The United States has never apologized
for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki.
The nuclear bombs instantly killed
almost 250,000 people, mostly civilians.
Japan and the United States
moved on from World War II
to forge one of the most
successful alliances in the world.
Yet the hibakusha,
the atomic bomb survivors,
are the living reminders
of Hiroshima’s devastation
for the nuclear era.
The legacy
of developing the atomic bomb
has continued for
over seven decades.
But was the atomic bombing
that started the rush for nuclear arms
a war crime?
A short time ago,
an American airplane
dropped one bomb on Hiroshima
and destroyed its usefulness to the enemy.
That bomb has more power than 20,000 tons of TNT.
Wataru Namba was a junior college student.
He was taking a math class.
One B-29 came over.
Every day, those days, a reconnaissance plane came over taking a picture of Hiroshima.
8:15, all of a sudden,
a strong flash came from the window side.
And it’s so bright.
And the whole world is white-colored.
Even I can’t see my hands.
It’s unbearably hot.
I hit the floor,
and a big blast hit the whole school building.
I became unconscious. I didn’t know what happened.
Wataru was directly exposed to radiation.
When I woke up,
the whole area become black.
I began to crawl between a chair and a desk.
He saw the destruction the 9,700-pound
uranium bomb had caused.
Time in Hiroshima stopped at 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945.
Three days later,
the U.S. detonated a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki.
Since that fateful day,
public opinion on the atomic bombing
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has shifted.
Take a look at this graph.
A study found 85% of Americans approved of dropping atomic bombs in 1945.
Less than 60% of Americans approved 60 years later.
On the 71st anniversary,
President Barack Obama became the first U.S. president to visit Hiroshima.
We come to ponder the terrible force
unleashed in a not-so-distant past.
We come to mourn the dead.
By the way, at the time as commander-in-chief,
he held the launch codes for over 900 nuclear warheads.
And to this day,
Americans overwhelmingly believe the atomic bombing
of Japanese cities was the right thing to do.
So I saw, [Obama] is in Japan, in Hiroshima,
and that's fine.
Just as long as he doesn't apologize,
it's absolutely fine. Who cares.
The U.S. has never apologized.
That’s significant,
as the U.S. is the only country ever to have dropped an atomic bomb.
I think the overwhelming narrative
is that the bombs were dropped
to hasten the end of the war.
Professor Norma Field is professor emeritus of East Asian studies
at the University of Chicago.
Different numbers were given,
which were gradually escalated
about the numbers of American lives saved.
Historians have for decades debated why Washington decided to use the atomic bomb.
Revisionist historians argued
Japan was ready
to surrender before the atomic bombs.
Can these debates ever be settled?
Partly I think, because I think it is testimony
to how we human beings have registered
the gravity of that act.
Let’s take a look at the real-life impact of the A-bomb.
The U.S. bombings indiscriminately
killed almost a quarter of a million Japanese civilians.
People suffered long-term effects from radiation exposure.
Survivors were left traumatized.
So, you might be asking:
Why aren’t the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki called war crimes?
That's a really good and thorny question.
I think the answer is one of prevarication.
Even the international court of justice
taking this up later on,
perhaps in the ‘60s, I think,
would say really, yes.
They should be war crimes.
Modern international humanitarian law was established with the Geneva Conventions of 1949.
Their definition of war crimes includes intentionally killing civilians.
Aerial warfare itself,
the technology, has made it very,
very difficult to maintain
distinctions between non-combatants and combatants.
I think the notion of victor's justice
is really important.
War crimes, trials, tribunals
in Germany and Japan
have been conducted by the allied powers.
The U.S. government hasn't ever
had to answer for the atomic bombings in court.
You see, there's still some ambiguity
around nuclear weapons and international law.
The International Court of Justice hasn’t ruled
whether nuclear weapons would be lawful or unlawful
in an extreme situation, such as self-defense.
Even though the United Nations has repeatedly condemned nukes.
And note:
The UN Security Council’s five permanent members are all armed with nuclear warheads.
At its heart, the security council,
which is dominated by the nuclear states,
also has a great deal to do with
how nuclear weapons will be viewed.
The U.S. has a triad of land-based missiles,
nuclear submarines
and bombers.
In 2019,
half of the warheads were deployed around the world and ready to go.
One of these warheads is
80 times more powerful than the bomb dropped in Hiroshima.
How Washington chooses to use its nuclear threat in foreign policy
at best remains a gray area.
In the past we’ve had success is because of that threat of mutual nuclear destruction.
I want to make sure I’m not taking a deterrence off the table.
So how has the U.S. come to terms with atomic bombings
in Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
You see, information about Hiroshima and Nagasaki was censored after the war.
And Americans were immersed in a nuclear craze.
Bars and clubs started serving a drink
called the “atomic cocktail.”
If you look at many of the aerial photographs,
well, all the aerial photographs of the two cities,
you see nothing.
You see city blocks,
as it were, leveled to the ground.
We don't realize that
we're actually looking at mass graves.
Americans have been stunningly ignorant,
and remain so,
about the dangers of radiation exposure.
The impact of the atomic bomb was felt on U.S. soil too.
Since the first atomic bomb,
uranium in the U.S. has been mined in Navajo Nation.
It’s home to 250,000 people.
Many have died of kidney failure and cancer linked to uranium contamination here.
And that’s not all.
Government-sponsored scientists injected 18 patients
with dangerous radioactive substance between 1945 and 1947.
Human radiation experiments continued across the country
for another 30 years.
It came to a stop with stricter regulation on human testing.
As the Cold War arms race heightened,
many Americans feared a nuclear war could happen at any time.
John F. Kennedy saw a future
where the U.S. would face dozens of nuclear-armed nations.
The U.S. later signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
In 2010, a new treaty negotiation
started at the UN to prohibit any nuclear weapons.
But the U.S. and other nuclear-armed countries rejected it.
In Japan, Hiroshima is part of the national narrative.
Peace Memorial Park is in the center of Hiroshima.
And the legacy of Hiroshima lives today in the memories of the hibakusha.
These survivors have made it their mission
to speak to the world
because they are desperate
to do what they can
to make sure that we can live in a world
without nuclear weapons.
We don’t know if there will be another arms race.
We don’t know if we’ll see another atomic bombing.
The war crimes debate hasn’t been settled.
But we do know the atomic bombings devastated a whole generation.
Its impact is still seen and felt.
I have to escape from this spot.
I run, I run, run.
I realized I have a cousin,
so I thought I’d better drop by to check him.
And sure enough,
90% his body’s burned.
His face skin is separated.
All his hand
skin peeled
and hanging on his nails like this,
and he looked like a ghost.