Atomic Aftermath
Andrew J. Rotter
How the world struggled to understand America’s deadliest invention
The profound shock felt in Hiroshima on the morning of 6 August rippled outward to the rest of the world, less destructive but hardly less psychologically powerful for its distance from its source. Two days after the bombing, an editorial writer for the Australian Courier-Mail was dumbstruck: ‘What [the bomb] really is no one can begin to describe. Even scientists are lost for words that will describe the full magnitude of its terrifying force.’ ‘We still feel dazed by the implications of the new discovery,’ wrote the editorialist for the Shanghai Evening Post on the 10th. The bomb was ‘a thing to crush the mind.’ More than a week later, Quebec’s L’Autorité was still staggered; the bomb had ‘left the civilized world dumbfounded.’ In London, Palestine, and Rhodesia there was ‘wonderment’ and ‘awe’, while in Mexico City the bomb was ‘a nightmare and [a] horror.’ Little Boy ‘was doubtless heard by human ears for hundreds of miles around, but morally it was heard around the world.’ Even in New York, reported the Herald Tribune, ‘one senses the foundations of one’s own universe trembling.’
(American Heritage Collection )
When ordinary words and images failed, writers and analysts resorted to myth. J. E. Gendreau, who directed the Institute of Radiology at the University of Montreal, compared the cracking of the nucleus to the theft of fire by Prometheus. A journalist for Le Populaire, in Paris, thought of the biblical Tower of Babel, the handiwork of human arrogance aimed at reaching God. Others invoked Faust; as accounts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki gained circulation, it became easy to believe that scientists and statesmen had been granted the secret of the bomb only by their willingness to deal with the devil. (Bombay’s Statesman offered this judgment: ‘Substantial patent control has been established in America, the United Kingdom, the soviet union 229 and Canada . . . All who wish to apply should address communications to S. Lucifer, esq., Evil Patents Universal Unlimited, Nether Region.’) Most often, commentators referred to the bomb as Frankenstein’s monster, the terrible offspring of a science so self-absorbed, so consumed by its own curiosity or hubris, that it had lost sight of the consequences of its work. ‘The legend of Frankenstein came back grimly to life when that bomb was dropped on Hiroshima,’ declared the Rhodesia Herald, while the Trinidad Guardian thought the bomb ‘a Frankenstein more terrible even than Mrs Shelley’s famous creation’, and the Sydney Morning Herald warned that scientists ‘have called into being a Frankenstein monster which, if unfettered, has the power to destroy its creators’—a somewhat optimistic version of the myth in its willingness to make the monster’s destructiveness conditional.
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No one doubted that something very dramatic had happened, something new and revolutionary had been ushered in. Some thought the apocalypse loomed. Humans had fashioned the tools of their ultimate destruction; another war, cautioned Montreal-Matin, would bring ‘the complete annihilation of humankind.’ An editorialist in Alberta was more matter of fact: the announcement of the bomb ‘means simply that men now know how to blast the whole world to smithereens.’ Future war was now impossible, for, if war happened, human civilization would end. The Palestine Post, echoing a column in the New York Times, imagined a world ‘equipped with underground cities in which a race of modern troglodytes might seek shelter from atomic blasts.’ There was criticism of the United States for using the bomb and of the British for presumably having helped build it; the Japanese-controlled Hong Kong News referred bitterly to the Allies’ ‘diabolic nature’, and Bombay’s Free Press Journal inveighed against the ‘savagery’ of destroying whole cities. But other commentary was less accusatory and, sometimes, cautiously optimistic. The bomb was traced not to the Americans or a particular set of perpetrators, but to ‘mankind’, ‘science’ in the abstract, or (most often) ‘humanity.’ Because humans had unleashed nuclear energy, the rational and just among them might now find a way to harness it for some good purpose. The French commentator E. Letellier de Saint-Just hoped for ‘a new radiant world where mankind would live in brotherhood’ if the alternative was annihilation. The bomb was a double-edged sword, thought the Trinidad Guardian, embodying ‘undreamed of possibilities . . . for science knows no barriers.’ Recalling the science fiction of H. G. Wells, some writers speculated that the peaceful uses of nuclear energy—supplying power, for example, for lighting, heating, and transportation—might prove the bomb’s truest legacy, as long as human beings foreswore further use of atomic weapons.
