The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

by Richard Rhodes

Not human beings alone died at 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 let...