Defusing the Bomb
TW: GRAPHIC DEPICTIONS OF WAR
War is being waged all over the world. One of the simplest and most important doctrinal truths is the commandment to love one another, to treat them as you would be treated. You may not think that this applies to war, when important human rights are threatened or when self defense is needed. But the wars and events we are justifying are riddled with war crimes that go directly against Jesus’s teachings. If God told us to “renounce war and proclaim peace” (D&C 98:16), should not Latter-day Saints be vehemently anti-war? Russell M. Nelson said if nations applied Jesus Christ’s peaceful teachings to their governing, we could be in “an age of unparalleled peace and progress,” and “war with its horrors would be relegated to the realm of maudlin memory.”1 Christ taught against war, Mormon prophets have taught against war, and yet our community does not seem to be overly passionate about peace. And when minority groups are misrepresented or simply underrepresented in the media, when the history books and the movies tell skewed narratives of people of color being oppressed or when they fail to mention the women who contributed to humankind's advances, there is silence.
Oppenheimer recently won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and it swept the show with the cast and crew snagging awards for Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Cinematography, Film Editing, and Original Score. I don’t mean to say that these awards weren’t deserved. The film was incredibly well-made and had impressive performances from the cast members. When I first heard that Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, and Florence Pugh were going to be in a movie together, I was excited. I love all of these actors and was anxious to see what kind of story they would tell. Once I discovered what the film was about, I felt like throwing up.
My heart sank when I saw that Oppenheimer was winning award after award at the Golden Globes, and I knew that it would most likely sweep the Academy Awards as well. And I was saddened that other films I loved, films that uplift voices that are often underrepresented in the media, like Past Lives and Barbie, won hardly anything. Killers of the Flower Moon was another one of my favorite films this year, and Lily Gladstone made history as the first Native American ever nominated for an Oscar. Oppenheimer didn’t talk about the Latinx and Native Americans who worked on the Manhattan project––the ones who lived in the area and suffered effects of radiation poisoning––or the fact that their land was taken to build Los Alamos.2 In the film, it’s implied that the project had no impact on minoritized communities, but that is far from the truth. Many were displaced and had to turn to jobs on the plant, and while the White leaders of the project were given protective gear for the radiation, the Indigenous and Latinx workers were not. The effects of radiation have plagued them for generations. And although Oppenheimer mentioned the bomb would kill innocent Japanese civilians, it failed to show any of the effects the bomb had on the Japanese people. While this could be chalked up to an artistic choice, the film had no Asian actors in it.
It does pain me that in this age, Hollywood has produced a film that is influencing people to believe wrongly, especially since Everything Everywhere All At Once swept the show and made history at last year’s Oscars, with it being the first time that Asian performers and filmmakers won or were nominated in many categories. This year’s awards felt like a step backward.
Growing up, my history classes only ever spent half a day learning about the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII, if we learned about it at all. I didn’t learn about the Native and Latinx populations that were hurt because of the Manhattan project. I wasn’t taught that Hispanic families in the area were given forty-eight hours notice––some of them threatened at gunpoint––to leave their homes to make way for the lab, and many of these families were given no compensation.3 I didn’t learn that the Native and Latinx people who worked at Los Alamos––ironically, because their jobs and farms were destroyed to create Los Alamos––were some of the only ones who weren’t given protective gear for the radiation. Instead, I was taught that the only way to end WWII was to drop atomic bombs on Japan.4 I was taught that Oppenheimer was a genius who made it possible for our troops to come home, and that if the bomb weren’t dropped, more people on both sides of the war would have died, though there are several first-hand accounts that dispute this claim. Many people that worked with Oppenheimer have said that the US government was under the impression that the Japanese would have surrendered within the next week, and they pushed to drop the bomb anyway.4 A group of scientists worked on the Manhattan project and petitioned to drop the bomb on an uninhabited island first to demonstrate its power to the Japanese before killing any civilians, but Oppenheimer was against this idea. Once the first bomb was dropped, Oppenheimer and his team laughed and cheered.5 I didn’t know any of this until I was an adult and decided to research it on my own.
