Raisuke Shirabe was an able and respected doctor who worked for the College of Medicine at Nagasaki Hospital. His diary tells us he was on night duty on August the Ninth, 1945. After civil defense exercises, he went for breakfast, attended roll-call and gave a lecture.He then went back to his office to review a student's thesis. It was then he heard "a loud, roaring engine noise." He threw off his white coat and rushed for the door. Before he got there "a bright blue flash shone" in his eyes. He felt he had been hit, crouched down while the building vibrated at a low pitch. When he got up and brushed off some light debris he heard a strange sound "resembling heavy rain".He did not know what had happened to him.
How the Nagasaki Bomb Did its Work
A few minutes earlier, the Bockscar, a B-29 bomber, commanded by Charles Sweeney, dropped a squat, ten thousand pound bomb through a space in the clouds. The bomber had taken off from Tinian Island in the Pacific and had originally headed for Kokura, a historic town quite close to Tokyo, but earlier fire bombing and cloud obscured the city. In the splintered seconds as the bomb fell, a spherical shock-wave of explosions was detonated. These created a mathematically-predicted sequence that compressed the sphere around a ball of Beryllium-Plutonium. These in turn started a fission-chain in a core of modified Plutonium. The Uranium surround reflected the neutrons given off in the chain back into the reaction. The process was utterly routine. A gram of mass was converted into energy. On the ground the total bill for death might even reach 80,000, if the number of those who died of subsequent poisoning was counted. The heat was 7,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The wind was 624 miles per hour. it killed a city of Buddhists, Shintoists and Christians.
The First Cases of Radiation Sickness
Shirabe could only think of the Buddhist hells, the Avici Hell, the Eighth Hell when he saw his city butchered. "We heard the voices of friends calling for each other, screaming and seeking help. The place had turned into a scene of terrible confusion and it was more than...just gruesome...there were burned, naked, blackened faces with staring eyes, tinted red with blood." He was later to learn the death of his hospital president, of both his sons and of colleagues dear to him. He was not just the survivor of a disaster keener than the Apocalypse, but also the first able doctor to confront that most lingering of Twentieth Century diseases, radiation sickness. His description of a colleague leading wounded people "He looked like Jesus leading his disciples on a pilgrimage" burns with a spiritual indignation.
The First Hours of the Nagaski Blast
He suffered radiation sickness himself, but survived. He found his son's Shirabe's remains by returning to the devastated hospital. his family of his wife and three daughters braved the massed flocks of carrion crows "as if they were cursing the souls of the dead" and went into the lecture hall .There he found the remnants of his son's student uniform which he had taken as a hand me down from his cousin. The match was clear. The family gathered the ashes of the blue serge uniform.
Shirabe lived on as a medical practitioner until the age of eighty. He campaigned against any form of nuclear deterrence. Yet his description of the first hours of an iniquity will never be forgotten.
Sources : The Manhattan Project
Scientific Data on the Nagaski Atom Bomb Disaster
The Making of the Atomic Bomb, R Rhodes, 1995 - Simon & Schuster
A Physician's Diary of the Atomic Bombing and its Aftermath, Raisuke Shirabi M.D., 2002 (Tr Kuo and Kuo) NASHIM
Duncan McGibbon - By contributing writer, Bath (UK) Institute Convenor and Wells Festival Prize-Winner, Duncan McGibbon
