I’ve been interested in the history of the atom bomb and nuclear technology ever since I read about Hanford in a book on the Columbia River called “The Organic Machine” almost two years ago. This book inspired me to visit the region last summer for my first serious foray into film photography, and soon after, I would fortuitously meet a photographer at the PCNW fair who had published a whole book on that area I had just been to. I was hooked and I kept telling myself I’d visit again.
I immersed myself in the history of that godawful decision that unleashed “the basic power of the universe” over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Then I started reading about Chernobyl. Then I stopped. It was all so bleak.
A few months ago, I heard murmurs of a movie about “the father of the atom bomb,” whom I hadn’t actually read anything about — I’d focused on the two Washingtons by that point, Hanford and D.C. — but I wasn’t curious enough to dig deep. Then I saw that Haymarket Books was publishing a new text on Hanford and I was hooked again. Suddenly, I couldn’t stop digging.
I’ve seen some interesting reactions to Nolan’s Oppenheimer, with one artist I admire calling it “irresponsible” in how it “capitalizes” on nuclear fears at a time when the threat of “World War III” is over the horizon. It’s a very curious take that feels like déjà vu when read in light of U.S. cultural reactions in the aftermath of the bomb that supposedly ended World War II.
In a book I’m reading literally called “By the Bomb’s Early Light,” we see two major reactions reverberate over the Pacific and into the American psyche: fear and hope. People were afraid of what a new age of atomic warfare might mean for national security (among other things), and indeed, people like Oppenheimer strategically leveraged that fear to try & push the U.S. away from further armament and into international cooperation – you see hints of that in Nolan’s depiction. The atomic scientists you see in the movie wringing their hands after they’d handed over their own creation worked tirelessly to (in their own words) scare the living daylights out of the American public through op/eds and town hall meetings, hoping that a “sane” nuclear policy would emerge; they soon realized that fear is actually not a great motivator of higher ideals. What fear did instead was fuel a desire for bigger & better bombs.
Others desperately clung to hope. The atom & its isotopes promised medical cures and technological marvels. They insisted that the bombs that incinerated Hiroshima and a few days later Nagasaki were in fact the dawn of a brighter age – they had won the war and now it was time to wage peace. They even held rallies around that very idea in Richland, the town that housed Hanford’s atomic workers, all the while the plant itself was being prepared to increase production for the coming Cold War.
And so, there was fear, and there was hope, but there was very little remorse or guilt. Might Nolan’s breathtaking yet flawed endeavor bring about pinpricks of such a feeling? Or was Nolan too enthralled with Oppenheimer’s failed calculations to realize that he could be repeating history in its retelling?
“Once in a lifetime all responsible elements of the city join hands to exceed all previous efforts in giving their community a concerted economic boost.” (Seattle City Light and Century 21)
“When you are young, you always expect that the world is going to end. And then you get older and the world still chugs along and you are forced to re-evaluate your stance on the apocalypse as well as your own relationship to time and death. You realise that the world will indeed continue, with or without you, and the pictures you see in your head. So you try to understand the pictures instead.
In modern middle-class culture, the absence of death in most people’s early years creates a psychic vacuum of sorts. For many, thoughts of a nuclear confrontation are one’s first true brush with nonexistence, and because they are the first, they can be the most powerful and indelible. Later in life, more sophisticated equations for death never quite capture that first intensity-the modern sex/death formula; mysterious lumps; the mental illness of friends; the actual death of loved ones all of life’s painful gifts. At least this is what I tell myself to explain these pictures in my head that will not go away.
And these images are more common than I had realised before, and they are not only particular to me. I have asked many of the people I know, and have interviewed many strangers, and I have heard their stories, tales of their blinkings in reverse. And while the pictures vary greatly from one person to the next-some people witness the flash with their family, some with lovers, some with strangers, some with pets, many alone-there is one common thread, and the thread is this: The flash may occur over the tract suburbs of the Fraser River delta, over Richmond and over White Rock; the flash may occur over the Vancouver harbour, over the Strait of Juan de Fuca, over the Pacific Ocean; the flash may occur over the American border, over Seattle, over Bremerton, over Tacoma, Anacortes, and Bellingham. But the Flash–flashing bright, making us remember in an instant what was, making us nostalgic before our time-is always flashing to the South–always to the South, up in the sky, up where we know the sun was supposed to have been.”
