(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
It was once a city, a fairly ordinary city, a little smaller than Oslo, but a good deal bigger than Bergen.
It was summer and it was a hot day in August. The workers had long since arrived at work, the office workers as well, and the housewives were on their way to the center to make purchases. Many with a stroller, some with a bad time because at home it was a little they could not be far away from, and some went swell and expectant with a new life they were soon to enter into a strange and varied world.
That said, it was an ordinary town, a town with schools, hospitals and factories, shops, residential buildings and churches, and it was a hot morning in early August. An airplane came in over this city, and the flight alarm went off, because it was a war, and it was a foreign plane. But there had been war for many years, and people had begun to become indifferent. They thought they had more important things to do than jump in and out of the shelters only to find that they could just as well have been in the street, in the office, in the kitchen or where they were when the sirens began to growl.
It followed a bang, and it was the start of our cultural epoch's greatest crime. Our cultural epoch, the greatest crime of the Christian epoch, what does that mean? Is there any yardstick for crimes against humanity? Were the Crusades worse than the Negro slavery, the Inquisition worse than the witch processes or the gas chambers worse than Hiroshima?
Some historians let the numbers decide it. The biggest crime, they say, is the one that affects most people. In this case, 150 unsuspecting housewives, children, office workers and workers were exterminated by a single bomb, and this was, to a new extent, the world record. But there is one other scale, a yardstick that has something to do with comparison of goals and means, and it was the one here that would justify the strong words.
Among the scientists who took the initiative to make the Hiroshima bomb was Albert Einstein. He wrote a letter to the then US President, Roosevelt, explaining the possibilities for new weapons that were within the reach of the research. The scientists only needed money, time and rest to create them, and they got it.
To understand this, we must refresh some of the eerie memories that formed the background for Einstein's desperate initiative. He never forgave himself, because Einstein and his colleagues knew what they were doing when they started working. It was for the barren joy of research that drove them. It was fear.
They knew that other researchers in Japan, Germany and Italy possessed knowledge that could lead to one of said the countries became the first member of the nuclear club. They knew that the Japanese, Italian and, above all, the German leaders were ruthless to the point of human incomprehensibility, and they saw that the race depended on money and the authorities 'belief in the scientists' statements about the effect of the new weapons.
Nevertheless, this was not the most important explanation for Einstein's letter. The most important explanation lies in what is now being rolled up with the Eichmann case. Albert Einstein felt the horrors of the concentration camps, the ghettos, the gas chambers and the massacres everywhere where Hitler's armies advanced, and he thought:
- This must be stopped. It must be stopped at all costs. Nothing can be more cruel than this.
It was the Jews, Einstein's own people, who were affected more than anyone else. To understand how he experienced it, we must for a moment try to imagine the unthinkable. Let us try to imagine a mass extermination of Norwegians. We remember the first two, Hansteen and Wikstrøm, we remember the mass graves at Trandum, we remember Grini, Victoria Terrace, the deportations, Uranienburg, Auschwitz, Majdanek, – that is: we remember it when we are reminded of it, and so it should be be. We should not remember it more often.
But the extermination of an entire people, of all Norwegians, women and children, office workers and workers, no matter what they had done, what their name was and what kind of profession they had, that they should be stacked on top of each other as close as in a cinema queue and mowed down just because they were Norwegians, and because an order has been given from a distant headquarters, we have no imagination or experience to understand.
Einstein got the imagination to think this about his own. It happened, and the made it possible. He saw trains of mothers on one side of the barbed wire, and he saw their children in trains on the other side. He saw stuttering four-year-olds, whining eight-year-olds and starving, deadly twelve-year-olds in line to be executed. He saw his own queuing to die.
That is the explanation for the desperate letter. Einstein thought: – It must be stopped. It must be stopped at all costs. Not noe human can be crueler than this.
But he changed his mind – there was something worse. There was a method of extermination that surpassed the gas chambers and concentration camps in the devilish abuse of human intelligence, and that is the method we have talked about introducing in Norway today. When the researchers fully realized what it meant, it was too late. They tried, but they could not stop what happened to a fairly ordinary city on the sixth of August 1945.
There was a plane, it followed a snow-white bang – Hiroshima. Another plane arrived a few days later over a nearby town – Nagasaki. Today – 16 years later – fetuses are born without vision, without arms, without mobility, fetuses that due to the two bangs must be killed because it is better if they for get to live.
Einstein understood too late that it would go that way, and he tried to hinder. Those who gave the order did not understand it. They did not have the imagination to imagine the concrete background for Einstein's desperate warnings. It serves their excuse.
But there is something else like for sorry, and that's what makes the bombing the greatest crime of our cultural era. World War I was over. Hitler was dead. The Japanese had tried to start negotiations on a ceasefire. It was rejected. Those who now had the power and were sure of victory demanded an unconditional capitulation. It was no longer strategically necessary, but they still wanted to try Einstein's weapon.
They tried it en time, and they saw what it was capable of. They tried again, and they were convinced. They were given unconditional capitulation, and then they put the new weapon into production. It was said that there was a difference between good and evil. It should give the good people a means to stagnate the bad ones.
Today, many people have this weapon, Einstein's weapon, and it has become many hundreds of times more horrible than what hit two fairly ordinary Japanese cities 16 years ago. The experts talk about megatons, about millions of megatons, and we have no imagination to imagine it. But. We know that no significantly weaker nuclear weapon can be made than the one that hit Hiroshima. We know that there is talk of "tactical" weapons, and we have heard them compared to grenades. It is not correct. There is no nuclear projectile today with a weaker effect than the bomb that fell on Hiroshima.
Try to understand those who are protesting. Try to understand Einstein, Albert Schweitzer and Bertrand Russell: This is not war. It's the biggest crime in history.
