Last month, I spent nine intense days inside the Occupied Palestine Territories, as a member of a global inter-faith delegation made up of Americans and British of Christian and Jewish faiths, Indian Hindus and a Burmese Buddhist. During our day trip from Jerusalem to Kerem Shalom Cross into Southern Gaza near the Israeli Egyptian border, we heard loud explosions from inside the besieged strip and saw, from less than a kilometre away, large plumes of smoke billowing up in tornado-storm shapes.
So, I was naturally heartened when Toshiyuki Mimaki, the head of the atomic bomb survivors’ group Nihon Hidankyo drew the world’s attention by expressing survivors’ concerns – Gaza’s “children are bleeding out so much, it reminds me of Japan eighty years ago.”
Mimaki drew this parallel at the group’s press conference on the occasion of the group winning the 2024 Nobel peace prize, held in Tokyo on October 11.
Thousands of atomic bomb strike victims who were not vaporised instantaneously – the survivors or hibaku in Japanese – like Nihon Hidankyo leader Mimaki, have had to live with the impact of atomic radiation.
This touched a raw nerve in the genocidaires, as evidenced by the Israeli ambassador to Japan, Gilad Cohen, lashing out about the comparison of the American atomic bombings to Gaza.
But the Norwegian Nobel Peace Committee’s choice for the prize resonated with millions of peace-loving people worldwide. For millions of people are increasingly worried about the risks of the World War III, and the corresponding threat of the use of nuclear weapons, in light of the several ongoing cold and hot regional wars involving global powers like the US, Russia and China, who are armed with thousands of nuclear warheads.
In Asia, this concern is also very real, in light of the rising military tensions in the Far East, in the Korean Peninsula, over Taiwan Straits, and in the South China Sea.
That said, the Committee’s narrow focus on the hitherto exceptionally rare choice of nuclear weapons – used once in 80 years – must be weighed against the exponential increase in conventional weapons’ destructive power since the two American bombs over Hiroshima and Nakasaki.
Free admission ticket and the glossy brochure at the Hiroshima Memorial Peace Park. The clock at the large sculpture is set at 08:15 hours to memorialise the time when the first US atomic bomb detonated at the altitude of 2,000 ft above the busy city centre on August 6, 1945. Photo: Maung Zarni, both materials in his private research collection, January 2016.
Some years ago, visiting Kyoto for an academic seminar on genocides and other organised violence, including my own native Myanmar’s genocide of the Rohingya, I took the time to travel to Hiroshima in order to pay my respect to the atomic bomb victims immortalised at the shrine at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. I learned from the museum’s audiovisual exhibits about the horrors of the first atomic bomb dropped by the United States on this industrial city of 350,000 residents, specifically the city centre, at 8.15 am – rush hour at that – on August 6, 1945.
A promotional brochure at the Hiroshima Memorial Peace Park for the exhibit of the hitherto un-distributed “Memoirs of the Atomic Bombing”. It stated that the United States’ occupying government (known as the General Headquarters of the Allied Powers in Tokyo) shut down, at the last minute. Photo: Maung Zarni, the leaflet is in his private research collection, January 2016. For the first time in 66 years, the Memoirs were made accessible to the public.
The bomb – inappropriately named “Little Boy” by the Americans at the Pentagon-run Manhattan Project – killed an estimated 100,000+ including thousands of Korean and Chinese workers and students, many of whom were incinerated at the blast in which temperatures reached upwards of 7,000°C (or 12,600° F) within the first few minutes. The two bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, killed an estimated total of 200,000.
A comparable estimated number of “indirect deaths” of Palestinians in Gaza – 186,000 – was offered by a team of Palestinian and North American researchers in their correspondence with the British medical journal Lancet published on July 5, 2024. The researchers argued that “(a)pplying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37,396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186, 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.”
So, I was left completely shaken when I took only a glance at the shocking social media footage of a group of unidentifiable silhouettes of a Palestinian family of four being incinerated in their tents outside Al Aqsa Hospital in Northern Gaza on October 14. My mind raced back to the moment I looked at the horrific black and white images of screaming kid survivors, with their flesh hanging like drapery on their bones, all on display on the walls of the exhibit halls inside Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, six years ago.
Eighty years since the two blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, weapons manufacturing in the technologically advanced nations – in which the US is the world’s unrivalled leader and number one arms supplier – the destructive power of even conventional (non-atomic or non-nuclear) weapons has reached a level unimaginable during World War II.
