This essay originally appeared in HuffPost on August 6, 2013. I bring it back today to mark the 75th anniversary.
What is left to say about Hiroshima on this anniversary? Much, of course. So far we have mostly covered the window dressing that came with victory and has lasted for three generations after the blood stopped flowing. It took 50 years for revisionist historians to enter the mainstream with evidence that there was no military need to use the Bomb at all, let alone blow a city to smithereens. No doubt it will take longer still to digest the evil of Hiroshima, as W.G. Sebald portrayed the sin of fire-bombing Berlin.
A few days ago, Asahi Shimbun, the New York Times of Japan, reported that the long-lost medical records of the death of Midori Naka have been discovered there. Who on earth was she? Midori Naka was a minor actress who died on August 24, 1945, at the age of 36. She was almost nobody, that is, except for the epochal coincidence of having awakened with other members of her theater troupe, known as the Sakura-tai (“Cherry Blossom group”), in Hiroshima on the morning of August 6. She was in the kitchen of their dormitory in the Horikawa-cho neighborhood when, according to the new records, she saw a flash of yellow light two meters square and heard a noise like the rupture of a hot water boiler. Fate had placed her about 750 meters from the detonation of Little Boy, the 16-kiloton atomic bomb handmade in New Mexico and dropped by an airplane from Nebraska.
Miraculously without serious apparent injury (the blast had instantly killed five of the troupe’s nine members), she squeezed out of the wreckage and headed to the Kyobashigawa River to escape fires raging everywhere. She felt nauseous and vomited. A local rescue corps (first-responders, indeed) took her to a relief camp where there was no medical care. She abandoned the camp and, wrapped only in a straw mat, somehow boarded a train for Tokyo, her home, where she arrived on August 10. She was admitted to the University of Tokyo hospital on August 16. Whatever the details are of this journey, and they will never be known, it is fair to say that Midori Naka was a very, very strong young woman.
At the university was Masao Tsuzuki, a professor of surgery and one of the few doctors in the country — or the world, for that matter — familiar with the biological effects of radiation as then poorly understood. The records show that her white cell count had plummeted to 400 per cubic millimeter of blood, less than a tenth of normal. She began shedding clumps of hair the following day. On August 21, her temperature soared to almost 104 degrees. Tsuzuki, who must have realized that her bone marrow had been destroyed, ordered blood transfusions. Her white cell count dipped to 300 per cubic mm on August 22. With essentially no immune system, infectious ulcers formed around her original injuries. More blood transfusions. On August 23, she developed ulcers around a needle injection site, plus hemorrhagic macules the size of rice grains over her entire body. Yet more blood transfusions. Her temperature hit 104.72 degrees on August 24 and she died at 12:30 p.m. Tsuzuki noted the cause of death as “A-bomb disease,” making Midori Naka the world’s first recognized fatality from radiation exposure.
Scientists within the Manhattan Project had known that the bomb would release lethal amounts of radiation, of course. But the medical profession was in the dark about that, like everyone else, and still infatuated with X-rays for imaging and sundry therapies. Tsuzuki and his colleagues were now in possession of priceless data from their treatment of Midori Naka and other survivors who staggered to their doorstep, which the U.S. Army quickly began to confiscate and hoard. Her autopsy remains were not returned to Japan until 1973. It is likely that the Japanese doctors hid some of their paper work, which was finally located all these years later by family descendants of the medical team.
What is there to say now about Midori Naka? That she was not the only innocent person to die a ghastly death in World War II? That no one, let alone a beautiful young actress, should ever awake on a fine morning and see a nuclear weapon detonate outside the kitchen window? That a new kind of bomb created out of fear that Hitler would make one first should never have been dropped on a city in Japan? That war debases every combatant nation, whether winner or loser? That the asking of these questions is never over, never settled, never sewn up. That Midori Naka should be pondered every year at this time by anyone who feels the need to make sense of senselessness.
Spring semester’s end marks my retirement from teaching after 20 years at Johns Hopkins. Now the old unsolved mystery: Where does the time go? I will miss the students, some more than others. (The faculty are already remembered like odd ducks from childhood. It is highly possible that I have become one, too.) They brought fresh initiative to my dwindling personal cache. If we can give them a fair chance, maybe we’re going to be okay. Everything else looks iffy, except spring itself.
