tag:theconversation.com,2011:/au/topics/atomic-bombs-17704/articles
Atomic bombs – The Conversation
2024-03-08T13:35:55Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/222591
2024-03-08T13:35:55Z
2024-03-08T13:35:55Z
Despite its big night at the Oscars, ‘Oppenheimer’ is a disappointment and a lost opportunity
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/580022/original/file-20240305-24-oirj08.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=24%2C6%2C4085%2C2150&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The U.S. detonates an atomic bomb at Bikini Atoll in Micronesia in the first underwater test of the device.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/united-states-detonating-an-atomic-bomb-at-bikini-atoll-in-news-photo/113493339?adppopup=true">Universal History Archive/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>With 13 Oscars nominations <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/oscars-2024-live-winners-list-academy-awards-oppenheimer-jimmy-kimmel-210004276.html">and seven wins</a> – including best picture – “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15398776/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk">Oppenheimer</a>” was the star of the 96th Academy Awards.</p>
<p>Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster, which told the story of the making of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, added to its awards season haul that includes <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/07/movies/golden-globes-takeaways.html">five Golden Globes</a> and <a href="https://apnews.com/article/britain-bafta-film-awards-oppenheimer-220af1ec73e47e6222abe2b0934cddc8">seven BAFTA awards</a>.</p>
<p>But as a historian <a href="https://academic.oup.com/whq/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/whq/whae016/7610040?redirectedFrom=fulltext">whose research has revolved around the survivors of the bombings</a>, I cannot help but be disappointed that, yet again, the dominant narrative of the bombs chugs along. </p>
<p>This narrative has long informed how Hollywood and the U.S. media have addressed nuclear weapons. It paints the bombs’ creation as a morally fraught but necessary project – an extraordinary invention by exceptional minds, a national project that was a matter of life or death for a country mired in a global conflict. To use the bombs was a difficult decision at a challenging time. Yet it’s important to remember that, above all, the bombs saved democracy.</p>
<p>There is something that strikes me as so inward-looking to this narrative – it is so focused on the stress over losing an arms race, on fears of making a mistake, on anxiety over what would happen if bombs were to one day be dropped on the U.S. – that it drowns out what actually did happen after the bombs were detonated. </p>
<h2>A barren cultural landscape</h2>
<p>When Nolan was pressed over why he chose not to show any images of Hiroshima, Nagasaki or the victims, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/11/movies/robert-downey-jr-christopher-nolan-oppenheimer.html?searchResultPosition=2">he said</a>, “less can be more” – that the subtext of what’s not shown is even more powerful, since it forces audiences to use their imaginations.</p>
<p>But what images from popular culture do audiences even have to pull from?</p>
<p>From the 1950s to the 1980s, many Hollywood films explored the fear of a nuclear apocalypse. Only a few depicted mass deaths on the ground – “<a href="https://theconversation.com/is-it-time-for-a-21st-century-version-of-the-day-after-90270">The Day After</a>” comes to mind – but virtually none showed survivors who looked or sounded like real survivors.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Middle-aged man in a tuxedo and an awards ceremony." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/580026/original/file-20240305-26-v8bt61.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/580026/original/file-20240305-26-v8bt61.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580026/original/file-20240305-26-v8bt61.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580026/original/file-20240305-26-v8bt61.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580026/original/file-20240305-26-v8bt61.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580026/original/file-20240305-26-v8bt61.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580026/original/file-20240305-26-v8bt61.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">‘Oppenheimer’ director Christopher Nolan.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/british-film-producer-and-director-christopher-nolan-poses-news-photo/2013546999?adppopup=true">Adrian Dennis/AFP via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>Instead, films such as “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057012/">Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb</a>” simply showed mushroom clouds and bird’s-eye views of the bombs from above. When cameras did zoom in on the ground in films such as “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056331/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8_nm_0_q_panic%2520in%2520year">Panic in Year Zero!</a>” and “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086429/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8_nm_0_q_testament">Testament</a>,” they revealed Americans bracing for or panicking about the bomb being dropped on them. </p>
<p>Watching these films, it’s easy to believe that if a nuclear attack had ever occurred, it must have been in a U.S. city. </p>
<p>This genealogy of films also includes collective biopics of a sort, in which a nuclear drama unfolds among scientists, military officials and politicians.</p>
<p>In the 2024 book “<a href="https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295752341/resisting-the-nuclear/">Resisting the Nuclear: Art and Activism across the Pacific</a>,” one chapter describes how Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein reenacted the Trinity test in “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0038312/">Atomic Power</a>,” a 1946 film that celebrates the role of science in U.S. military might. They note that in the film’s outtakes, Einstein seemed unfocused while Oppenheimer appeared stilted. </p>
<p>Clearly, the two scientists were uncomfortable with their newly assigned role as promoters of a mesmerizing, dangerous technology. If “Oppenheimer” expands on this personal discomfort, the film keeps firmly in place the disconnect between the bombs’ creators and the destruction they wrought.</p>
<h2>The bombs didn’t discriminate</h2>
<p>In the end, films like “Oppenheimer” offer few, if any, new insights about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and their repercussions. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2023-08-04/oppenheimer-movie-christopher-nolan-atomic-bomb-hiroshima-nagasaki-critics">More than 200,000 people perished</a>, and the lives lost included not only Japanese civilians but also Koreans who had been in Japan as forced laborers or military conscripts. </p>
<p>In fact, <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/27017727#:%7E:text=It%20has%20been%20estimated%20that,stayed%20in%20Japan%20%5B2%5D.">1 in every 10 people who survived the bomb were Koreans</a>, but the U.S. government has never recognized them as survivors of U.S. military attacks. To this day they struggle to get access to medical treatment for their long-term radiation illness. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Elderly Korean women cry, shout and hold photos of lost loved ones during a protest march." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/580241/original/file-20240306-18-2jgn2l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/580241/original/file-20240306-18-2jgn2l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580241/original/file-20240306-18-2jgn2l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580241/original/file-20240306-18-2jgn2l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580241/original/file-20240306-18-2jgn2l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580241/original/file-20240306-18-2jgn2l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580241/original/file-20240306-18-2jgn2l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Relatives of conscripted Koreans killed in the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki protest at the Japanese embassy in Seoul in 2005.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/korean-conscripted-victims-family-hold-victim-portrait-with-news-photo/1229624814?adppopup=true">Seung-il Ryu/NurPhoto via Getty Image</a></span>
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<p>Moreover, about 3,000 to 4,000 of those affected by the bombs were Americans of Japanese ancestry, as I have shown in my <a href="https://bookshop.org/p/books/american-survivors-trans-pacific-memories-of-hiroshima-and-nagasaki-naoko-wake/15472870?ean=9781108835275">book about Asian American survivors of the bombings</a>. Most of them were children who were staying with their families, or students who had enrolled in schools in Japan prior to the war because U.S. schools had become increasingly discriminatory to Asian American students.</p>
<p>These non-Japanese survivors – including many U.S.-born citizens – have been known to scholars and activists since at least the 1990s. So it feels surreal to watch a film that depicts the bombs’ effects purely in the context of the U.S. at war against its enemy, Japan. As my work shows, the bombs didn’t discriminate between friend and foe. </p>
<p>It is not that Christopher Nolan ignores the bombs’ power to destroy.</p>
<p>He gestures toward it when he depicts J. Robert Oppenheimer, the nuclear physicist played by Cillian Murphy, <a href="https://collider.com/oppenheimer-cillian-murphy-gymnasium-scene/">imagining a nuclear holocaust</a> when giving a celebratory speech to his colleagues after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.</p>
<p>But what Oppenheimer sees in this hallucination is the face of a young white woman peeling off – played by <a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm6898446/">Nolan’s daughter, Flora</a> – not those of the Japanese, Korean and Asian American people who actually experienced the bombs. Later in the film, Oppenheimer looks away from the images of Hiroshima’s ground zero when they’re shown to him and his Manhattan Project colleagues. </p>
<p>I wondered, as I watched this scene, whether this decision encourages the audience to look away, too.</p>
<h2>Global reverberations</h2>
<p>Even if this film is seen purely through the lens of entertainment, Nolan could have chosen to recognize why the bombs are such a galvanizing subject to begin with: They have done much, much more than make white, middle-class Americans feel anxious or guilty.</p>
<p>Their blasts reverberated across the globe, tearing apart not only America’s wartime enemies but also colonized peoples and racial minorities. </p>
<p>Cold War nuclear production disproportionately hurt Native and Indigenous Americans who worked at uranium mines and the residents of <a href="https://www.arcjournals.org/international-journal-of-research-in-sociology-and-anthropology/volume-3-issue-4/4">the Pacific Islands chosen as the sites of several dozens of U.S. nuclear tests</a>.</p>
<p>For those on the receiving end, the effects of the nuclear explosions are not a thing of the past. <a href="https://theconversation.com/bikini-islanders-still-deal-with-fallout-of-us-nuclear-tests-more-than-70-years-later-58567">They are a daily reality</a>. </p>
<p>And the effects of radiation continue to plague not just humans but the environment. Scientists still don’t know what to do with <a href="https://upittpress.org/books/9780822966128/">highly radioactive nuclear waste</a>, whether it’s from nuclear power plants or former nuclear test sites that remain off-limits <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4165831/">because they are too contaminated to inhabit</a>. </p>
<p><a href="https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/">As global conflicts increase the possibility of nuclear war</a>, it’s certainly important to talk about the ongoing legacies of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. </p>
<p>But to create a more balanced understanding of nuclear weapons, it would be helpful if talented filmmakers like Nolan made more of an effort to look beyond the narrow immediacy of a mushroom cloud.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/222591/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Naoko Wake does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
For all its praise, the film furthers the dominant narrative of the bombs as a morally fraught but necessary project, with American anxieties playing a starring role.
