The Unthinkable for Kids

When I was a kid in the ‘50s, there were echoes of World War II all around. My friends and I played with toy soldiers and sang Army songs that praised Betty Grable and ridiculed Mussolini. Sometimes my dad and I would watch Sgt. Bilko or “The Big Picture” on TV, and he’d remember his days in the Army. One day my dad opened one of the olive-drab steamer trunks beneath the basement stairs. It was full of stuff he’d brought home from Japan. A short sword. A white and red silk flag. A brown field telescope inscribed with little white characters. A guide book to Tokyo and eight English-language tourist books published by the Japanese National Railway. They were beautifully illustrated (one even with a real woodblock print) paperback books on Sumo wrestling, Odori dance, traditional Japanese architecture and the Japanese national character. Published during the war, they showed Japanese life as it was before my dad was there, before their cities were bombed and burned. Dad let me keep those books, and I poured over them many times as I was growing up. I have kept them to this day.

I remember one time on television seeing the testing of an atomic bomb in the Utah desert; I thought it was live. Dad said that dropping a couple bombs like that had ended the war. When he spoke of the “Japs,” there was a cold edge to his voice, then the pointed silence of words suppressed. It was funny. He never told me anything about his time in Japan. Only that the “Japs” got the pounding they deserved. Years later, I noticed that he’d stopped calling them Japs. He complimented me on my new Mazda station wagon. I wondered if he ever had read those books he’d given me.

Japan always interested me. When I was 5 or 6, my mother introduced me to a young woman named Yoko who was visiting from Japan. She was beautiful and wore an elegant kimono. She was from the Japan of my tourist books, a refined and ancient culture that seemed to have little in common with the simian, buck-toothed soldiers we saw in the movies and cartoons.

Yet as we all know, there had been those death marches. There had been Japanese atrocities against Chinese civilians and the bombing of innocent cities. Forced labor. The beheadings of Allied pilots. The isolation box in “The Bridge on the River Kwai.” Those kamikaze airplanes slamming into the decks of our ships.

By the end of the war, the United States was pursuing an annihilationist policy against Japan, fueled in no small part by a question of which race was to survive. President Harry Truman decided to drop the atom bomb because, in his words, the Japanese were “savages, ruthless, merciless, and fanatic.” You could see that for yourself in the old movies and newsreels. When I was young, lots of people still hated the Japanese.

When I was in high school, my mother brought home a Modern Library edition of “Hiroshima” by John Hersey (1946). It described, through the experiences of six survivors, the bombing of Hiroshima and the immediate aftermath. Hiroshima personified the tragedy for me. Of the nearly 400,000 civilians who died from the bombings of 66 Japanese cities, including Tokyo, more than half died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

After reading “Hiroshima,” I realized that there were hundreds of thousands of lovely people like Yoko who perished because of the atom bomb. I began to wonder which side in the war seemed more inhuman.

When the mother of a friend told me that the U.S. Office of War Information had commissioned cultural anthropologist Ruth Benedict to do a wartime study of the Japanese character, I read her findings in “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword” (1946). It rounded out my appreciation for these people who had been, in Benedict’s words, “the most alien enemy the United States had ever fought in an all-out struggle.”

Now it is many years later, and I am the publisher of a journal that helps parents, teachers and librarians select fine children’s books. There are many more books today about Japan than there were when I was a boy, but there aren’t many children’s books about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki or about nuclear war. Images of nuclear annihilation are generally not what a parent has in mind when choosing picture books for kids at the library or local bookstore. It’s a subject most of us would just as soon avoid.

As you will see in the book list on the next page, there are several mostly true accounts of Hiroshima (curiously, none about Nagasaki), all created by Japanese or Japanese American authors and artists. These books put a human face on the tragedy and are aimed at children over the age of 5. Most of the stories are dramatic and very moving.

There are also several excellent fictional accounts about surviving a nuclear war. It is interesting to note that there is a rich genre of science fiction books set in future, post-apocalyptic worlds, though most are not about the war itself but use nuclear holocaust as a distant event to set the stage--or sweep the slate clean--for a story. For this reason, I have not listed John Christopher’s “Tripod Trilogy” (1967-68), for example, or Caroline Stevermer’s “River Rats” (1992). Yet I mention these books because, like the movies “Mad Max” and “The Planet of the Apes,” this genre assumes the inevitability of a nuclear holocaust. It is a chilling thought--and a recurring one for many in my generation.

