At 8:15 on the morning of August 6th, 1945, a single American bomber, a Boeing built B-29 named the Enola Gay, dropped the first atomic weapon over the Japanese city of Hiroshima.
An immediate blindly flash, an eyeball melting tsunami of heat, followed by a mega-firestorm, engulfed the city. Hiroshima was not a significant military target. The atomic bomb was detonated as an unprecedented act of military state terrorism.
Instantaneously, between 100,000-200,000 people perished. Men, women, children, invalids, the elderly, doctors, nurses, priests, air raid wardens, common workers. People with gardens. Mothers with infants. Women giving birth….
Six days later, the second nuclear weapon used in history was dropped on the smaller industrial city of Nagasaki. The immediate death toll there exceeded 75,000 human beings. Both Little Boy and Fat Man, as the new bombs were nicknamed, were used against people of color.
The survivors of the Bombs, the hibakusha, burned, scarred, deformed, afflicted with radiation sickness, continued a life in death of pain, suffering, shame, guilt and inescapable nightmares.
For years a group of these gentle survivor-folk toured the world, always accompanied by a medical specialist, to warn governments and citizens against the criminal horror of nuclear holocaust. A party of these people had come from meeting with then President Jimmy Carter, and we shared a dinner at an American Friends Service Committee facility. The small and meek Japanese women who sat beside me, gifted me an iconic folded crane, an origami peace crane.
When I was 17 years old, I read John Hershey’s book HIROSHIMA. The first poem I ever had published, when barely turned 18, was a commemoration of the initial atomic bombing. The poem appeared in the premier issue of Dryad, a small literary magazine out of Silver Springs, Maryland, across the river from the Pentagon and White House.
Hersey’s book awakened and confirmed in me a pacifist instinct. Now on the eve of August 6th, 2026 (and looking at the approach of another 9/11 and the continuing nuclear strategy of MAD, mutually assured destruction) I have remained true in my opposition to war and my unwavering conviction that nuclear war—threatening to eradicate human life and all bio-forms of the Earth—is as total as evil can become. And it is the finality shadow of our manmade event horizon of doom.
As of August 6, 1945, the wrath of God was rendered obsolete by the scientific technology of total war.
To this day, I do not share nor do I comprehend public numbness and the surrendering of the precious power of life to the weaponized politics of death. If you do not wish to discourse with me on the cause of this inhuman darkness, at least ask yourself Why?.
Why do we go on behaving and believing that what is given exhausts the possibilities of what can be? That how it is, is the way it must be? That historical trauma andapocalyptic anticipation are imagination’s parameters and, to the despair of a viable humanity, the terminus is morally conditional?
David Sparenberg is a humanitarian and eco poet, an international essayist and storyteller. He published four eBooks with OVI Books (Sweden) in 2025, one so far this years. He has just completed a play, political and contemporary but based in the traditions of German Expressionist Theatre, soon to be published and available for performance. David Sparenberg lives in Seattle, WA in the Pacific Northwest of the United States but identifies as an Ecotopian Citizen of Creation.
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