Naoko Wake, Professor of History, Michigan State University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/187759
2022-08-04T12:19:58Z
2022-08-04T12:19:58Z
Atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki left survivors wrestling with spiritual questions – here’s how Buddhists and Catholics responded
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/477002/original/file-20220801-62374-upy1cz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C6%2C1013%2C633&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Priests from several religions pray for the victims of the atomic bomb in Nagasaki upon the 60th anniversary.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/priests-from-a-variety-of-religions-pray-for-the-victims-of-news-photo/53347778?adppopup=true">Koichi Kamoshida/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>It has been over seven decades since the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and Aug. 9, 1945. The U.S. attack left <a href="https://thebulletin.org/2020/08/counting-the-dead-at-hiroshima-and-nagasaki/">between 110,000 and 220,000 people dead</a>, and hundreds of thousands more who survived the bomb but suffered its effects – people known in Japan as “hibakusha,” many of whom died of related illnesses.</p>
<p>Yet the production and possession of nuclear weapons <a href="https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/Nuclearweaponswhohaswhat">has not stopped</a>. In the United States, they hold <a href="https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/people-of-the-bomb">an important place</a> in the national psyche, regarded as ultimate protection. </p>
<p>For years, hibakusha have shared their testimonies and memories with the public. However, as <a href="https://las.depaul.edu/academics/religious-studies/faculty/Pages/yuki-miyamoto.aspx">an ethicist</a> working on <a href="https://www.iwanami.co.jp/book/b515759.html">nuclear discourses in the U.S. and Japan</a>, I have been frustrated to see that their philosophical, religious and spiritual perspectives on the matter are largely overlooked in English-language literature. Popular culture seems to value their tragic stories, but not their struggle to come to terms with the event.</p>
<p>Religious leaders’ understandings, rooted in their own experiences living in post-atomic Hiroshima and Nagasaki, <a href="https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823240517/beyond-the-mushroom-cloud/">offer insights into our violent world</a>. At times, their interpretations of the bombings have been used to promote political agendas. Nonetheless, their interpretations allow people today to reconsider the ethics of responsibility in the atomic age.</p>
<h2>Punishment from above</h2>
<p>Hiroshima, where the first of the two bombs was dropped in Japan, has historically been known for the <a href="https://tricycle.org/magazine/shin-buddhist-practice/">True Pure Land school of Buddhism</a>, or Shin Buddhism, the largest Buddhist institution in Japan. Its Hiroshima adherents are called “<a href="https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2865">aki monto</a>.”</p>
<p>One of them was Kōji Shigenobu, who grew up to become a Shin Buddhist priest. He and other schoolchildren had been evacuated from the city during the war but lost family members in the inferno. Eventually, he developed a perspective on the bombing that represented many Hiroshima residents’ frame of mind, as I describe in my book “<a href="https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823240517/beyond-the-mushroom-cloud/">Beyond the Mushroom Cloud</a>.”</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="A black and white photo shows a man looking sad sitting in front of small boxes with Japanese script." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/477008/original/file-20220801-13716-wpqlv2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/477008/original/file-20220801-13716-wpqlv2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=631&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477008/original/file-20220801-13716-wpqlv2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=631&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477008/original/file-20220801-13716-wpqlv2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=631&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477008/original/file-20220801-13716-wpqlv2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=794&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477008/original/file-20220801-13716-wpqlv2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=794&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477008/original/file-20220801-13716-wpqlv2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=794&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A Japanese man sits in a Buddhist temple in Hiroshima in front of ceremonial boxes containing ashes of victims of the blast.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/japanese-man-sits-in-a-buddhist-temple-in-front-of-news-photo/615307608?adppopup=true">Corbis Historical via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p><a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/%E4%BA%BA%E9%96%93%E3%81%AE%E5%BF%83%E3%83%92%E3%83%AD%E3%82%B7%E3%83%9E%E3%81%AE%E5%BF%83/cZZOAAAAMAAJ?hl=en">In his essay</a>, Kōji viewed the atomic bombing as representing three circles of sins: the sins of Hiroshima residents, of Japanese nationals and of humanity as a whole. He failed to mention that the city was one of Japan’s military bases sending soldiers to occupied lands and battlefields across Asia. However, Kōji criticized Hiroshima citizens as selfish, writing that they had abandoned the injured after the bombing; condemned Japan for its military aggression; and lamented that humans had become warmongers. Such human nature, according to Kōji, invited the atomic bombing. </p>
<p>His critical self-reflection and attempts to go beyond a black-and-white understanding of good and evil – such as Japanese vs. Americans or victims vs. victimizers – may offer an insightful perspective on how to escape cycles of violence.</p>
<p>On the other hand, his understanding of Buddhist doctrine, which interpreted a particular historical incident as a universal sin of humankind, may have diverted attention from the Japanese government’s responsibility. Moreover, it exonerated the U.S. of its responsibility for using indiscriminate weapons – which continued <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/nuclear-tests-have-changed-but-they-never-really-stopped/">to be tested</a> and produced in the U.S. mainland <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2015/11/27/a-ground-zero-forgotten/">and its territories</a>. </p>
<h2>Sacrificial lambs</h2>
<p>Nagasaki, about 200 miles west of Hiroshima, has a long history of Catholicism. In the 16th century, in many parts of the Japanese archipelagos, local lords converted to Christianity, leading to mass conversions in their domains. But the following 250 years saw foreign priests expelled and converts <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-50414472">persecuted for their faith</a>.</p>
<p>Even after Christianity was forbidden, as worship of a “foreign” god, political leaders viewed Catholics as posing a high risk to the stability of the country. Hence, the Catholic community in Nagasaki, which clandestinely carried on its faith, was forced to live next to that of the “<a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-34615972">burakumin</a>,” a social group that was traditionally outcast as “untouchables.” </p>
<p>This history helps to explain the particular interpretation presented by one Catholic convert, a medical doctor and professor in Nagasaki: <a href="https://nagaitakashi.nagasakipeace.jp/english/overview.html">Nagai Takashi</a>. </p>
<p>Three months after the bombing, a requiem Mass for the dead was held at the site of the Urakami Cathedral, the closest landmark to the center of the blast, and Nagai was asked to deliver a speech. He crafted his remarks on a conversation he had with a former student who was agonized by people telling him that he lost his family and community because of his faith in a foreign god, disrespecting Japanese gods and the emperor. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Two women kneel as they tend to a child injured by the atomic bomb in Hiroshima." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/477009/original/file-20220801-82236-5s4ysz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/477009/original/file-20220801-82236-5s4ysz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=554&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477009/original/file-20220801-82236-5s4ysz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=554&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477009/original/file-20220801-82236-5s4ysz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=554&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477009/original/file-20220801-82236-5s4ysz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=697&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477009/original/file-20220801-82236-5s4ysz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=697&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477009/original/file-20220801-82236-5s4ysz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=697&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A child hurt in the atomic bomb blast at Hiroshima, Japan, receives care from her mother and a nurse’s aide.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/bandaged-child-hurt-in-the-atomic-bomb-blast-at-hiroshima-news-photo/615316474?adppopup=true">Corbis Historial via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>In the speech, Nagai responded that <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1030303.The_Bells_of_Nagasaki">those killed by the bombs were sacrificial lambs, chosen by God because of their unblemished nature</a>. Thanks to their sacrifice, he noted, the war ended – whereas those who survived, like him, had to endure defeat and destruction. Nagai portrayed the hardships as an entrance exam to heaven to reunite with loved ones. </p>
<p>Perhaps it is understandable that the Nagasaki Catholics, whose history is rife with persecution and martyrdom, <a href="https://www.nagasaki-np.co.jp/peace_article/2121/">embraced Nagai’s message</a> to help them come to terms with the loss of their loved ones. And it is not entirely far off from the Catholic approach to <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/apost_letters/1984/documents/hf_jp-ii_apl_11021984_salvifici-doloris.html">theodicy – the question of why God allows human suffering</a>. </p>
<p>Like Kōji’s interpretation, however, this one could invite a victim-blaming attitude, disregarding the effort to assign responsibility to the actual perpetrators. If their message of self-critical reflection had been adopted not by the victims alone, but also by those who inflicted the harm, perhaps the world could have avoided creating more victims from the production and tests of nuclear weapons.</p>
<p>On this anniversary, we should remember not only those who suffered from the atomic bombing in Japan – including <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-a-hiroshima-survivor-helped-remember-12-u-s-pows-killed-by-bomb">12 American prisoners of war</a>, <a href="https://apjjf.org/2015/13/32/Mick-Broderick/4358.html">other POWs</a> and people from <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520085879/hiroshima-traces">Japan’s colonies in the Korean Peninsula</a>. We should remember all who have suffered the effects of this atomic age, including <a href="https://fas.org/pir-pubs/uranium-mining-u-s-nuclear-weapons-program-3/">uranium miners</a> in New Mexico, Americans living downwind of <a href="https://www.deseret.com/utah/2022/5/12/23068706/utah-nuclear-testing-downwinders-john-curtis-chris-stewart-nevada-cold-war-radition-exposure-cancer#:%7E:text=for%20his%20signature.-,Downwinders%2C%20or%20victims%20of%20radiation%20exposure%20from%20aboveground%20testing%20of,The%20legislation%2C%20sponsored%20by%20Sen.">test sites in Nevada</a> and <a href="https://www.whitman.edu/newsroom/whitman-magazine/whitman-magazine-summer-2015/wm-featured-stories-summer-2015/the-downwinders">Washington state</a>, and citizens of <a href="https://theconversation.com/75-years-after-nuclear-testing-in-the-pacific-began-the-fallout-continues-to-wreak-havoc-158208">the Marshall Islands</a>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/187759/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Yuki Miyamoto receives funding from DePaul University's Humanity Center fellowship, DePaul's University Council Research summer grant, and a board member of an NPO group, named CORE (Consequences of Radiation Exposure), founded by Hanford downwinders. </span></em></p>
As Japanese victims struggled to process the nuclear attack, many turned to religion. The way they understood the horror still has consequences today.