To an extent, international reaction to the bomb followed the accounts of American newspapers and American-based news organizations. American sources presumably knew more about the bomb than did others, and authority attached itself naturally to scientists who built the device, some of whom were quoted in reports during the weeks following Japan’s surrender. Phrases drawn from US newspaper stories, especially from the New York Times, found their way unedited into English-language papers across the globe. In that way did the discourse surrounding the atomic bomb begin with a common source, and one not inclined to criticism of the decision to use the weapon. Relief that the war was over, and the conviction that the bombs had contributed enormously to its ending, seemed to cascade in all directions from US and Western media capitals. So too, it should be said, did a measure of sobriety and reflectiveness concerning the means used to end the war. President Harry S. Truman had first exulted when he heard of the Hiroshima bombing—‘the greatest thing in history’, he had called it—but his tone was different three days later, prior to the Japanese surrender, when he wrote to a belligerent senator: ‘I certainly regret the necessity of wiping out whole populations because of the “pigheadedness” of the leaders of a nation and, for your information, I am not going to do it unless it is absolutely necessary.’ Winston Churchill, a strong advocate for the bomb project, by the early autumn sounded subdued: ‘This revelation of the secrets of nature, long mercifully withheld from man, should arouse the most solemn reflections in the mind and conscience of every human being capable of comprehension.’ And Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French Resistance during the war, while professing not to be surprised at the news of the atomic bombings, nevertheless confessed himself ‘no less tempted to despair at the birth of means that made possible the annihilation of the human race.’
Though influenced by American interpretation of the bomb’s meaning, representatives of other nations also responded to the event with images and idioms that were very much their own. The most common description of the exploded bomb, offered first by the air crews who observed the bombings and then in the United States but frequently repeated elsewhere, was a great, mushroom-shaped cloud. But descriptions also corresponded to phenomena, both miraculous and disastrous and always powerful, that were local and familiar. El Nacional, the organ of the Mexican government, reported on 7 August that ‘the first earthquake-bomb’ had struck Hiroshima and focused on the bomb’s effects on the city’s trains. ‘It is interesting’ writes Regis Cabral, ‘that the newspaper associated the Abomb with two matters of concern to Mexico, one of them quite serious: Earthquakes and railroad performance.’ In Japan the bomb was likened also to an earthquake or typhoon. The Rhodesia Herald brought the bomb’s impact close to home by pointing out that a single bomb produced enough devastation to destroy the center of Johannesburg—or enough power ‘to drive the Witwatersrand gold mines for perhaps weeks.’ A Trinidad paper compared the bomb to a volcano, much like Mont Pelé, which had erupted recently on nearby Martinique. (The Reuters news agency called on readers to suggest names for the bomb. ‘Doomsday Bomb’ and ‘Earth-Shaker’ earned mention in Reuters stories, but ‘The Japatomiser’ won a headline in the Pretoria News.)
The psychologist Robert Jay Lifton, who interviewed survivors of the Hiroshima bombing during the early 1960s, concluded that many of them regarded the attack and its results as ‘unnatural’ or even ‘supernatural’ occurrences, in which ‘Buddhist hell’ or an utter void had replaced an earthly city of human beings. That may have been a first reaction, allowing as it did some distancing between living victims of the atomic bomb and what they had experienced: what had happened was beyond comprehension because it was part of another world, and one could not get one’s mind around it, so it was pointless trying to do so. But the subsequent comparison of the bombing to natural phenomena, in Japan and elsewhere, created a memory of the attack that was at once familiar and abstract. If the bomb was like lightning or an earthquake or a volcano, it was something that a nation had suffered before, and from which it had recovered. It was a horror, but it was nevertheless oddly comforting to connect the unknown impact of the bomb to something as natural as a storm. Making this sort of comparison also permitted people to avoid blaming anyone in particular for having unleashed the bomb. No one is responsible for an earthquake; one can shake one’s fist at the earth or God, for all the good it will do. Scientists who built the bomb would tell themselves that the weapon’s secret was always somewhere out there, waiting to be discovered, and that they had stumbled on it first. Mushrooms need not be planted by humans—they just appear. Even giant ones can, of course, be picked and eaten and thus tamed.
From Hiroshima:The World's Bomb by Andrew J. Rotter. © Andrew J. Rotter 2008 and published by Oxford University Press, Inc. All rights reserved.
—Andrew J. Rotter is Charles A. Dana Professor of History at Colgate University. His previous books include The Path to Vietnam and Comrades at Odds: India and the United States.