrading of our car, our computer, our home entertainment center, our clothes, and, most ominously, our weapons. New and improved is the watchword of our culture, though new is often not improved only different and not infrequently worse. The power and the peril of the technological imperative are revealed in the story of our building and dropping the only nuclear weapons ever used against human beings. Robert Wilson, one of the leading scientists at Los Alamos, wrote in the early 1980’s that “I would like to think now that at the time of the German defeat (the decision to build an A-bomb was motivated by the fear that Nazi Germany would do so first—KWP) I would have stopped and taken stock…and walked away from Los Alamos. In terms of everything I believed in before, after and during the war, I cannot understand why I did not take that act. On the other hand, it was simply not in the air. Our lives were directed to one thing, it was as if we were programmed to do that, and we as automatons were doing it.” That one thing, of course, was to build a working atomic bomb, which was achieved. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific head of the Manhattan Project, put it simply: once the test of the atomic bomb was successful, it was too late, “the whole mechanism for use had been set in motion.” We dropped the bombs and we won the war. Then we changed our enemy and spent more than four decades inventing new forms of nuclear destruction. We could not think of a way to stop increasing the danger in which the world was being placed. Now we face a huge problem of how to safely disarm all these thousands of weapons we do not need. What are we going to do with nuclear waste? A more frightening question is how we keep nuclear weapons technology out of the hands of terrorist individuals and groups and rogue states. What kind of example are we in the United States setting as a world leader? We have a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons and are now seriously contemplating adding to it. We are threatening first strikes and have abandoned the program of helping Russia to disarm the weapons of the former Soviet Union. How does any of these actions increase the security of the world? These and other difficult questions should have been considered long ago and responsibly answered before we created the horde of weapons that now bedevils us. The technological imperative drove us to design and build and deploy these weapons because we could. We did not think clearly, nor did we give adequate attention to the moral aspects of our behaviour. We need to learn how to resist the technological imperative for our safety and our well-being. We need to pursue wisdom with the same zeal with which we have pursued knowledge. The first thing we can work for is to learn how to resist the technological imperative. The second is to work for planetary cooperation. Fifty years ago Adlai Stevenson was talking of the need for all the peoples of the earth to realize that we lived on only one earth, comparing our situation to being in a lifeboat. We did not choose our companions. We may not like those who share this lifeboat with us. But if we want to survive we must learn to transcend the selfishness of our own needs and pleasures so that the needs and pleasures of everyone in the boat with us are part of our plans and actions. I have just finished reading a remarkable novel. It is called LIFE OF PI by Yann Martel. It was the winner last year of the Man Booker Prize, the most prestigious literary award offered to writers in Great Britain and the Commonwealth countries. It is the story of a boy and a tiger on a lifeboat together after their ship sinks. There are other animals there too at first. They dispatch each other and the tiger eats the survivors so that in the end there are only the two of them, Pi Patel and the tiger who is called Richard Parker. The novel tells the story of how they survive their 227 days at sea. The key their survival, and occasionally their prosperity, is cooperation. They learn to respect each other’s territory. The boy helps to find food for the tiger so that he will not perish, knowing that he needs the companionship of this other life form, alien though it be. A vegetarian, the boy learns to eat meat because that is necessary if he is to live. Sleep patterns, daily activity, bodily functions, the shape of their bodies, adjusting to the rolling sea after life on land, and many other aspects of existence change as life demands that they learn how to pay attention to their surroundings, pay attention to each other, and pay attention to inner needs they are unable to share with each other but which must be kept under control so that these inner impulses do not threaten the other. The whole world needs to learn what Pi Patel and Richard Parker learned on that unwanted voyage: how to get along, how to think in larger categories than only my self and my needs, how to be creative as life forces unusual challenges upon us. The world has been moving towards an international society for several centuries, since those first commercial explorations from Europe in the 16th century. In the 20th century especially, technology made of our planet a small neighborhood where what is happening in the most distant corner of the globe is known everywhere immediately. The impact of events in places whose names we can barely pronounce and about which we are largely ignorant can be considerable. Our clothes are made in Asia. Our oil comes from the Middle East. Our food is from the Phillipines and Latin America. Our soldiers are stationed in tens of countries and actively fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. Even if we cannot speak the names correctly, what happens in distant places matters a great deal to us. It is that kind of world whether we live in Korea or Guatemala, Liberia or Bosnia, or any other place. There are institutions and systems and mechanisms now in place and more that can be created to help us to live in such a world. There is, for example, a World Health Organization that has recently demonstrated its enormous value to humanity by helping to contain the SARS epidemic that raged from Hong Kong to Toronto. There are international athletic competitions that help individuals and countries to know each other better and enjoy the thrill of striving at the highest level of sporting achievement to reach peaks of physical prowess. There are international societies of engineers and physicists, musicians and teachers, writers and peace activists, groups of all kinds that help us to learn from others engaged in pursuits like ours how better to do our work or follow our interests. There is an international organization devoted to the welfare of children, UNICEF and another that focuses on cultural well-being, UNESCO. There is widespread communication among the scientists of the world about the dangers to our planetary health from various ways that we pollute the environment. One country alone cannot solve the world’s environmental problems or even its own. Because the earth is an ecology, a single entity tied into the atmosphere that surrounds it, it will