c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin is the senior interreligious adviser of the American Jewish Committee.)

(UNDATED) Which news event did the Associated Press select as the top story of the 20th century? Who was chosen by Time magazine as the most important person of that century? Which Broadway play won this year’s award for best drama?

The answers to the three questions _ dropping atomic bombs on Japan, Albert Einstein and “Copenhagen” _ are intimately linked and are especially timely since it was 55 years ago this month that the United States exploded A-bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The Nazis ridiculed Einstein, the great scientist and Nobel Prize winner, because he was a Jew. They called Einstein’s theory of relativity “Jewish science.”

Einstein found haven in America in the 1930s, and in August 1939 he wrote a now famous letter to President Franklin Roosevelt outlining the military possibilities of atomic energy. Einstein urged Roosevelt to begin an intensive atomic project because it was widely believed Nazi Germany had started its own program to build an A-bomb.

Einstein was correct on both points. An atomic bomb was possible, and Hitler’s Germany, under the brilliant leadership of Werner Heisenberg, another Nobel winner, was exploring the military uses of atomic energy.

“Copenhagen” describes Heisenberg’s still unexplained personal journey in 1941 to German-occupied Denmark to visit his older and revered teacher, Niels Bohr, yet another Nobel Prize winner. Although the Tony-winning drama explores the emotions and ideas of the two physicists and Bohr’s wife, the atomic mushroom is an invisible, ominous presence offstage.

Because one of Bohr’s parents was Jewish, the prominent physicist was constantly in danger in Copenhagen. Fortunately, he fled to Sweden with other Danish Jews, and then made his way to Los Alamos, N.M., in time to work on the bombs used over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Happily, such weapons of mass destruction have not been employed since 1945, but the past record of restraint by the nation states that possess nuclear weapons provides no comfort for the future.

Does anyone really doubt that a fanatical leader of a “rogue state” or an extremist religio-political terrorist group would hesitate to use an atomic or hydrogen bomb against a perceived “Satanic” adversary or a “defiler of the true faith”?

The recent nuclear competition between India and Pakistan offered a frightening glimpse of what may lie ahead in the new century. When the leaders of those countries proudly spoke of their “Hindu” and “Islamic” bombs, an international community, already concerned about the possibility of the cash-hungry former Soviet Union selling A-bombs to terrorist groups, became even more jittery.

Not surprisingly, Japan is among the most concerned nations about the possible “retail sales” of atomic bombs to terrorists.

I was a U.S. Air Force chaplain stationed in Japan and Korea during the early 1960s. In those years, both cities still clearly showed the devastating effects of the American nuclear raids. On Aug. 6, 1945, more than 140,000 Japanese died when the B-29, the “Enola Gay,” dropped its single bomb. Three days later a second bomb was used on the southern port city of Nagasaki, the operatic home of “Madame Butterfly.” Because of Nagasaki’s hilly terrain, “only” 70,000 people were killed. The war ended less than 10 days later without the need for an American military invasion of the Japanese home islands.

Most of the world, including many Japanese I spoke with in the 1960s, accepted President Harry Truman’s explanation for using the bombs. And most of the world, including many Japanese, accepted the math that Truman offered to buttress the American position: The immediate deaths of 210,000 people, mostly civilians, was horrible in its scope, but the probable loss of more than 1,000,000 American and Japanese lives in the planned invasion was averted. I, too, share those beliefs, but that is not the end of the story.

In 1963, a year after I returned to civilian life, I attended a Kansas City luncheon and was seated next to Truman. After the formal niceties ended, the former president asked me many questions about Japan. In a most un-Truman-like moment, he plaintively remarked that, “Of course, Mrs. Truman and I can never visit there because of August 1945.”

However, he added that “I sleep well at night. … Despite everything, I am at peace with my decision to use the weapons.”

And indeed he was until his death a decade later.

DEA END RUDIN