Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [142]
Walking near a crossroads in Hiroshima two days after the bombing, the historian Toyofumi Ogura came upon a makeshift booth, patched together from bits of wood gathered from the wreckage that surrounded it. ‘On the shelves’, he observed, ‘were rows of small packets made from old folded newspaper... like the ones in which peddlers wrap seeds. However, each of these packets contained a small quantity of ash and had a name and address written on them. Many didn’t even have names—only a description, such as “Male about thirty years old” or “Forty-year-old female” ’. Bereaved family members, Ogura noted, had come to claim the minuscule remains, even if it meant guessing wildly about whose ashes they were getting. Ogura’s wife, Fumiyo, was doomed to die less than two weeks later. He continued to write letters about his experience, all of them addressed to her.67
Some five years later, after the stories of the hibakusha and their lost loved ones had begun to come to light, after censorship about the atomic bomb had eased in Japan and permitted publication of some memoirs and poems, Hanson W Baldwin, the distinguished military affairs writer for the New York Times, published an essay in an edited volume called Great Mistakes of the War. Baldwin reviewed what was then known of Japanese decisionmaking during the summer of 1945 and concluded, in agreement with a number of postwar critics, that the atomic bombs had not been necessary to win the war. The Japanese, he wrote, were on the verge of surrender, the Emperor having aligned himself with the peace faction in July. By using the bombs, the Truman administration had exacted from the people of Japan a terrible price and had compromised America’s moral standing in the world. Americans had ‘inherited the mantle of Genghis Khan and all those of past history who have justified the use of utter ruthlessness in war’, and were ‘now branded with the mark of the beast’. Equally troubling was the precedent the bombs established of ‘Total War’. By unleashing on defenseless citizens the power of the nucleus, the United States had removed the final restriction on the conduct of war, and it was utopian to assume that the United States itself would now be spared the consequences: ‘We sowed there a whirlwind of hate which we shall someday reap.’ In an age of bitter Cold War rivalry, and with the Soviet Union having detonated its first atomic bomb the previous summer, Baldwin’s prediction had about it the ring of ominous and terrifying common sense.68
SEVEN - The Soviet Union: The Bomb and the Cold War
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’Autorite 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’.1
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