take the efforts of all the nations. The Kyoto Treaty, which almost all nations have signed and are abiding by, is an example of precisely the kind of international cooperation needed and being carried out to deal with the issue of environmental degradation that humanity has caused. There is an International Atomic Energy Commission, and there were international inspections in Iraq that did their job of making sure there were no nuclear weapons of mass destruction there. The United Nations itself, as the United States government is now unhappily learning, is a vitally important organization. As war rages on in Iraq and the rebuilding of this devastated land moves at a glacial pace, the United States has now asked for the help of other nations. It has even indicated a willingness to come before the United Nations Security Council to seek assistance in dealing with the violent and chaotic situation in Iraq. The inspiration for moving towards a planetary vision is embedded in the charter documents of the organization and numerous covenants and declarations since that time. What is needed is not more words, but more attention to the words that we have already written about the human rights every person deserves, about being free from the scourge of war, about nations respecting one another. Like Pi Patel and Richard Parker, we need to learn that in working together for common objectives, working together equitably and equably, lies our best hope for confronting the perils of the 21st century. One last suggestion is that we “begin again as spiritual children.” (Dillman Baker Sorrells) The ultimate threat to humanity and the earth is not bombs or explosives or biological or chemical agents. The ultimate threat is the same as it has always been, our inability at times to transcend our fear and our insecurity and our ignorance, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. Our struggle, in other words, is ultimately a spiritual struggle. It is a struggle between the angel that is in us and the devil that is also in us. It is a struggle to hold at bay our selfishness, our pride, our need to look good before others, our defensiveness about positions we have taken that have proven to be false or unworthy. It is a struggle to accept the truth that today’s world has imposed upon us: that no one religion is the one true religion; that religions are only languages about the absolute, not absolute themselves; that in every religion there is the same struggle between good and bad that is part of every individual’s struggle. Many do not want to accept this truth that the closeness of the world has made abundantly clear to us. Osama bin Laden and his followers certainly have chosen to ignore this truth. So have those like Jerry Falwell and Franklin Graham and Pat Robertson who have declared that Islam is a wicked religion. The religiously Orthodox Israeli settlers on the West Bank also won’t recognize this truth. There are too many in many religions just like these people. Almost every religion has ample textual warrant for the commission of violence in defense of the religion. Every religion has ample textual warrant for resisting the call to violence. Demons and angels abide in all religions. The increasing contacts between the religions that have been a feature of the 20th century and of our own century have made clear that no honest appraisal of another religion allows for the elevation of our own religion to a status above all others. The three Parliaments of the World’s Religions have brought this point home forcefully. Representatives from hundreds of religions have gathered in 1893, 1993, and 1999 to share insights, to learn from each other, to confront flaws and foibles, to work towards a harmonious relationship between all the religions. At each of these Parliaments, these men and women have confessed before each other their failures to curb violence, to reduce corruption, to support loving families, and to inspire good behaviour. At these gatherings—the next one of which will be in Barcelona, Spain next July—Christians and Jews and Muslims and Buddhists and Hindus and Unitarian Universalists and hundreds of others teach each other, learn from each other, and enjoy one another. Each of us at one of these Parliaments becomes like a little child, learning from scratch about the meaning of religion, the meaning of spirituality, the meaning of goodness. One of the most important learnings of these occasions is that there is inspiration and love and hope to be found in every expression of spiritual yearning. Carolyn Forche suggests that our need today is to “awaken God “in us and around us so that goodness prevails. That is what I believe is happening at these Parliaments and at smaller interfaith gatherings around the world, including in Ann Arbor. Even if we do not use God language comfortably, we all see the point: to make ourselves conscious of that divine part of our humanity, that part that loves goodness and mercy and justice, that part that sacrifices for others and shares with an open heart and a ready smile, that part that makes us sometimes noble. When the task we set for ourselves is not to force God on others but to awaken the divine within ourselves and in others, that is, to stir up love within ourselves, there can be hope for the world. We must embark upon such a mission with humility, with openness, with respect, and with kindness. If we can truly become as spiritual children and learn the lessons of love and justice that all the great religions teach, we shall find ways to handle the dangerous knowledge we possess without destroying ourselves. We will develop a deep appreciation for all the many variant ways in which humanity appears and acts, develop what Robert J..Lifton has called “a species mentality.” We will value all the peoples of the earth. We will know that we cannot divide humanity into Us and Them. Us is all there is. What have we done with the knowledge of nuclear power we have gained over the past century? Mostly what we have done is to build weapons of mass destruction. What can we do about the peril in which this puts humanity? One thing we cannot do is to stuff the genie of that knowledge back into the bottle. We have to deal with it. I have offered three suggestions for what I believe is a wise and moral course of action. We need to struggle against the technological imperative to which we seem to be in thrall. We need to work towards a truly international society, not an American version of it. We need to humble ourselves that we might be as spiritual children learning the lessons of love and fair play and sharing all over again. We create reality by living it. The reality I seek for myself and my children and grandchildren and yours and theirs as well is this kind of reality— thoughtful, communitarian, and generous. I invite you to join with me is using these means to confront the dangers of the nuclear world that together we might bring about the creation of a fairer, gentler world. Then when the question is asked many decades from now, what have we done?, the answer will be that we have done good. - - Copyright (c) 2003, Dr. Kenneth W. Phifer