My father was a civilian in the military. He got transferred to a little town in West Germany when I was in high school. I went to high school at Zweibrucken American High School on the Air Force base in Zweibrucken. Believe it or not, I was on the football team. One afternoon, we were having football practice and a fighter jet took off from the air base. It happened all the time, jets taking off and landing, but this jet took off and climbed, climbed, climbed, and climbed straight up. As they say, what goes up must come down. This fighter jet crashed a few miles away. We were stunned. Then our coach started jumping up and down, screaming and pointing, and we looked and we saw a parachute floating to the ground, with a pilot attached. Everybody cheered, but I wondered what happened to the plane. Later we found out that it had crashed in a field. Nobody was hurt.
My Sunday School teacher was a major in the Air Force and one day he gave me a tour of the hangar. He showed me the cockpit of a fighter jet. He told me that what happened that day was fighter pilots have clipboards attached to the thighs of their flight suits. When this pilot took off and pulled the joystick back, one of the clipboards fell off and got wedged between the joystick and the cockpit floor. He leaned forward but couldn’t reach it because he was all buckled in. So a ten or twenty million dollar fighter jet was brought down by a dollar forty-nine clipboard. I think back on that time and I wonder, did America really need to have an Air Force base in that little town? Or in any of the other little towns in Germany and elsewhere in the world? And I think, what if that accident had happened and somehow there was a nuclear explosion? But I suppose there really couldn’t be any accidents involving nukes, right?
In 1964 one of my favorite movies was released, Dr. Strangelove, which some of you may have seen before. Peter Sellers plays three parts, the President of the United States, Mandrake, aide to the general of an Air Force base and Dr Strangelove, who sounds strangely like Henry Kissinger, who later became Secretary of State. The story revolves around this commanding general of an Air Force base, who was paranoid the communists were trying to take over America by putting fluoride in our water. (Which has a West Michigan connection since I’m from the town where fluoride was first put in the water, Grand Rapids.) This commanding general flipped out, or maybe I should say, “went rogue.” He sent off a squadron of bombers on what seemed like a routine training mission. They would fly toward the Soviet Union and then they would be called back. Only this time the general didn’t call them back, he told them that World War III had started, and they were to go to their assigned cities and drop their nukes in the Soviet Union. Mandrake, the general’s aide, gets a hold of a radio and notices they’re just playing music, there’s no world war, no one’s talking about it. He tries to tell the general, but the general won’t listen. In Washington, meanwhile, the president is meeting in the War Room with his generals and advisors. He is trying to convince the leader of the Soviet Union that this is all a mistake, that America is not attacking the Soviet Union. As a sign of good faith, he invites the Russian ambassador to the Unites States into the War Room. One of the most famous scenes of the movie is when the ambassador tries to sneakily take pictures of the War Room and is wrestled to the ground by a general, played by George C. Scott, and the president says, “Gentlemen, gentlemen, there’s no fighting in here; this is the War Room!”
Well the president gives the leader of the Soviet Union the code to bring down all the fighter planes, except one, piloted by Slim Pickens. He gets through all the defenses and is going to drop a bomb on Moscow. But the bomb won’t release. So he takes it upon himself to try and release the bomb; pushes on it, kind of sits on it, and it drops. Another famous scene from the movie is where he rides it like a mechanical bull, “Yee-hah!” into Moscow. That sets off nuclear bombs all around the world and that’s how the movie ends, with nuclear bombs going off while beautiful music is played. It’s a black comedy.
In 1983, another TV movie was released that was not a comedy, it was a drama, The Day After. It starred Jason Robards. It’s centered on Lawrence, Kansas, a little town about 30 miles from Kansas City. It shows people going about their business, scenes of farmland and in the midst of this farmland are nuclear missile silos. Throughout the beginning of the movie, you overhear, on the radio or TV, news stories about how tensions are being raised in Europe between NATO, the U.S. and Soviet Union. Eventually, it’s not clear who, one side or the other, starts a nuclear war and the people of Lawrence, Kansas are stunned to see missiles flying out of the silos towards the Soviet Union. A few minutes later incoming nuclear bombs are set off. The movie was supposed to be 4 hours long, but was cut by censors to two and a half hours, you never saw the most gruesome picture of a bomb going off over Kansas City and obliterating the city. But people were vaporized, people suffered from radiation sickness. Jason Robards, his character, would eventually die of radiation exposure. It was a gruesome portrayal of nuclear war. I’m not sure how realistic it was because at some point there’s a ceasefire. I’m not sure if that would happen.
