The Menace of the Bomb
“Over the wreckage of the Urakami Valley towered a monstrous expanding pillar of smoke shooting upward from the middle of the explosion at incredible speed. Like a genie released after countless ages of captivity, the column writhed and twisted toward the stratosphere. . . . The deadly apparition seethed up toward the circling planes. It changed faces, it changed colors from purple to salmon to gold to soft white.”—The Fall of Japan, by William Craig.
THIS was the scene at Nagasaki on the morning of August 9, 1945, just minutes after an atomic bomb was dropped there. The explosion was terrifyingly beautiful. But there was nothing beautiful at the base of the fireball. “People by the hundreds lay on the streets, in the fields, in wreckage, and screamed for water. Creatures that barely resembled human beings walked dazedly, skin hanging down in huge flaps, torsos blackened.” Forty thousand people died that morning, as almost a hundred thousand had died three days earlier in Hiroshima.
The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, though primitive by today’s standards, were the only nuclear bombs ever dropped on men, women and children. Nevertheless, those fiery, mushroomlike columns of death have become an enduring nightmare in the collective consciousness of the human race. With a horrible vividness they showed on a small scale what could happen worldwide if mankind ever fought an all-out nuclear war.
It is hardly surprising, then, that many voices have been raised in a continuing—but so far unavailing—protest against the relentless growth of the world’s nuclear arsenals. Recently, though, these protesters have had new, unexpected allies—prominent individuals and organizations of Christendom.
For many of these religious groups, this has been a startling reversal of positions. Back in 1950, The New York Times reported: “The Vatican, through its official newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, assured the United States Government and people today that it fully understood the reasons why President Truman had decided to approve the construction of a hydrogen superbomb.” In 1958, according to a news dispatch from Denmark, a special commission of the Protestant World Council of Churches had concluded: “A Christian could in conscience agree to the use of atomic arms in a limited war.”
Some individual leaders were even more pro-Bomb. In 1958 the Archbishop of Canterbury went so far as to say: “For all I know it is within the providence of God that the human race should destroy itself in this manner [by nuclear bombs].” And in 1961 the English Daily Express reported: “Britain should keep the hydrogen bomb, the Archbishop of Wales . . . said yesterday. It might lead men to Christ.”
How remarkable, therefore, to hear many Protestant and Catholic organizations now speaking out against nuclear weapons! Why have they changed their views? What are they now saying? And will it really make a difference in the long run?