Back in October 2005, I wrote up an
“Artifact” for Reason magazine (for the uninitiated, we call our
feature on the last page of each issue Artifact; it consists of an
image and a short text). Called “War’s
Nightmare Landscape,” it’s worth recalling today
especially:

This horrifying image shows a young boy scarred by the atomic
bomb dropped on Nagasaki in August 1945. Almost unbelievably, he
would not only survive, but live into the
21st century.

The U.S. military shot miles of color film documenting the
effects of atomic bombs on residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
then classified the footage as secret and locked it away until the
1980s. On the 60th anniversary of the dropping of the Bomb, the
Sundance Channel ran the documentary Original Child
Bomb, which brought some of the long-suppressed images to a
wide audience for the first time. That same month, in response to
legal action taken by the watchdog group the National Security
Archive, the Pentagon released several dozen uncensored photos of
flag-draped coffins of troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and
agreed to comply “as expeditiously as possible” with future Freedom
of Information Act requests for images of casualties.

If you can stand to search for it in the melted flesh of the
boy’s back, you may find the reason why all governments try to
conceal the human costs of war. Even on those rare occasions when
the cause is unambiguously just, such images represent a blurred,
nightmare landscape in which easy patriotism disappears.

That was written as the United States was mired in the thick of
two wars, one of which (Iraq) was sold to the public on doubly
dubious arguments. The first was that Saddam Hussein had weapons of
mass destruction, which turned out not to be true (as I
argued back in 2002, even if it were true, the invasion of Iraq
was best understood as a non sequitur in the “war on terror”). The
second was that Iraq could be pacified on the cheap (lest we
forget, Bush admin hand Larry Lindsey was sacked for suggesting
that Iraq could cost as much as $200 billion, or double what the
administration had suggested – and less than a fifth of what Iraq
and Afghanistan have
cost so far).

I don’t think that there is any way to make a clean and easy
evaluation regarding the moral or strategic righteousness of
dropping the Bomb on Japan, but I do think it’s an ongoing debate
that is necessary and proper in any country that strives to be
either moral or righteous. And the recognition that governments
routinely and systematically lie about the causes, costs, and
casualties of war – remember that image above and miles of color
film of the aftermath of atomic bombs were hidden by the government
for decades – is something that needs to be built into every
calculation to send troops into harm’s way. “Even on those rare
occasions when the cause is unambiguously just,” as I wrote seven
years ago. 

Related: Information about the boy in the
picture, Sumiteru Taniguchi, who is still
alive.

Lucy Steigerwald reflects on “Some
Reminders of the Cost of Ending World War II.”

Wikipedia has a page that is a good starting point for further
inquiry into the continuing controversy over the dropping
of A-bombs
on Japan here.

Streaming
video of Alain Resnais’ 1955 film, “Night and Fog,” a brilliant
and haunting meditation on genocide, war, and the mixed desires to
forget and remember horror. And the start of
his 1959 movie, Hiroshima Mon Amour,