Israel tanks parked 100 yards from Kerem Shalom Crossing, Southern Gaza, August 29, 2024. Photos: Will Allen DuPraw.
You don’t need a weapon that will deliver heat waves at 12,600°F to incinerate living creatures. A chicken is roasted in an oven at 450°F. It must be stressed that even the state of conventional weapons in 2024 is incomparably more advanced than that which existed in the tragic days of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These conventional weapons are readily supplied worldwide by the USA, the Russian Federation, China, the UK, Germany, France, and Israel. They are routinely used around the world, with devastating consequences on a par with those wrought by the explosive power of the atomic bombs used in 1945.
Gaza since October 2023 is a case in point.
In 1963, in choosing to award the Peace Prize to Professor Linus Carl Pauling of the California Institute of Technology, already the 1954 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, “for his fight against the nuclear arms race between East and West”, Gunnar Jahn, Chairman of the Nobel Committee, began his remarks by quoting Albert Einstein, whose formula served as the foundation for the atomic bomb of 1945.
‘Shortly after the atomic bombs were exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki (in 6 and 9 August 1945 respectively), Albert Einstein made this statement:
“The time has come now, when man must give up war. It is no longer rational to solve international problems by resorting to war. Now that an atomic bomb, such as the bombs exploded at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, can destroy a city, kill all the people in a city, a small city the size of Minneapolis, say, we can see that we must now make use of man’s powers of reason, in order to settle disputes between nations.”
The great physicist would be completely shocked by the exponentially far greater power of even today’s conventional weapons as evidenced in Israel’s one-year long bombardment of Gaza. The first atomic bomb that the Americans dropped on Hiroshima contained the equivalent of 15,000 TNT or dynamite, the Swedish weapons inventor Dr. Alfred Nobel’s invention.
An Interfaith rally against Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, Kerem Shalom Crossing, Southern Gaza, August 29, 2024. Photo: Will Allen DuPraw)
On November 2, 2023, the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor group observed that “due to technological developments affecting the potency of bombs, the explosives dropped on Gaza (25,000 TNT tonnage) may be twice as powerful as a nuclear bomb. Euro-Med continued, this means that the destructive power of the explosives dropped on Gaza exceeds that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima noting that the area of the Japanese city was 900 square kilometres, while the area of Gaza does not exceed 360 square kilometres.”
On January 11, 2024, Associated Press reported that Israeli Defence Forces had destroyed two-thirds of all structures in northern Gaza and one-quarter of those in the southern area of Khan Younis in the first few months since the start of Israel’s retaliatory strikes in October 2023. Among the destroyed buildings are tens of thousands of homes, hospitals, mosques, and other multi-storey buildings. The news agency based its report on the research done by Corey Scher of the City University of New York Graduate Center and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University who mapped war-time damage using satellite data.
For a comparative perspective, the same AP reporter turned to Robert Pape, a US military historian, who found that the IDF destroyed 30% of buildings across Gaza between October 8, 2023 and January 2, 2024 as compared with the allies’ destruction of 10% of the building across Germany under Nazi rule between 1942 and 1945.
Gaza is a densely populated narrow strip of 140 square miles, about the length of a marathon race of 26 miles. Israel’s choice of bombs and artillery used against the largely civilian population pockets includes 1,000- to 2,000-pound “bunker-busters” which “turns earth to liquid” and “pancakes entire buildings”, as Marc Garlasco, a former Pentagon defence official and United Nations war crimes investigator, put it.
With the most advanced generations of conventional weapons in 2024, Israel has already demonstrated that, even without resorting to the open secret of its nuclear warheads, it could in such a short time destroy 80% of the Gaza Strip, including multiple cities and refugee camps. Chillingly, Einstein’s atomic bomb anguish in 1945 – mass death, city-wide destruction – has now been a daily reality for the 2.3 Palestinians of Gaza for one year and counting.
The now elderly child survivor of the first atomic bomb over Hiroshima and his Hiroshima-Gaza parallel must be taken seriously. His words must be seized by the world of conscience to end Israel’s mass extermination in Gaza.
Maung Zarni is a Burmese genocide scholar and human rights activist with 36 years of involvement in international affairs and activism. He is co-founder of the Forces of Renewal for Southeast Asia and the Free Rohingya Coalition.