Yuki Miyamoto, Professor of Religious Studies, DePaul University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/164333
2021-08-03T20:08:01Z
2021-08-03T20:08:01Z
The Hiroshima Panels are a remarkable artistic exploration of trauma
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/414264/original/file-20210803-19-18jq4h4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C2%2C2000%2C494&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">XIV Crows (からす) by Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi, 1972</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy the Maruki Gallery</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>On August 6, 1945, the US military obliterated Hiroshima with the world’s first deployed nuclear bomb. Several days later, artist Maruki Iri arrived in his hometown from Tokyo by train. Stunned by the devastation, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/335844.The_Hiroshima_Murals">he felt</a> he was seeing “something that I wasn’t supposed to see”. </p>
<p>Travelling to his family home, the artist negotiated a wasteland, including mounds of dead and barely alive bodies. When his wife, Maruki Toshi, arrived a week later, the pair spent a month assisting bomb blast casualties.</p>
<p>With the end of the war, the Japanese Communist Party saw Allied Occupation forces as <a href="https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/japan-reconstruction">liberating</a> Japan and encouraged its followers to focus on a bright future for Japan. Toshi and Iri were party members but struggled to comply. By 1948, each knew they must reproduce in visual art form the perdition they had witnessed. </p>
<p>The pair collaborated on each painting. Iri worked in traditional <em><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihonga">Nihonga</a></em> (Japanese painting), although with an idiosyncratic surrealist turn. Toshi’s style was more westernised and featured the human form. </p>
<p>This “water and oil” aesthetic combination produced a spectacularly successful — although sometimes tense — collaboration. Subverting censorship, the Hiroshima Panels (known in Japanese as the Atomic Bomb Panels) were born.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/world-politics-explainer-the-atomic-bombings-of-hiroshima-and-nagasaki-100452">World politics explainer: The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>The Hiroshima Panels</h2>
<p>Over three decades, the couple produced 15 Hiroshima-themed panel-scenes, average size 1.8 by 7.2 metres, with accompanying descriptive text. </p>
<p>Each had eight Japanese-screen/scroll style distinct sections. Notwithstanding occasional swirls of colour — vermilion depicting the fires of Hiroshima/Hell — most were the stark black of sumi ink. </p>
<p>The collaboration was <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25751654.2019.1698141">not always harmonious</a>. Iri would splash ink over images painstakingly created by his wife. The resultant wash-effect, however, enhanced the impact of bomb-mutilated forms. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/atomic-amnesia-why-hiroshima-narratives-remain-few-and-far-between-45102">Atomic amnesia: why Hiroshima narratives remain few and far between</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Incrementally, the couple’s subject matter expanded to different but similar topics. When an American viewer raised the Japanese Imperial Army’s 1937 Nanjing massacre, the couple produced a 4 by 8 metre image of that atrocity.</p>
<p>They collaborated in this way almost until Iri’s death in 1995.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/414265/original/file-20210803-16-2vapqu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/414265/original/file-20210803-16-2vapqu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/414265/original/file-20210803-16-2vapqu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=148&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414265/original/file-20210803-16-2vapqu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=148&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414265/original/file-20210803-16-2vapqu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=148&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414265/original/file-20210803-16-2vapqu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=186&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414265/original/file-20210803-16-2vapqu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=186&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414265/original/file-20210803-16-2vapqu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=186&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">I Ghosts (幽霊) by Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi, 1950.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy the Maruki Gallery</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The first Hiroshima panel, Ghosts, originally titled August Six, was exhibited in February 1950 at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum when occupation restrictions eased. </p>
<p>Ghosts is a searing depiction of bodies in the post-blast landscape. To the right is a heap of misshapen, ossified corpses, balancing precariously, several faces visible. Left and centre is a massed parade of upright figures, clothes sheared off by the blast, strips of scorched skin dripping from arms instinctively raised as shields. </p>
<p>Seemingly illuminated, the standing body of a woman throws her head back in horror or pain. Perhaps in both.</p>
<h2>Depicting the true catastrophe</h2>
<p>Initial responses in Japan <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25751654.2019.1698141">were mixed</a>. Allied restrictions resulted in limited awareness of Hiroshima’s ordeal, so some thought the work exaggerated. There were survivors who felt the images aestheticised the event. Nevertheless, the Marukis were clearly inspired to continue working on the Hiroshima theme.</p>
<p>One of the few atomic tropes permitted to circulate in the immediate postwar era was the familiar mushroom cloud. This cloud – necessarily distant – elided suffering. </p>
<p>The Marukis, however, depicted the catastrophic scenes beneath.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/414266/original/file-20210803-25-162b10v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/414266/original/file-20210803-25-162b10v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/414266/original/file-20210803-25-162b10v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=148&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414266/original/file-20210803-25-162b10v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=148&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414266/original/file-20210803-25-162b10v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=148&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414266/original/file-20210803-25-162b10v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=186&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414266/original/file-20210803-25-162b10v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=186&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414266/original/file-20210803-25-162b10v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=186&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">VII Bamboo Thicket (竹やぶ) by Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi, 1954.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy the Maruki Gallery</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Several panels profile women with children. One is Bamboo Thicket. Survivors sought shelter in these thickets which often partially survived the explosion. With intertwining body parts and bamboo trunks, the left of the image suggests the catastrophic wind surge generated by the heat of the blast. A woman clasps a child. </p>
<p>Other infants, dead or alive, lie curled up on the ground. A boy – clothes torn away – embraces two younger children. One woman holds up hands charred raw by the thermonuclear heat. The clear visibility of faces makes for particularly disquieting viewing.</p>
<p>Crows depicts Korean victims of the blast, who were often forced labourers in wartime Japan. Deeply discriminated against, Koreans were forsaken by rescuers even in death and their cadaver eyes were pecked out by crows. </p>
<p>While human forms dominate most panels, this work foregrounds the eponymous birds swooping down from the right and eddying above before eventually blanketing the decomposing corpses. In a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Chagall">Marc Chagall</a>-like twist, disembodied traditional Korean women’s attire – the full <em>chima</em> skirt and shaped <em>jeogori</em> coat – float ethereally above the scene.</p>
<h2>Art and trauma</h2>
<p>Ultra-nationalists in Japan perpetuate a discourse that <a href="https://theconversation.com/japans-way-of-remembering-world-war-ii-still-infuriates-its-neighbours-45663">elides</a> Japanese war atrocity. This can never diminish the unspeakable trauma of the Hiroshima ordeal.</p>
<p>Art undoubtedly has the power to explore trauma. As University of Queensland academics Névine El Nossery and Amy L Hubbell <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:318392">have argued</a>, art transmits trauma’s unspeakability. The power of art, they say, is to “transform and render pain.”</p>
<p>The Maruki Gallery is situated in rural Japan on a rise above the Toki River a little north of Tokyo. Opened in 1967 to make Maruki artwork available to all, the gallery expanded over the decades to include features such as a memorial to Korean people massacred after the 1923 Great Tokyo earthquake.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/japans-way-of-remembering-world-war-ii-still-infuriates-its-neighbours-45663">Japan's way of remembering World War II still infuriates its neighbours</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The extraordinary Hiroshima Panels transform the intense pain of that great crime against humanity into images to be revisited across generations. With Maruki Gallery images now online, people everywhere can contemplate the Hiroshima trauma. </p>
<p>Viewers of the Hiroshima Panels become witnesses to that event. With this witnessing surely comes the need to prevent nuclear war.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>A broad complement of Maruki art can be viewed at the <a href="https://marukigallery.jp/en/hiroshimapanels/">Maruki Gallery website</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/164333/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Barbara Hartley is affiliated with Just Peace, Qld., and Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). </span></em></p>
Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi were witness to the direct aftermath of the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima. The art they created is striking.
Barbara Hartley, Honorary Senior Lecturer, The University of Queensland
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/155525
2021-05-20T09:37:02Z
2021-05-20T09:37:02Z
How soil changes the danger of a buried IED – new research
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/399758/original/file-20210510-5598-1uj4vgd.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=81%2C40%2C5029%2C2916&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A test explosion during a training exercise.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/fire-movement-car-part-blown-away-521147020">Shutterstock/Prath</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>What happens when a bomb explodes? A <a href="https://www.ctbto.org/nuclear-testing/">lot of testing</a> has been done over the years to answer that question about <a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-is-a-hydrogen-bomb-and-why-it-may-not-be-what-north-korea-exploded-52841">huge bombs</a>, but there is much less understanding when it comes to small bombs – especially when they are buried.</p>
<p>This is despite the fact that improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, kill and maim about <a href="https://aoav.org.uk/2020/a-decade-of-global-ied-harm-reviewed/">17,000</a> people each year, and over the last decade, 273 British service personnel have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan by enemy forces using these bombs.</p>
<p>To gain a better understanding of what happens when an IED explodes, we set up our own unique “blast lab” and <a href="https://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.2019.0791">we’ve discovered</a> that the soil IEDs are buried in is almost as important as what the explosive is made from.</p>
<p>Our earlier research on <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijimpeng.2016.12.006">buried explosives</a> suggested that different soil conditions could make a massive difference to the intensity of the blast pressure generated during a detonation. It also affects how that destructive impulse gets directed.</p>
<p>This matters because every soil is different. The soil at your local park is different to that found nearer the north pole or in the Sahara. In the past, it was hard to know precisely what effect the soil density and moisture had. In our lab, we learned how to control the soil conditions and how to produce repeatable explosions. But we had no way to map the pressure and impulse from a buried explosion and relate it to the soil parameters until we created a unique piece of testing apparatus to do exactly this.</p>
<p>Our device comprises a large metal disc loaded with steel bars that can measure extremely high magnitudes of pressures. These bars act as high-speed force sensors and record the pressures at <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2013.0291">points</a> above a buried explosive to capture the variations in loading and shape caused by changes in the soil. We called our system the <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/0957-0233/26/1/015001">characterisation of blast loading apparatus</a>, or CoBL for short.</p>
<h2>Informing vehicle design</h2>
<p>This allowed us to quantify how an explosive interacts with its immediate confining materials and structures. This information is very useful as it can be used to develop methods for reducing the impact generated from explosives through the intelligent application of materials. And this can inform the design of new military vehicles. </p>
<p>Our soil experiments involved detonating explosives buried in a soil bin at known depths and positions. The soil was carefully characterised – so we knew its density, particle-size range and moisture content. When the explosive was detonated, high-speed cameras filmed the test. The footage told us when the detonation products (gas released from the explosion) and soil were ejected from the explosion and reached our mock target.</p>
<p>The camera footage and pressure data together allowed us to work out how much impulse comes from the explosive itself and how much comes from the soil. We could also see how this changes at different positions across the target face and from this we produced a map of the pressure and impulse that can be used by future vehicle designers.</p>
<p><a href="https://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.2019.0791">We found that</a> the detonation products were more easily able to force their way through dry soil. The ejected soil and explosive gases hit the target at a similar time. And the blast loading is focused right above the explosive location and can punch through some military vehicles’ armour systems.</p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/wZV7ZBsOWkU?wmode=transparent&start=1" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>But when the soil is wet, everything changes and can become more dangerous to some military vehicle types. The explosive gases get trapped in the soil and an expanding ring of high pressure wipes across the target, increasing the load generated. The impulse becomes more even across the area, but the timing of the loading varies.</p>
<p>In simple terms, this means that wet soil spreads the explosion and so makes the bomb more effective at throwing a vehicle in the air. The information our lab has discovered can now be used for route planning in IED zones to help reduce the risk to vehicles.</p>
<p>It has also changed the way vehicle designers think about the danger of buried IEDs. They can now consider a range of different conditions for the soil and look at how that changes the pressure loads they have to design against. With our experiments, they now have the information they need to decide which are the most serious threats their vehicles face and how to best protect against them.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/155525/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sam Clarke receives funding from UKRI and Dstl. </span></em></p>
What happens when a bomb explodes? This unique ‘blast lab’ found out.
