This is a Fourth of July address delivered on the sixth of August.
The Fourth is capitalized and the sixth is not, because today’s date has not attained national-holiday status. This is a brief argument why it should.
Eighty years ago, the first atomic bomb obliterated Hiroshima, causing almost 100,000 fatalities and countless horrible injuries. On August 9 another was detonated over Nagasaki with similar results. Neither was a military city. Three days later, Japan surrendered, unconditionally, to allied forces.
The standard justification for unleashing the terrible power of atomic weapons stood on two grounds. First, using a simple ends/means equation, the end of securing Japanese surrender justified the otherwise undesirable means of mass devastation. The second was a hypothetical calculation: the destruction the bombs would cause in Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be far outnumbered by the deaths (on both sides) occasioned by what almost everyone agreed would be a necessary invasion of Japan. These are strong arguments, easy to grasp though painful to accept. They share a branch of logic that regards less evil as better than more evil.
While staggering, the death toll in Hiroshima was not the greatest of the war. More were killed in the firebombing of Tokyo earlier the same year with the use of conventional weapons. More than a million Russian civilians died in the German siege of Stalingrad. The allies carpet-bombed German cities with almost total abandon, causing more than half a million deaths, overwhelmingly civilians. The Japanese entombed more than 2000 American sailors at Pearl Harbor for no just reason. There was the rape of Nanking. There was the Holocaust. Evidence of cruelty is not difficult to find. Hiroshima wasn’t the first nor even the greatest killing ground.
So it wasn’t just a matter of numbers nor even its degree of wrongness that gave Hiroshima its epochal stature.
It was the singularity of the event.
It commenced an age when a previously unconceivable amount of destructive force could be contained in a single cylinder, carried by one plane, sent on a mission by a single person. Everyone knew there was more to come: the dreadful strength of atomic weapons would be increased a thousandfold by nuclear ones, planes would be replaced by missiles –- and within a historical instant a dozen nations would possess such power. War, never an entirely rational affair, now entailed the possibility of causing more terror and destruction than the world could endure. If nuclear war erupted, annihilation could be accomplished in an instant. A Hiroshima-like means-and-ends test would no longer make sense because the end mutual destruction would justify nothing.
A second consequence of August 6 — another singularity — was that the bomb made our world one. It forced us to think about the meaning of universal existence because we had to face the possibility of its opposite. Fragmented, unbounded nationalism raised the risk of civilization’s end by intent, mistake or suicide.
Making the sixth of August a national holiday might be seem wildly inappropriate. The memory of mass death ought not be celebrated, let alone create an occasion to go to the beach. But it would not be a traditional holiday. It would be more of a solemn day, a holy day, when normal activities would cease. That would be the point.
Its purpose would not be to compete with the Fourth of July but to fulfill its values. On the Fourth we celebrate the courage and bravery of our founders who committed their lives and fortunes and honor to create an autonomous, enlightened nation. The Sixth would be dedicated to a consideration of the meaning of patriotism itself. We are fortunate to be citizens of a nation whose values are never beyond question and admit the need for improvement. We strive, the Constitution says, to create a “more perfect union,” a linguistic impossibility but a political aspiration which requires us to question our purpose and guarantees the freedom to do so.
We might wish to ponder, for example, what values transcend reasons of state or the ethical consequences of making America (or any nation) “first.”
Nationalism itself is a relatively new concept, only a few hundred years old. The universal values embedded in religions and ethics preceded the creation of nations. And patriotism is, at bottom, a sentiment created more by accident of birth than intent. Are we presumptuous enough to think that had we been born in Tokyo or Berlin rather than Chicago we would have had the courage or intelligence to realize what our leaders were telling us to do was wrong?
The significance of Hiroshima is acknowledged but its consequences are still not fully understood. Wars create bad bargains and may not be the best places to search for moral lessons. But remembering the terrible explosion which ended a terrible war eighty years ago provides an opportunity to pause and contemplate what it forced us to realize: that all our fates are shared.
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