I cannot sleep with all this death.
Content warning: In this article I consider actual and potential death and destruction caused by nuclear weapons. No images, other than this first one, which does not depict destruction.

“They may expect a rain of ruin”
Shortly after August 6th became August 7th, 1945, I imagine that no person in Japan who was still awake could sleep. These words had just been issued by the President of the United States, half a world away:
Sixteen hours ago, an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of T.N.T. . . .
We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city. We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications. Let there be no mistake; we shall completely destroy Japan’s power to make war. . . .
If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth. Behind this air attack will follow sea and land forces in such numbers and power as they have not yet seen and with the fighting skill of which they are already well aware.
1 square mile of the city was immediately destroyed, with fires starting in the 4.4 square miles around the blast. By the time the president had made this declaration, between 45 and 73 thousand people had died because of the blast, the radiation burns, or the destruction of buildings. Over the next four months, that number would double due to injuries, radiation sickness, illness and malnutrition. The true amount of damage was unknown on that night. Japanese officials didn’t even know what had happened until they sent a young officer there in an airplane to learn and report the reason for Hiroshima’s radio silence.
It was later determined that only 1% of the fissile material of the bomb had undergone fission. The rest was scattered.
I can only imagine the days of terror that ensued. For a month before this, Japan had been littered with leaflets warning of the complete destruction of several cities, and for a year before that, the firebombing had been picked up in earnest. Already hundreds of thousands of Japanese people had died from conventional bombing. But this terror was new; now each person in Japan had to face the possibility that they and everyone they knew could die of a single object dropped from a single plane, 45 seconds before either engulfment by a blast of unrestrained energy or a first exposure to unknown horrors and pains which would last between a few hours and a few months preceding a gruesome end.
Atomic destruction is hell on earth, and the Japanese people would now be living in fear of hell coming to their doorstep at any conceivable instant.
Both the Prime Minister and Radio Japan indicated that the war would continue despite this situation. The Japanese Cabinet determined that the US couldn’t possibly have more than two or three additional weapons, and resolved to endure future attacks. At the same time, the emperor and the government considered conditions for surrender, as they had already been doing for months.
At midnight on August 9th, Russian forces invaded Manchuria. Four hours later, the Japanese government was informed that the Soviet Union had declared war. Seven hours after that, at 11:00 AM, a second bomb detonated over a tennis court in Nagasaki. A targeting error caused a major portion of the city to be protected from the blast by natural hills. It killed less people than the bomb on Hiroshima, only 35 or 40 thousand immediately, with the number of human deaths increasing to 40 to 90 thousand within a year.
“Only 35 thousand.” That’s the student population of some of the largest universities in America. A third of my hometown. When you consider the size and complexity of a single life, the dreams and feelings and relationships and stories that make up a year, or twenty years, or eighty years, and you multiply that by 35 thousand, you realize just how much life we’re talking about. The size of that amount of life is unimaginable. The size of that amount of death is unbearable.
It is impossible for a single person to understand the extent of nuclear destruction that was made possible by two nuclear weapons.
I’ve lived my entire life on an earth with over ten thousand nuclear weapons.
Four thousand of these devices are considered “active.” Many of these are mounted to missiles that can be sent to any corner of the earth in mere hours. My own country holds more than half of them. My own country is the only one to ever use them. My own country is the one most likely to use them again.
As we remember the incredible pain experienced by the Japanese victims, the incredible death experienced by those cities, and the incredible fear experienced by everyone in those days who looked up and wondered if their own sky would soon bring their own death, we must remember that nobody on earth has been truly safe from that pain, that death, or that fear, in the 72 years since Japan was forced to surrender to a war machine hell-bent on borning hell.
“They will be met with fire and fury”
Today, we hear the echos of Truman’s terrifying statement. The President of the United States recently said, in what appeared to be an off-the-cuff statement, at a golf course of all places, that:
North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.
Comparing this threat and Truman’s “fire and fury” line side-by-side is unnerving. But whereas the old one was an unjustified threat of force to make “the enemy” surrender, the current one is an unjustified threat of force to . . . make them stop threatening us? President Trump says that North Korea “has been very threatening beyond a normal state,” but it is impossible not to look to Trump’s own statements as “very threatening.” They’re intended to be. And the sad and terrifying part is that they’re easy to brush off.
When we consider today’s nuclear threats with the same mind of Japanese civilians and service members who first heard one, with loss in their hearts and fear in every extremity, that is when we can understand the stakes. Today, the lives of Americans and Koreans are being tangibly threatened by powers who do so with flippancy. For 72 years, the lives of every person on the planet has been threatened by the possibility of nuclear death. It’s a threat that we seem to have learned to live with, but one to which we should never acquiesce.
“It would lead to the total extinction of human civilization”
At noon on August 15th, six days after the second bomb was dropped, Japanese radio stations played the emperor’s Gyokuon-hōsō. In the first time a Japanese emperor had ever addressed the common people directly, Emperor Shōwa explained why Japan was unconditionally surrendering.
The enemy now possesses a new and terrible weapon with the power to destroy many innocent lives and do incalculable damage. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.
Such being the case, how are we to save the millions of our subjects, or to atone ourselves before the hallowed spirits of our imperial ancestors? This is the reason why we have ordered the acceptance of the provisions of the joint declaration of the powers.
The threats of nuclear war followed a familiar form: “If they do not accept our demands, we will destroy them with a greater force than the world knows.” The response then, and my response today, follows a strange form, the anti-threat, a sober warning: “If we all should continue to fight, we all will be destroyed with a greater force than the world knows.”
After the announcement, there was an amount of confusion. It would be another 18 days before the surrender was made official on September 2nd. Many more lives were lost in the interim, from suicides, an attempted coup, and continued combat.
Twenty-seven:
the number of nights that passed between the first atomic bomb’s use and Japan’s formal surrender.
Seventy-two:
the number of years since August, 1945.
The U.S. Secretary of State recently said that “Americans should sleep well at night,” in spite of the current threats looming over us. But I cannot sleep well knowing that the Japanese people could not do the same on these same nights all those years ago.