“Hiroshima: Breaking the Silence” by Howard Zinn

An excerpt from the first chapter of his last book, “The Bomb”:

The bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, turned into powder and ash, in a few moments, the flesh and bones of 140,000 men, women, and children. Three days later, a second atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki killed perhaps 70,000 instantly. In the next five years, another 130,000 in- habitants of those two cities died of radiation poisoning.

No one will ever know the exact figures, but these come from the most exhaustive report available, Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Physical, Medical, and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings, put together by a team of thirty-four Japanese scientists and physicians, then translated and published in this country in 1981. Those statistics do not include countless other people who were left alive, but maimed, poisoned, disfigured, blinded.

The sociologist Kai Erikson, reviewing the report by the Japanese team of scientists, wrote: “The question is: What kind of mood does a fundamentally decent people have to be in, what kind of moral arrangements must it make, before it is willing to annihilate as many as a quarter of a million human beings for the sake of making a point.”

Let’s examine the question properly raised by Kai Erikson, a question enormously important precisely because it does not permit us to dismiss horrors as acts inevitably committed by horrible people. It forces us to ask: what “kind of mood,” what “moral arrangements” would cause us, in whatever society we live, with whatever “fundamental decency” we possess, to either perpetrate (as bombardiers, or atomic scientists, or political leaders), or to just accept (as obedient citizens), the burning of children in vast numbers.

(via Instapaper)