The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

by Richard Rhodes

They flew into history through a middle world, suspended between sky and sea, drinking coffee and eating ham sandwiches, engines droning, the smell of hot electronics in the air.

The first combat atomic bomb fell away from the plane, then nosed down. It was inscribed with autographs and messages, some of them obscene. “Greetings to the Emperor from the men of the Indianapolis,” one challenged.

Lewis said he could taste atomic fission. He said it tasted like lead.

B-sans

Yale Medical School pathologist working with a joint American-Japanese study commission a few months after the war, Averill A. Liebow, observes: Accompanying the flash of light was an instantaneous flash of heat . . . Its duration was probably less than one tenth of a second and its intensity was sufficient to cause nearby flammable objects . . . to burst into flame and to char poles as far as 4,000 yards away from the hypocenter [i.e., the point on the ground directly below the fireball]. . . . At 600–700 yards it was sufficient to chip and roughen granite. . . . The heat also produced bubbling of tile to about 1,300 yards. It has been found by experiment that to produce this effect a temperature of [3,000° F] acting for four seconds is necessary, but under these conditions the effect is deeper, which indicates that the temperature was higher and the duration less during the Hiroshima explosion.

At the same instant birds ignited in midair. Mosquitoes and flies, squirrels, family pets crackled and were gone. The fireball flashed an enormous photograph of the city at the instant of its immolation fixed on the mineral, vegetable and animal surfaces of the city itself. A spiral ladder left its shadow in unburned paint on the surface of a steel storage tank. Leaves shielded reverse silhouettes on charred telephone poles. The black-brushed calligraphy burned out of a rice-paper name card posted on a school building door; the dark flowers burned out of a schoolgirl’s light blouse. A human being left the memorial of his outline in unspalled granite on the steps of a bank. Another, pulling a handcart, protected a handcart- and human-shaped surface of asphalt from boiling. Farther away, in the suburbs, the flash induced dark, sunburn-like pigmentation sharply shadowed deep in human skin, streaking the shape of an exposed nose or ear or hand raised in gesture onto the faces and bodies of startled citizens: the mask of Hiroshima, Liebow and his colleagues came to call that pigmentation. They found it persisting unfaded five months after the event.

These glowing ruins and the blazing funeral pyres set me to wondering if Pompeii had not looked like this during its last days. But I think there were not so many dead in Pompeii as there were in Hiroshima.

Something else was destroyed as well, the Japanese study explains—that shared life Hannah Arendt calls the common world: In the case of an atomic bombing . . . a community does not merely receive an impact; the community itself is destroyed.2697 Within 2 kilometers of the atomic bomb’s hypocenter all life and property were shattered, burned, and buried under ashes. The visible forms of the city where people once carried on their daily lives vanished without a trace. The destruction was sudden and thorough; there was virtually no chance to escape. . . . Citizens who had lost no family members in the holocaust were as rare as stars at sunrise. . . . The atomic bomb had blasted and burned hospitals, schools, city offices, police stations, and every other kind of human organization. . . . Family, relatives, neighbors, and friends relied on a broad range of interdependent organizations for everything from birth, marriage, and funerals to firefighting, productive work, and daily living. These traditional communities were completely demolished in an instant.

Destroyed, that is, were not only men, women and thousands of children but also restaurants and inns, laundries, theater groups, sports clubs, sewing clubs, boys’ clubs, girls’ clubs, love affairs, trees and gardens, grass, gates, gravestones, temples and shrines, family heirlooms, radios, classmates, books, courts of law, clothes, pets, groceries and markets, telephones, personal letters, automobiles, bicycles, horses—120 war-horses—musical instruments, medicines and medical equipment, life savings, eyeglasses, city records, sidewalks, family scrapbooks, monuments, engagements, marriages, employees, clocks and watches, public transportation, street signs, parents, works of art. “The whole of society,” concludes the Japanese study, “was laid waste to its very foundations.”2698 Lifton’s history professor saw not even foundations left. “Such a weapon,” he told the American psychiatrist, “has the power to make everything into nothing.”

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The officials were not legally bound to do so—the Emperor’s authority lay outside the legal structure of the government—but by older and deeper bonds than law they were bound, and they set to work.

By the time we reach the atom bomb, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the ease of access to target and the instant nature of macro-impact mean that both the choice of city and the identity of the victim has become completely randomized, and human technology has reached the final platform of self-destructiveness.2747 The great cities of the dead, in numbers, remain Verdun, Leningrad and Auschwitz. But at Hiroshima and Nagasaki the “city of the dead” is finally transformed from a metaphor into a literal reality. The city of the dead of the future is our city and its victims are—not French and German soldiers, nor Russian citizens, nor Jews—but all of us without reference to specific identity.