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LEST WE FORGET Prof. H.W.Berky

The bomb exploded 150 feet directly about Military Park. In the whole city only about 50 concrete buildings still have walls. As far as a man can walk for an hour in any direction there is only a flat, silent plain, a still stinking junk pile. The trees, killed by the blast, stand like skeletons. Americans visiting the city have to keep reminding themselves that this enormous destruction was caused by one bomb. The article was written for Life Magazine in September, 1945 by an eyewitness photographer who viewed the ravages upon an innocent Japanese city by th explosion of a thimble full of matter which blotted out 125,000 men, women and children, faster than eyesight. Nor is this the last page to their tragedy. People are still dying inchwise from incipient anemia, cancer, and shriveling sores, caused by the bomb. Children are being born cripples and monsters and doctors are expecting this for generations. Radio- active air reached California a few days after the test explosions at Bikini Islands, although in comfortingly small amounts, but on the next page we read that bombs many times more powerful are formulating in the minds of scientists and groups of these dropped in the Pacific near California could make American air deadly, could make all or most American Water undrinkable and the soil, plants, and the rain deadly poisonous. Scientists who know, are crying as one voice that almost any nation could produce enough atomic bombs to break any existing nation on earth in one night and that war must never again be allowed to try to settle an international dispute. One scientist who helped build the first bomb and saw the fifth explode at Bikini, remarked solicitously, - the stone age lasted a thousand years, the machine age lasted one hundred years - will the atomic age last only ten years ? If so, three years are gone. We have seven years left.