Eighty-one years ago today, a nice man from Ohio named Paul Tibbets flew an airplane named after his mom to Japan and killed 70,000 people at 8:15 AM, with a single weapon named Little Boy.
An oddly comparable apocalypse was perpetrated almost exactly 2161 years earlier, on August 2, 216 BCE, when 50-60 thousand Romans lay dead or dying in pools of their own blood, vomit and feces at Cannae, having been killed in more intimate and terrible ways (limbs hacked off, faces, chests and abdomens punctured and mangled), although over a more extended period (a few hours) than those instantaneously vaporized citizens of Hiroshima.
These two horrible events, which if we would remember anniversaries should be observed together in the first week of every August, had similar impacts on the societies which lived through them.
Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial, by Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell (Harper Perennial, 1996), is a startling book. I offered it to my father-in-law, who had been a 19-year-old American soldier trained to pilot Higgins boats to the beaches for thirteen Pacific landings, and who would have been ordered to storm mainland Japan in a first wave if Truman had decided not to use the atom bomb to end World War II. Hypothetically but for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Bob might never have survived the war, my wife would never have been born, and my children and grandchildren would not exist. I'll never forget Bob's opinion of the Lifton book. He had almost never spoken about the war, but he said Lifton was right, Paul Tibbets probably never had to drop that bomb: the USA, Truman, et al., were probably guilty of a transcendently immoral act that just incidentally saved his own life.
At the same time, he said that when a society fails to avert a destructive war, any and every available weapon simply will be deployed. No other morality exists. If Abraham Lincoln had been in possession of a nuke in 1863, he definitely would have used it against Richmond! Lincoln could only afford his wonderful "malice toward none and charity for all... to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and for his orphan..." in 1865, after "...every drop of blood drawn by the lash (was) paid by another drawn with the sword." That's the only way it ever works.
In The Ghosts of Cannae: Hannibal and the Darkest Hour of the Roman Republic, by Robert L. O'Connell (Random House, 2011) a renowned military historian meticulously narrates one of the most famous battles in Western history. My daughter was a classics major who wrote a fascinating thesis about Roman society, but coincidentally developed great admiration for Hannibal Barca during her studies. The Carthaginian commander was fatally wrong about the nature of Roman power, and his inability to separate the alliances ultimately brought about the slaughter of his people and the total annihilation of his once-great home city.
But the impact of Cannae on the Roman psyche was analogous to the impact of Hiroshima in America. The handful of Roman survivors of the battle were shamed and banished to Sicily. Those disgraced remnants became a nucleus for a future army, but the spectre of Cannae haunted everyone, and no matter how all-powerful Rome was later, she remained instinctively afraid, she always expected the empire's fall, and knew it must deserve to fall. The Republic went into full panic after the catastrophic defeat in 216, appointed a dictator, and began drafting young boys, criminals and slaves to fill the ranks of the legions for the existential crisis. The Senate banned public mourning (for the 20% of military-age men who were all dead in the field). Perhaps Rome only became an empire in reaction to its chronic nightmare of another Cannae.
It seems to be the same whether you happen to be victor, vanquished or both: when so much is destroyed when you are there, you think it must somehow be your fault and it changes you toward a darker future.
That darker future often comes with desperate solutions (e.g., "psychedelic assisted therapies" or psychiatry itself, manipulations of the brain to "improve" human cognition, emotion and behavior) that only cause more harm and make people crazier than ever.
We need to pay better attention, and solve this.