I wasn’t taught in school that we purposefully didn’t firebomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki because we were saving them for the atomic bomb, or that those cities were chosen because they were flatter than other cities in Japan, and the leaders of the Manhattan project wanted to see how far the destruction would go. I was taught that the people working on the bomb didn’t know how destructive it was going to be. They knew exactly what the effects would be. Oppenheimer, in his later years, called himself a pacifist, and outspokenly opposed war. I don’t doubt that he struggled with guilt after WWII ended. But in Oppenheimer, he’s portrayed as a victim who was pressured by the government and struggled with his calling, who was haunted by the words “I am become death, destroyer of worlds.” There are journal entries from people who worked with him at Los Alamos that contradict this portrayal.5 And yet the film leads viewers to sympathize with him.
I am proud to be a citizen of the United States of America. But just like every country, the United States has many things in its history to be ashamed of, things that are ignored, omitted from the history books. We were on the right side of WWII, we helped Japan rebuild after the war, but we also killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians. We also interned 125,000 innocent Americans with Japanese descent and put them in barracks with terrible conditions, a very racist act that people still try to justify today. This wasn’t taught in history classes for years, sometimes isn’t even taught today, and an apology for the internment wasn’t issued until Ronald Reagan was president.
It’s estimated that at least 140,000 died in Hiroshima and 74,000 in Nagasaki, but what many aren’t aware of is how horrific their deaths were, and no one knows exactly how many died years later from the effects of radiation.6 The dropping of the bomb didn’t just burn their bodies. It melted their skin off. The people who weren’t incinerated instantly walked the streets with ribbons of skin hanging from their bodies. Children who survived suffered nightmares from seeing their peers dead in the street and the river. Some of their eyeballs hung from their sockets. People that were injured from the blast laid on the side of the road to die, begging passersby for water, but the water from the river was toxic from radiation and riddled with bodies. Those who drank the water died within minutes. Those who didn't died thirsty, hours later. Black, sticky, radioactive raindrops fell from the sky in the days after the blast. Survivors’ gums bled, their hair fell out, they had fevers, and their bodies swelled up so much they couldn’t open their eyes. These are the images that are burned in my brain: fragments of children's clothing lined up, still stained with blood. Tiny school uniforms and name-tagged book bags shredded with holes. Pocket change that had been melted together. Crude crayon pictures of piles of bodies on the roads, drawn by survivors. A three-year-old boy's tricycle that he held as he died. His family buried him with it in their backyard; years later, they dug up the grave to move to their family plot and donated the trike to the museum. Quotes from survivors––the one that broke me the most was from a father whose wife and children all died in the bombing. He almost threw himself off a bridge because he had no surviving friends or relatives, but then thought, "If I am dead, who will pray for their souls?" The devastation continues. Entire families have died from stomach cancer, lung cancer, thyroid cancer, leukemia, even years later.7,8
I am in no way trying to justify the terrible war crimes that the Japanese military committed. I am not ignoring or justifying the Rape of Nanking, Unit 731, or any of the horrific atrocities for which Japanese leaders are responsible and for which they have never officially apologized. But what also pains me is the hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians that suffered horrific pain and death from the genocide that the United States committed. We must remember that the Japanese government was corrupt, not the people. Leaders wage wars with each other, yet only civilians suffer from the effects.
But people still blame the Japanese for the horrors of WWII today. They say unimaginable things. I see it online all the time. On Instagram posts with the news that Oppenheimer was not being shown in Japan, you need only scroll through a few comments to see the bigotry.
“Hiroshima and Nagasaki––we could do it again.”
“F*** Japan.”
“What happened in Hiroshima was what they deserved.”
On Instagram posts that remember the anniversary of the bombing, you’ll see similar comments.
“Japan acting like the victim is f***ing hilarious to me.”
“Cry about it, Japan.”
To me, Oppenheimer winning the Academy Award for Best Picture is a regression in our move toward accurate representation of minoritized groups. It shows that the media has too strong an influence on our opinions of the world and that education in this country is failing us. It is further evidence that truth doesn’t always prevail. The truth is that we are closer to nuclear war today than we were when during the Cold War. There are war crimes being committed right now in Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan, among other places. Should members of the Church not be speaking up about these atrocities? About the erasure of victims’ voices? Any war is a horrifying violation of everything the Lord Jesus Christ stands for and teaches, and there are things that we could be doing now to call for peace and help our brothers and sisters around the world. We can sign petitions that call for ceasefires, we can write letters to our local leaders, and we can share information about the threat of nuclear war. We can make a point to educate ourselves on the complex histories of our countries and ancestors. We can share our knowledge with people we know. We can support the making of films that promote the voices of those so often underrepresented. Prodigal aims to “highlight underrepresented voices,” and members of our community need to start doing the same.