“Why is it night already? Why did our house fall down? What happened?” The befuddlement of 5-year-old Myeko Nakamura moments after the first atomic bomb fell at 8:15 on the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, as related in John Hersey’s classic account Hiroshima, remains to a large extent our befuddlement today. Seventy-five years after about 80,000 of Myeko’s neighbors died in an instant, we are, like that little girl, grateful to be alive but somewhat mystified about how it happened—and what surviving in the nuclear age really means.
Above all we are mystified that today’s leaders aren’t doing more to prevent a greater horror than Hiroshima; if anything, led by America’s history-shredding president, Donald Trump, they are making that prospect more likely.