(Douglas Coupland, Life After God)
When I read about Hanford, I felt a strong urge to go there with a camera. A year later, as I read book after book about that time and that place and the nuclear horrors that node “loosed” as across the globe (very literally) as part of a particular constellation of sites and cities across this country, I realized just how intertwined the camera was with this nuclear history.
I’d already read about that infamous incident with Kodak after the Trinity test, but I had not thought much about the technical and cultural connections between the history of photography and the history of the atom bomb. I also hadn’t heard of the @atomicphotographersguild, which opened up a rich vista of historical and creative work on the subject.
I’d love to visit post-nuclear sites the way I visited the perimeters of Hanford last summer, but right now, and after Oppenheimer, I have a strong urge to look “through post-atomic eyes” at places I already inhabit. What would we see?
Would we see the same promises made about the atomic age being repackaged around AI? It’s interesting how one pundit back in the day tried to allay people’s nuclear fears by saying that this hopeful source of energy is misunderstood the way electricity might have been had it been discovered through the mass electrocution of a hundred thousand people. Shocking statement, right? But the thing is, AI is a weapon of war – we know this: you can watch their projects to militarize it on Netflix. But it was “loosed” upon the world as a hundred thousand little apps and doodads, so we haven’t really thought about what’s coming in World War III the same way they did in 1945.
“It is an awful responsibility which has come to us. We thank God that it has come to us, instead of to our enemies; and we pray that He may guide us to use it in His ways and for His purposes.”
That’s how President Truman talked about the atom bomb, a technology he chose to develop and deploy, but in these words, he attributed to divine providence instead.
Are these not the words of a genocidal megalomaniac? How did he get away with it?
He didn’t have to try very hard. By 1945, the Japanese enemy had been rendered uniquely “subhuman” in the American psyche, as one reporter at the time noted: “In Europe, we felt our enemies, horrible and deadly as they were, were still people. But out here I gathered that the Japanese were looked upon as something subhuman and repulsive; the way some people feel about cockroaches or mice.”
You fight people; vermin, you exterminate.
He didn’t have to try very hard because the Pacific theatre was “a war of distances…measured culturally as well as geographically,” as one historian put it, going as far as describing this as “a race war.”
He didn’t have to try very hard, as “the effects of dehumanizing propaganda were readily visible in average Americans’ reactions to the instantaneous death of over 200,000 civilians. Many saw no reason to mourn — or even express regret — for the mass killing of an enemy they viewed as worthy of extermination” (Hilary Elmendorf, 2007).
There was rabid, imperialistic religiosity on both sides of the Japanese-American war, but only one “Act of God,” because even though Emperor Hirohito claimed to be a descendent of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu, it was President Truman who chose to become Prometheus.
Why? Because it wasn’t very hard. American culture was ready for that “awful responsibility.”
Three weeks before the bombing of Hiroshima and a day after the Trinity test where the first nuclear explosion in human history was set off in the deserts of New Mexico, 155 atomic scientists sent a letter to Truman urging him to reconsider the morality of using their technology against Japan. We see a little bit of this hand wringing in Nolan’s Oppenheimer, but I don’t think it was enough to truly wrap our heads around the dizzying dissonance of this document.
How could 155 atomic scientists work so hard and know so much about something, and yet be so blind to its moral implications until it was much too late?
The scene where Oppenheimer is aggressively questioned about his moral reservations is powerful because it highlights a question that every scientist involved in that project should have had to answer: at what point did you realize that you were working on mass murder?
It’s easy to point fingers and even easier to throw up our hands and call everything ambiguous, but this is not an idle question about hapless historical figures now long gone. It’s about you and I and everyone we know, today. At what point do the technologists of our time realize what it is they’re working on? At what point do our own 9-5s add up to mass murder? Would we do anything about it if we knew?
After Nuremberg, we learned a lot about the banality of evil, but some evil is so banal, so hidden in spreadsheets and source codes and zoom calls, that we never actually notice it. Until it’s too late.
