Early one August morning, Tsutomu Yamaguchi was preparing to return home from the town where he had spent the last three months on business. He worked for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Japan as a draftsman, and was working over the summer on a shipbuilding project. He was on the bus heading to the station with two of his colleagues when he realized he left his ticket behind. His friends continued on while he returned to the company dormitory to retrieve it. Once he did, he began walking back toward the shipyard. Mr. Yamaguchi remembered the day well: “It was a flat, open spot with potato fields on either side. It was very clear, a really fine day, nothing unusual about it at all. I was in good spirits.”

But that would change in an instant for him and the approximately 300,000 others in Hiroshima that day, Aug. 6, 1945. “As I was walking along I heard the sound of a plane, just one. I looked up into the sky and saw the B-29, and it dropped two parachutes. I was looking up into the sky at them, and suddenly… it was like a flash of magnesium, a great flash in the sky, and I was blown over,” he explained. (Richard Lloyd Parry, The Times, “The Luckiest or Unluckiest Man in the World?”, March 29, 2005).

The plane he saw was the Enola Gay. It had just completed its mission of dropping the first atomic bomb (called “Little Boy”) ever used in a military operation. He continued, “When the noise and the blast had subsided I saw a huge mushroom-shaped pillar of fire rising up high into the sky. It was like a tornado, although it didn’t move, but it rose and spread out horizontally at the top. There was prismatic light, which was changing in a complicated rhythm, like the patterns of a kaleidoscope. The first thing I did was to check that I still had my legs and whether I could move them. I thought, ‘If I stay here, I’ll die.’

“Two hundred yards ahead, there was a dugout bomb shelter, and when I climbed in there were two young students already sitting there. They said, ‘You’ve been badly cut, you’re seriously injured.’ And it was then I realized I had a bad burn on half my face, and that my arms were burned.”

Mr. Yamaguchi’s story is one of thousands of first-hand accounts of the horrifying devastation that single bomb created. One patient of Michihiko Hachiya, who was the director of the Hiroshima Communications Hospital, recounted this story, which Hachiya kept in a diary along with dozens of other stories he heard from patients at that time:

“The sight of the soldiers … was more dreadful than the dead people floating down the river. I came onto I don’t know how many, burned from the hips up; and where the skin had peeled, their flesh was wet and mushy … And they had no faces! Their eyes, noses and mouths had been burned away, and it looked like their ears had melted off. It was hard to tell front from back” (Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, 1986, p. 726).

With one bomb, approximately 140,000 people were killed. Every person who survived had his or her own account of the suffering they witnessed, and those accounts numbered in the tens of thousands. “People exposed within half a mile of the Little Boy fireball … were seared to bundles of smoking black char in a fraction of a second as their internal organs boiled away. ‘Doctor,’ a patient commented to [Dr.] Hachiya a few days later, ‘a human being who has been roasted becomes quite small, doesn’t he?’ The small black bundles now stuck to the streets and bridges and sidewalks of Hiroshima numbered in the thousands” [Rhodes, pg. 714-715]. The magnitude of the destruction is beyond comprehension. No words can adequately describe it.

How Could We Do This?

The capacity of people to kill each other entered an entirely new and never before imagined age that day. For the first time in history, the dreadful prophecy that mankind would completely destroy itself if it weren’t for the return of Christ was actually conceivable (Matthew 24:22). Yet instead of being chilled by such destructive power, over the next several decades, ever more powerful atomic weapons were developed across the globe in an arms race between the U.S. and Soviet Union during the Cold War. The most powerful weapon ever tested was the Russian Tsar Bomba, with an explosive power nearly 3,000 times that of the Little Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Today, the nuclear arsenal of just the United States and Russia (to say nothing of India, Pakistan, the United Kingdom, France, China and other countries known to possess nuclear weapons) is sufficient that the inhabited portions of the earth could be destroyed multiple times over.

