After the Bomb | Hacker News Reader

After the Bomb

time.com

38 pointsShrugLife28 comments

"‘What did I do to the Americans?’ she would often say, ‘Why did they do this to me?’"

I could imagine a German thinking the same thing during conventional bombings.

Or a Jew on Kristallnacht, or Chinese in Nanjing

It’s easy to say “I was a three year old and did not deserve this” but this is what happens in a total war, 3 year olds are rarely the primary targets of bombing but when the scale of conflict is so great their moral weigh becomes a rounding error compared to those who would use them as a shield.

At the start of the war civilian bombing campaigns were unthinkable. By the end they were standard operating procedure.

There hasn’t been a daring war since. Now everyone knows the costs. No one is safe.

On reflection I think I have read too much into this one small quote inside the article.

For that matter in 2023 every single day there is probably at least one three year old whose daddy (or mama) is abruptly taken away for any one of a number of reasons completely opaque to a toddler. Some parents disappear by blind chance, but mostly it happens because some other adult strangers decided that their father or mother needed to be ripped away from them and put in a box somewhere.

The child did nothing to deserve this, but has to live knowing one of the most important people in their lives is rotting away in a cell instead of pushing them on the swing or teaching them to make spaghetti or just being there to help stabilize the family even if it's only financially. It's a wonder that we don't have more instances of anger-fueled violence against prosecutors, defense lawyers and judges by children whose lives were deeply scarred by their deliberately harmful actions.

And before the obvious remarks come about how these parents could have been abusive to the child or deadbeats or otherwise fall far short of being the parent the child needs, well no shit. The appropriately shallow answer to such a shallow remark is that not all convictions are deserved, but this argument is beside the point. The child doesn't comprehend what happened, all they know is the trauma. Trauma for which, if it had happened to anyone else under similarly innocent circumstances would be grounds for millions in damages for the psychological harm caused, but in this case society just collectively shrugs "huh. well that's too bad I guess." And goes about their day.

It's crazy to think people actually lived through this.

Even crazier that a number of people were a victim of the bomb on Hiroshima, and a few days later also got hit by the bomb on Nagasaki.

And some of them even lived through that.

What is the date of this Time posting?

Good question, and something I was wondering as well. Wayback machine says it was first indexed in 2017, so I'd go with that.

Right, full project this content is from https://www.1945project.com/ is a documentary project created by Haruka Sakaguchi and published on August 6, 2017.

In the source code there is a line that says

    ,"contentPublishedDate":"2017-08-05T15:26:11+00:00"

"Later, we discovered that the bomb was dropped a few meters away from my sister’s school."

I suppose modern precision-guided bombs are an improvement for humanity. Wars are mostly between military targets these days.

> I suppose modern precision-guided bombs are an improvement for humanity. Wars are mostly between military targets these days.

Unfortunately this is not always the case - I am not sure if this is an issue with the ability of precision-guided bombs to hit a target reliably or the assumed lack of concern for the non-military victims that the bombs will impact.

>American B-29 bombers dropped leaflets all over the city, warning us that Nagasaki would ‘fall to ashes’ on August 8. The leaflets were confiscated immediately by the kenpei (Imperial Japanese Army)

Yikes. Imagine living in a situation where the government of your own country has as much care for your life as the enemy.

Wasn't Nagasaki a secondary target, chosen because the first was clouded over?

They dropped leaflets stating "some or all of the cities named" would be destroyed in the coming days.

What else did you expect? It was wartime.

Controlling the propaganda and information and not letting the enemy direct their narrative was something each government wanted to fully own regardless of the outcome to civilians, even the allies:

The Londoners were told that the V2 rockets landing on their heads were "gas explosions" because it was better for population morale them not know the enemy has such advanced long range strike capabilities as that would increase fear and lower morale and we're less likely to support long time war attrition with this knowledge.

Same with the Japanese, why would they parrot the enemy narrative to the population, especially that until after the bomb blast was examined, Japan didn't believe that the US already had a nuclear weapon so soon.

"especially that until after the bomb blast was examined"

The first bomb had already been detonated in Hiroshima a few days prior. They had radio. Are you saying they still felt the threat was not credible?

I was talking about the first bomb.

Also, that was the second bomb, so it was a very credible threat.

> ‘What did I do to the Americans?’ she would often say, ‘Why did they do this to me?’

Seems like they don’t blame their government all that much

Imperial Japan was something else, truly. I just finished Dan Carlin's six-part Hardcore History series called "supernova in the east" which covers a lot of context in an attempt to help people like us understand the zeitgeist in Japan at the time. I can't recommend it enough.

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