57 years ago this week, on August 9th, 1945, the second of the only 2 atomic bombs ever used as an instrument of aggressive war (and against essentially defenseless civilian populations, at that) was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan by an all-Christian bomb crew. The well-trained American soldiers were only "doing their job" and they did it well.

It had been 3 days since the first bomb, a uranium bomb, had decimated Hiroshima, with chaos and confusion in Tokyo, where the fascist military government and the Emperor had been searching for months for a way to honorably end the war. (The only obstacle to surrender had been the United States' insistence on unconditional surrender, which meant that the Emperor Hirohito, whom the Japanese regarded as a deity, would be removed from his figurehead position in Japan, an intolerable demand for the Japanese.)

The Russian army was advancing across Manchuria with the stated aim of entering the war against Japan on August 8, so there were extra incentives to end the war quickly. The US did not want to divide any spoils or share power after Japan was defeated.

The US bomber command had for many weeks spared Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Kokura from the conventional bombing that had leveled and burned 60+ other major Japanese cities during the first half of 1945. One reason for targeting relatively unbombed cities was scientific: to see what would happen to intact buildings, and their living creatures, when atomic weapons were exploded over them.

Early in the morning of August 9, 1945, a B-29 Superfortress called Bock's Car, took off from Tinian Island, with the prayers and blessings of its Lutheran and Catholic chaplains, and headed for Kokura, the primary target (its plutonium bomb was code-named "Fat Man," after Winston Churchill). The only field test of a nuclear weapon, blasphemously named "Trinity," had occurred just three weeks earlier, on July 16, 1945 at Alamogordo, New Mexico. The molten lavarock that resulted, still found at the site today, is called trinitite.

With instructions to only drop the bomb on visual sighting, Bock's Car arrived at Kokura, which was clouded-over. So, after circling three times looking for a break in the clouds and using up a tremendous amount of valuable fuel in the process, it headed for its secondary target, Nagasaki.

Nagasaki is famous in the history of Japanese Christianity. Not only was it the site of the largest Christian church in the Orient, St. Mary's Cathedral, but it also had the largest concentration of baptized Christians in all of Japan. It was the city where the legendary Jesuit missionary, Francis Xavier, established a mission church in 1549, a Christian community which thrived and multiplied for several generations until, in the early 1600s, it became the target of brutal Japanese Imperial persecutions. Within 50 years of Xaviar's mission was planted, it was a capital crime to be a Christian. The Japanese Christians who refused to recant their beliefs suffered ostracism, horrific torture and even crucifixions similar to the Roman persecutions in the first three centuries of Christianity. After the reign of terror was over, it appeared to all observers that Christianity had been stamped out.

However, 250 years later, in the 1850s, after the coercive gunboat diplomacy of Commodore Perry forced open an offshore island for American trade purposes, it was discovered that there were still thousands of baptized Christians in Nagasaki, living their faith in a catacomb existence, completely unknown to the government which immediately started another purge. But because of international pressure, the persecutions were soon stopped, and Nagasaki Christianity came up from the underground. And by 1917, with no help from the government, the Japanese Christian community had organized and, after decades of work, built the massive St. Mary's Cathedral, in the Urakami River Valley district.

Now it turned out, in the mystery of good and evil, that St. Mary's was one of the landmarks that the Bock's Car bombardier had been briefed on, and, looking through his bomb site over Nagasaki that day, he identified the cathedral, ordered the drop, and, at 11:02 am, Nagasaki Christianity was carbonized, then vaporized, in a scorching fireball. And so the persecuted, vibrant, faithful center of Japanese Christianity became ground zero, and what Japanese Imperialism couldn't do in 200 years of persecution, American Christians did in 9 nanoseconds; the entire worshipping community of Nagasaki was wiped out.

The above true (and unwelcome) story should stimulate discussion among those who claim to be disciples of Jesus. The Catholic chaplain for the 509th Composite Group (the 1500 man Army Air Force group whose only job was delivering the atomic bombs) was Father George Zabelka, who several decades later saw his grave theological error in religiously legitimatizing the mass slaughter that is modern war. He finally recognized that the enemies of a nation were not the enemies of God, but rather children of God whom God loved, and whom the followers of Jesus should also love. Fr. Zabelka's conversion led him to devote the remaining decades of his life speaking out against violence in any form, especially the violence of militarism. The Lutheran chaplain, William Downey, in his counseling of soldiers who were troubled by the immorality of "the bomb," later denounced all killing, whether by a single bullet or by a weapon of mass destruction.

In Daniel Hallock's important book, "Hell, Healing and Resistance" the author talks about a 1997 Buddhist retreat led by Thich Nhat Hanh that attempted to deal with the hellish post-war existence of combat-traumatized Vietnam War veterans. Hallock commented, "clearly, Buddhism offers something that cannot be found in institutional Christianity. But then why should veterans embrace a religion that has blessed the wars that ruined their souls? It is no wonder they turn to a gentle Buddhist monk to hear what are, in large part, the truths of Christ."

