Max McCoy

Posted August 7, 2025

 

It was such a peaceful morning that Yoshito Matsushige could scarcely believe it was wartime.

 

Matsushige, a 32-year-old newspaper photographer who had been up most of the night before covering air raid warnings, woke from a brief nap at army headquarters in time to see the sun rise over Hiroshima.

 

It was Monday, Aug. 6, 1945.

 

Now we know Matsushige was witnessing the last sunrise of the age before humankind had developed a weapon powerful enough to annihilate itself — and had demonstrated a willingness to use it.

 

There had been just one other explosion of a nuclear bomb, a test shot July 16 of a plutonium implosion weapon at the Trinity Site in southern New Mexico. The resulting fireball had fused the sand of the desert floor into a kind of glass later named Trinitite. On the morning of Monday, Aug. 6, another atomic bomb — a uranium gun-type device — was bound for Hiroshima.

 

Wednesday marked the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, a grim milestone that has me pondering the nature of time, memory and hope. It’s been slightly more than an average human lifetime since the bomb devastated Hiroshima, and those who are still around to recount the unthinkable are increasingly few. Once Hiroshima and Nagasaki fade from living memory, how will its warning be passed to future generations?

 

At 8:15 a.m. on Aug. 6, an American B-29 named the Enola Gay, after the pilot’s mother, released a 12-kiloton atomic bomb over the city. The aircraft was flying six miles up. The aim point was a T-shaped bridge in the center of the city. The bomb fell for 43 seconds and then detonated at 1,968 feet.

 

If we are not to fall into the great silence, we must learn to do a better job of passing on the lessons of the past.

 

What happened next took only milliseconds.

 

The temperature on the ground reached 7,000 degrees Fahrenheit, vaporizing humans near the epicenter and leaving only their shadows behind. A 1,000-mph blast wave spread from the epicenter, destroying two-thirds of the city’s homes and buildings and contributing to a massive firestorm. A dark mushroom cloud rose over Hiroshima, carrying deadly radioactive fallout.

 

Matsushige had left army headquarters and returned to his home, about a mile and a half from the target bridge, where he was sitting shirtless in the August heat eating a meager breakfast of rice.

 

“There is an explosive called magnesium that is used for photographic (lighting) and everything went white as if that magnesium had been fired,” Matsushige told me through an interpreter in 1986, when I was a young reporter in Japan on a grant project to interview those who had experienced the bomb. “It seemed the light was an electrical short, or spark. So I was about to stand up and try to switch off the light, … and then came the blast.”

 

The force lifted Matsushige from his feet and slammed him into a far wall. He was covered in debris and broken glass, and his bare chest was bleeding, although he wasn’t badly hurt. He and his wife ran outside and hid in a sweet potato field for 40 minutes in the dirty brown gloom of ash and dust. Then Matsushige put on his uniform, retrieved his Mamiya camera from the rubble of his home and two rolls of film, and set out for newspaper office in the heart of the city.

 

Matsushige was a photojournalist but like most everyone else in Japan had also been pressed into military service. He worked for both the city newspaper and military headquarters, wearing a uniform with no rank insignia. Civilian photography was prohibited.

 

When he was about a kilometer, or six-tenths of a mile, from the center of the city, he had to turn back because the fire was too intense. He made his way to the Miyuki Bridge. The bridge was a landmark in a city known for its bridges and river, but this morning it was swarmed by thousands of wounded and dying civilians.

 

In 1986, I stood with Matsushige on the Miyuki Bridge and he told me what he had seen 41 years earlier. It was one of the last times the photographer, then in his early 70s, would visit the bridge, which was closed and about to be demolished to make way for a new structure. My interview with Matsushige originally appeared in my newspaper, the Pittsburg (Kansas) Morning Sun, which had sponsored my application for the Akiba Project travel grant to interview the aging hibakusha, a Japanese term translated as those who had received or been exposed to the bomb. In 2021 I wrote about my memories of that assignment for the Reflector.

 

Matsushige told me in 1986 that he had yet to take a single photograph on his grim trek into the city but here, at the bridge, he readied his Mamiya. Many of those on the bridge were junior high school students. Unlike elementary school children, most of whom had been evacuated to relatives and others in the hills around the city, the junior high students had been kept in the city to clear fire lines or to work in the ammunition factories. The victims on the bridge looked as if their clothes were hanging from their bodies, but they weren’t trailing fabric, it was tattered pieces of their own skin.

 

“I thought that I would take a photo of (the scene on the bridge), so I checked the camera in my hands,” Matsushige said. “When I saw this tragic scene, I was unable to push the shutter button. Among these people, there was a person holding a child. She was crying the name of the baby, and the baby probably was dead. The mother was saying, ‘Please open your eyes, please open your eyes.’”

 

It took Matsushige more than a quarter of an hour to make a photo.

 

“I felt as if the eyes of these people were piercing me,” he said. “These people had black faces because of the burns. It was such cruelty. I couldn’t stop my tears as I tried to take that second picture, and I remember that the viewfinder of my camera was blurred because of the tears.”

 

He returned home but set out again that afternoon.

 

He attempted to go to the newspaper office again but found it ablaze. He passed Hiroshima University, where he saw corpses at the bottom of a swimming pool that had been nearly emptied by the heat. The deeper he went into the city, the greater the destruction.

