91Èȱ¬

Good morning. On Tuesday I was reminded that forty years ago I was in Hiroshima attending the ceremony that marked the dropping of the first atomic bomb. Two days later I went to Nagasaki where the second bomb was dropped. I will never forget those visits in the steaming heat of Japan’s summer. I met survivors, peace campaigners, children with genetic injuries, artists, Buddhist and Shinto monks, Catholic priests and Quakers. Everyone I talked to believed that a line had been crossed in 1945 and that the atomic horror must never happen again. Near Nagasaki I visited a rebuilt temple with a massive statue of the Bodhisatva of Compassion and a bell that rang each day to remember the dead.
We used to be much more aware of 6th and 10th August. The dates never slipped by without some mention in the news. Yet this year there was almost nothing in the news about it, just a sober appeal from Fumio Kishida, the Japanese Prime Minister, not to abandon the cause of peace.
But here in the West it is almost as if we have stopped listening. And that is weird, because the peace of the world looks more fragile today than it has since the end of the cold war. While our military leaders tell us how run down our defences are, many of us simply shrug: we don’t want to think about it. We watch while China, North Korea, Iran and Russia intensify their challenges to the West. We all know that the Middle East could explode in warfare at any time. There has even been casual speculation about whether a nuclear device might be employed in conflict, say in Ukraine, and yet this is always qualified as a small, or limited nuclear device. It reminds me of a satirical song from 1969 by the folk singer Sydney Carter in which he imagined world leaders saying to each other ‘I want to have a little bomb like you’. But Hiroshima and Nagasaki suggest there are no little bombs. To go nuclear is to opt for a devastation and ongoing danger to humanity we can barely imagine.
My visit to Japan showed me that once you go nuclear you enter a different category of destructiveness, inter-generational, ecological, genetic. An American theologian who was with me suggested that breaking open the power of the atom had brought humanity into a new confrontation with God’s judgment, God’s darkness. I was shaken by that, but what I saw convinced me he was onto something. Forty years on I can’t see much sign that we have changed our ways or that we are prepared for the repentance that makes for peace.