A report that Google is hedging on its pledge to stop participating in Project Maven, the military program to adopt artificial intelligence for drone targeting, brings to mind Hans Bethe’s 1995 plea to scientists and engineers developing new nuclear weapons: “cease and desist.” For the old lion of Los Alamos, there was only one way to end the perpetual technical refinement of weaponry: remove yourselves, all of you, right now. It was the logical conclusion of a line of thought he had expressed as early as 1954, regarding work on nuclear fusion armaments: “In the course of time, the present conflict between communism and democracy, between East and West, is likely to pass, just as the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have passed. We can only hope that it will pass without thermonuclear war. But whichever way it goes, the H-bomb will remain with us and remain a perpetual danger to mankind.” Pity he is not here today to comment on the relentless development of autonomous lethal drones. Of course, few took his advice back then.
After three generations of futile efforts to develop reliable defenses against ICBM’s, tracing back to the Nike, Patriot, and Sprint programs of the 1950’s and 60’s and warped by Ronald Reagan’s science fictional “Star Wars” scheme, the Trump administration will today pick up the eternal torch. The chimera of anti-missile weaponry remains the most inexhaustible strategy for channeling hundreds upon hundreds of billions of dollars from the U.S. Treasury into the military and its industrial minions—far, far easier than even an endless war. It is now part of the everyday furniture of American life. Future historians will marvel at this mendacious folly.
With the passage of another Cold War “whiz kid” whose youthful technological prodigy was sacrificed on the altar of nuclear supremacy, historians are left to contemplate why. Harold Brown’s mentor, Edward Teller, epitomized the clinical paranoia that ruled the era, so much so that Teller became unemployable in the government he relentlessly militarized. By contrast, Brown remained acceptable in polite Washington company, perhaps because he lacked the H-bomb father’s vampirish Hungarian accent. (Too, he had an enjoyable sense of humor, as when he told the Senate Armed Services Committee in April 1987 that Sen. Pete Wilson’s views on certain Star Wars issues “may win a Nobel prize–not in physics, but in perverse literature.”) But Brown’s legacy of world-destroying weapons, including the grotesque MX ICBM, is testament to how thoroughly he nonetheless embodied Teller’s mindset. A seemingly immortal relic of the catastrophe that was World War II is the industrial and political constituency that continues to laud America’s myriad Harold Browns as saviors of democracy. But they can and will justify anything, especially any raid on the nation’s treasury, in the name of defense against whatever goes bump in the night. Harold Brown, like so many of his fellow whizzes, should be mourned as a mind wasted on an obsession that was and still is a national disaster.
He was, to boot, a longtime director of the tobacco giants Altria and Philip Morris.
Concerns about harmful applications of artificial intelligence are “very legitimate.” Dangers posed by artificial intelligence are “not one of those things that keeps me up at night.” Guess which words were spoken by Google CEO Sundar Pichai and which by DARPA director Steven Walker. While the tempest-tossed masses may be forgiven for not even knowing what AI is, let alone whether it is good or bad, these two authorities at the top of the technocratic ladder reflect the field’s deepest knowledge base. Right? So Pichai is troubled and Walker is what, me worry? Here in a crystalline nutshell is the battle for the future between civilian and military applications that is one of the strongest story lines in the history of technology, especially for the past century. Hundreds of billions of dollars push the tech from each side. Pichai and Walker ought to start spending occasional weekends together–you know, maybe get to know each other a little, being apparently from different planets.
As the international scientific community adjusts its wig after the shockwave of the world’s first genetically altered babies, one thing is clear: self-regulation of research is always a pipe dream. He Jiankui is neither a “rogue scientist” nor “crazy.” He is not a Dr. Moreau. He carries all the credentials of his profession’s elite. History abundantly shows that once a technology as potent as CRISPR exists, nothing can stop it from being used. Someone, somewhere, will feel an irresistible social need, whether from the exigencies of war that compelled the world’s top physicists to use their new knowledge of nuclear fission to make atomic bombs or from the dire straits of AIDS victims in China that compelled genome editors there to make children resistant to infection. The brave new world stumbles on.
Long ago and far away, in an old collegetown in the land of prestidigital lakes, lived three damsels in a half-timber cottage. They had faces that could launch thousands of ships and the most handsome, strongest young men of the college gladly would have tried that and whatever else might possibly win even a single hour of their fancy. But there were so many fine suitors that it took nothing short of magic to acquire more than the pleasure of an idle afternoon. So one of the young men, an outlier who appeared to foolish eyes as just another schlub with long hair, learned to pluck ping-pong balls and quarters from behind the pretty ears of the loveliest of the three. She was of course charmed by this impossible feat and made him her consort, no matter that he had a suspicious name and no visible past other than something to do with New Jersey. This was perhaps his first great act of wizardry, from which he went on to acclaim around the wide world.
So rest in peace, Ricky. Somehow you knew from the start what it takes to enchant the hard-to-get.