Sam Clarke, Senior Lecturer in Geotechnical Engineering, University of Sheffield
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/143964
2020-08-06T12:33:59Z
2020-08-06T12:33:59Z
Nuclear threats are increasing – here’s how the US should prepare for a nuclear event
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/351408/original/file-20200805-20-xvz6pv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C202%2C7957%2C4062&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A visitor to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum views a photo of the aftermath of the 1945 bombing. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/visitor-to-hiroshima-peace-memorial-museum-views-a-large-news-photo/1227916081?adppopup=true">Carl Court/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Because several generations have passed since the atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki – the only use of nuclear weapons in warfare – some may think the threat from nuclear weapons has receded. But <a href="https://pulitzercenter.org/journalism/issues/nuclear-threats">international developments</a>, including <a href="https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-federation/2022-07-04/thinking-about-unthinkable-ukraine">nuclear threats from Russia in the war in Ukraine</a>, have brought a broader awareness of the vulnerability to global peace from nuclear events.</p>
<p>I’ve been <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Cham_Dallas2">studying the effects of nuclear events</a> – from detonations to accidents – for over 30 years. This has included my direct involvement in research, teaching and humanitarian efforts in multiple expeditions to Chernobyl- and Fukushima-contaminated areas. Now I am involved in the proposal for the <a href="http://doi.org/10.1186/s13031-017-0116-y">formation of a Nuclear Global Health Workforce</a>, which I proposed in 2017.</p>
<p>Such a group could bring together nuclear and nonnuclear technical and health professionals for education and training, and help to meet the <a href="https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2017.00202">preparedness, coordination, collaboration and staffing requirements</a> necessary to respond to a large-scale nuclear crisis. </p>
<p>What would this workforce need to be prepared to manage? For that we can look back at the legacy of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as nuclear accidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/91076/original/image-20150806-5263-pc5aav.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/91076/original/image-20150806-5263-pc5aav.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=392&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91076/original/image-20150806-5263-pc5aav.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=392&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91076/original/image-20150806-5263-pc5aav.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=392&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91076/original/image-20150806-5263-pc5aav.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=492&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91076/original/image-20150806-5263-pc5aav.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=492&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91076/original/image-20150806-5263-pc5aav.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=492&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Hiroshima Prefecture Industrial Promotion Hall after the blast.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/65847118@N06/6018958296/">Maarten Heerlien/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>What happens when a nuclear device is detonated over a city?</h2>
<p>Approximately <a href="http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/MED/med_chp10.shtml">135,000 and 64,000 people died</a>, respectively, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The <a href="http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/MED/med_chp10.shtml">great majority</a> of deaths happened in the first days after the bombings, mainly from thermal burns, severe physical injuries and radiation. </p>
<p>The great majority of doctors and nurses in Hiroshima were killed and injured, and therefore unable to assist in the response. This was largely due to the concentration of medical personnel and facilities in inner urban areas. This exact concentration exists today in the majority of American cities, and is a chilling reminder of the difficulty in <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/dmp.2013.103">medically responding</a> to nuclear events. </p>
<p>What if a nuclear device were detonated in an urban area today? I explored this issue in a 2007 study modeling a nuclear weapon attack on <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1476-072X-6-5">four American cities</a>. As in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the majority of deaths would happen soon after the detonation, and the local health care response capability would be largely eradicated. </p>
<p>Models <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1097/DMP.0b013e318159a9e3">show</a> that such an event in an urban area in particular will not only destroy the existing public health protections but will, most likely, make it <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK215195/?report=reader">extremely difficult</a> to respond, recover and rehabilitate them. </p>
<p>Very few medical personnel today have the skills or knowledge to treat the kind and the quantity of injuries a nuclear blast can cause. Health care workers would have <a href="http://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2017.00202">little to no familiarity with the treatment of radiation victims</a>. Thermal burns would require enormous resources to treat even a single patient, and a large number of patients with these injuries will overwhelm any existing medical system. There would also be a massive number of laceration injuries from the breakage of virtually all glass in a wide area. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/91080/original/image-20150806-5268-1pwsmh4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/91080/original/image-20150806-5268-1pwsmh4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=481&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91080/original/image-20150806-5268-1pwsmh4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=481&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91080/original/image-20150806-5268-1pwsmh4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=481&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91080/original/image-20150806-5268-1pwsmh4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=604&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91080/original/image-20150806-5268-1pwsmh4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=604&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91080/original/image-20150806-5268-1pwsmh4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=604&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Officials in protective gear check for signs of radiation on children who are from the evacuation area near the Fukushima Daini nuclear plant in Koriyama in this March 13, 2011 photo.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Reuters/Kim Kyung-Hoon/Files</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Getting people out of the blast and radiation contamination zones</h2>
<p>A major nuclear event would create widespread panic, as large populations would fear the spread of radioactive materials, so evacuation or sheltering in place must be considered. </p>
<p>For instance, within a few weeks after the Chernobyl accident, more than <a href="http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Safety-and-Security/Safety-of-Plants/Appendices/Chernobyl-Accident---Appendix-2--Health-Impacts/">116,000 people were evacuated</a> from the most contaminated areas of Ukraine and Belarus. Another 220,000 people were relocated in subsequent years. </p>
<p>The day after the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami, over <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/03/11/AR2011031103673.html">200,000 people were evacuated</a> from <a href="http://fukushimaontheglobe.com/the-earthquake-and-the-nuclear-accident/evacuation-orders-and-restricted-areas">areas within 20 kilometers (12 miles) of the nuclear plant</a> because of the fear of the potential for radiation exposure.</p>
<p>The evacuation process in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Japan was plagued by misinformation, inadequate and confusing orders and delays in releasing information. There was also trouble evacuating everyone from the affected areas. Elderly and infirm residents were left in areas near radioactive contamination, and many others moved unnecessarily from uncontaminated areas (resulting in many deaths from winter conditions). All of these troubles lead to a loss of public trust in the government. </p>
<p>However, an encouraging fact about nuclear fallout (and not generally known) is that the actual area that will receive dangerous levels of radioactive fallout is actually only a fraction of the total area in a circle around the detonation zone. For instance, in a <a href="https://cdn.theconversation.com/static_files/files/1160/EPA_Planning_Guidance_for_Response_to_a_Nuclear_Detonation.pdf?1596653235">hypothetical low-yield (10 kiloton) nuclear bomb</a> over Washington, D.C., only limited evacuations are planned. Despite projections of <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/15/AR2008041502969.html">100,000 fatalities</a> and about 150,000 casualties, the casualty-producing radiation plume would actually be expected to be confined to a relatively small area. (Using a clock-face analogy, the danger area would typically take up only a two-hour slot on the circle around the detonation, dictated by wind: for example, 2-4 o'clock.)</p>
<p>People upwind would not need to take any action, and most of those downwind, in areas receiving relatively small radiation levels (from the point of view of being sufficient to cause radiation-related health issues), would need to seek only “moderate shelter.” That means basically staying indoors for a day or so or until emergency authorities give further instructions.</p>
<h2>The long-term effects of radiation exposure</h2>
<p>The Radiation Effects Research Foundation, which was established to study the effects of radiation on survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, has been tracking the health effects of radiation for decades. </p>
<p>According to the Radiation Effects Research Foundation, about <a href="http://www.rerf.jp/general/qa_e/qa2.html">1,900 excess cancer deaths</a> can be attributed to the atomic bombs, with about 200 cases of leukemia and 1,700 solid cancers. Japan has constructed very detailed cancer screenings after Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Fukushima. </p>
<p>But the data on many potential health effects from radiation exposure, such as birth defects, are actually quite different from the prevailing public perception, which has been derived not from validated science education but from entertainment outlets (I teach a university course on the impact of media and popular culture on disaster knowledge).</p>
<p>While it has been shown that intense medical X-ray exposure has accidentally produced birth defects in humans, there is doubt about whether there were <a href="https://www.rerf.or.jp/en/programs/roadmap_e/health_effects-en/geneefx-en/birthdef/">birth defects</a> in the descendants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb survivors. Most respected long-term investigations have concluded there are no statistically significant increases in birth defects resulting in atomic bomb survivors. </p>
<p>Looking at data from Chernobyl, where the release of airborne radiation was 100 times as much as Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, there is a lack of definitive data for radiation-induced birth defects.</p>
<p>A wide-ranging <a href="https://cdn.theconversation.com/static_files/files/1160/EPA_Planning_Guidance_for_Response_to_a_Nuclear_Detonation.pdf?1596653235">WHO study</a> concluded that there were no differences in rates of mental retardation and emotional problems in Chernobyl radiation-exposed children compared to children in control groups. A <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-7610.00613">Harvard review</a> on Chernobyl concluded that there was no substantive proof regarding radiation-induced effects on embryos or fetuses from the accident. Another <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/aje/kwh231">study looked at the congenital abnormality registers</a> for 16 European regions that received fallout from Chernobyl and concluded that the widespread fear in the population about the possible effects of radiation exposure on the unborn fetus was not justified. </p>
<p>Indeed, the <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1001/dmp.2012.72">most definitive Chernobyl health impact</a> in terms of numbers was the dramatic increase of elective abortions near and at significant distances from the accident site. </p>
<p>In addition to <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/00963402.2017.1338005">rapid response and evacuation plans</a>, a Nuclear Global Health Workforce could help health care practitioners, policymakers, administrators and others understand <a href="http://doi.org/10.1186/s13031-019-0197-x">myths and realities of radiation</a>. In the critical time just after a nuclear crisis, this would help officials make evidence-based policy decisions and help people understand the actual risks they face.</p>
<h2>What’s the risk of another Hiroshima or Nagasaki?</h2>
<p>Today, the risk of a nuclear exchange – and its devastating impact on medicine and public health worldwide – has only escalated compared to previous decades. Nine countries are <a href="https://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-weapons/worldwide">known to have nuclear weapons</a>, and international relations are increasingly volatile. The <a href="https://www.armscontrol.org/issue-briefs/2020-03/surging-us-nuclear-weapons-budget-growing-danger">U.S.</a> and <a href="https://www.hudson.org/research/16199-the-message-in-russia-s-new-nuclear-weapons-strategy-don-t-mess-with-us-but-let-s-talk">Russia</a> are heavily investing in the modernization of their nuclear stockpiles, and <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/00963402.2019.1628511">China</a>, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/00963402.2018.1533162">India and Pakistan</a> are rapidly expanding the size and sophistication of their nuclear weapon capabilities. The developing technological sophistication among terrorist groups and the growing global availability and distribution of radioactive materials are also <a href="https://www.nti.org/about/projects/nti-index/">especially worrying</a>.</p>
<p>[<em>Deep knowledge, daily.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/the-daily-3?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=deepknowledge">Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter</a>.]</p>
<p>In recent years, a number of government and private organizations have held meetings (all of which I attended) to devise large-scale medical responses to a nuclear weapon detonation in the U.S. and worldwide. They include the National Academy of Sciences, the National Alliance for Radiation Readiness, National Disaster Life Support Foundation, Society for Disaster Medicine and Public Health, and the Radiation Injury Treatment Network, which includes 74 hospitals nationwide actively preparing to receive radiation-exposed patients. </p>
<p>Despite the gloomy prospects of health outcomes of any large-scale nuclear event common in the minds of many, there are a number of concrete steps the U.S. and other countries can take to prepare. It’s our obligation to respond. </p>
<p><em>This article is an update to an <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-if-it-happened-again-what-we-need-to-do-to-prepare-for-a-nuclear-event-45564">article originally published in 2015</a> that includes links to more recent research and updated information on the threat of nuclear incidents. It was updated again in August 2022 to add a reference to nuclear threats related to war in Ukraine.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/143964/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Cham Dallas has received funding from:
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), through the State of Georgia Division of Public Health (DPH), Georgia Emergency Preparedness (Hospital Preparedness and Ebola Emergency Training)
U.S. Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR), through the State of Georgia Division of Public Health (DPH), “Georgia Hospital Emergency Preparedness Exercises”
U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), through the Georgia Emergency Management Agency (GEMA), “Veterinary Medicine Training for the AMA Basic Disaster Life Support (BDLS) Curriculum
United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), “FSIS/FERN Food Emergency Management Program Cooperative Agreement”
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)/ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “Center for Mass Destruction Defense, a CDC Specialty Center for Public Health Preparedness”
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (HRSA #BTCDP 05-080), “Bioterrorism Training and Curriculum Development Program
He is affiliated with:
Senator Max Cleland (D-GA); Senator Sam Nunn (D-GA); Congressman Paul Broun (R-GA); Congressman Jody Hice (R-GA)
</span></em></p>
What if there was another nuclear incident in the US? A disaster management scholar looks back at the history of nuclear events to assess the risk.