A senator once called the bombing of Hiroshima “one of the most morally unambiguous events of the twentieth century,” but as Hilary Elmendorf points out in her paper on American religious narratives of the atomic bombings, if this were true, why was so much of the aftermath censored by the U.S. military occupation?
Nagasaki in particular would pose a unique challenge to the ‘Good War’ warriors’ neat story of triumph over evil. The bomb dropped on August 9 blew up near Urakami Cathedral, “the main center of worship for Catholics in the city that had long held the largest number of parishioners in all of Japan.” As Elmendorf puts it, “the very existence of Christians in Nagasaki, not to mention their subsequent slaughter by a vocally Christian nation, negated the wartime denial, on both sides of the Pacific, of any spiritual commonalities between the two enemies.”
Some photographs that brought this dissonance to the fore made it out, with Life magazine publishing a haunting image by Bernard Hoffman of Christ’s head in the cathedral rubble, but the censors put a stop to that very quickly. Indeed, American “censors worked consciously to eliminate material that ‘reduced the cultural distance between Americans and Japanese.'”
Why would they work so hard if their actions were so morally unambiguous?
There’s a minor history of religious resistance to this God-given victory narrative that I wish more people knew about. In 1946, the Federal Council of Churches published a report that said: “As American Christians, we are deeply penitent for the irresponsible use already made of the atomic bomb…the surprise bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are morally indefensible…we have sinned grievously against the laws of God and against the people of Japan.”
Do you think any member of any of the churches represented in that document even remembers that? Would they be clear sighted enough to agree? Yes, it was morally unambiguous: it was wrong.
It’s a little bit heartening to read that, “though a minority viewpoint,” the “greatest concentration of critical comment on the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings came from the churches” (Boyer, 1985). In fact, the federation of churches that would call them a “grievous sin” in 1946 almost immediately issued a statement urging a stop to their use; it was published on August 9, 1945, before the news of Nagasaki’s bombing that happened that day would break.
Intense theological debates would go back and forth on the ethics and morality of atomic war for the next two years, and by 1947, the two main “branches of American Christendom [had] roundly condemned the concept of total war, the deliberate terror bombing of civilians, and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” but there was no “categorical condemnation of the atomic bomb as an instrument of war.” The commies were sure to be working on one, after all, and indeed would test their first in 1949.
Would it have mattered if U.S. theologians had pressed the matter harder? Boyer speculates that “the nuclear arms race might well have unfolded precisely as it did,” with or without their condemnation. And yet, in my view, it’s fair to judge their failure to “render a clear and unequivocal no to these new instruments of mass destruction.”
It’s also important to remember and judge how one burgeoning branch of “American Christendom” decided to react to the bombings; when the magazine of the National Association of Evangelicals was asked why it made no comment on the bomb in its reporting on “V-J Day,” its editors “responded with a classic statement of the evangelical position:”
“Our concern is not so much about the atomic bomb as about the people who control it. If the people are saved Christians, it will do the world no harm. If they are pagan, beware…Our business is to preach the gospel…We are unwilling to take any blame for the shortcomings of our social order beyond our own personal conduct.”
Is it any surprise how these people behaved when they eventually took interest in the social order?
It’s even more heartening to know that “isolated voices of protest” to the bombings did make it into the historical record; these were “not coordinated or organized,” but represented what Boyer calls “a spontaneous, anguished cry” that we really ought to remember.
Various newspapers ran editorials and columns that called the bombings a “supreme tragedy”–the Omaha World Herald even called Truman’s announcement “almost sacrilegious” in its invocation of “the name of a merciful God in connection with so Satanic a device.”
Ordinary people also wrote bitter and angry letters calling what happened “a stain upon our national life” and “simply mass murder, sheer terrorism.” One of the best reactions from an ordinary American that Boyer documents wrote this:
“Phooey America. That blood will scream up to our dear God–What will come next? … Bury the bomb and all the papers, it is too shocking news what America did with that knowledge. If we destroy innocent civilians we will be destroyed in return–that was a devilish act against Japan.”
Where is the lie?
I was intrigued and frankly disappointed to read about the confused response of the American Left, however. While the socialist Norman Thomas did make it among the ranks of the “isolated voices of protest,” condemning the “pious satisfaction” of most commentators on the atomic bombings, he was doing so against many of his comrades as well.
