Susan Southard, MFA in Creative Writing alum and author of Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War, published an opinion piece in the Washington Post about the questions Americans ask, and often neglect to ask, about the 1945 atomic bombings of Japan.
In “Americans insist the atom bomb ended the war in Japan — ignoring its human cost” she writes, “In Nagasaki alone, 74,000 people died by the end of 1945, when the first count was possible. Only 150 were military personnel. Seventy-five thousand more civilians were injured or irradiated. In Hiroshima, another 140,000 were killed. If we justify their deaths, injuries and irradiation, where do we draw the line? Exactly how many civilians in any conflict are we willing to sacrifice to achieve military victory?” Read the full story in the Washington Post here.
Southard won the 2016 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, for Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War. She was featured in the 2018 Antioch Alumni Magazine. Read that story here.
