This week marks seventy years since the US dropped the first and last wartime-use atomic bombs, on Japan, in Hiroshima (August 6th) and Nagasaki (August 9th). I watched a brilliant documentary a few days ago, PBS’s “The Bomb”, which follows the development of nuclear arms not just from their inception and use but up through the arms race (including the intra-military arms race within the US armed forces) and disarmament.
One of the seminal cultural moments surrounding the atomic bomb in the US was the publication in 1946 of a New Yorker magazine without cartoons, Talk Of The Town, or reviews. All the magazine contained was a single article telling the story of six bomb survivors – two doctors, two women, and two clergymen. It’s called Hiroshima.
The same author, John Hersey, wrote a followup forty years later called Hiroshima: The Aftermath, but it’s not available through the New Yorker without a subscription. I haven’t read it, but I did spend a significant part of the original article wondering if the survivors would survive much longer – we didn’t understand the effects of radiation exposure very well in 1946, and the suffering that was to come was unclear at the time. The experiences of one woman and her family are outlined in another article by Sarah Stillman, Hiroshima and the Inheritance of Trauma.
The bomb is complicated. As a liberal with pacifist leanings, and the friend of children and grandchildren of hibakusha, I find it horrifying; my heart is against everything it represents. As a pragmatist and a child of the dying days of the cold war, who watched the Wall fall when I was ten, I understand the concept of the nuclear deterrent; I understand intellectually the people in the documentary who said “If we didn’t do it, someone else would have” and “if not for the deterrents, we would have gone to actual war with the Soviets.” It is difficult to argue either side.
But my stance on the bomb isn’t actually relevant to why I link the articles. I believe that if you carry a weapon you’d best understand the consequences and you can’t avoid facing them. Whatever one feels about the atomic bomb, the hydrogen bomb, the nuclear arms race, all of it, one should know what happens when they fall.
I remember the profound effect Hersey’s book had on me. I found it in my school library, and I think I read it in one sitting. It told me more than any history book about whta war really is, and what it means for those who die in it or who live and have to survive it. I’m not saying that it’s the book that made me have the position I have today on war, but it certainly has never left me. Passages and images are still as clear in my head now as the first time I read it.
Hiroshima
knitting in the dark 