As a lifelong Christian, that comment stung me, but it was the sting of a very painful truth. And as a physician who deals with psychologically traumatized patients all too often, I know that it is violence, in its myriad of forms, that bruises the human psyche and soul, and that that trauma is deadly and highly contagious and spreads through the families and progeny of the trauma victims.

One of the most difficult "mental illnesses" to heal is combat-induced posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In its most severe form it is virtually incurable. It is also a well known fact that whereas most Vietnam War recruits came from churches where they actively practiced their faith, if they came home significantly traumatized by the war, the percentage returning to the faith community approached zero.

This is a serious spiritual problem for any church that, either actively or by its silence on issues of militarism, glorifies war or fails to thoroughly inform its youth about what Jesus and the earliest form of Christianity taught about war and killing: that both were forbidden.

If a worshipping community fails to at least fully inform its confirmands about the gruesome realities of the warzone before they are forced to register for potential conscription into the military at age 18, it invites the condemnation that Jesus warned about in Matthew 18:5-6: "And whoever welcomes a little child like this in my name welcomes me. But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea."

The purpose of this essay is to stimulate open and honest discussion (at least among the followers of Jesus) about the ethics of killing by government, not from the perspective of national security ethics, not from the perspective of military ethics (an oxymoron, according to many critical thinkers), not from the perspective of (the pre-Christian) eye-for-an-eye retaliation, but from the perspective of the Sermon on the Mount, the core ethical teachings of the founder.

Out of that discussion, if any are willing to engage in it, should come answers to those horrible realities that seem to immobilize decent Bible-believing Christians everywhere: Why are some of us willing to commit (or support or pay for others to commit) homicidal violence against other fellow children of a loving, merciful, forgiving God, the God whom Jesus clearly calls us to imitate? And what can we do, starting now, to prevent the next war, the next epidemic of combat-induced posttraumatic stress disorders, the next Mylai massacre, the next Auschwitz, the next Dresden, the next El Mozote, the next Rwanda, the next Jonestown, the next black church bombing, the next Columbine, the next execution of an innocent death row inmate or the next Nagasaki?

© August 9, 2001, Gary G. Kohls, MD, 1306 E.8th St., Duluth, MN 55805 Ph/fax (218) 728-9756, email: gkohls@cpinternet.com, Midwest Coordinator for Every Church A Peace Church (http://www.ecapc.org).

Every August, following the sorrowful observances of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings, there is the inevitable knee-jerk nationalistic pro-bombing response that ridicules the "bleeding heart liberals" and "peaceniks" and other idealists who are repeatedly demeaned by almost every variety of conservative. The critics are obviously at the opposite end of the theological and political spectrum from the peacemakers, but they deserve a reply. Recognizing the reality that attacks are easy to make in 250 words or less, and rational, historically accurate and documentable responses are impossible to do in less than 700, I submit the following:

It is important to recognize, first of all, that many of the annual world-wide August 6 and 9 observances originate within faith-based Christian peacemaker communities, who happen to believe, with the founder and His earliest disciples, that killing is outside the mind of Christ, and is therefore forbidden to those who wish to follow him. Murder, whether paid for by one's taxes or whether illegal or legal (i.e. church- or state-sanctioned), was an excommunicable offence in early Christianity. Christians could not be killers, even of those brutal Roman soldiers, and simultaneously be part of the body of Christ. The modern-day critics of Christian nonviolence who don't know what Jesus said and did about the matter of homicide and violence can't be expected to regard Nagasaki as an atrocity. Every human has the freedom to reject Jesus' teachings on the matter, except, it seems to me, for thoughtful and faithful Christians.

Secondly, the commemorations on August 6 and 9 are also for those many WWII-era Allied soldiers and airmen, imprisoned in various major Japanese cities, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki, who were incineratedby "friendly fire"in the massive bombing, both nuclear and conventional, and whose existence was known by bomber command before the bombing runs were authorized.

Thirdly, silence gives consent. When the overwhelming military atrocities that have occurred with breath-taking regularity in all wars, by all sides, are censored for whatever reasons, it is guaranteed that future atrocities will occur. Witness the hundreds of My Lai-type massacres and other atrocities that were covered up during the Vietnam war (not to mention the multitudes of No Gun Ri-type massacres in the Korean conflict) and the horrific suicidality, depression, hostility and criminality that exists among previously gung-ho soldiers. Soldiers are not informed ahead of time of the satanic quality of war zones, but their suffering continues on forever in the near-dead souls in PTSD wards all over the VA system. The psychological trauma rarely heals unless victims are willing to talk about it. And future psychological casualties are certain to occur again unless the bystanders of war, the victims of basic training, the family members of the soldier-victims, the therapists and those who have experienced combat-induced mental illnesses are given permission to speak the truth.

Fourthly, the mentality that says that the deaths and sufferings of hundreds of thousands is justified as long as "my father" or "my grandfather" did not have to go into battle is indefensible by Christian ethical standards and very worrisome in non-Christian ethical systems. Innumerable fascist military dictators and a bunch of kings, as well as many communist and capitalist leaders throughout history have justified their preemptive strikes against real and imagined enemies for similar reasons and innocent civilians, especially children, are disproportionately the victims. The deaths in modern war are 90% innocent non-combatants: women, children and the elderly. In WWI civilian deaths were 10% and in WWII, 50%.

