Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki

A sermon preached by the Rev. Roger Scott Powers at Light Street Presbyterian Church in Baltimore, on Sunday, August 9, 2009

II Samuel 18:5-9, 15, 31-33; Psalm 130

The scripture reading from II Samuel tells of a massive battle that occurred thousands of years ago. It "spread over the face of all the country" and resulted in the slaughter of 20,000 men. The passage ends with a father, King David, lamenting the death of his son: "O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!"

War has changed a great deal since then. It used to be that soldiers engaged in hand-to-hand combat on the battlefield. Today, in a nuclear age, an entire city can be obliterated with the push of a button. What hasn't changed is the enormous human cost of war. In the end, fathers and mothers are left grieving over the death of their sons and daughters, husbands mourn the death of their wives, and wives the death of their husbands, children cry for parents who never come home again, and the injured who survive remain physically and emotionally scarred for life.

This week, all around the world, people have been commemorating the 64th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was on August 6, 1945, at 8:15 a.m., that our country dropped the first atomic bomb over Hiroshima, Japan. Some 70,000 people were killed instantly. Another 70,000 would die by the end of the year from burns, radiation, and related disease.

And 64 years ago today, on August 9, 1945, at 11:02 a.m., our country dropped a second atomic bomb over Nagasaki, Japan. An estimated 80,000 people died by the end of 1945 as a result of that explosion.

The U.S. military documented the human effects of the atomic bombings on film, but that film was classified, buried in the national archives for thirty years. The only pictures Americans were shown were black and white photos of blasted buildings or mushroom clouds. It was not until the late 1970s after the documentary film footage had been declassified, that Americans were able to see what Hiroshima and Nagasaki looked like after the atomic bombings.

I was in college at the time, and some of the documentary film footage was shown at a Campus Conference on Religion sponsored by the campus ministries at our school. The haunting images I saw that night are ingrained in my memory. The human silhouettes left behind on walls -- shadows of people who had been vaporized by the atomic blast. The hospitals filled with radiation victims, severely burned and scarred. The total destruction within a mile of ground zero -- city block after city block completely leveled.

Seeing that film was a life-changing experience for me. I was horrified and indignant that such a thing could have happened -- not just once but twice -- and that my own country bore the responsibility. I thought to myself, "this can never be allowed to happen again!" I became determined to do whatever I could to prevent nuclear weapons from ever being used again. That, in a nutshell, is how I became a peace activist.

I spent much of my time during and after college working with the movement to halt and reverse the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1978, the Riverside Church in New York City started its Disarmament Program. In 1980, our own denomination, the Presbyterian Church (USA), started its Peacemaking Program. And in 1982, nearly a million people marched in New York City calling on the U.S. and the Soviet Union to "adopt a mutual freeze on the testing, production, and deployment of nuclear weapons and [their delivery systems]." It was that kind of public pressure that eventually led the Reagan administration to enter into negotiations with the Soviet Union to begin to reduce the stockpiles of nuclear weapons held by our two countries.

Since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the subsequent end of the Cold War, we became complacent about nuclear weapons, believing that the nuclear threat had receded. But in recent years, there has been a renewed concern about the threat posed by nuclear proliferation and the prospect of nuclear terrorism. The number of countries with nuclear weapons has continued to row. In addition to the first five nuclear powers (the U.S., Russia, the United Kingdom, France, and China), South Asian rivals India and Pakistan both now have nuclear arsenals. North Korea has been in the news a lot lately as the newest nuclear power. Israel is thought to have nuclear weapons, although it has never been confirmed, and Iran is believed to be developing the capacity to build a nuclear weapon. The more countries that have nuclear weapons, the more dangerous the world becomes. And keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists becomes even more challenging.

For a long time now the U.S. and other nuclear powers have tried to keep other countries from acquiring nuclear weapons while retaining nuclear arsenals of their own. But it hasn't worked. It's an arrogant double standard that is unpersuasive. The Rev. William Sloane Coffin once put it this way: "Just as a fat person cannot talk persuasively to a skinny one about the virtues of not overeating, so nuclear powers cannot convince nonnuclear ones to renounce access to nuclear weapons -- not until the nuclear powers themselves start seriously to disarm. Either they disarm or they must face the fact that any nation in the world that wants nuclear weapons eventually will get them. Either the world becomes nuclear free, or the whole planet becomes a nuclear porcupine."

Inspired by Rev. Coffin's vision, four years ago, on the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, people of faith from a variety of religious traditions came together to form a new group called Faithful Security -- the National Religious Partnership on the Nuclear Weapons Danger. Faithful Security is a multifaith coalition dedicated to raising the voice of U.S. religious communities toward a world free of nuclear weapons.

There is new energy behind the movement to abolish nuclear weapons. For example, a movement of U.S. Christians has just come together called The Two Futures Project. They "believe that we face two futures and one choice: a world without nuclear weapons or a world ruined by them." They "support the multilateral, global, irreversible, and verifiable elimination of nuclear weapons, as a biblically-grounded mandate and as a contemporary security imperative."

And young Christian evangelicals who once wore bracelets that had the initials WWJD, which stood for What Would Jesus Do? now wear t-shirts with the intials WWJB, which stands for Who Would Jesus Bomb? Indeed! The questions leads us to ponder just how far we have strayed from the teachings of Jesus.

Fortunately, the possibility of creating a world without nuclear weapons is no longer just the vision of peace activists and starry-eyed idealists. The idea is gaining support from some unlikely places. Former secretaries of state George Schultz, and Henry Kissinger, former secretary of defense William Perry, and former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee San Nunn have been calling for the United States to lead a global campaign to eventually rid the world of nuclear weapons. An additional 14 former secretaries of state and defense and national security advisers have endorsed their call. And it seems that President Obama is following their lead. In Prague in April, he spoke of "America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons." He cautioned that this goal would not be reached quickly -- maybe not even in his lifetime. But he set a course that, with patience and persistence, could eventually bring us to the day when nuclear weapons will finally be abolished.

The Psalmist writes, "O Israel, hope in the Lord! For with the Lord there is steadfast love, and with him is great power to redeem. It is [the Lord] who will redeem Israel from all its iniquities."

If God can redeem ancient Israel from all its iniquities, surely God can do the same for us. The United Stats has more nuclear weapons than any other nation. We invented nuclear weapons, and we are the only country to have ever used them. Historians have debated for decades whether or not it was necessary for the U.S. to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to force Japan to surrender and bring an end to the Second World War. But wherever we come down on that question, surely we can agree that the United States bears more responsibility than any other nation for bringing an end to the nuclear threat. We led the world into the nuclear age. We have a moral responsibility to lead the world out of it.

O America, hope in the Lord! For with the Lord there is steadfast love, and with her is great power to redeem. It is the Lord who will redeem America from all its iniquities.

But if the soul of America is to be redeemed, it will take repentance. We can no longer rely on nuclear weapons for our security. They are false gods. By placing our faith in them, we have actually become less secure. They have made the world a more dangerous place. So, we must turn away from our nuclear idolatry. We must lead the world away from the false security of nuclear weaponry and toward a nuclear-free future. We must ensure that what happened to the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 64 years ago will never happen to another city again. Only then will we find redemption.

May it be so. Amen.