AFTER BASH
Chalk
white moon, a disc of pooling light.
Round
old pond, stillness unruffled,
Bird
tucked inward. Behind
Embankment
of clouds, a frog leaps—
Touchdown
in water!
Black
sky bursts, broken,
Beatific
placid mirror shattered
By
splash of a big blast,
Droplets,
tremulous,
Subatomic
particles scattering,
Tsunami
unleashing gamma waves, X-rays,
70,000
instantly dead…
Genbaku
Dome, UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Originally
published in Eastlit (August 1, 2015)
 |
| Genbaku Dome, Hiroshima, Japan. UN Photo |
Total deaths estimated that immediately resulted from the Hiroshima bombing varies. The 1946 Manhattan Engineer District Study calculated that 45,000 died the first day, while CNN.com (August 6, 2013) cited the figure of 80,000 “instantly” killed. The poem “After Basho” cites the figure of 70,000, a reasonable estimate based on the range given in some reputable sources, e.g. bbc.co.uk (October 15, 2014), of 60,000 to 80,000 instantly killed.
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UN Photo reproduced under Fair Use terms
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Basho biography: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/basho
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Basho's frog haiku: http://www.bopsecrets.org/gateway/passages/basho-frog.htm
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—“Matsuo Bashô: Frog Haiku (Thirty-two Translations and One Commentary),” Bureau of Public Secrets, n.d.
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Also published in Arlijo, Issue 86 (March 1, 2016)
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Also published in Teresa Mei Chuc, ed., Nuclear Impact: Broken Atoms in Our Hands (Pasadena, California: Shabda Press, 2017), p. 377
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…estimates made in the immediate postwar, for which the methodology is not available, include the following, which were cited in some of the aforementioned reports:
ReplyDeleteHiroshima Red Cross Hospital estimated 70,000 dead, and another 50,000-60,000 dead within the next two months, for a total of around 125,000 dead;
The British estimated, based on their own population estimates, that some 70,000-90,000 people died at Hiroshima, and an additional 100,000 were injured; at Nagasaki, they initially estimated 39,500 killed, but later reduced this to 34,000; they also estimated that at least 60,000 were injured at Nagasaki;
…the fact that most of these numbers hover around similar orders of magnitude (66,000-90,000 dead at Hiroshima, 25,000-45,000 at Nagasaki) should probably be understood as being essentially based on the same types of data for the populations of the cities, and they may not be totally independent estimates.
…In practice, authors and reports seem to cluster around two numbers, which I will call the “low” and the “high” estimates. The “low” estimates are those derived from the estimates of the 1940s: around 70,000 dead at Hiroshima, and around 40,000 dead at Nagasaki, for 110,000 total dead. The “high” estimates are those that derive from the 1977 re-estimation: around 140,000 dead at Hiroshima, and around 70,000 dead at Nagasaki, for a total of 210,000 total dead. Given that the “high” estimates are almost double the “low” estimates, this is a significant difference.
…My qualitative sense is that historians who want to emphasize the suffering of the Japanese (and the injustice of the bombing) tend to prefer the “high” numbers, while those who want to emphasize the military necessity of the attack tend to prefer the “low” numbers. And therein lies the real question: What do these estimates do for us, rhetorically? It is clear that numbers, stripped from their technical contexts, are deployed primarily as a form of moral calculus.
…Given that there is no satisfactory way to decide whether the “low” or “high” estimates are more accurate, it is fairly clear there is no “neutral” choice to be made. It ultimately comes down to which sort of authority one wishes to go with: the official estimates of the United States military in the 1940s, or the later estimates by a group of anti-nuclear weapons scientists, largely spearheaded by Japan. Both made legitimate points in making their estimations; neither show any apparent perfidy or obvious intellectual dishonesty.
https://thebulletin.org/2020/08/counting-the-dead-at-hiroshima-and-nagasaki/
—Alex Wellerstein, “Counting the dead at Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, August 4, 2020
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