 

“People were under collapsed buildings and utility poles and were buried alive,” he said. “Among (the corpses) there were some mothers with children. I was totally numb. I didn’t feel anything, didn’t feel any heat or pain.”

 

He found a streetcar filled with corpses.

 

“All their clothes were burnt off,” he said. “I thought about taking a picture, I put my hands on my camera at one time, but since all these dead people were naked, I felt (ashamed) to take such a photo.”

 

Hours later he found himself back at the Miyuki Bridge, where he took a photograph of an injured policeman writing out relief certificates for food rations. The photo of the policeman was the last Matsushige would take that day. He had carried enough film for 24 exposures but ended up making only five. Two of the photos were at his home, two on the bridge, and one at an intersection near the bridge.

 

Matsushige took some of the hardtack biscuits next to the policeman’s station for his and his wife’s dinner. After it was dark, he developed the film in trays in the kitchen sink and washed the negatives in a nearby creek. He hung the strip of film in a tree to dry. The photos weren’t published in the Hiroshima newspaper until the next year. They didn’t appear in the United States until Life magazine published them in 1952.

 

The death toll at Hiroshima was horrific. Estimates vary widely, but at least 70,000 died from the bombing. Three days later, on Aug. 9, a plutonium bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, killing another 40,000. These are conservative estimates, however, and the actual number might be double for each city.

When I went to Japan to interview Matsushige and the other hibakusha in 1986, it was the height of the Cold War. There were 70,374 nuclear warheads deployed or in stockpiles around the world, according the Federation of American Scientists, an all-time high. Of those, all but a few thousand belonged to the United States and the Soviet Union. The Doomsday Clock, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist’s graphic representation of how close we were to nuclear annihilation, was at six minutes to midnight.

Now the Doomsday Clock is at 89 seconds.

There are fewer nuclear weapons — about 12,000, according to the FAS — but there are hot wars around the world, tensions are high, and the Doomsday Clock now takes into account other existential risks.

“We now move the Doomsday Clock from 90 seconds to 89 seconds to midnight — the closest it has ever been to catastrophe,” the Bulletin said in a January 2025 statement. “Our fervent hope is that leaders will recognize the threats posed by nuclear weapons, climate change, and the potential misuse of biological science and a variety of emerging technologies.”

The Bulletin cited emerging and re-emerging disease and the military use of artificial intelligence as concerning. It also said threat of nuclear war had been exacerbated by various conflicts.

“The war in Ukraine, now in its third year, looms over the world,” it said. “The conflict could become nuclear at any moment because of a rash decision or through accident or miscalculation. Conflict in the Middle East threatens to spiral out of control in a wider war without warning.”

The 10 or so countries that possess nuclear weapons are increasing the size and the role of their arsenals, the Bulletin said, and the nuclear arms control treaty process is collapsing.

We seem hellbent on our own destruction.

In my hand is a relic of the birth of the nuclear age, a bit of Trinitite that my wife, Kim, bought at a rock shop in New Mexico near Alamogordo. Yes, it’s legal to possess because it was gathered from the site decades ago, and no, it’s no longer dangerously radioactive. Why did she want it? Because she gathers information of all kinds — books, objects, experiences — that will help her understand the beauty and darkness of the world. The Trinitite sample cost a few bucks and is only mildly radioactive. It’s about the size of a peanut, is greenish black, and weighs about the same as the albatross in the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner.

Trinitite is among the artifacts that were to be included in the Library of the Great Silence, a catalog of objects representing transitions and periods of existential threat. The project was part of the SETI Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to the search for intelligent life beyond earth. The library is a response, in part, to the Fermi Paradox. Posed by physicist Enrico Fermi, the paradox asks why, given how vast and old the universe is, we haven’t found evidence of other communicative technological civilizations?

I won’t bore you with the math behind the Drake Equation, which seeks to estimate how many intelligent worlds there might be out there, except to cite the most important variable, L. That stands for the average lifespan of technological civilizations. One explanation for the great silence is that civilizations have a tendency to destroy themselves. Nobody knows what L might be, because we have a lack of observable data, but our current estimate is at least 80 years.

If we are not to fall into the great silence, we must learn to do a better job of passing on the lessons of the past. Part of that is honoring the testimony of those who have gone before, such as Yoshito Matsushige.

Matsushige died in 2005, at the age of 92, but his words and his pictures live on. They were given to me in 1986, and now I share them with you.

The time the bomb detonated will be observed with a moment of silence at 8:15 a.m. Wednesday in Hiroshima. That’s 6:15 p.m. Tuesday for most of Kansas, because of the 14-hour time difference.

Honoring the dead is proper.

But too many of us who yearn for peace content ourselves with prayer and visualization. This may be mentally healthy and personally satisfying, but it’s not enough to turn policy or change minds. The pursuit of peace is an active one, requiring a knowledge of the past combined with a willingness to engage the future.

It’s 89 seconds to midnight.

Let’s raise some L.

 

Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. McCoy has also written more than 20 books, the most recent of which is “Elevations: A Personal Exploration of the Arkansas River,” named a Kansas Notable Book by the state library. “Elevations” also won the National Outdoor Book Award, in the history/biography category. This commentary is republished from  Kansas Reflector under a Creative Commons license.