Montpelier
This past Sunday, Aug. 6, was celebrated in most Christian churches as the Feast of the Transfiguration. That’s the New Testament event in which four Middle Eastern men improbably hike up a 9,200-foot-high mountain in sandals to an interview with Moses, Elijah and God, who tells three of them (Peter, John and James) to listen to whatever the fourth (Jesus, whose face is “shining”) tells them. The mountain, nowadays on the border between Israel and Syria, is controlled by Israel and capped by a United Nations surveillance post. An Israeli ski resort enlivens one side, and buried land mines would enliven the upper slopes for anyone who ventured carelessly there. The sacred and the profane have forever been dancing partners.
By a coincidence of the calendar, Transfiguration Sunday this year coincided with the anniversary of an event that truly transfigured the modern world. Seventy-two years ago, on a sunny August morning, a U.S. B-29 Superfortress based in Tinian dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Matsui Kazumi, the current mayor of Hiroshima, describes the scene: “Pika — the penetrating flash, extreme radiation and heat. Don — the earth-shattering roar and blast. As the blackness lifts, the scenes emerging into view reveal countless scattered corpses charred beyond recognition even as man or woman. Stepping between the corpses, badly burned, nearly naked figures with blackened faces, singed hair, and tattered, dangling skin wander through spreading flames, looking for water. The rivers in front of you are filled with bodies; the riverbanks so crowded with burnt, half-naked victims you have no place to step. This is truly hell.”
Here in the States, the news was confused and confusing. Our vocabulary and experience were unequal to explaining or understanding what had happened. The war in Europe had ended just three months earlier. Was this possibly the end of the Pacific war? Three days later, the city of Nagasaki suffered a similar fate, and the government of Japan offered unconditional surrender.
There are fewer of us every year now old enough to remember those days and how we felt at the time, and who can appreciate how those events transfigured our consciousness. When in 1949 the Soviet Union declared that it had also built a nuclear weapon, everything changed. No longer was total war for us a clash of distant forces hammering at each other till one was finally beaten; now, suddenly, it seemed, a tiny speck of an intercontinental bomber, impossibly high, could rain unimaginable death and defeat in a single stroke on a single day.
If it ever occurred to policymakers of any nation that possession of such weapons was not only a bad bargain, but ultimately suicidal, it hasn’t been evident. For 70 years any entity with pretensions to international parity has lusted after nuclear weapons. Satire and ridicule — Dr. Strangelove, The Kingston Trio, the Beyond the Fringe comedy revue — have done nothing to stem the quest. And yet, as Mayor Kazumi writes in his anniversary proclamation: “Civil society fully understands that nuclear weapons are useless for national security. The dangers involved in controlling nuclear materials are widely understood. Today, a single bomb can wield thousands of times the destructive power of the bombs dropped 72 years ago. Any use of such weapons would plunge the entire world into hell, the user as well as the enemy. Humankind must never commit such an act. Thus, we can accurately say that possessing nuclear weapons means nothing more than spending enormous sums of money to endanger all humanity.”
As in almost everything, our difficulties in this situation arise from a serious lack of imagination. I’ve always been amazed that, without the slightest hint of awareness of the irony, the U.S. Navy named a nuclear attack submarine (just decommissioned Memorial Day 2016) Corpus Christi – the Body of Christ. And I’ll never forget the tears that sprang briefly to my eyes one day when I heard Jimmy Carter say that he envisioned a world in which we might negotiate an end to nuclear weapons. It seemed a nirvana beyond reach — which it is turning out indeed to be.
About 60 years ago I dated for a short while a college woman who was a Hiroshima survivor. She was lively and lovely, an impassioned peace-seeker, and a great hiker (my standard for judging, I’m afraid, in those days). Nothing came of it; I had mountains to climb, and she was ready to get to work. But in recent years we’ve kept sort of in touch. In 1996 she published One Fine Day, the story of her experience. She’s been an advocate for nuclear disarmament for at least 60 years; our college recently awarded her an honorary degree. A few months ago she flew to Tinian and planted a Peace Tree beside the fateful runway. Each year on Aug. 6 I email her, remembering and hoping all is well. Her answer this year included Mayor Kazumi’s proclamation.
I have another friend, a retired history professor, who, in spite of being quite upbeat in general, opined one day that he was not optimistic about the future of the human race. There’s no way to know if he’s right or wrong. If he’s right we’ll never know; there’ll be no one to remark our departure, and no one to listen. But when we see graphic representations of our almost utter insignificance in the apparent infinity of the cosmos, and then, forgetting, regard ourselves the masters of vast territories, power, wealth and knowledge, we seem as silly as children building forts out of cardboard boxes. As a Southern poet interviewed on NPR said one day of modern weaponry, “We’re still just rollin’ rocks down on one another.”
“We offer heartfelt prayers … and pledge to work with the people of the world to do all in our power to bring lasting peace and free ourselves from the absolute evil that is nuclear weapons.”
— Matsui Kazumi, mayor, the city of Hiroshima
Willem Lange can be reached at willem.lange@comcast.net.
