Hiroshima

“At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time . . . the moment when the atomic bomb flashed over Hiroshima . . . .”

John Hersey's Hiroshima is an incredible first-hand account of the experience of six fortunate survivors of the terrible event that happened on Monday, August 6, 1945, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima by the American military. This book provides a vivid description of the events and happenings, through the eyes and memory of these survivors, few hours before and up to a few years after the tragic event. The engrossing eye-witness stories are horrifying, too real, and charged with emotion and drama without the least bit of induced melodrama. There's no need. Hiroshima shows that truth is far more terrible than fiction.

This book serves to demonstrate the great importance of state actors being responsible over their nuclear power due to the vast amount of devastation that accompanies it. In the modern day this is only exemplified, as many of the current leaders were not alive at the time of the droppings of Little Boy and Fat Man and do not remember the absolute horror that accompanies civilians when they saw the pure destruction of the atomic bomb for the first time in history. The bomb’s creator, J. Robert Oppenheimer, was incredibly morally conflicted over his creation. When reviewing the test bomb of plutonium-infused Trinity, Oppenheimer stated that it was the darkest day in all of history, and there is no way to go back to the comforts of before.

Everyone should occasionally read books that remind us of the human costs of war, as it's easy to grow complacent. Nowadays, state leaders talk about dropping ICBMS as if they weren’t the incredible weapons of mass destruction that they are. Hiroshima by John Hersey shows the true horrors of the bomb in a way that reinforces the horror onto us that have forgotten.