Cham Dallas, University Professor Department of Health Policy & Management, University of Georgia
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/142184
2020-07-15T13:25:32Z
2020-07-15T13:25:32Z
This is what happened the morning the first atomic bomb created a new world
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/347300/original/file-20200714-18-ixz4me.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The gadget in the Trinity Test Site tower. Unless otherwise indicated, this information has been authored by an employee or employees of the Los Alamos National Security, LLC (LANS), operator of the Los Alamos National Laboratory under Contract No. DE-AC52-06NA25396 with the U.S. Department of Energy. The U.S. Government has rights to use, reproduce, and distribute this information. The public may copy and use this information without charge, provided that this Notice and any statement of authorship are reproduced on all copies. Neither the Government nor LANS makes any warranty, express or implied, or assumes any liability or responsibility for the use of this information.</span> </figcaption></figure><p>Fifteen seconds before 5.30am on July 16 1945, above an <a href="https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Resources/maps/trinity_site_map.htm">area</a> of New Mexico desert so unforgivingly dry that earlier travellers christened it the <a href="https://www.atomicheritage.org/files/jornada-del-muerto"><em>Jornada del Muerto</em></a> (Journey of the Dead Man), a new sun flashed into existence and rose rapidly into the sky. It was a little before dawn.</p>
<p>This strange, early daybreak was the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJRP4TCA4Q8">Trinity Test</a>: humanity’s first encounter with the atomic bomb. Within a month two bombs were dropped on Japan: the first, “Little Boy”, a uranium weapon, at Hiroshima; the second, “Fat Man”, a plutonium weapon of the <a href="https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/little-boy-and-fat-man">implosion design</a> tested at Trinity, on Nagasaki. Casualty estimates <a href="http://www.aasc.ucla.edu/cab/200708230009.html">vary</a> <a href="http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/MED/med_chp10.shtml">widely</a>, but perhaps as many as <a href="https://k1project.columbia.edu/news/hiroshima-and-nagasaki">150-250,000 people</a> died as a direct result of these two events. The following half century was one of intense nuclear <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjAqR1zICA0">testing</a>, the residue of which might be the <a href="https://theconversation.com/anthropocene-began-in-1965-according-to-signs-left-in-the-worlds-loneliest-tree-91993">signature</a> for the proposed new epoch of the Anthropocene.</p>
<p>The extraordinary story of the Manhattan Project, which led to this point, has been told many times. It begins with the realisation that atomic weapons, releasing vast amounts of energy via a nuclear chain reaction, were possible. It includes <a href="https://www.atomicheritage.org/key-documents/einstein-szilard-letter">a 1939 letter</a>, signed by Albert Einstein, alerting President Roosevelt to the dangers of a German atomic bomb programme, and tells how, following the United States’ entry into the second world war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the programme accelerated rapidly under the control of <a href="https://www.atomicheritage.org/profile/leslie-r-groves">General Leslie Groves</a>. </p>
<p>The Manhattan Project absorbed the British and Canadian “Tube Alloys” atomic programme, and drew on a dazzling array of scientific talent. More than a purely scientific endeavour, it was an engineering and <a href="http://alexwellerstein.com/teaching/documents/?pdf=manhattan_project_map.pdf">industrial enterprise</a> on a massive scale, employing about 130,000 people at its peak, and perhaps <a href="http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/11/01/many-people-worked-manhattan-project/">half a million</a> cumulatively.</p>
<hr>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/288776/original/file-20190820-170910-8bv1s7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/288776/original/file-20190820-170910-8bv1s7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/288776/original/file-20190820-170910-8bv1s7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/288776/original/file-20190820-170910-8bv1s7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/288776/original/file-20190820-170910-8bv1s7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/288776/original/file-20190820-170910-8bv1s7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/288776/original/file-20190820-170910-8bv1s7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
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<p><strong><em>This article is part of Conversation Insights</em></strong>
<br><em>The Insights team generates <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/insights-series-71218">long-form journalism</a> derived from interdisciplinary research. The team is working with academics from different backgrounds who have been engaged in projects aimed at tackling societal and scientific challenges.</em> </p>
<hr>
<p>Site Y was a town built from scratch to build the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Here, under the scientific directorship of J Robert Oppenheimer – a complex, charismatic figure (so famous after the war that he was instantly recognisable by his <a href="https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/photos/oppenheimer-j-robert-h6">porkpie hat</a>) – scientists, including many who’d fled Nazi persecution in Europe and were acutely aware of what a Nazi bomb might mean, built the “gadget” tested at Trinity.</p>
<p>By then, though, circumstances had changed. In late 1944, as Allied forces advanced across Europe, it became apparent that the <a href="https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/german-atomic-bomb-project">German bomb programme</a> had stalled years before. After Franklin Roosevelt’s death in April 1945 and Germany’s defeat in May, the Trinity Test was prioritised so Harry Truman, the new president, would have news of it when he met Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill at the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Potsdam-Conference">Potsdam conference</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346871/original/file-20200710-189224-1six7hu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346871/original/file-20200710-189224-1six7hu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346871/original/file-20200710-189224-1six7hu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346871/original/file-20200710-189224-1six7hu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346871/original/file-20200710-189224-1six7hu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=614&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346871/original/file-20200710-189224-1six7hu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=614&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346871/original/file-20200710-189224-1six7hu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=614&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Winston Churchill, Harry S Truman and Josef Stalin at the Potsdam conference, Germany 1945.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:L_to_R,_British_Prime_Minister_Winston_Churchill,_President_Harry_S._Truman,_and_Soviet_leader_Josef_Stalin_in_the..._-_NARA_-_198958.jpg">© National Archives and Records Administration</a></span>
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</figure>
<p>Trinity is a striking moment. Scientists, military personnel and observers gathered in observation bunkers 10,000 yards from <a href="https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Resources/maps/trinity_site_map.htm">ground zero</a>, at a base camp ten miles away, and at Compañia Hill, 20 miles away. Overnight, thunder, lightning and rain swept across the area, imperilling the test. </p>
<p>Don Hornig, the last man to <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=z3PBDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT365&lpg=PT365&dq=cynthia+kelly+the+manhattan+project+%22desert+island+decameron%22&source=bl&ots=ryjmM6i117&sig=ACfU3U3z3tDq5AdbCuSZCyIvLEqTuCXVJA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjbwZ3J28LqAhX8RxUIHTplAL8Q6AEwAHoECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q=cynthia%20kelly%20the%20manhattan%20project%20%22desert%20island%20decameron%22&f=false">“babysit” the bomb</a> in its metal shack at the top of a 100ft tower, recalls passing the time by reading an anthology of humorous writing, <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Desert_Island_Decameron.html?id=YpxUAAAAYAAJ&redir_esc=y">Desert Island Decameron</a>, by the light of a 60-watt bulb. He hoped the wet tower would act as a lightning rod if there were any lightning strikes. The alternative was sobering, but he appears to have been philosophical: “It would set the bomb off. And in that case, I’d never know about it! So I read my book.”</p>
<p>At a 2am conference, Groves threatened hard-pressed project meteorologist, Jack Hubbard, <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Rf2O9eqrMgMC&pg=PA77&lpg=PA77&dq=szasz+day+the+sun+rose+twice+insisting+that+Hubbard+sign+his+forecast&source=bl&ots=mP5lvttS0k&sig=ACfU3U0M8-xt__5_-N1Dlpe5WpkXD1DuEQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjW_PWpprPqAhXDnFwKHbLFAyAQ6AEwAHoECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q=szasz%20day%20the%20sun%20rose%20twice%20insisting%20that%20Hubbard%20sign%20his%20forecast&f=false">insisting he sign</a> his forecast predicting conditions would clear by dawn and promising to “hang” him if they didn’t. Groves then roused New Mexico’s governor by phone, warning him he might have to declare martial law if things went wrong. By 4am the skies were clearing.</p>
<p>As 5.30 approached, people readied themselves with welder’s glass to view the test. At Compañia Hill, the physicist, Edward Teller, <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=aSgFMMNQ6G4C&pg=PA668&lpg=PA668&dq=rhodes+making+of+the+atomic+bomb+%22passed+the+lotion%22&source=bl&ots=JyanySZG32&sig=ACfU3U2IT6BHgSBChii0QMzTzsDZ0am8uA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi2qM-V5MLqAhWpRhUIHdXUCmEQ6AEwAHoECAcQAQ#v=onepage&q=rhodes%20making%20of%20the%20atomic%20bomb%20%22passed%20the%20lotion%22&f=false">passed around sun cream</a>. At S-10000, the main control bunker, an exhausted Oppenheimer leaned against a post to steady himself as the final seconds ticked away, and was heard to mutter: “Lord, these affairs are <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=2G2TlJOhGI8C&pg=PA669&lpg=PA669&dq=rhodes+making+of+the+atomic+bomb+%22Lord,+these+affairs%22&source=bl&ots=IA9xzd4B0X&sig=ACfU3U2iVC5T7kAWLTUuE4P2RNJ4pCtX1g&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjRlKei48LqAhULUxUIHXNNC9QQ6AEwAHoECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q=rhodes%20making%20of%20the%20atomic%20bomb%20%22Lord%2C%20these%20affairs%22&f=false">hard on the heart</a>.”</p>
<p>The story of the Manhattan Project often ends with the controversial use of the bomb on Japan, or goes on to tell about the leaking of atomic secrets by <a href="https://www.mi5.gov.uk/klaus-fuchs">Klaus Fuchs</a> and the first Soviet atomic test in 1949. It might add that Oppenheimer, frequently portrayed as a tragic figure, had his <a href="https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/oppenheimer-security-hearing">security clearance</a> revoked amid the anti-communist hysteria of the early 1950s.</p>
<h2>A new world</h2>
<p>Now, 75 years on, it’s worth isolating Trinity from this complex history to ask what that early morning moment in the remote desert meant. It was here, after all, that humans first encountered phenomena that were to haunt the cold war imagination, and still shape how many imagine potential nuclear futures: the atomic flash, the mushroom cloud and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1946/05/23/archives/film-spots-trace-vast-abomb-range-radioactive-particles-spread-over.html?searchResultPosition=364">radioactive fallout</a>.</p>
