Failure to understand: Paul Oestreicher, eighty years after Hiroshima

‘The world has not learned Mr Roberts’ lesson.’

Eighty years ago, I was thirteen years old, riding my bike to school in Dunedin. 

I was worried. The morning news had told me that one single bomb, an atom bomb, had destroyed the city of Hiroshima. Of course I could not understand how that was possible. Maybe our physics teacher would explain. It was the second lesson of that day. Mr Roberts tried to help us to understand nuclear fusion, or was it fission? We didn’t really understand, and I still don’t. As he was leaving the classroom, he turned and said: ‘Boys, either we now abolish war, or war will abolish us.’

I took that lesson to heart. The wider world did not. Today, aged ninety-three, I am still a vice-president of the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (I invite you here and now to join). It has been a spectacularly unsuccessful organisation. More and more nations have, at huge cost, thought it necessary to acquire nuclear weapons that are far more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. Even small nations like North Korea and Israel believe they, too, need these monstrous instruments of mass murder. 

The world has not learned Mr Roberts’ lesson. The threat of nuclear extinction is with us every day, in a world that is very far from abolishing war. As I write, hundreds of thousands of women, men, and many children, are suffering the dire consequences of war. Just think of Sudan, Gaza, Ukraine and many more. Who benefits? The arms industry has never done so well. A global economic system allows the rich to get obscenely richer at the expense of the poor. Never have there been so many forced to flee their homes. We live in a time of mass migration.

Laws are made to protect us. Weapons of mass destruction have been outlawed by the United Nations, only to be ignored. Life and liberty, our basic rights as human beings, are constantly trampled under the feet of the powerful. At the cost of more than sixty million lives, Hitler was defeated in the last world war, only now to find new Hitlers, new Stalins, new tyrants being worshipped by hate-filled, deluded, ordinary people like us. Floods of refugees, the world’s uprooted, clamour to share our wealth. Do we embrace or fear them?

I was once a German-Jewish child refugee. My family was offered the asylum denied to many, many others. Those with nowhere to flee were murdered because no one wanted Jews as neighbours. And now the children of the Jewish survivors rule the state of Israel. The abused becoming abusers is one part of our human tragedy. God help us if we just watch in silence.

I send you these greetings from New Zealand, which, so far, has turned its back on the fallacy of nuclear defence. Remembering the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – and of every war – I invite you to join me, and the human family, in a hopeful struggle for peace and justice, a struggle that commits us to swim against the currents of prejudice and pride. Against the odds, do not be afraid to buck the trend. Go on loving, for love casts out fear.

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Comments

Thank you Paul for being a witness to peace. Your words are a light in the darkness.

By bigbooks1963@gmail.com on 9th August 2025 - 12:39

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