![]() As he glances into a post Nagasaki world, a post Bay of Pigs world, a post Berlin Wall world, Ham observes that it was in the end economic, not military forces that drove the Soviet bravado to its knees and that there is no guarantee that a tin pot state (my words, not Ham’s) or rampant nationalistic or religious fundamentalist breakaway group will not detonate nuclear winter. Sadly the world that was born on the day Trinity exploded has not in any temporal sense been redeemed: referring to the Dr Strangelove figure Dr Edward Teller, Ham observes (ruefully, it seems) “posterity had judged him and the exponents of MAD, partly correct, insofar as mankind had avoided a nuclear war through the assurance of mutual annihilation that does not mean, of course, that it will not happen, and the dire uncertainty and immense expenditure of maintaining the balance of mutually assured death has turned the minds of enlightened leaders to the policy of nuclear disarmament.” (468). Ham’s writing is extraordinarily compulsive, and the torrid tale he tells, and the exhaustive research he utilizes to corroborate his case, ensures that no reader could digest his work while believing that a nuclear arsenal can save or redeem the world. Would that this volume could be on the reading list of every final year secondary school curriculum (and the reading list of every undergraduate curriculum, from physics to theology, sociology to economics). If heroes emerge from the chronicle it is the survivors, those hibakusha maimed beyond belief who dared to rise from the ashes of their respective cities and live again, those who like Tagashi Nagai spent their every last ounce of life force trying to ameliorate the plight of the dying and the grieving, those who strove to build a just Japan. ![]() Truman comes out of the narrative badly, but Ham’s case is well presented. ![]() Certainly, as others have noticed, Ham is of the opinion that a militaristic nose-thumbing at the emerging Soviet superpower underscores the saga and its aftermath, but he does not ultimately claim there can be nor ever could have been a naïve return of the nuclear genie to her bottle. Ham has no sympathy for after the event hanky-wringers (Oppenheimer, for example) or Ramboesque opportunists (LeMay, though not responsible for nuclear warfare, Groves, who was), nor tries to exonerate the Japanese from a vile period of sub-human cruelty. Few figures in the tragic narrative of preparation for, delivery of, and aftermath to Hiroshima and Nagasaki come out of the narrative unscathed, yet simultaneously few emerge as unambivalent villains. No one-eyed the USA can do no wrong reader will agree – or probably even persevere, but to this reader it seemed that Ham skillfully negotiates pitfalls of doctrinaire anti-Americanism, blind pacifism, and plastic militarism with overwhelming skill. What an outstanding resource Paul Ham has provided. Here was a chance to rectify the black hole in my knowledge pool. Coming from my perspective, driven not least by exhaustive readings of the theology of Jürgen Moltmann, that the world changed dreadfully on July 16, 1945, when the obscenely named Trinity was detonated in the New Mexico desert, I realized I simply did not know enough about the circumstances and mindset that led up to its dark successors, Little Boy and Fat Man. I purchased Ham’s tome because I have long held a genuine sense that I really did not have my head around the complexities of the Japanese bombing. Hiroshima Nagasaki presents the grisly unadorned truth about the bombings, blurred for so long by postwar propaganda, and transforms our understanding of one of the defining events of the twentieth century. Ham also gives powerful witness to its destruction through the eyes of eighty survivors, from twelve-year-olds forced to work in war factories to wives and children who faced the holocaust alone. In this gripping narrative, Ham demonstrates convincingly that misunderstandings and nationalist fury on both sides led to the use of the bombs. Yet American leaders claimed the bombs were "our least abhorrent choice"-and still today most people believe they ended the Pacific War and saved millions of American and Japanese lives. Many hundreds of thousands more succumbed to their horrific injuries later, or slowly perished of radiation-related sickness. More than 100,000 people were killed instantly by the atomic bombs, mostly women, children, and the elderly. In this harrowing history of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, Paul Ham argues against the use of nuclear weapons, drawing on extensive research and hundreds of interviews to prove that the bombings had little impact on the eventual outcome of the Pacific War.
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