<p>Although this was a new human experience (Norris Bradbury, who succeeded Oppenheimer as director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.co.uk/books/The-Making-Of-The-Atomic-Bomb/Richard-Rhodes/9781471111235">noted</a> that “the atom bomb did not fit into any preconceptions possessed by anybody”), it was processed through cultural traditions with long histories. It’s become an origin story in nuclear mythologies.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346864/original/file-20200710-42-1pdsjv2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346864/original/file-20200710-42-1pdsjv2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=473&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346864/original/file-20200710-42-1pdsjv2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=473&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346864/original/file-20200710-42-1pdsjv2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=473&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346864/original/file-20200710-42-1pdsjv2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=594&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346864/original/file-20200710-42-1pdsjv2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=594&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346864/original/file-20200710-42-1pdsjv2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=594&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Norris Bradbury, group leader for bomb assembly, stands next to the partially assembled Gadget atop the test tower.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/departmentofenergy/10540204545/">© U.S. Department of Energy</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Writers return repeatedly to Trinity as a moment pregnant with meaning. In the 21st century alone, it’s featured in novels by, among others, <a href="http://www.lydiamillet.net/oh-pure-and-radiant-heart/">Lydia Millet</a>, <a href="http://ellenklages.com/writing/the-green-glass-sea-2/">Ellen Klages</a>, <a href="https://www.noragallagher.org/changing-light.php">Nora Gallagher</a>, <a href="http://tarasheanesbit.com/writing/the-wives-of-los-alamos/">TaraShea Nesbit</a>, <a href="https://www.harpercollins.co.uk/9780008209322/the-atomic-weight-of-love/">Elizabeth J Church</a> and <a href="https://louisahall.net/portfolio/trinity/">Louisa Hall</a>, and there are notable earlier examples, including those by <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1959/05/03/archives/science-and-the-bomb-command-the-morning-by-pearl-s-buck-317-pp-new.html">Pearl Buck</a>, <a href="http://www.jaas.gr.jp/jjas/PDF/2014/04_Matsunaga.pdf">Leslie Marmon Silko</a> and <a href="http://josephkanon.com/books/los-alamos/">Joseph Kanon</a>. It’s been depicted by poets from <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42777/at-the-bomb-testing-site">William E Stafford</a> to <a href="https://unmpress.com/books/critical-assembly/9780826358837">John Canaday</a> and <a href="https://plumwoodmountain.com/alamogordo-glass/">Hannah Cooper-Smithson</a>, and on stage by <a href="http://www.tommortonsmith.com/theatre/2014/10/21/oppenheimer">Tom Morton-Smith</a>. It features in music in genres ranging from <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlqZM4covn1EBdzdKnChfMmaaRFiAqt3O">rock</a> to <a href="https://www.metopera.org/user-information/synopses-archive/doctor-atomic">opera</a>.</p>
<p>This fascination with Trinity shows how it’s not only an important historical moment, but a critical cultural one too. As the old sun crept above the horizon a few minutes after the test, many present were in little doubt it was rising on a new world.</p>
<h2>The brightest light</h2>
<p>In both eyewitness accounts and in fiction, Trinity is described as a moment of rupture and rapture: rupture because it marks the transition from a pre-nuclear to a nuclear age; rapture because the encounter with dazzling light and a power overwhelming the senses has the quality of religious experience. </p>
<p>Of course, there can be distortion in such accounts. The popular tendency to see the atomic bomb as the definitive nuclear technology marginalises fields like nuclear medicine and ignores the intellectual richness of the nuclear sciences. </p>
<p>And there are other candidates for the beginning of the nuclear age: <a href="https://theconversation.com/hiroshimas-literary-legacy-the-blinding-flash-that-changed-the-world-forever-45471">Hiroshima</a>, for sure, but also perhaps the creation of the first self-sustaining <a href="https://www.uchicago.edu/features/how_the_first_chain_reaction_changed_science/">chain reaction</a> by Enrico Fermi’s team in Chicago in 1942, Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch’s description of <a href="https://www.atomicheritage.org/key-documents/meitner-frisch-nuclear-fission">fission</a> in 1939, James Chadwick’s discovery of the <a href="https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200705/physicshistory.cfm#:%7E:text=By%201920%2C%20physicists%20knew%20that,which%20he%20called%20the%20neutron.">neutron</a> in 1932, and Ernest Rutherford’s “<a href="https://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/news/rutherfords-legacy--the-birth-of-nuclear-physics-in-manchester/">splitting</a>” (depending how one defines this) of the atom in 1917. The very notion of a singular beginning to the nuclear age is a fiction: each moment exists only in the context of others.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/hiroshimas-literary-legacy-the-blinding-flash-that-changed-the-world-forever-45471">Hiroshima's literary legacy: the 'blinding flash' that changed the world forever</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Yet, Trinity was experienced as a new dawn. This is particularly apparent in the recurring metaphor of the explosion as a sun. For William Laurence of the New York Times, observing the test from <a href="https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.84862/page/n25/mode/2up?q=super-sun">20 miles away</a> at Compañia Hill, it was: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Sunrise such as the world has never seen, a great green super-sun climbing in a fraction of a second to a height of more than 8,000 feet, rising ever higher until it touched the clouds, lighting up earth and sky all around with a dazzling intensity.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/wki4hg9Om-k?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Ernest Lawrence, inventor of the <a href="https://www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/lawrences-cyclotron/3010873.article">cyclotron</a>, a type of particle accelerator, noted the transition “from darkness to brilliant sunshine, in an instant”.</p>
<p>Perhaps the <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Qgv9Xjv8_LYC&pg=PA156&lpg=PA156&dq=rabi+brightest+light+i+have+ever+seen+or+that+i+think+anyone+has+ever+seen&source=bl&ots=j4293-Ww3R&sig=ACfU3U1L027oNf6LqzMHA1TfcUiTajJ7BA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwip8MmltLnqAhVSVsAKHbvFDCMQ6AEwBnoECAYQAQ#v=onepage&q=rabi%20brightest%20light%20i%20have%20ever%20seen%20or%20that%20i%20think%20anyone%20has%20ever%20seen&f=false">description</a> by Isidor Rabi, discoverer of nuclear magnetic resonance (used in MRI scans), is the most compelling:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The brightest light I have ever seen or that I think anyone has ever seen. It blasted; it pounced; it bored its way right through you. It was a vision that was seen with more than the eye.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The experience is corporeal here: the light has heft and is felt by the body. Its revelatory characteristics are picked up in literature of the Trinity Test. In Lydia Millet’s novel, <a href="http://www.lydiamillet.net/oh-pure-and-radiant-heart/">Oh Pure and Radiant Heart</a>, the flash is a “sear of lightness”. In Joseph Kanon’s thriller, Los Alamos, the protagonist “closed his eyes for a second, but it was there anyway, this amazing light, as if it didn’t need sight to exist”. In John Canaday’s poem, <a href="https://unmpress.com/books/critical-assembly/9780826358837">Victor Weisskopf</a>, “a sun erupted”.</p>
<p>Laurence, whose reporting on the bomb <a href="https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/william-leonard-laurence">won a Pulitzer</a>, saw Trinity as crystallising a new relation with the universe. There, he wrote, “an <a href="https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.84862/page/n25/mode/2up?q=elemental+force">elemental force</a> [was] freed from its bonds after being chained for billions of years” as, for the first time, humans used an energy source that “does not have its origin in the sun”. “All seemed to feel”, wrote Brigadier General Thomas Farrell, General Groves’s deputy, “that they had been present at the birth of a new age – the <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=6hAaCgAAQBAJ&dq=cynthia+kelly+the+manhattan+project&q=Age+of+Atomic+Energy#v=snippet&q=%22Age%20of%20Atomic%20Energy%22&f=false">Age of Atomic Energy</a>”.</p>
<h2>Fire from the gods</h2>
<p>Stories of human acquisition of knowledge and power have deep roots in western culture. In Greek myth, Prometheus steals fire from the gods and is punished by being chained to a rock, his liver torn out daily by an eagle, only to grow back that he might be tormented again. One of the most substantial biographies of Oppenheimer names him, in its title, <a href="https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/kai-bird-and-martin-j-sherwin">The American Prometheus</a>. </p>
<p>In 1946, reflecting on the moment of the Trinity Test, Oppenheimer himself saw the analogy: “We thought of the <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=BWek8zJ-U7IC&pg=PA161&lpg=PA161&dq=oppenheimer+we+thought+of+the+legend+of+prometheus&source=bl&ots=N1knDB0fVc&sig=ACfU3U38MmS82yo_F6yYyH5clKbueMiY9A&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiO7JePt7nqAhXNiFwKHX9_AyIQ6AEwCnoECAsQAQ#v=onepage&q=oppenheimer%20we%20thought%20of%20the%20legend%20of%20prometheus&f=false">legend of Prometheus</a>, of that deep sense of guilt in man’s new powers, that reflects his recognition of evil, and his long knowledge of it.”</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346867/original/file-20200710-22-6j5iwp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346867/original/file-20200710-22-6j5iwp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346867/original/file-20200710-22-6j5iwp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=778&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346867/original/file-20200710-22-6j5iwp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=778&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346867/original/file-20200710-22-6j5iwp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=778&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346867/original/file-20200710-22-6j5iwp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=977&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346867/original/file-20200710-22-6j5iwp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=977&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346867/original/file-20200710-22-6j5iwp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=977&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Oppenheimer and Groves at Ground Zero, Trinity Test.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Trinity_Test_-_Oppenheimer_and_Groves_at_Ground_Zero_002.jpg">© U.S. Army Corps of Engineers</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The most famous of Oppenheimer’s words to describe Trinity, the lines from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lb13ynu3Iac">Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds</a>” – first appearing in print in <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=BWek8zJ-U7IC&pg=PA161&lpg=PA161&dq=charles+thorpe+oppenheimer+%22first+publication+of+Oppenheimer%27s%22&source=bl&ots=N1knGx0l-6&sig=ACfU3U0EluzRfOjN-7KePahyVmdMhI0EOg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiL2vWQgsHqAhUBShUIHT3cDbIQ6AEwAHoECAIQAQ#v=onepage&q=charles%20thorpe%20oppenheimer%20%22first%20publication%20of%20Oppenheimer's%22&f=false">1948</a> but frequently repeated subsequently – reinforce this sense of an encounter with divine forces. They are, for instance, the final words in Tom Morton-Smith’s play, <a href="http://www.tommortonsmith.com/theatre/2014/10/21/oppenheimer">Oppenheimer</a>. They are invoked, too, though not actually spoken or sung, when the chorus sings <a href="https://www.opera-arias.com/adams/doctor-atomic/libretto/">lines from the Gita</a> in John Adams’ opera, Doctor Atomic.</p>
