Volume 28, Number 14 · September 24, 1981
'Unacceptable Damage'
By Lewis Thomas
Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Physical, Medical, and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings by the Atomic Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki
by the Committee for the Compilation of Materials on Damage Caused, translated by Eisei Ishikawa, by David L. Swain
Basic Books, 706 pp., $37.50
Unforgettable Fire: Pictures Drawn by Atomic Bomb Survivors
edited by the Japan Broadcasting Corporation
Pantheon, 111 pp., $7.95 (paper)
The hardest of all tasks for the military people who are occupationally obliged to make plans for wars still to come must be to keep a comprehensive up-to-date list of guesses about what the other side might, in one circumstance or another, do. Prudence requires that all sorts of possibilities be kept in mind including, above all, the 'worst case.' In warfare, in this century, the record has already proved that the worst-case possibility will turn out in the end to be the one that happens, and, often enough, the one that hadn't been planned for. At the outset of World War I, the British didn't have in mind the outright loss of an entire generation of their best youth; nor did any of the Europeans count on such an unhinging of German society as would lead straight to Hitler. When things were being readied for World War II, nobody forecast the destruction of Dresden or Coventry as eventualities to be looked out for and planned against. In Vietnam, defeat at the end was not anywhere on the United States' list of possible outcomes, nor was what happened later in Cambodia and Laos.
Review, 2988 words
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