Most socialists reacted with automatic applications of their rote “materialist” (in name only) analyses, insisting that “the people must be the owners of atomic energy,” because “the atom can be socialized,” of course. The Socialist Party saw this new age as a shining opportunity; in a 1946 pamphlet called “The Atomic Age,” the vanguard declared that the splitting of the atom had “made it possible to transform nature into the servant of man, giving him food infinitely beyond the capacity of the human appetite, clothing far more abundant than we can wear, homes for all to fill our streets with palaces.” Yikes.
One writer even formulated an atomic age archetype he called the “Liberal of 1946.” This man (always a man) is “aware of perils ahead and therefore alert, but who [is also] convinced that the opportunity is greater than the danger.” Indeed, “find a man unterrified, and you have found the liberal of 1946.”
I love the way that Boyer structures his book to really amplify and dramatize the parts of the post-Hiroshima story where America’s intellectuals reacted in self-serving and wholly irresponsible ways. He ends his chapter on “experts and ideologues” with a line for the ages: “As Albert Einstein said in a different context, the atomic bomb changed everything except the way men thought.”
“I saw a great light, more luminous than the sun, flooding out over the darkness of the earth. Its rays were lighting up the innermost recesses of life, searching out secrets never revealed by the light of the sun … I saw all men standing straight and tall and confident, facing, without fear, their future, urged forward by a new hope, by the infinite wonder and possibility of a new life … Everything I have seen, everything I have heard, everything I have felt has given me this faith: We are bigger than the atom, and if we face the future boldly, we will enter a world made bright by the sunny side of the atom.”
These are the words of the narrator in a CBS documentary aired in June 1947. Media researchers tested how people felt after watching this documentary by monitoring them with polygraphs during a screening and following up with a questionnaire: 41% responded that they felt less fearful after the broadcast.
Fear and hope: the predominant affects in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But were they masking more? “Did this obsessive preoccupation with the atomic future,” Boyer asks, “provide an excuse for avoiding what had already happened?”
One Dutch psychologist seemed to think so, linking these fears to “hidden feelings of guilt.” They were very well hidden, however, because, in the words of a historian of that early period, there was actually “little public remorse.”
The truth of the matter is over 80% of Americans approved of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A Gallup poll made weeks after the bombings asked: “do you approve or disapprove of the use of the atomic bomb?” and 85% answered: it’s a-okay with me, Jack.
In 1948, a study in New York asked: “which of these words best describe your feelings when you hear the phrase ‘atomic energy'” and 1% chose “guilt.” It was simply not a thing for that generation, no matter how many theologians wrote and stated and prayed and proclaimed otherwise.
Does this not frighten you? That your grandfathers and their fathers probably felt this way?
Boyer quotes a 1983 statement from Catholic bishops that pleaded: “we must shape the climate of opinion which will make it possible for our country to express profound sorrow over the atomic bombings of 1945. Without that sorrow, there is no possibility of finding a way to repudiate future use of nuclear weapons.”
It almost feels comical to ask a nation founded on so much lawless impunity to cry over one nuclear holocaust way out there, 78 years ago. But it still shocks the mind to think that something so blindingly bad could be so deeply repressed for so long.
Indeed, if America were a person, America would be in desperate need of therapy.
“Lots of people have little tricks to help steady their nerves at times like that–like reciting jingles or rhymes or the multiplication table … You’ll probably be frightened. But don’t be ashamed of being afraid at that moment. It’s perfectly normal and healthy to be afraid of danger. Just don’t let it make you lose your head and forget the facts in this book. Make sure you’ve got hold of yourself by the time the all-clear sounds.”
These words come from a 1950 book called “How to Survive an Atomic Bomb,” and they describe the moment of impact. It’s perfectly normal to be afraid when a bomb goes off. Just don’t let it make you lose your head, slugger.
This is the sort of nonsense that typified the bizarro world of the Cold War. Can you imagine living like that? The mental tricks you have to play on yourself to convince yourself that everything is fine and that your country is good?
Well, I suppose we don’t have to stretch our imaginations much to know that cognitive dissonance today. What mental tricks do we play on ourselves to keep ourselves going as global warming turns to global boiling and climate change becomes irreversible climate catastrophe?
Will anyone write that survival book?