<p>So much part of the mythology are these words, that it’s sometimes <a href="https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/satyam-bruyat/bhagavad-gita-and-the-first-atomic-explosion/">erroneously</a> assumed Oppenheimer actually said them at Trinity. His brother Frank’s recollection was that he simply said: “<a href="https://youtu.be/xosmgrYF9K8?t=3106">It worked</a>”. It’s important, too, to be wary of where the mythmaking might take us. As the nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein <a href="http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/05/23/oppenheimer-gita/">points out</a>, the words from the Gita are unlikely to be the hubristic statement of Oppenheimer’s triumph they might seem. They are often contrasted with the rather blunter assessment of Kenneth Bainbridge, in charge of the test, who commented to Oppenheimer, “<a href="http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2015/07/17/now-we-are-all-sons-of-bitches/">Now we are all sons of bitches</a>”.</p>
<p>The phrase’s attraction is, I think, its ambiguity. It’s portentous, but open to interpretation, gesturing toward something important in humanity’s encounter with greater powers (perhaps a Faustian bargain struck between the purity of physics and the real-world horror of military technology) without quite stating it. A similar suggestiveness surely accounts, too, for the proliferation of the famous (but possibly <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Rf2O9eqrMgMC&printsec=frontcover&dq=szasz+the+day+the+sun+rose+twice&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi74YbwkbnqAhWNT8AKHfDwACQQ6AEwAXoECAAQAg#v=onepage&q=theories%20are%20still%20unlikely&f=false">erroneous</a>) story that Trinity was named by Oppenheimer for a metaphysical <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44106/holy-sonnets-batter-my-heart-three-persond-god">poem</a> by John Donne: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you<br>
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;<br>
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend<br>
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>It opens up interesting creative possibilities. In her novel Trinity, Louisa Hall imagines Donne’s poem to be one admired by <a href="https://www.atomicheritage.org/profile/jean-tatlock">Jean Tatlock</a>, with whom Oppenheimer had an intense relationship, but who died in 1944. In Doctor Atomic, the poem’s words comprise the lyrics of the moving <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlUHKHLk_VU">aria</a> closing the first act.</p>
<p>Unsurprisingly, Christian traditions of the acquisition of knowledge, and of the relation with God, are also invoked at Trinity. Oppenheimer famously stated in a lecture in 1947 that “the physicists <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=xg0AAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA65&lpg=PA65&dq=oppenheimer+physics+in+the+contemporary+world&source=bl&ots=cGBTysgzrO&sig=ACfU3U2WOwz8BztdN1Oa8bA1a6XrntAuVQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjC8_-Csq7qAhWRiVwKHR_cATcQ6AEwB3oECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q=oppenheimer%20physics%20in%20the%20contemporary%20world&f=false">have known sin</a>”, a statement controversial among his colleagues.</p>
<p>There is, then, a furious mythmaking around both Trinity and Oppenheimer. It transforms Oppenheimer from an actual person into a compelling tragic figure. It transforms the atomic bomb into a technology that symbolises broader anxieties about the relations between ourselves, our technologies and the Earth.</p>
<h2>Beauty and terror</h2>
<p>Stories about the atomic explosion also conjure up the aesthetic tradition of the <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/sublime">sublime</a>, perhaps the dominant means through which encounters with nature have been processed in western societies since the Romantic period. In the art of the sublime, extremity of experience – the wildness and grandeur of nature one might encounter in a <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/the-sublime/the-romantic-sublime-r1109221">storm at sea</a>, for instance – is emphasised.</p>
<p>The sublime evokes both beauty and terror. For Farrell, Groves’s deputy, the explosion was “<a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=6hAaCgAAQBAJ&dq=cynthia+kelly+the+manhattan+project&q=Age+of+Atomic+Energy#v=snippet&q=%22magnificent%2C%20beautiful%22&f=false">magnificent, beautiful</a>” and “terrifying”. In Ellen Klages’ young adult novel, The Green Glass Sea, a witness describes Trinity, saying “<a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=-Y4YipKx898C&printsec=frontcover&dq=klages+green+glass+sea&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjakKTiuLnqAhU6TRUIHUmOA64Q6AEwAHoECAIQAg#v=onepage&q=%22It%20was%20beautiful%22&f=false">It was beautiful. It was terrifying</a>”. These are experiences of awe in the sense defined by the Oxford English Dictionary: “a feeling of fear or dread, mixed with profound reverence, typically as inspired by God or the divine”. </p>
<p>Indeed, Edwin McMillan, one of the physicists, described “the immediate reaction of the watchers as <a href="https://www.blackdogandleventhal.com/titles/cynthia-c-kelly/manhattan-project/9781603762069/">one of awe</a>” and <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=D9KpDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=frisch+what+little+i+remember&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiB6Mb7vLnqAhU5QUEAHdFtCCUQ6AEwAHoECAYQAg#v=onepage&q=awesome&f=false">Frisch</a>, <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=6hAaCgAAQBAJ&dq=cynthia+kelly+the+manhattan+project&q=Age+of+Atomic+Energy#v=snippet&q=awesome&f=false">Farrell</a>, <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.co.uk/books/The-Making-Of-The-Atomic-Bomb/Richard-Rhodes/9781471111235">Bainbridge</a> and <a href="https://youtu.be/xosmgrYF9K8?t=2973">Robert Wilson</a> all use the word “awesome” to describe their own responses.</p>
<p>Farrell said of the test that it appeared as “that beauty that <a href="https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.84862/page/n179/mode/2up?q=great+poets">great poets</a> dream about but describe most poorly and inadequately”. He is, in fact, remarkably eloquent, as this description of the desert landscape, lit by Trinity, shows:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, violet, grey and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Pearl Buck’s novel about the Manhattan Project, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1959/05/03/archives/science-and-the-bomb-command-the-morning-by-pearl-s-buck-317-pp-new.html">Command the Morning</a> (1959), seems to draw on this description. Stephen Coast, a (fictional) project scientist, sees:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The sky burst into blinding light. Miles away the mountains were black and then glittered into brilliant relief in the searing light. Colour splashed over the landscape, yellow, purple, crimson, grey. Every fold in the mountain sprang into bold lines, every valley was revealed, every peak stood stark.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The proliferation of adjectives chase after the experience as if they can’t keep up with the boiling profusion of colours. Characteristically, here, the sublime exceeds language’s capacity to capture it.</p>
<h2>Trinitite and transmutation</h2>
<p>Of course, what’s important about eyewitness and literary descriptions is not merely that they fit Trinity into established aesthetic traditions, but that the fit is uncomfortable. There are religious connotations to the dazzling light and overwhelming power of the explosion, but the forces encountered aren’t divine. Feelings aroused by the sublime are displaced uncannily when the source is technology, not nature.</p>
<p>In an <a href="https://journals.ku.edu/amsj/article/view/2890">essay on the atomic sublime</a>, the scholar, Peter Hales, shows how the threat of the mushroom cloud was eventually somewhat tamed by being mediated through the aesthetics of the sublime. Trinity, though, provides a compelling origin story in nuclear mythologies precisely because in 1945 it was too new to be contained by that tradition. Even the familiar term, “mushroom cloud”, wasn’t yet readily available to name what rose into the sky (Frisch thought it both “a bit like a strawberry … slowly rising into the sky from the ground, with which it remained connected by a lengthening stem of whirling dust”, and “a <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=D9KpDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=frisch+what+little+i+remember&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi8-4KDxLnqAhXYWhUIHVjTC0oQ6wEwAHoECAYQAQ#v=snippet&q=elephant&f=false">red-hot elephant</a> standing balanced on its trunk”).</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346869/original/file-20200710-58-1e52x3z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346869/original/file-20200710-58-1e52x3z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346869/original/file-20200710-58-1e52x3z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=792&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346869/original/file-20200710-58-1e52x3z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=792&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346869/original/file-20200710-58-1e52x3z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=792&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346869/original/file-20200710-58-1e52x3z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=996&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346869/original/file-20200710-58-1e52x3z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=996&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346869/original/file-20200710-58-1e52x3z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=996&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Trinity test site.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Trinity_Test_Site.jpg">© United States Army</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Trinity is unsettling. The experience evoked intimations of the world’s end that were later frequently associated with nuclear weapons. George Kistiakowsky, who led the group building <a href="https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/electronics-and-detonators">explosive lenses</a> for the gadget, said Trinity was “the <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=R10-DwAAQBAJ&pg=PT365&lpg=PT365&dq=kistiakowsky+the+nearest+thing+to+doomsday&source=bl&ots=QuJ0PDcHH2&sig=ACfU3U3anoVEEtmttS_ECAaWceqejOMZcA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj9osP5xrrqAhVUqHEKHYNuAuUQ6AEwBHoECAgQAQ#v=onepage&q=kistiakowsky%20the%20nearest%20thing%20to%20doomsday&f=false">nearest thing to doomsday</a> that one could possibly imagine”. </p>
<p>As the mushroom cloud boiled upwards, one military official, perhaps spooked by Enrico Fermi’s mischievous <a href="https://youtu.be/xosmgrYF9K8?t=2844">taking of bets</a> on whether the explosion would ignite the atmosphere and, if so, whether it would destroy the whole world or just New Mexico (a possibility actually discussed, but ruled out well in advance of the test), apparently lost faith in the “long-hairs”, as the scientists were sometimes referred to by the soldiers at Los Alamos. “My God,” <a href="https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.84862/page/n175/mode/2up?q=long-hairs+have+lost+control">he’s said to have exclaimed</a>, “the long-hairs have lost control!”.</p>
