“The first bomb, set to go off at a height of some five hundred metres, produced a nuclear flash which lasted one fifteenth-millionth of a second, and whose brightness penetrated every building down to the cellars. It left its imprint on stone walls, changing their apparent colour through the fusion of certain minerals, although protected surfaces remained curiously un-altered. The same was the case with clothing and bodies, where kimono patterns were tattooed on the victims’ flesh. If photography, according to its inventor Nicéphore Niepce, was simply a method of engraving with light, where bodies inscribed their traces by virtue of their own luminosity, nuclear weapons inherited both the darkroom of Niepce and Daguerre and the military searchlight. What appears in the heart of darkrooms is no longer a luminous outline but a shadow, one which sometimes, as in Hiroshima, is carried to the depths of cellars and vaults. The Japanese shadows are inscribed not, as in former times, on the screens of a shadow puppet theatre but on a new screen, the walls of the city.” (Paul Virilio)
I found this quote in an ingenious little kaleidoscope of a book by Akira Mizuta Lippit, who splices together the histories of psychoanalysis, X-rays, and cinema to retell the cultural crisis inaugurated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a haunting of anxieties that emerged in 1895.
But in this section, he focusses on one aspect or shadow, as it were: “an inextricable relationship between atomic warfare and light, nuclear destruction and photography.”
What the X-ray gave to photography on a small scale, the atom bomb demonstrated to the world as a catastrophic megaton spectacle: that “the body itself could function like a photograph.”
This realization, he argues, brought to light what was always latent in “what one might call the ideology of photography” – i.e. “the desire to make the invisible visible.”
Akira Mizuta Lippit does a lot of things in his surprisingly slim ‘Atomic Light (Shadow Optics),’ one of which is draw an eerie connection to Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s ‘In Praise of Shadows,’ a 1933 essay on Japanese aesthetics that pushed back on the “excessive illumination” of Western-style architecture emerging in Japan at the time. As Akira puts it, this excessive illumination was “a Western imposition, enlightenment” meant to ‘drive away the shadows’ of the Orient.
What makes this connection so spooky for me is how Tanizaki’s language seems to foreshadow what was to come on a megaton level more than a decade later:
“As in most recent Western-style buildings, the ceilings are so low that one feels as if balls of fire [hi no tama] were blazing directly above one’s head. “Hot” is no word for the effect, and the closer to the ceiling the worse it is–your head and neck and spine feel as if they were being roasted. One of these balls of fire alone would suffice to light the place, yet three or four blaze down from the ceiling, and there are smaller versions on the walls and pillars, serving no function but to eradicate every trace of shadow. And so the room is devoid of shadows.”
Akira doesn’t have to add anything to the passage to make it spooky, but he does anyway: “In this light, in the light of searing Western heat, Tanizaki’s anxiety…appears prescient. Tanizaki trembles before a light still to come, under the first waves of catastrophic heat. A light that has already begun to appear but has yet to reveal the full extent of its radiance. A radiation that arrives as atomic light and brings absolute destruction.”
If any of this sounds overly aestheticized, it’s nothing in comparison to Willem de Kooning’s reflections on the atom bomb, which Akira also comments on:
“Today, some people think that the light of the atom bomb will change the concept of painting once and for all,” wrote de Kooning in 1951. “The eyes that actually saw the light melted out of sheer ecstasy. For one instant, everyone was the same color. It made angels out of everyone!”
Akira rightfully calls this account a “sadistic metaphysics” and “cruel suggestion” conveying “de Kooning’s uneasiness in front of the atomic spectacle.” He then breaks down the quote line by line, demonstrating how the “monochromatic annihilation” it describes is both racist and religiously confused.
But as we’ve seen, Akira does not shy away from aesthetics, because, in his analysis, “when technological advances facilitate the appearance of unknown phenomena, they often take the semblance of an artwork. The legacy of the atomic bomb, particularly its spectacular form, attests to this effect.”
Which is what makes his description of the photographic dimension of the bombings both so insightful and so painful to read: “if the atomic blasts and blackened skies can be thought of as massive cameras, then the victims of this dark atomic room can be seen as photographic effects. Seared organic and nonorganic matter left dark stains, opaque artifacts of once vital bodies, on the pavements and other surfaces of this grotesque theater. The “shadows,” as they were called, are actually photograms, images formed by the direct exposure of objects on photographic surfaces. Photographic sculptures. True photographs, more photographic than photographic images.”
Akira’s imaginative analysis and staccato style of writing is relentless, like a “black rain” (of terror) on the white pages of his strange and, I feel, anguished book. There is something performative about it and deeply moving.
Of this atomic spectacle, Akira concludes: “there can be no authentic photography” because the atom bomb is already “a total form of photography.”
