"This Could Be Ground Zero"

By Kenneth M. Pierce

Streetcars stopped in silence. A bell rang mournfully seven times. It was 8:15 a.m. in Hiroshima last Tuesday, 40 years after an atomic bomb nicknamed Little Boy burst 1,850 ft. over the city with a searing, blinding flash, killing 118,000 people within days and dooming nearly as many to slower deaths in later years. In a speech to 55,000 onlookers at Hiroshima Memorial Peace Park, Mayor Takeshi Araki urged the superpowers to abolish nuclear weapons. The goal, said Araki, was "no more Hiroshimas." Afterward, 1,500 doves, symbols of peace, were released into cloudy skies.

Throughout the U.S., hundreds of groups held their own memorials last week for the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima and, three days later, Nagasaki. While speakers at many of the rallies echoed Araki's agenda, for the most part they avoided both partisan rhetoric and talk of disarmament. Like the Hiroshima service, which used doves to make its point, many of the American commemoratives made use of simple symbols to underscore mankind's vulnerability to nuclear weapons. The displays were frail and mute, but they managed to express deep fears for the survival of the race, which the language of policy analysis has not defused in the 40 years since Hiroshima. And they raised, too, 40-year-old questions of whether the Bomb should have been used at all (see ESSAY). Among the memorials:

The Ribbon. During her morning prayers in 1982, Denver Grandmother Justine Merritt conceived the idea of a band of people encircling the Pentagon with a ribbon of peace. She began to ask those on her Christmas-card list to fashion cloth banners depicting things they could not bear to lose. The project attracted a national volunteer network, which produced 25,000 different banners, many with pictures of children or pets or sunsets. Tied together, the banners formed a ribbon that stretched 15 miles--long enough not only to encircle the Pentagon but also to cross the Potomac and wind around the Lincoln Memorial, the Capitol and the Ellipse behind the White House.

More than 15,000 demonstrators turned out as the ribbon was finally tied around the Lincoln Memorial. Nearly overwhelmed by the occasion, Merritt told the crowd, "I'm not going to cry. I'm just going to pray for peace." Afterward, sections of the ribbon were flown to Los Angeles and unfurled as demonstrators conducted a peace vigil along a 15-mile stretch of Wilshire Boulevard.

The Shadow. As they made their way to work on the morning of Aug. 6, residents of New York, Boston, Minneapolis and 370 other cities in the U.S. and abroad discovered that artists had been at work overnight, painting silhouettes of people on streets. The silhouettes were intended as reminders of the Hiroshima victims who, caught outdoors by the blast, were vaporized, leaving no trace except for profiles etched on Hiroshima sidewalks. The arresting images, usually created with plastic stencils and rollers dipped in whitewash, were the work of the International Shadow Project, a network of 10,000 volunteer painters in cities ranging from Penang, Malaysia, to Budapest, Hungary. Worldwide, some 300 project volunteers were arrested, but police in many areas chose to permit the effort. In New York, Landscape Artist Alan Gussow, who conceived the project, said he was "staggered" by the response. As she stenciled an image of herself and her husband near Wall Street in Manhattan, Artist Janna Josephson noted, "I want to make an impact, to startle people, to make them know that this could be ground zero."

The Candles. After the sun had set, more than 1,000 lighted candles inside paper lanterns were launched down the Mississippi River at La Crosse, Wis., by members of the Wisconsin Physicians for Social Responsibility. Those killed by the Bomb are annually commemorated this way in Japan, where floating paper lanterns are a symbol of dead souls. Similar lights bobbed along dozens of other U.S. waterways last week. Said Cameron Gundersen, a pediatrician in La Crosse: "The purpose of this commemoration is not to assign guilt or linger among the images of death but to remind ourselves of what we are capable of doing. We are capable of destroying the world's civilization. More important, we are capable of preventing that."

In Hiroshima, many residents avoided last week's ceremonies. A few blocks from the blast's hypocenter, Takeshi Ito, an economics professor who chairs the national organization of 370,000 Bomb victims, visited the graves of two nieces. "I was face to face with the dead," said Ito, "and that was a lot more meaningful to me than listening to empty speeches."

Some Americans, recalling the nearly 300,000 American casualties in the Pacific fighting that began with Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, felt the domestic memorials were misplaced. Others, including President Reagan, emphasized that peace and the elimination of weapons were not necessarily synonymous. "We must never forget what nuclear weapons brought upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki," said Reagan, "yet we must remain mindful that our maintenance of a strong nuclear deterrent has for four decades ensured the security of the U.S. and the freedom of our allies in Asia and Europe." For most, however, it was simply a time to consider events that all fervently hope will never be repeated. --By Kenneth M. Pierce. Reported by Ai Leng Choo/Washington and Yukinori Ishikawa/Hiroshima

With reporting by Reported by Ai Leng Choo/Washington, Yukinori Ishikawa/Hiroshima