In the Midst of Life

In most American cities, last Wednesday was a summer's day much like any other. Hot. California beaches reported record sales in ice cream, while New York headlines announced that the Mets had just fired Manager Yogi Berra. But it was not a day just like any other. It was the day on which, 30 years before, a bomb known as "little boy" fell on Hiroshima.

Hiroshima is almost totally rebuilt now, and many of the present inhabitants were not born when the white flash blinded the city. But they still gather to remember. Some 40,000 assembled last week in the peace park, and at 8:15 a.m.--the hour at which the whale-shaped bomb dropped from the Enola Gay--a bell tolled to signal a moment of silent prayer. Men and women wept.

President Truman used to say that he had never lost a moment's sleep over his decision to drop that first atomic bomb, but in the course of three decades Americans have become less certain about who their enemies are and what right the U.S. had to visit a holocaust upon the citizens of Hiroshima. At least half a dozen nations now possess the secret of nuclear destruction, and some 7,000 missiles many times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb stand ready to ravage civilization. The fact that they have not yet done so can be ascribed to many reasons, but one, surely, is that Hiroshima did happen and that it does stand as a warning of what humankind can do to itself.

In a guest book that remains in the Hiroshima atomic museum, Americans still come and confess their sense of awe. They mostly offer simple words like "Peace" and "Never again." One wrote, "I hate what we did." Another could not bring himself to record anything more than "Sorry."

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