I began this series with notes on Nolan’s Oppenheimer, so it’s only appropriate to start wrapping things up with another film: MGM’s 1947 ‘The Beginning or the End,’ a film presented as a documentary featuring the whole cast of characters we’ve come to know: J. Robert Oppenheimer, General Groves, President Truman, etc. One difference though, as Boyer puts it, was that “the film contained many insidious distortions of the atomic-bomb decision.”
They lied about Truman, who was “portrayed as agonizing over the decision when, in fact, as he himself frequently boasted in later years, he made it quickly with no qualms.” They lied about giving the Japanese advance warning (“ten days more warning than they gave us before Pearl harbor,” no less!). They even insinuated (falsely) that the Japanese were about to make their own atomic bomb…
These lies are not only significant from a documentarian perspective (apparently, MGM’s head told Albert Einstein that “dramatic truths” are just as important as “verifiable truth”–yikes!). They’re also important because they typify the official climate at the time.
If there’s one thing you take out of everything I’ve shared, take this: they lied and they lied and they lied. The U.S. military covered up the radiation effects of the atomic bomb; when an Australian reporter called Wilfred Burchett started documenting a mysterious illness killing survivors, a military briefing officer told him: “I’m afraid you’ve fallen victim to Japanese propaganda.”
Look up Dr. Harold Jacobson of Columbia University and see how much the War Department and the FBI actively suppressed the basic truth of nuclear science.
This point might seem inconsequential in light of the bombings themselves, and, indeed, the discourse moved so swiftly away from those fateful days in early August that they didn’t really need to lie as much anymore; nothing shared here is a national secret.
And yet, it strikes me as extremely significant that this was like every “original sin” – their eyes were opened as they realized that they were naked. That’s why they cover up and they hide.
Why did this happen? For some astute observers, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were less the final strikes of WWII and more the first shots of the Cold War. As A. J. Muste put it in 1947: “There seems no escape from the conclusion that the…atrocities were in one important aspect a move in the power struggle between the United States and Russia.”
In 1948, this theory was pushed further in a book called ‘Fear, War, & the Bomb,’ where a British scientist argued that the extreme haste to produce and drop the bombs was (contra Nolan’s focus on “better us than the Nazis”) timed around Russia’s decision to enter the war. They were seen as bound to “emerge as a major force in postwar Japan” & thus “American’s powerful rival for world dominance” (Boyer, 1985).
As he put it: “One can imagine the hurry with which the two bombs — the only existing two — were whisked across the Pacific to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki just in time, but only just, to ensure that the Japanese Government surrendered to American forces alone.”
Was this a fair assessment? The book was certainly attacked and the broader theory it espoused “ridiculed, denounced, or ignored” pretty much until the 1960s. And yet, one of the physicists who was on the scene did share this in a mildly positive review: “I can testify personally that a date near August tenth was a mysterious final date which we, who had the daily technical job of readying the bomb, had to meet at whatever cost in risk of or money or good development policy. That is hard to explain except by [the author] Blackett’s thesis.”
There are hints of this insinuation in Nolan’s Oppenheimer; it was far from enough.
The official start of the Cold War is remembered as March 12, 1947, when Truman became famous for the “doctrine” that still bears his name – that “it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” We still live under his shadow to this day; a shadow that stretches out from New Mexico right across the Pacific & back again.
One of the biggest tragedies of these two days that live in infamy is how cruelly they were quickly turned into signs and symbols and metaphors of something else, whatever that may be; Boyer describes this as an “almost lyrical mood” where “the ‘meaning’ ascribed” to Hiroshima and Nagasaki became more important that the dead and the dying of Hiroshima and Nagasaki themselves.
The phrases and fragments he collects from this subgenre are depressing:
“Far more important to humanity…[than] what happened in Hiroshima is how [these bombs] will affect mankind’s destiny.” (H. V. Kaltenborn, August 6, 1945)
[The bombings] “flashed across the world a light of such glaring intensity that even blind eyes could glimpse the forked road that is presented to humanity’s choice and destiny.” (Business Week, September 1945)
“What is happening to men’s minds is more important than what has happened in the physical realm.” (Senator Elbert Thomas, August 1945).
Everyone was rushing to find a “larger meaning” and a “true significance” and this, as Boyer so eloquently and viscerally puts it, “contributed to the process by which thick layers of psychic keloid tissue gradually came to overlay the still unhealed moral wounds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
Boyer published those words a year before I was born, and I don’t think anything has changed here in my lifetime.
Will Nolan’s Oppenheimer help to tear open this nation’s psychic callouses and expose what’s left untreated and unhealed below? Or will it contribute to the narcotizing effects of atom age spectacle and our now all too pedestrian doctrines of doomerism and despair?