Patrick Comerford
Eighty years ago this week, the world passed into a terrifying new age. The mushroom clouds that rose above Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945 announced not only that we have the capacity to slaughter each other in staggering numbers, but also that humanity now possesses the means to raze all civilisation as we know it. Yet, despite the defining nature of these bombings, these dreadful events at the end of World War II may feel distant for many eight decades later.
Today, every one of the crew members who carried out the bombings is dead. But many of the survivors, now in their 80s, still live with the physical, psychological and social scars of that dreadful week.
I was involved earlier this week in a number of events marking the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. Two of us attended the annual Hiroshima Day commemorations at the Japanese Peace Pagoda by Willen Lake in Milton Keynes on Wednesday evening. I also recorded reflections and memories of my own activism for events organised by the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship and Christian CND and in Dublin by the Peace and Neutrality Alliance. But I am conscious too that today marks the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki three days later on 9 August 1945.
One of the bell towers at Urakami Cathedral in Nagasaki was left empty all those years until a replacement bell was finally installed earlier today. The replacement bell was installed after a successful international effort to fund it raised $125,000 in just over a year from more than 600 donors.
The atomic bomb at Nagasaki killed 70,000 people instantly, while many thousands more continued to die for months and years afterwards from the effects of burns, radiation sickness and other injuries compounded by illness and malnutrition. The bomb fell near the cathedral, where killed g two priests and 24 people inside among the more than 70,000 dead in the city. Nagasaki Peace Park, which marks the centre of the explosion, includes a section of wall from the destroyed cathedral.
Following the bombing of Nagasaki, the parishioners at Urakami Cathedral managed to dig up one of the original bells at the site of the destroyed cathedral, and that bell was installed in the right-hand bell tower of the new cathedral when it was rebuilt in 1959. The other bell was destroyed and the second bell tower of the rebuilt cathedral has remained empty for decades.
The funding initiative for the replacement bell was launched by James Nolan, a professor of sociology and anthropology at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. His recent books include Atomic Doctors: Conscience and Complicity at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age (Harvard University Press, 2020). The book examines the moral dilemma of medical doctors who took part in the Manhattan Project, is based on materials his grandfather left behind.
Dr Nolan’s involvement in the project has a personal aspect: his grandfather served as the chief medical officer at the Los Alamos facility in New Mexico, where the atomic bomb was developed, and he later visited Nagasaki and Hiroshima with a survey team following the atomic bombing of the two cities.
Professor Nolan visited Nagasaki frequently while he was researching and writing a book about the local Catholic population and their response to the bombing. He told the Catholic News Agency (CNA) how Kojiro Moriuchi, a parishioner at the cathedral, told him two years ago (2023) that it would be ‘wonderful if American Catholics gave us the bell for the left tower’. He responded by helping to spearhead the efforts to make it happen.
Archbishop Peter Michiaki Nakamura Nagasaki blessed the new bell last month (17 July 2025) and named it the ‘Saint Kateri Bell of Hope’.
Speaking at the blessing ceremony, Professor Nolan said that US Catholics ‘expressed sorrow, regret, sadness and a wish for forgiveness and reconciliation’ on learning about the destruction wrought at Nagasaki.
One person wrote to him: ‘May the ringing of these bells continue to remind the people of Nagasaki of our sorrow for what their people have endured and reassure them of ours and God’s love for them.’ Another told him that the gift of the new bell would help ‘heal the wounds’ of the war and bolster ‘progress to world peace’.
The bell was officially installed earlier today, 80 years to the day after the cathedral and the surrounding parish were levelled by the atomic bomb. The bell was rung at 11:02 am, the exact moment when the bomb detonated about 1,600 ft from the cathedral.
Dr Nolan says he hopes the new bell at the cathedral ‘will bear the fruit of fostering hope and peace and solidarity between American and Japanese Catholics’.
All the crew members who flew on the missions to Hiroshima and to Nagasaki have died. Meanwhile, the numbers of hibakusha, the people who survived the attacks, are rapidly dwindling in numbers too. We are passing into a twilight of history, yet the world has become a more dangerous place. More nations are developing nuclear weapons with few, if any, effective international controls. Trump has redeployed nuclear missiles closer to Russian territory, Putin and Kim Jong-un have explicitly threatened tactical nuclear strikes, we have come close to war in the Middle East over responses to allegations that Iran is close to having a bomb, and India and Pakistan, two covert nuclear powers, have come close to war in recent months.
The bomb was tested in New Mexico on 16 July. Its blast was equivalent to the destructive payload of 2,000 B-29s. The New Mexico test explosion was described as the hottest and brightest thing since the creation. Little Boy, the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima used enriched uranium. But Fat Man, the Nagasaki bomb, was more sophisticated, using plutonium.
Nagasaki was never the first choice as a target. Three cities were selected, in a descending order: Hiroshima, Kokura (now called Kitakyushu) or Nagasaki; and the deciding factor would be the weather.
Originally the second bomb was intended to be dropped on 11 August – five days after Hiroshima. Kokura was 100 miles north of Nagasaki and home to one of Japan’s largest military arsenals. With Hiroshima devastated, this No 2 city had now moved up to the top of the list and Nagasaki was a backup in case bombing Kokura was ruled out.
The weather forecast predicted clear conditions over Kokura. But on the morning of 9 August the US plane ran headlong into the first of the thunderstorms. Kokura was saved by an accident of weather. When the crew diverted to Nagasaki, the city was covered in cloud.
In a bizarre coincidence, the Nagasaki bomb was detonated almost directly over the factory that once made the torpedoes used in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Six days later, on 15 August, battered by both nuclear attacks and suffering a crushing Soviet invasion of Japanese-occupied Manchuria, Japan finally surrendered.
The number of people who were killed in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on those two fatal mornings will never be known, but they may number 200,000 to 300,000 people or more. They were men, women, and children. The overwhelming majority were in their own homes on those mornings. Few were in the military, the overwhelming majority were civilians. Nuclear weapons are indiscriminate: they do not distingush between cvilians and the miliary, between adults and children, betweem hospitals and factories. They are weapons of mass destruction, they are agents of genocide, they are crimes against humanity.
