Hiroshima

The news that an entire Japanese city had been obliterated by a single bomb on August 6, 1945 reached us in Adelaide quite soon after the event, and was soon followed by the news that a second atom bomb had been dropped on the city of Nagasaki with equally widespread death and destruction. Members of my medical student class had studied physics recently enough to comprehend the nature of these immensely powerful bombs. I remember our discussion one August day in 1945 in the students' hut where we had lunch and some of us played cards (I'd played cards too for a while but stopped when they began playing for money). We understood without being told that atom bombs had changed our world forever. John Hersey's account of the devastation in Hiroshima occupied an entire issue of the New Yorker a year later on August 31, 1946 (I still have my copy) and Albert Einstein's eloquent words about a "New Manner of Thinking" had considerable impact too. Today is the 68th anniversary of that world-changing event. It's a sad comment on our information-overloaded times that the anniversary passed without notice this year; and I saw no little paper boats carrying candles in the pond beside the Canal a couple hundred meters south of my condo, where they have been a mute tribute to memory of the dead in previous years. Technology has changed the world almost beyond recognition during my lifetime. Atom bombs and other nuclear weapons are the most ominous technological change - in the Epilogue to the First Edition of Public Health and Human Ecology (1986) I dreaded their possible imminent use; 10 years later in the Epilogue to the Second Edition  I wrote more hopefully that the danger of a nuclear holocaust had receded. But it hasn't altogether vanished, and never will unless a cadre of wise statesman and women who love humanity more than illusory "victory" in a nuclear war agree to destroy stockpiles of nuclear weapons all over the world. There seems absolutely no chance that anything of this sort will happen in my lifetime.