And then I wrote...

... that a liberal columnist whose efforts I used to read often quoted advice his father gave him: “Remember, they are all out to get you!”
That came to mind a few times while I was reading another book lent to me, The Last Train From Hiroshima,  by Charles Pellagrino, published by Henry Holt and Co. in 2010.
The title is from the fact that quite a few Japanese who escaped the atomic bomb which destroyed Hiroshima August 6, 1945, “escaped” to Nagasaki, including those aboard the last train to make that trip before Nagasaki was destroyed by another bomb three days later.
One of the survivors of that latter blast lost his life in the collapse of the World Trade Center in New York City 56 years later, September 11, 2001.
I almost didn’t finish the book.
For the first 75 pages or so, the author treated the reader to detailed descriptions of what that Hiroshima uranium core bomb did to those it killed or fatally injured. Unnecessarily detailed and gruesome, I thought. I have mentioned here before that I visited Hiroshima in 1957-58, and saw the diorama in the museum, and took photos of a survivor at the dome nearby, where he was standing in the protection of a downdraft when the aerial explosion came. His shoulder wound did not heal and was still bleeding at that time.
I also got to visit Kobe, which had been destroyed by conventional firebombing, which in many ways was as cruel as atomic energy. There I talked to two survivors of those fires, one woman who as a child had been taken into the country for safety, and a young Japanese army major who had come home for hospital care. Neither expressed ill will toward the United States. They escaped the fires, but an earthquake there 50 years later killed 5,000 and injured 35,000. Were they among them?
The luck of the draw.
Nagasaki was only a “target of opportunity” for the plutonium core second bomb. It was supposed to be dropped on the arsenal at Kokura on the same island, Kyushu, but things went wrong. And they were not about to fly back with it aboard!
A few further ironies.
The huge Toyota factory was, in the words of the day, “removed from existence forever.” Toyota vehicles are in use world wide today.
When we visited Hiroshima 12 or 13 years after the bomb, the heart of a new city had been created. We ate at a fancy, modern cafeteria-type place. And we saw huge vegetables grown where “nothing was expected to grow for decades.” Maybe the radishes were radioactive?
Irony of ironies, perhaps.
A Kyushu city not all that far from Nagasaki was for a time considered imperiled by radioactive drift.
That city? Obama!