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By Root 1227 0

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 ofmeans that made possible the annihilation of the human race’.4

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 A-bomb 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 Pele, 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.)5

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. Ifthe 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