Those two movies are of course fiction. The other night several of us went to the Herrick District Library and saw a documentary about what nuclear war really looks like. The documentary was called White Light, Black Rain and it was about the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki 65 years ago last week. I was surprised by the beginning of the documentary, where they showed Hiroshima and Nagasaki today - bustling cities. I thought they’d be burned out, bombed out craters, like the dark side of the moon.
They interviewed some teenagers from those cities and asked them what was significant about Hiroshima and Nagasaki and they had no idea. They didn’t know what happened. Then they interviewed several adults who were children during the dropping of those bombs. One of them had gnarled fingers and hands, another had a scarred face, several of the adults had had multiple surgeries on their faces, but they had survived the atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One man said, “It’s called a mushroom cloud, but it isn’t really a cloud, it’s a tower of fire.” They reported having seen their siblings killed, their parents killed, neighbors vaporized, people with their eyes dangling out of their sockets, their skin hanging from their bodies. So gruesome. I can’t imagine what it was like.
I have always doubted that those bombs had to be dropped to end the Second World War. If that’s true, maybe the first bomb had to be dropped, but the second was - pardon the word - overkill. The bomb at Hiroshima killed 140,000 people; the one at Nagasaki killed 70,000 people. The other night a veteran named Jim spoke and said that he was on a train and that he was being sent to be part of the invasion of Japan. People talked about how that could result in hundreds of thousands of soldiers being killed. So when the train was stopped on August 6, 1945, and the people got word that the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, people cheered, because they said, “This is the end of the war.” He said three days later when the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, he called it “pure evil.” I talked to him afterwards and thanked him for that, because I always thought the same thing. He said that it was just a scientific experiment; they wanted to prove that the first one wasn’t a fluke. They wanted to show that they could do it again. So even though the war could have ended with the first one, they exploded the second one.
People talked the other night about how people could do something like that. They talked about what had to happen was the Japanese needed to be dehumanized. The Japanese needed to be demonized to end the war, so that when those bombs were dropped people just figured we didn’t really kill human beings.
For more than three years now, Jasiu Milanowski and I and some others have walked for peace in downtown Holland on Thursday afternoons. (Some have said we saunter for peace, but nevertheless we’re there.) A couple of weeks ago I was thinking, you know with troops coming home from Iraq, and, beginning next July, troops coming home from Afghanistan, we’ll probably stop walking for peace. But then after seeing that documentary the other night, I want to keep walking for peace until the United States and the world get rid of all nuclear weapons.
I believe people are basically good, but it’s hard to hold that position with the creation of nuclear bombs. It’s man’s inhumanity to man on a grand scale. You’d probably expect a minister, and specifically me, to quote what some religious leaders have said about hate and war, so I’ll try to meet your expectations. Jesus said, “Love your enemies.” Gandhi said, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” The Dalai Lama said, “By far the single greatest danger facing humankind – in fact, all living beings on our planet – is the threat of nuclear destruction.”
But I don’t want to stop with just quoting religious leaders. Let me also quote some of America’s military and civilian leaders. President Eisenhower said, “Controlled, universal disarmament is the imperative of our time.” General Colin Powell said, “Today I can declare my hope, declare it from the bottom of my heart, that we will eventually see the time when the number of nuclear weapons is down to zero and the world is a much better place.” President Reagan said, “We seek the elimination one day of nuclear weapons from the face of the earth.”
In 1992 I was with channel 8 in Grand Rapids. The Today Show was on in the background. I wasn’t really paying attention to it, but then something piqued my interest. They reported that a little town in what was now Germany, since the end of the cold war there is no longer an East and West Germany, of course, a little town named Zweibrucken was witnessing the closing of the American Air base there. My initial reaction was one of sadness. There goes my high school. But today I look back and say how joyful it is and I wonder when it will be that America will close all of its bases, hundreds of bases, all around the world. I wonder when American leaders, who keep saying we can’t disarm because someday someone will use a nuclear bomb for the first time in war, will recognize and realize that America has already used nuclear weapons twice in war. I wonder when American leaders will say twice was twice too many.
