August 7, 2025
Cliff Potts, WPS.News

August 7, 1945: Hiroshima Wakes in Hell

The day after the bomb fell, Hiroshima was no city. It was an open wound—charred earth, broken bones, and silence thick with death. Survivors wandered blindly, skin hanging from their bodies. Children cried out for parents who no longer existed. The fires still smoldered.

Governor Genshin Takano and military police tried to coordinate disaster response, but the system had collapsed. Burn victims overwhelmed clinics. Radiation sickness, still misunderstood, began to kill silently. Dr. Michihiko Hachiya—himself injured—staggered back into his hospital and began treating the dying with what little remained. Dr. Shuntaro Hida, summoned from the outskirts, walked through hell and recorded it all in a daze.

The government’s response? Bury the dead. Find water. Disinfect wells. Forbid looting. Report to Tokyo. But communications were broken. The emperor remained silent. There were no food lines. No national speech. No rescue planes. There was only death, and survivors becoming sick, and more bodies being burned in mass graves.

Hiroshima didn’t fall apart on August 6. It kept falling on August 7, piece by radioactive piece.

Reagan’s Era: The Myth of Survivable Nuclear War

Four decades later, in the 1980s, Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) sounded the alarm that Washington didn’t want to hear: that America was now living under the delusion that nuclear war could be “won.” President Reagan’s team floated strategic nuclear options—limited strikes, counterforce doctrines—and the defense industry sold bunkers like candy.

PSR, led by real doctors like Dr. Fred Galluccio, shredded that fantasy. In articles published in the New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA, they laid out clinical, unflinching projections: no functional hospitals, no blood banks, no antibiotics, no burn units. Cities would become graveyards. Infrastructure would collapse. Disease would follow. The only survivors would be the lucky and the doomed.

In 1985, PSR and their global counterparts in IPPNW won the Nobel Peace Prize for speaking what every government feared: there is no treating nuclear war.

Today: The Lies Linger

Eighty years after Hiroshima, the U.S. still hasn’t learned. Defense documents still refer to “limited nuclear exchange.” Military strategists still run war games based on the fantasy of escalation control. Politicians still talk about deterrence as if it’s magic.

Meanwhile, scientists warn that even a small nuclear war—say, between India and Pakistan—would kick up enough soot to collapse global agriculture. U.S. emergency services would evaporate. Hospitals couldn’t handle a fraction of the trauma. Power grids, water systems, supply chains—all gone. The myth of survivability remains, but it’s been dead since 1945. Only the delusion lives on.

And let’s be clear: the people keeping that myth alive aren’t patriots. They’re cowards and profiteers. They deny history. They ignore science. They threaten every life on this planet so they can posture like gods of war.

Conclusion

On August 7, 1945, Hiroshima showed us what nuclear war looks like. By 1985, doctors tried to warn us what it would look like next time. And here in 2025, we still haven’t done what needs to be done: shut the lie down. Shut it all down. Disarm. Dismantle. And finally admit that this weapon has no place in a civilization that wants to survive.

REFERENCES (APA Format)

Hachiya, M. (1955). Hiroshima Diary. University of North Carolina Press.
Hida, S. (2017). Under the Mushroom-Shaped Cloud in Hiroshima. WC Peace.
National Archives. (2023). Contemporaneous Japanese Reports of Radiation Sickness. Nuclear Vault Briefing Book.
Galluccio, F. (1990). “People were scared again… premise: nuclear war was survivable.” Los Angeles Times.
Schlosser, E. (2014). Command and Control. New England Journal of Medicine.
Nature Editorial. (2023). Nuclear war and physicians’ social responsibility. Leukemia, 37, 2147–2149.
PSR. (n.d.). Preventing Nuclear War: A Public Health Imperative

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