Why did the United States drop the bomb in Japan that day? To end the war faster. Japan was all but defeated, yet their national pride kept them from surrendering. The American military was gearing up for a massive land invasion of Japan, so they reason that if the bomb could be used and proved effective in forcing Japan to an unconditional surrender first, then the lives of perhaps tens of thousands of American servicemen could be spared. In his history of the Second World War, Winston Churchill summarized the thinking behind the decision: “To avert a vast, indefinite butchery, to bring the war to an end, to give peace to the world, to lay healing hands upon its tortured peoples by a manifestation of overwhelming power at the cost of a few explosions, seemed, after all our toils and perils, a miracle of deliverance.” [Rhodes, p. 697].

A miracle for whom? The men and families of the men who would have been sent to the shores of Japan to fight the enemy in conventional warfare if it weren’t for the bomb, yes. But certainly not those who lived in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nor for the billions born since who have lived in the shadow of the Bomb.

This is the peace that mankind produces.

Apocalyptic Forerunner

When trying to picture the events Jesus talked about that will happen before He comes back, I don’t think it’s entirely off-base to imagine the desolation in Hiroshima, and multiply it the whole world over. In that coming tribulation, every citizen of every country of the world will be at risk.

I recommend looking up the book The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes (which I have been quoting from in this article), and reading its final chapter, “Tongues of Fire.” As I read its account of Hiroshima’s devastation—beginning months in advance with the American military preparing an island from which to launch this and other attacks on Japan, and concluding with page after page of firsthand survivors’ recollections of the misery they witnessed that day—my heart began to pound. Rhodes makes a chilling statement:

“‘There was a fearful silence which made one feel that all people and all trees and vegetation were dead,’ remembers Yoko Ota, a Hiroshima writer who survived. The silence was the only sound the dead could make … They were nearer the center of the event; they died because they were members of a different polity and their killing did not therefore count officially as murder; their experience most accurately models the worst case of our common future. They numbered in the majority in Hiroshima that day.” [Rhodes, p. 715, emphasis added).

There is only one thing that can give us hope in the face of such unspeakable evil and the fear that ensues from living in an age where to be utterly destroyed remains a possibility: God’s promise of salvation.

“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the old heaven and the old earth had disappeared … I heard a loud shout from the throne, saying, ‘Look, God’s home is now among his people! He will live with them, and they will be his people. God himself will be with them. He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain. All these things are gone forever’” (Revelation 21:1-4, New Living Translation).

There is a day coming when no one will ever have to worry about destruction from bombs, guns, chemicals, tanks, landmines; a day when there will no longer be a feeling of unease that somebody in a different country might come hurt you and your family simply because you are a different skin color, religion, culture or have something they want. God will enforce His law of love, which mankind has so blatantly torn to shreds.

At that time, He will take the earth—destroyed, tattered and burned as it will have been by mankind—and remake it. All the death, the sorrow, the evil, the hatred, the legacy of humankind’s aggression against God and each other will be destroyed and forgotten. He will raise all those killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki—and all those who have died in every war or accident or by natural causes through all of history—and they will be given a new life. A life free of hatred, sorrow and suffering; instead full of love, service and joy (Revelation 20:5, 12).

Whatever happened to Mr. Yamaguchi? After getting his bearings and finding cover at an air raid shelter that terrible day, his wounds were bandaged, and he spent the night. The next day he and his companions managed to return to their hometown—Nagasaki. Despite his wounds, he reported for work two days later, Aug. 9, 1945. At work, he and his boss were having a conversation when the second atomic bomb detonated above the city, killing tens of thousands more as the first had done in Hiroshima. Mr. Yamaguchi was not injured in the second blast, and he and his wife both went on to live into their 90s. They both died in 2010, and are survived by three children. He is the only person officially recognized by Japan for having survived both atomic blasts, though there were many others.

“The reason that I hate the atomic bomb is because of what it does to the dignity of human beings,” he said in an interview. “I can’t understand why the world cannot understand the agony of the nuclear bombs. How can they keep developing these weapons?” (Michael W. Robbins, Military History, “Japanese Engineer Survived Atomic Strike on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” July/August 2009).

There will be a day Mr. Yamaguchi will have his wish fulfilled. God speed that day.