Threnody for Hiroshima

 In his classic poem "For the Union Dead"—one of the various images that Robert Lowell encounters on his tour through Boston Common in the early 1960s is that of a picture of a mushroom cloud—used as an advertisement for a safe: 

on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling

over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages"
that survived the blast.

It's an image that strikes many of us now as something out of another era—the sort of thing that obsessed the public mind in the early Cold War. 

But the New York Times yesterday reminds us that we still very much live under the shadow of that same mushroom cloud. 

As part of a series of articles and essays they published to mark the 80th anniversary since the bomb fell on Hiroshima—the Times invited us to reflect that the fate of that city—"boiling"—could still be our own. 

We are living in a summer of nuclear scares. Trump recently engaged in an escalating series of nuclear threats with Russia. India and Pakistan—both nuclear powers—fought a brief but frightening hot war that many feared could turn into a nuclear conflict. 

Israel and the United States—also nuclear powers—bombed Iran in order to prevent it from ever acquiring nuclear weapons—with unclear success and no justification under international law. 

Robert Lowell was one of the few American writers of his age cohort who declined to fight in World War II. In a poem he wrote later reflecting on his imprisonment as a conscientious objector during the war, he recalls a conversation with a murderer: 

"What are you in for?" Lowell asks the murderer (I'm paraphrasing here). "Killing," the latter replies; "and you?" "Refusing to kill," is Lowell's answer. 

Lowell didn't even have the recompense of being a conscientious objector in an unpopular war. He went to prison for what many would regard as an unjust cause. We still tend to think of World War II as the most justified conflict we fought in the twentieth century. 

But the way the war ended may have proved Lowell right—or at least, closer to being right than many of us like to think. If more people in that era had "refused to kill" in 1945—Hiroshima would never have "boiled." 

And we ourselves today—80 years after the event—would not still be living under the threat of the same nuclear annihilation.