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By Root 1174 0

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, 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.2

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.3

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 followingJapan’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