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By Root 1246 0

change in thinking about human targets in war. It is not easy to find nuclear weapons, but in a happier world warheads can be detected, counted, and even disassembled. The part of the human brain that assists in making moral choices is far more difficult of access. The Japanese butchered Chinese civilians with bayonets; the Americans killed Japanese with non-nuclear weapons and without discrimination, since all Japanese were said to be alike in their inhumaness (the Americans depicted them as rats and roaches). The Nazis exterminated millions of unresisting people during the 1930s and 1940s. The Americans, and especially the British, bombed German cities: in February 1945 Arthur Harris, head of Britain’s Bomber Command, said, ‘I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier.’ Much of the world refuses to accept this view. Article 51 of the 1977 protocol to the Geneva Conventions declares that civilians ‘shall enjoy general protection against dangers arising from military operations’, including ‘indiscriminate’ attacks such as those ‘expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated’. Thirty years later, among the nations that have not yet ratified the protocol are the nuclear nations Pakistan, Israel, and the United States, and the nuclear hopeful Iran. Neither, of course, has Al Qaeda announced plans for a signing ceremony.

Who is victimized by weapons ought to be our main concern. And yet, in the end, despite the hundreds of thousands of innocents killed by ‘conventional’ means during the twentieth century, we always return to Hiroshima, banal in its similarity to other sites of atrocity, appalling in its difference from them. One bomb, which killed not only by blast and flame but insidiously, from the inside of the body out, by radiation. The atomic bomb was new, and its use made Hiroshima special forever. Hiroshima today is a thriving and attractive city of over a million people. It has been massively rebuilt since 1945. An arcaded shopping mall is perpetually crowded with visitors; the best restaurants are jammed; a major league baseball team, the Hiroshima Carp, plays in a downtown stadium (though is rarely very good). There is an art museum featuring some French Impressionist painting. In 2004 Hiroshima’s central wholesale market sold 33 billion yen worth of vegetables and about 18 billion yen of fruit. Shopkeepers and hoteliers are friendly and Hiroshimans are in general more helpful than Japanese in larger cities. In the summer of 2006 a bus driver left his bus and ran three blocks in the heat to catch an American visitor, to whom he was afraid he had given wrong directions. In short, Hiroshima is a remarkably nice place to spend a few days.

It is also a place that promotes peace. There is a yearly ceremony on 6 August in which the mayor makes a declaration of peace and the victims of the bomb are remembered. The vortex of peace activity in the city is the Peace Memorial Museum, on the lush grounds of the Peace Memorial Park, just where the (Ota River splits in two and within yards of ground zero. The skeletal dome of the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion hall rises just across the river from the park. In the northwest part of the park, near a statue of Kannon, the Goddess of Peace, carefully folded paper cranes hang suspended from wires, gifts from thousands of children around the world and given in the memory of Sadako, the Hiroshiman girl who made cranes until the day she died of radiation poisoning. There is a Peace Clock, a Peace Fountain, a Peace Bell, and a monument to the Koreans who died in the bombing, built in 1970 and moved into the park, following some diplomatic wrangling, in 1999. Within the park is the Peace Memorial Museum, with a main building and an east wing. Its exhibitions chronicle the history of Hiroshima, including its role as a military center