1 Boring Old Man

We started it – 65 years ago today. We dropped "little boy" on Hiroshima at 8:15 AM to solve the problem of Japan’s intransigence in World War II – less than four years after they bombed Pearl Harbor. We followed that three days later by dropping another atomic bomb ["fat man"] on Nagasaki. The Japanese  surrendered the next day [August 10th, 1945].

The day of the surrender was one of my earliest memories. I was 3½ years old. Everyone was outside on the street, hitting pans, shooting guns, dancing. My mother looked over at me and saw I was terrified. She said something like, "It’s okay. The War’s over!" My memory is of not understanding what she meant. I understood "war" but I didn’t know what "over" meant when paired with "war." I guess I had no idea that war  was not "always" – part of life. I was born 4 days before Pearl Harbor was bombed, so I had only known "war-time." To me, it was just "time." I still measure history by those events, Pearl Harbor and VJ Day [Victory in Japan]. That’s where modern history starts for me.

I don’t know when it occurred to me that dropping those bombs might not have been the best of ideas. In Grammar School, we had bomb drills and hid under our desks as if wooden desks would ameliorate the effects of a nuclear explosion. The magazines like Popular Science had instructions about how to build your own fallout shelter, though nobody I knew had one. They didn’t seem very inviting, and I later figured out that you might have to stay in there a really long time – like a few centuries.

But I do remember that it was somewhere in late college, early medical school [mid sixties] that the hormones abated long enough for it to dawn on me that what the world was doing about nuclear weapons was absolutely nuts. There was a movement in England, the nuclear disarmament movement that had moved to America. People marched and carried signs with that funny symbol. It didn’t have anything to do with the Viet Nam War at that point. There weren’t any Hippies. They sang a song, "Just a Little Rain" about fallout. That funny symbol stood for nuclear disarmament, from the semaphore for "N.D." I wasn’t in those marches. In the South, we were marching at that time for something closer to home. But I liked the idea. "Why not?" I thought. Living under the threat of the mushroom cloud for my whole life didn’t make any sense.

And then it all ran together – the "peace symbol," and the Civil Rights Movement, and the Anti-War Movement, and the Drugs, Sex, and Rock-n-Roll Movement, and something got lost. The nuclear disarmament symbol became a day-glo cultural icon, consumed by pop-culture. And then came the back-lash and we’ve lived our polarized lives ever since. We’re still a nuclear power fighting a war twice as long as World War II claiming it’s about stopping nuclear proliferation. I wish that symbol could have somehow kept its first meaning. Now, I see it on kids back-packs and tee-shirts. I occasionally ask them what it means. They say "peace symbol!" or "I’m all about peace!" like they might say "Lady Gaga!"