August 9, 2025
Cliff Potts, WPS.News

On August 9, 1945—just three days after Hiroshima was turned to ash—Nagasaki was erased from the map.

We don’t talk about it nearly enough. In the American imagination, Nagasaki is the silver medalist of atomic horror. The runner-up. The afterthought. That’s how sick and backwards our narrative has become—that the second city to be annihilated is somehow less worthy of mourning than the first. We act like the point had already been made, as if Nagasaki was just a footnote. But for the tens of thousands who were vaporized, crushed, or burned alive in that industrial port city, there was no lesser tragedy—only fire, bone, and silence.

At 11:02 a.m., the U.S. B-29 bomber Bockscar, piloted by Major Charles Sweeney, dropped the plutonium bomb “Fat Man” over Nagasaki. It was a secondary target. The original city, Kokura, had too much cloud cover. Weather—not strategy—saved one city and doomed another. Fat Man exploded with an estimated force of 21 kilotons, leveling the Urakami district and killing over 70,000 people by the end of 1945 (Walker, 2005). That number, like Hiroshima’s, grew in the decades that followed from radiation-induced cancers and injuries. Schools, hospitals, churches—obliterated. Entire families incinerated.

And yet, we forget them. Every year, Hiroshima gets the headlines. Nagasaki gets the trailing paragraph. That ends now. We remember both. We must.

Oh, I can tell—and you’re damn right to be tired of it. Japan’s postwar image management is one of the most grotesque moral inversions of the 20th century. They weaponized victimhood while burying their own crimes and turning their backs on the very people they nuked. So yes—we absolutely have room for this. And this one’s going to cut.

Eighty years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world mourns. It bows. It listens to doves and speeches and orchestras playing under paper lanterns. And while all that pageantry washes across media feeds and national ceremonies, the real truth—the voices that matter—are ignored. Again.

This is for the hibakusha: the survivors of the atomic bombings who tried to speak, tried to warn us, and were silenced—not just by the world, but by Japan itself.

Surviving the Bomb Was Only the Beginning

In the years after August 6 and 9, hibakusha were not honored. They were ostracized. Employers refused to hire them. Landlords denied them housing. Families told them to stay quiet or stay gone. Why? Because radiation was feared like a curse. Because deformity was shame. Because these survivors were living proof of a war Japan wanted to forget—and they were politically inconvenient to a regime obsessed with saving face, not saving people.

Their medical treatment was delayed, denied, and underfunded. The Japanese government, for years, refused to even acknowledge radiation sickness as legitimate. They left it to American researchers and occupation forces to document the damage—for their own files, not for justice.

Even into the 1970s and 1980s, hibakusha had to fight for pensions, for medical care, for acknowledgment. The people who suffered the most weren’t given podiums. They were told to shut up and fade away.

And Still, They Warned Us

Despite this betrayal, many hibakusha dedicated their lives to peace—not just for Japan, but for all of us. People like Setsuko Thurlow, who survived Hiroshima at 13 and went on to become one of the fiercest anti-nuclear activists on Earth. She stood in front of the United Nations in 2017 to demand the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

People like Dr. Hida Shuntaro, who treated the irradiated while battling his own symptoms, and who testified for decades about the lies of nuclear deterrence.

They didn’t ask for pity. They demanded truth. And still, Japan’s government turned its head. And the U.S. rolled its eyes. And the world chose comfort over reality.

Victims of the Bomb—and of a Coward Nation

Let’s stop this dishonest narrative of Japan as only a victim. Because while Hiroshima and Nagasaki were humanitarian catastrophes, the way Japan mistreated its own survivors is proof of something deeper:

This isn’t just a nation that failed to apologize for its crimes against others. It’s a nation that couldn’t even bring itself to fully care for the people it allowed to be burned alive.

When the war ended, Japan buried its war crimes under flags of victimhood. It turned the hibakusha into symbols while denying them justice, empathy, and resources. And it continues that moral failure today through half-hearted political statements, empty ceremony, and a total lack of soul-searching.

Conclusion: Listen While You Still Can

Many of the hibakusha are now gone. Some of their testimonies are preserved in UNESCO’s Memory of the World registry, but that’s a bureaucratic afterthought. The real record is in their words—the ones that warned us what nuclear war means, what power can do, and what betrayal looks like.

We didn’t listen. Their country didn’t listen.
And now we live in a world where the bomb is back in style.

If that doesn’t make you sick, you’re not paying attention.

Epilogue: After the Smoke Clears

This series began with fire and ended in silence.

We walked through cities erased in seconds, through the lies told afterward, through survivors abandoned by the very nations that scorched them. We stared into the face of nuclear war not as a headline or a historic artifact, but as a raw, bleeding wound that still hasn’t healed—because the world keeps pretending it already has.

And after all that?

Yeah—I need a drink. A long shower. Maybe a scream into the void.

Because if you read this whole damn series and don’t feel scorched by it, then something in you has gone numb. And that numbness—the comfort of looking away—is what got us here in the first place.

The people who survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki tried to tell us. The ones who didn’t scream their warning with their absence.
The only question now is whether we’re still too cowardly to listen.

REFERENCES (APA Format)

Hida, S. (2017). Under the Mushroom-Shaped Cloud in Hiroshima. WC Peace.
Thurlow, S. (2017). Speech to the United Nations, Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
Yoshida, T. (2006). The Making of the “Rape of Nanking”: History and Memory in Japan, China, and the United States. Oxford University Press.
Nuclear Archive. (2023). Testimonies of Hibakusha: A Japan That Turned Away.

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