We Americans, who are notorious when it comes to skepticism for our government's propaganda machine, seem to have swallowed whole the wartime propaganda theory that American ground troops would have suffered a million casualties in an invasion of mainland Japan. The invasion, scheduled for no sooner than November 1945, was partly a contingency plan and partly disinformation for enemy consumption; most open-minded historians doubt that an invasion would have been necessary even without the Nagasaki bomb. Japan was defeated, starving, out of fuel and ammunition (unless one counts bamboo sticks) many weeks before the incineration of Nagasaki. Japan had been looking for ways to surrender with honor -- and the Truman Administration knew it! The irrational desire for merciless retribution, even to the point of insisting on the abdication of its figure-head emperor-god Hirohito, made the war department insist on unconditional surrender, a clear violation of both the Just War and Nuremburg Principles.

A number of other points must be considered before one judges whether or not the bombings were justified and whether compassion for and remembrance of the suffering of "undeserving" enemies should be ridiculed:

1) The Manhattan Project, which consumed over $2,000,000,000 1940s dollars to produce just 3 atomic bombs, had unstoppable momentum. The Truman administration and the aggressive militarists and politicos in charge would have lost face if the bombs had not been used. Many of the scientists, some of whom understood that Nazi Germany was the original intended target, condemned the use of the bombs on any civilian targets. Dwight Eisenhower, Admiral William Leahy and military analyst Hanson Baldwin, among many other moral thinkers at the time, thought that the bombings were not only unnecessary, but the ultimate in shameful, barbaric military behavior.

2) Only 3% of the population of Nagasaki were soldiers. The Mitsubishi industrial complex was limping along with essentially no raw materialsnor food or fuel because of the effective Allied sea blockade which had already brought Japan to its knees.

3) Russia had proclaimed its intent to declare war against Japan 90 days after V-E Day (August 8) and was already moving across Manchuria. Since America didn't want to share the spoils of victory with potential future enemies, the bombings became an "expedient "way to force Japan's surrender more quickly and at the same time send the first "message" of the Cold War to Russia's Stalinist totalitarianism.

4) Whereas we condemn the Israeli Defense Forces for promising to kill 20 Palestinians for every Israeli killed, and whereas we condemned Nazi Germany for promising to kill 50 anti-fascist resisters, prisoners of war or civilians for every German soldier assassinated, we refuse to consider the fact that the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was justified in the minds of many Americans as justified retaliation for the Japanese military's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, a ratio of 120 to 1! (There were 2500 American soldiers killed at Pearl Harbor, with no civilians either targeted or killed. 300,000 Japanese, almost all of whom were innocent, defenseless civilians, most of whom were ignorant of the realities of the war or opposed to it, were burned, evaporated, carbonized, scalded to death or fatally irradiated in the two cities, with hundreds of thousands more to suffer and die in the weeks and decades to come.)

5) It was European Christians who introduced gunpowder and conventional weapons of mass destruction to Japan in the 16th century, part of the missionary effort which was closely linked to the attempts to exploit Japan by Portuguese and Spanish merchants. What goes around, comes around.

6) Nagasaki was the center and the original site of Japanese Christianity. Its massive cathedral was ground zero on August 9, 1945, 300+ years after Christianity was declared an outlaw religion in Japan, punishable by death. The Japanese realized that European Capitalism ("under the robes" of Christian missionaries) was trying to do to Japan what it had done to the Americas, colonize, exploit and annihilate the indigenous way of life -- hence the persecution.

7) Original Nagasaki Christianity had been severely persecuted, with thousands of martyrs, and it was thought to have been extinguished. However, it survived in a catacomb existence for 200 years, unbeknownst to the Japanese Imperial government, until it was uncovered in the 1850s.

8) The massive Urakami Cathedral was easily identifiable from 31,000 feet up and was the aiming point for the bombardier on Bock's Car, the B-29 Superfortress whose all-Christian bomb crew so heroically performed its mission that day. What the Japanese government couldn't do in 200 years of persecution, American Christians did to Nagasaki Christians: it annihilated it -- in 9 nanoseconds!

The lessons of history are difficult to learn -- and its propaganda difficult to unlearn -- especially when one's patriotic spirit yearns to believe one's nation's myths. Those myths are particularly strong in times of war, when enemies must be quickly and efficiently demonized and dehumanized, so soldiers can more easily be taught to fear, hate and reflexively kill any and all who are fingered as enemies of the state. And when professed Christians perpetrate un-Christ-like vengeance on civilians, are we only pawns in the militarist's game and the mass slaughter we call war? More importantly, are those of us who call ourselves Christians also betrayers of the God of love and mercy and forgiveness and reconciliation?

© Gary G. Kohls, MD, 1306 E.8th St., Duluth, MN 55805 Ph/fax (218) 728-9756, email: gkohls@cpinternet.com, Midwest Coordinator for Every Church A Peace Church (http://www.ecapc.org).

See an article on Truman's decision to drop the bomb at http://www.isreview.org/issues/13/Hiroshima-Nagasaki.shtml.