We lived through the bomb shelter hysteria and Civil Defense drills that taught us to “duck and cover” in the school halls, as if pulling a blanket over our heads could save us. I remember President Kennedy’s television address during the Cuban missile crisis and sitting quietly afterward at my bedroom desk, wondering if I would live to see my 15th birthday. I wondered, too, if there were a war, whether the survivors would forget how to read music or books--if there were any survivors. Like so many other young people of my generation, I saw “On the Beach,” “Fail Safe” and “Dr. Strangelove” and shared in the gnawing angst of the atomic age. In time, however, we learned to take comfort and some measure of security in the nuclear stand-off between the superpowers. We hoped that our national leaders kept their heads, that all the safeguards in the military’s procedures and equipment would work.

Today, even though the Cold War is over, our world is a vastly more dangerous place than in any time past. India and Pakistan have recently tested their bombs. Nuclear knowledge and material, once closely held by a small handful of nations, is now widely diffused into many hands. But we have not only rogue nations and political terrorists to fear. As the 1986 film “The Manhattan Project” suggests, a really smart high school kid could build a small nuclear bomb with stolen materials from a nuclear lab or plant. What’s to prevent it?

I have a friend who built pipe bombs as a kid and set them off for the sheer thrill of it. Today, too many disturbed and angry young people are packing guns, building bombs and blowing away school chums and teachers in average towns like Pearl, West Paducah, Jonesboro, Edinburgh and Springfield. A study that came out of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory 20 years ago said that an amateur could produce a Nagasaki-sized explosion from about 22 pounds of plutonium oxide, the principal form of the element used in the nuclear power industry. A Ford Foundation report calculated that even one person working alone could build a nuclear bomb within weeks.

Thus it is conceivable that the fate of hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people can rest today in an individual pair of hands. Not just the president’s or some general’s, but in the hands of the kid down the street. I wonder, sometimes, what Timothy McVeigh was like as a kid. Who were his heroes? What movies did he watch? Did he read any books besides “The Turner Diaries”?

While it’s a truism that the future is in our children, what kind of children do we think we’re raising? What kind of future have we ourselves put into play? There is more anger everywhere today in our society. Violence is the staple fare of our popular entertainment. It is in the movies, television and professional wrestling. We make weapons easy for young people to get. In such circumstances, how can we not be cultivating small numbers of monsters who will murder their parents and classmates? Who can be surprised when some kids graduate from Mortal Kombat to assault rifles and fertilizer bombs?

So how can we, as parents, teachers and mentors of young people, help turn the tide on this escalating violence and firepower? Sharing books like these with your children is something, at least, to get them thinking about the unthinkable and talking with you about it.

Many children’s book writers like Louise Lawrence, author of “Children of the Dust,” offer thrilling visions with alternatives--creative alternatives--to violence. In the post-apocalyptic world that she created, “[v]iolence is incompatible with intelligence,” says Laura, one of a new and improved species of mutant people who have reactivated the lay lines and standing-stones of England. The remnants of those who waged the nuclear war live underground “like dinosaurs in a bunker,” using up their diminishing stores, their lives in slow decay. They no longer created things. The mutants, on the other hand, built a world on the outside out of the radioactive dust, one “based on human decency, free people, cooperating without violence, better than the old.”

Writers in other exciting genres for young people deal with the struggle between good and evil without allowing their characters to lapse into violence, as Lawrence does. For example, Will Hobbs, who writes adventure books, and Diane Duane, who writes fantasy books, provide “creative space” for their readers to think about creative alternatives, alternatives that films and television tend to discourage among their passive viewers. People in the entertainment business would, in fact, do well to look to children’s books as a source of engaging stories that do not rely on violence for their interest.

Isn’t this the time, after all, for all of us to stop teaching violence? Human beings can create anything they can visualize, especially young people. Why show them how to destroy other people, things and even themselves? Let us light young people’s minds instead with images of wisdom, virtue and beauty. Otherwise, as Harry says to Julie in the 1988 film “Miracle Mile,” it will be “the insects’ turn” to rule the Earth.