Nuclear Weapons and the Family of Man
by James N. Yamazaki, August 9, 2005

What is there to compare in the human experience to the anticipation of the birth of a child, and the joy of the mother as she cradles her newborn with an outpouring of love to last a lifetime joined by the father’s commitment for that child? How is that commitment to be fulfilled?

In the waning years of the most lethal war in man’s history, we did not know that we were to be catapulted into the nuclear era. The final segment of that war began in December of 1944 by a determined German thrust that engaged the largest Allied force of the European War. That one morning the snow covered Ardennes Forrest was littered with the bodies of the youthful combatants, both Germans and ours. Remnants of our unit, the 106th Infantry Division, surrendered and I began an 800 mile trek.

A few days later, packed inside of boxcars, we heard air raid sirens and the roar of bombers approaching the Hanover marshalling yard. Soon the exploding bombs rocked the boxcar. As the sirens wailed all clear, our boxcar had escaped the gauntlet’s blow. We were numbed but alive.

Soon afterwards incendiary bombs fueled the air arsenal and within two months, in February 1945, Dresden was ignited and obliterated. People died from the heat and asphyxiation, and others were incinerated as the survivors watched in speechless horror. Within a month the torching of Japan began when Tokyo was fire bombed. By July, 1945, 65 cities, in an area the size of California, were destroyed.

Looking back six years earlier, as the war in Europe ignited, and prior to the attack at Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, world renowned scientists began a project to harness the energy within the atom into a weapon that would unleash an enormous power to forever change warfare and threaten life on this planet.

Only two months following the end of the war in Europe, the nuclear age was ushered in with the explosion of the first atomic bomb test in Alamogordo in the desert of New Mexico on July 16, 1945. In just three weeks an atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima and three days later at Nagasaki instantly destroying these cities. The immense heat generated by the bomb ignited the cities and burned the inhabitants. Lethal radiation penetrated the whole body, killing and altering cells. Immediately following the nuclear and thermal radiation, a powerful hurricane blast leveled buildings and loosened objects into missiles of rock, metal, wood, and glass. In an instant man witnessed in sheer terror, beyond the wildest nightmare of imagination, his first encounter with a nuclear weapon.

Thus six years of the agonizing war came to an end. Fifty million of the Family of Man perished. In the Holocaust alone five million lives succumbed to torture, gunfire, incineration, hanging and starvation instigated by an inexplicable deranged rage of hatred.

Nuclear weapons now would become a surrogate instrument of war released at a distance that in a flash cleaved families, torched and blasted cities, reduced the inhabitants to a primal level with sheer terror. A sea of fire consumed the cities.

The next morning after the harrowing eternity and hell of the day before, fathers viewed the smoldering landscape where once there were homes, now barren except for the dead and the dying beyond recognition. These fathers gazed beyond at the school yard lined with seared, blackened, and stilled bodies of their children.

Grief overwhelms the surviving families – parents for their children, orphaned children for their parents as the hibakushas (survivors of the bomb), are recovering from the bomb’s induced malady, atomic disease. But what does that portend?

For the pregnant mother, now undergoing the pains of labor, giving birth to a baby who did not escape the nuclear radiation that penetrated her womb. The baby does not have a lusty cry, and two years later the baby’s growth is stunted and he does not crawl. The head is small and is abnormally shaped. Then when he is finally able to walk he wanders aimlessly. His delayed speech and behavior stamps him as touched by “pica” – the light of the bomb. So the entire family is tainted by the bomb’s ray and only the most compassionate neighbor comes to play with the “pica” baby. From time to time seizures rack the baby.

A few months after the bombing in Hiroshima a physician attends to a hibakusha child who succumbs to leukemia. By then a report from the United States has revealed that leukemia occurs more frequently in radiologists than in other physicians. In subsequent years, leukemia develops in children who were close to ground zero. This was confirmed in our investigation in 1950. Later adults also developed leukemia. Furthermore, the development of cancer among radium dial painters forewarns the populace of the cancer that adds to their concern.

Forty years later, in 1989, when I returned to Nagasaki, the children of the atomic bomb survivors are most concerned for the outcome to their children of the next generation. Moreover, often they withhold their past from others, as they do not to wish to disclose their identity of being tainted by the bomb as it may affect their prospects for marriage. But, how the bomb will affect the health of future generation remains unresolved, while the genetic investigation continues utilizing the burgeoning DNA modalities.

Now sixty years into the nuclear era, weapons of greater capabilities have spawned a pervasive terror, for now nations face the reality of instant nuclear annihilation. Cannot the energy, the intellect and resolve that first developed these weapons now be directed toward resolving the conflicts that beset us? Listen carefully to the voices that resonate from their witness at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, lest they be our voices some day.

The Peacemaker

Think not forever of yourselves, O Chiefs
Nor of your own generations.
Think of continuing generations of our families.
Think of our grandchildren and of those yet unborn,
Whose faces are coming
from beneath the ground.
        
On the formation of the Iroquois Confederation many centuries ago.

Dr. Yamazaki is a pediatrician who headed up the U.S. Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission's lab in Nagasaki following the bombing. He has continued to carry out research on the effects of radiation and is one of the world’s preeminent authorities on this subject, having worked with many of the survivors and their children. Dr. Yamazaki is a professor at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine.