nuclear arms | Jinny's Occasional Poems

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Hibakusha

Posted on August 6, 2023 | Leave a comment

Today, August 6, marks another anniversary of the dropping of an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945. This August 6, the war between Russia and Ukraine drags on, with periodic threats of deliberate use of nuclear weapons by the Russian military or of possible nuclear disaster at the vulnerable civilian nuclear power plant in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine. In the U.S., summer release of the film “Oppenheimer,” about one of the physicists who helped develop the first nuclear weapons during World War II, has also reinforced our uneasiness about the possibility of nuclear catastrophe.

A number of years ago, I had a chance to meet and to listen to a “hibakusha,” a Japanese term for survivors of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima or Nagasaki. The older woman I heard at a backyard barbecue in New Jersey was petite, exceptionally well-groomed, but nonetheless visibly scarred. She was passionate about the necessity of reducing the likelihood of further nuclear warfare.

She had been a young teenager in Hiroshima when the bomb was dropped. She and her schoolmates had been conscripted to work part-time folding parachutes at a war materials factory. As allied troops closed in on Japan in 1945, even young girls were recruited for the Japanese war effort. Whether this woman had been an “innocent victim” of the carnage may therefore be somewhat open to question. However, whether nuclear weapons should ever be used again should not be open for debate.

The woman I heard has probably died by now. The number of living hibakusha is dwindling. According to the most recent count in Hiroshima, taken in 2021, the average age of survivors was 84. During a spring 2023 summit of G7 industrial nations held in Japan, some of these survivors made the effort to present their stories.

For 84-year-old Toshiko Tanaka (six at the time of the blast), one of her most vivid memories from that time was the smell of burning corpses in the days after the explosion. The authorities had started cremating the bodies of those who died. “I was traumatized,” she says. “All my friends from school died and for a very long time I couldn’t speak about what happened.”

It can be too easy for those of us not directly exposed to the horrors of nuclear warfare to become complacent about the likelihood of a recurrence. It can be hard to figure out how best to articulate opposition to nuclear proliferation, to nuclear arms races, to the sheer inhumanity and indiscriminate slaughter wrought by this sort of weaponry.

May we continue to listen to the hibakusha; may we continue to develop more effective ways to reduce the chances of creating any more.

My Granny’s Knitting

Posted on March 1, 2022 | Leave a comment

Until I was eleven years old, I lived with my parents in a family compound, with my maternal grandparents next door. Until age four, I was an only child. Then, during the post-World-War-II baby boom, my three siblings were born over the course of twenty months. While my mom and dad were busiest—mom caring for my younger sister and twin brothers, dad building a fledgeling small business, both of them scrimping and saving up for a larger house—there were several years in the mid-1950’s when “Granny” became my frequent caregiver.

Granny taught me piano, encouraging me to practice daily on the tuned used upright at her house—as our family grew to four children, our small cottage threatened to burst at the seams and had no room for a piano. Granny also taught me to knit. I noticed that on social occasions, Granny often proudly wore a Red Cross lapel pin that identified her as a World War II “knit your bit” volunteer. She and others like her had knit warm sweaters, hats, and socks for Allied soldiers, both those at the front and the wounded in hospitals.

During the years when she was teaching me knitting basics, Granny was still knitting warm socks and caps for the Red Cross, probably to be shipped to World War II refugees in Europe. As the 1950’s gave way to the 1960’s, the need for Granny’s knitting diminished. Arthritis eventually put an end to her handicraft efforts. I don’t know what happened to Granny’s lapel pin, but recent events have got me to thinking about her knitting again.

The February 24, 2022 invasion of Ukraine by Russian troops plus threats of nuclear escalation by Russia’s president Putin have struck a nerve for many. They remind me of a previous nuclear stand-off—the Cuban missile crisis. In the fall of 1962, as I entered high school, the U.S. and the Soviet Union (U.S.S.R.), which included the current country of Russia, engaged in a tense stand-off about the deployment of nuclear-armed Soviet missiles in Cuba, just 90 miles from Florida. At the time, the U.S. had stationed nuclear missiles in Turkey, near the southern border of the U.S.S.R. Many adults around me worried about the possibility of an exchange of nuclear arms. The widespread destruction and the ongoing aftereffects of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki showed that nuclear weapons strikes could obliterate entire U.S. cities. They could also contaminate with long-term nuclear fallout the Maryland countryside where I lived. After a tense couple of weeks, the 1962 crisis was resolved peacefully, with the removal of missiles from both Cuba and Turkey.

Mr. Putin’s threat to again use nuclear weapons raises the specter of human-induced annihilation. It’s also scary that the site of one of the world’s worst nuclear accidents so far, at Chernobyl, is in northern Ukraine. Escape of radioactivity from that partially hardened reactor might be an ancillary result of ongoing hostilities.

It now makes more sense to me why Granny did her knitting, and why her Red Cross pin was so special to her. Granny was born in rural Virginia in 1879, when the area where her family lived was still struggling to rebuild after the U.S. Civil War. She lived in various parts of the U.S. before relocating to central Maryland with her husband and growing family about 1915. In April, 1917, when the U.S. entered “the Great War,” Granny was pregnant with my mom. For much of the Great Depression of the 1930’s, Granny became the prime family breadwinner, heading the housekeeping department at a Baltimore luxury hotel.

When war again broke out in Europe in 1939, Granny worried about the draft status of her only son. She followed news reports closely. I’m not sure how early in the conflict Granny began knitting for the Red Cross, but I think she produced warm wear for soldiers and then civilians for much of World War II and its aftermath.

Last weekend I attended a local rally in support of Ukraine. It was a sunny day in San Diego. War seemed distant. Lots of attendees waved Ukrainian flags, carried bouquets of sunflowers, hoisted hand-lettered signs decrying the Russian government’s aggression, expressing hopes for a speedy end to the killing. Several speakers explained, in Ukrainian, Russian or accented English, that there was no quarrel between the peoples of the two countries, just lethal aggression instigated largely by Mr. Putin.

By now, I too am a “granny.” It’s a continuing joy to watch our two grandchildren grow toward adulthood. Soon, if all goes well, I’ll have three additional step-grandchildren and a third biological grandchild. Since this past weekend’s rally, I’ve arranged further donations to charities working with refugees fleeing the fighting. I’m intensifying my charitable efforts more locally, also reaching out to friends and acquaintances with ties to Ukraine. I’m searching for ways to be more effective in reducing the suffering caused by this senseless war. I’m recalling Granny’s knitting with a renewed sense of respect.