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New Mexico reckons with its role in Japan's atomic devastation on 80th anniversary of Hiroshima
Wesley Burris remembers waking to a morning of potent, white light and panic as the planet’s first atomic bomb went off in a test in the Jornada del Muerto desert near his family’s Southern New Mexico home in July 1945. He does not recall, however, hearing the news from Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan over the radio just weeks later. In fact, because the U.S. government did not tell his family what it was they saw that July, it was years before Burris realized how the Trinity Test he witnessed as a child served as a prelude to the world-altering bombings of Japan on Aug. 6 and Aug. 9, 1945. Eighty years ago, the U.S. dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima near the end of World War II, unleashing immediate death on a sweeping scale and rendering vast corridors in the southwestern Japanese city charred and fragmented, with buildings reduced to rubble with harrowing speed. That bomb, as well as the one that devastated Nagasaki three days later, wa developed in New Mexico, a haunting and sobering legacy for the state. The connection to one of the most dramatic — and certainly apocalyptic — moments in global history will always feel acute in Northern New Mexico. The “Little Boy” atomic bomb, designed and partly assembled in Los Alamos by the Manhattan Project, was dropped on Hiroshima, killing, by some estimates, about 100,000 people and leveling the city in a stunning flash. Nagasaki was bombed three days later on Aug. 9 with the “Fat Man” bomb. Both followed the Trinity Test at the White Sands Missile Range on July 16, 1945. “Though many years have passed, the two cities remain living reminders of the profound horrors wrought by nuclear weapons,” Pope Leo XIV wrote in a message on the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima addressed to Bishop Alexis Shirama of the city. The Catholic leader continued, “In this context, I hasten to reiterate the words so often used by my beloved predecessor Pope Francis: ‘War is always a defeat for humanity.’ ” Scenes of devastation The detonation of Little Boy, dropped at 8:15 a.m. local time from 1,900 feet above Hiroshima, left nightmarish, unprecedented scenes. The faces of survivors utterly disfigured, reeling with radiation sickness. People dead on top of one another in streetcars. Two-thirds of the city’s buildings destroyed. Death all around. Skulls and bones scattered in heaps on a playground, less than a mile from ground zero. “There was a flash from the indoor wires as if lightning had struck,” said Yoshito Matsushige, a photographer who survived the bombing, in historical accounts. “I didn’t hear any sound, how shall I say, the world around me turned bright white." Wielding his camera near ground zero, its viewfinder clouding over with his tears, Matsushige described witnessing girls sheltering near the Miyuki Bridge, where there was a police box, about 40 minutes after the bomb was dropped. “Having been directly exposed to the heat rays, they were covered with blisters, the size of balls, on their backs, their faces, their shoulders and their arms,” he recalled, according to historical records. “The blisters were starting to burst open and their skin hung down like rugs. Some of the children even have burns on the soles of their feet. They’d lost their shoes and run barefoot through the burning fire.” Between Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an estimated 210,000 Japanese civilians were killed, from both the initial blast and the radiation poisoning that followed. N.M. marks anniversary New Mexico’s nuclear legacy is not only in the past. Los Alamos National Laboratory remains at the front and center of the nation’s goals for pit production for nuclear warheads. As a part of a multibillion-dollar effort, the lab is working toward the production of nuclear bomb cores with a stated goal of making 30 per year by 2030. The pursuit for years has generated controversy throughout Northern New Mexico, with critics raising concerns about environmental impacts and potential health risks. This week, remembrances of the bombings of Japan are widespread. At a Wednesday evening event organized by Nuclear Watch New Mexico, Archbishop John C. Wester of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe, long an outspoken advocate of nuclear disarmament, is set to celebrate Mass in Japan for victims with some other U.S. Catholic bishops and will participate in commemoration services. The event will be played by video at an event in Santa Fe. Alongside Cerrillos Road, a large cube patterned with a print of many hundred dollar bills was being constructed Tuesday as part of the “Up in Arms” campaign to reduce military and nuclear weapons spending, said Ben & Jerry’s co-founder Ben Cohen, an antinuclear advocate and philanthropist. The cube is similar to one now positioned outside of Union Station in Washington, D.C. “The people of New Mexico understand viscerally what the weapons can do, and that is what the government is planning to do to a whole bunch of other people around the world,” said Cohen in an interview with The New Mexican. Cohen said the Santa Fe cube sculpture, now situated at 1420 Cerrillos Road and visible from the prominent transportation artery, is meant to shed a light on the level of investment by the federal government in nuclear weapons production in the name of deterrence. We dropped one on Hiroshima. It was horrible. Everybody said, ‘Never again,’ “ Cohen said. “We had [President Ronald] Reagan coming out with his statement: ‘A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.’ And at the same time, out of the wallet of Congress, they continue to build more and more nuclear weapons, more and more powerful ones.” The 80th anniversary of the bombings in Japan brings into sharp focus global high geopolitical tensions, including among countries with capabilities. Nine countries — the U.S., Russia, China, France, the United Kingdom, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea — are known to possess nuclear weapons. Bombs justified or not? Both today and in 1945, Americans disagree on whether the irreversible and forceful military maneuvers were a necessary move or a calamitous misstep. At the time, the U.S. was embroiled in bloody and protracted World War II, which it entered only after the bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. For the renowned nuclear physicists of Los Alamos, brought to Northern New Mexico as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project mission, the realization that the fruits of their labor had ultimately resulted in the devastating scenes led to sobering reactions. Some felt it had to be done, despite the great toll. "You have to realize that dropping the bomb saved lives, saved American lives. It killed a lot of people, and you can never understand the horror of that,” said Ben Bederson, a Los Alamos scientist who worked on switches for the implosion bomb, according to the Atomic Heritage Foundation. “... The Americans were getting killed, and I guess the first thought was to save American lives. It may have saved Japanese lives, too. Who can tell how many Japanese lives would have been lost had there been an invasion of Japan?” The war officially ended days after the bombings, but there has long been debate over whether it was the use of atomic weaponry that brought the towering conflict to a close. According to a June survey from the Pew Research Center, 35% of Americans today say using the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 was justified, while 31% say it was not justified. A third say they are not sure. Antinuclear activist Greg Mello, of the Los Alamos Study Group, said a spate of declassified material has made some historians rethink their views on the subject. “Japan was already defeated by the time those bombs were dropped,” Mello said. “The bombs weren’t needed to end the war, although that has been the myth in the older generation. It was a carefully constructed myth." Greg Mello, executive director of Los Alamos Study Group and antinuclear activist in 2023. Mello said a spate of declassified material has made some historians rethink their views on whether dropping the atomic bombs on Japan was needed. “Japan was already defeated by the time those bombs were dropped,” Mello said. He added, “For [President Harry S.] Truman, the bomb was very, very important and for the cadre of hawks around Truman, the bomb was the winning weapon that would guarantee that the United States would be the dominant power after the end of the war.” Even though Wesley Burris’ family, who lived in the Fort Craig area about halfway between Socorro and Truth or Consequences, has experienced pain as a result of the Trinity Test bombing, Burris said he feels the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki was one the U.S military had to make. “It had to happen. That’s how I feel about it,” said Burris, now a resident of Socorro and one of the few still alive who have firsthand recollections of the Trinity Test in New Mexico. “According to what they say, if they didn’t bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the war wasn’t going to end." |
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