<p>Trinity presaged an era when the <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-end-of-the-world-a-history-of-how-a-silent-cosmos-led-humans-to-fear-the-worst-120193">absurdity of extinction</a> replaced a divinely ordained judgement day as the dominant vision of the end of the world: <a href="https://youtu.be/s4VlruVG81w">Dr Strangelove</a> instead of the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Revelation-to-John">Book of Revelation</a>.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-end-of-the-world-a-history-of-how-a-silent-cosmos-led-humans-to-fear-the-worst-120193">The end of the world: a history of how a silent cosmos led humans to fear the worst</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Frequently, then, Trinity is a story about entering an unsettling new era. <a href="http://ellenklages.com/writing/the-green-glass-sea-2/">The Green Glass Sea</a> captures this beautifully. The desert sand was melted by the test into a glassy substance, dubbed <a href="https://www.lanl.gov/museum/news/newsletter/2018/04/trinitite.php">trinitite</a> or Alamogordo glass. The novel’s young protagonist traverses this beautiful, alien world, that came into being 75 years ago:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The ground sloped gently downward into a huge green sea. Dewey took a few more steps and saw that it wasn’t water. It was glass. Translucent jade-green glass, everywhere, colouring the bare, empty desert as far ahead as she could see.</p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/313478/original/file-20200204-41481-1n8vco4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/313478/original/file-20200204-41481-1n8vco4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=112&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313478/original/file-20200204-41481-1n8vco4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=112&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313478/original/file-20200204-41481-1n8vco4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=112&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313478/original/file-20200204-41481-1n8vco4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=140&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313478/original/file-20200204-41481-1n8vco4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=140&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313478/original/file-20200204-41481-1n8vco4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=140&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><em>For you: more from our <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/insights-series-71218?utm_source=TCUK&utm_medium=linkback&utm_campaign=TCUKengagement&utm_content=InsightsUK">Insights series</a>:</em></p>
<ul>
<li><p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/the-remote-british-village-that-built-one-of-the-fastest-internet-networks-in-the-uk-137946?utm_source=TCUK&utm_medium=linkback&utm_campaign=TCUKengagement&utm_content=InsightsUK">The remote British village that built one of the fastest internet networks in the UK</a></em></p></li>
<li><p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/the-future-of-periods-can-now-be-sustainable-and-cheap-133025?utm_source=TCUK&utm_medium=linkback&utm_campaign=TCUKengagement&utm_content=InsightsUK">The future of periods can now be sustainable and cheap</a></em></p></li>
<li><p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/four-experts-investigate-how-the-5g-coronavirus-conspiracy-theory-began-139137?utm_source=TCUK&utm_medium=linkback&utm_campaign=TCUKengagement&utm_content=InsightsUK">Four experts investigate how the 5G coronavirus conspiracy theory began
</a></em></p></li>
</ul>
<p><em>To hear about new Insights articles, join the hundreds of thousands of people who value The Conversation’s evidence-based news. <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/newsletters/the-daily-newsletter-2?utm_source=TCUK&utm_medium=linkback&utm_campaign=TCUKengagement&utm_content=InsightsUK"><strong>Subscribe to our newsletter</strong></a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/142184/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Daniel Cordle does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Seventy-five years ago, the first atomic bomb exploded and a new world dawned.
Daniel Cordle, Associate Professor in English and American Literature, Nottingham Trent University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/122398
2019-08-28T06:34:21Z
2019-08-28T06:34:21Z
This is why nuking a hurricane will not work, Mr Trump
<p>President Donald Trump has <a href="https://www.axios.com/trump-nuclear-bombs-hurricanes-97231f38-2394-4120-a3fa-8c9cf0e3f51c.html">reportedly suggested</a> on more than one occasion that the US military explode nuclear bombs inside hurricanes to disrupt them before they reach land.</p>
<p>As reported in <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2016/11/hurricanes-weather-history-nuclear-weapons/">National Geographic</a>, this is not the first time a suggestion like this has been made – although Trump now <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1165918301932916736?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1165918301932916736&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theaustralian.com.au%2Fworld%2Fdonald-trump-denies-report-he-suggested-dropping-nuclear-weapons-into-hurricanes%2Fnews-story%2Fbc41998925639ff6ae55b964436aaee2">denies having said it</a>.</p>
<p>On the surface, it would seem like a simple solution to the devastation that occurs in the US each year during the hurricane season. However, there are several problems with this idea.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-economic-cost-of-devastating-hurricanes-and-other-extreme-weather-events-is-even-worse-than-we-thought-108315">The economic cost of devastating hurricanes and other extreme weather events is even worse than we thought</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>What is a hurricane?</h2>
<p><a href="https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/hurricanes/en/">Hurricanes</a> are low-pressure weather systems covering an area of more than 500,000km². They form over warm tropical oceans, which are their primary energy source. The low pressure at the centre of the hurricane – <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_(cyclone)">the eye</a> – draws in the surrounding warm, moist air. This air then rises and condenses into deep thunderstorm clouds surrounding the centre – the eyewall – and also in cloud bands spiralling out from the eye called rainbands.</p>
<p>As the air is pulled into the eye, Earth’s rotation causes it to spin cyclonically – anticlockwise in the northern hemisphere and clockwise in the southern hemisphere. The continuous supply of air into the deep thunderstorms surrounding the eye allows the hurricane to intensify until it reaches a steady state of equilibrium with the oceans and the environment.</p>
<h2>Would a nuclear bomb put a dent in a hurricane?</h2>
<p>The average hurricane can be likened to a very inefficient heat engine. As the warm moist air rises, it releases heat energy through the formation of clouds and rain at a rate of about <a href="https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/energy/energy-hurricane-volcano-earthquake1.htm">5.2 x 10¹⁹ joules per day</a>. Less than 10% of this heat is then converted into the mechanical energy of the wind. </p>
<p>To give some perspective of this energy, the heat released in a hurricane is equivalent to a <a href="http://www.atomicarchive.com/Effects/effects1.shtml">10-megatonne</a> nuclear bomb exploding every hour. This energy is also on the order of the global energy consumption in 2016, according to the <a href="https://www.eia.gov/">United States Energy Information Agency</a>. </p>
<p>It seems unlikely that exploding a bomb in the hurricane would make much impact on such a powerful weather system, and it is impossible to run controlled experiments to determine whether it would. </p>
<p>Not to mention that there could be shocking effects from the fallout of radioactive material from such an explosion. These materials would be transported widely via the trade winds through the lower levels of the atmosphere, and potentially around the entire planet in the stratosphere - similar to the effects from the volcanic fallout from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Pinatubo">Mount Pinatubo</a> in the Philippines in 1991.</p>
<h2>Have people tried to stop hurricanes before?</h2>
<p>There have been previous attempts to modify the impacts of hurricanes. Between 1962 and 1983 the US government funded experimental research on hurricane modification known as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Stormfury">Project STORMFURY</a>. The fundamental premise was, because the <a href="https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pdf/sshws.pdf">potential of damage</a> from hurricanes increases rapidly with the <a href="https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/D5.html">hurricane’s wind speed</a>, a reduction in wind speed of as little as 10% could make a large difference in the impacts when hurricanes reach land. By seeding the air outside the eyewall with silver iodide, a chemical used to seed clouds, it was thought a new ring of thunderstorms may develop outside the eyewall – robbing it of energy and weakening the hurricane.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/getting-ready-for-hurricane-season-4-essential-reads-117460">Getting ready for hurricane season: 4 essential reads</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Modification was attempted in four hurricanes on eight different days. On four of those days, a 10-30% reduction in wind speed was measured. The lack of response on the other fours days was initially interpreted to be the result of faulty execution of the experiment, but was later attributed to an imperfect understanding of the microphysics of clouds in hurricanes. </p>
<p>Successful <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_seeding">cloud seeding</a> using <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_iodide">silver iodide</a> requires that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercooling">supercooled</a> water droplets freeze onto the silver iodide seeds. </p>
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_dynamics_and_cloud_microphysics">Recent observations</a> show hurricanes have too many naturally occurring ice crystals and too few supercooled water droplets for cloud seeding to be effective. So any change in hurricane wind speed observed during the STORMFURY experiments was almost certainly due to the natural behaviour of hurricanes rather than human intervention.</p>
<p>Although Project STORMFURY was abandoned, the hurricane observation program is still run under the <a href="https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/">Hurricane Research Division</a> of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The original aircraft used in Project STORMFURY were replaced in the 1970s by <a href="https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/about_hrd/wp-3d.html">WP-3D</a> aircraft, which still reside under NOAA and are operated by its officers. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/hurricanes-to-deliver-a-bigger-punch-to-coasts-113246">Hurricanes to deliver a bigger punch to coasts</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The observations collected by these aircraft continuously over a period of more than <a href="https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/about_hrd/">60 years</a> has helped <a href="https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/about_hrd/achievements.html">improve hurricane forecasting</a>. Furthermore, these observations have allowed researchers to develop vital insights into the structure, intensity, and physical processes of this most destructive of natural phenomena.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/122398/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Liz Ritchie-Tyo has received funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation, NASA, the U.S. Office of Naval Research, NOAA, and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.</span></em></p>
At best, nuking a hurricane will do nothing, and at worst it will spread radioactive fallout around the world.
Liz Ritchie-Tyo, Associate Professor, School of Physical, Environmental, and Mathematical Sciences, UNSW Sydney
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/107298
2018-12-27T09:30:30Z
2018-12-27T09:30:30Z
A brief history of black holes
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/250023/original/file-20181211-76959-cevsi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/black-hole-space-distortion-anomaly-high-1253323123?src=_ZCrmjzHx8R553ssdCC96A-1-33">Cepheia/Shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Late in 2018, the gravitational wave observatory, LIGO, announced that they had detected the most distant and massive source of ripples of spacetime <a href="https://theconversation.com/new-detections-of-gravitational-waves-brings-the-number-to-11-so-far-107962">ever monitored</a>: waves triggered by pairs of black holes colliding in deep space. Only since 2015 have we been able to observe these invisible astronomical bodies, which can be detected only by their gravitational attraction. The history of our hunt for these enigmatic objects traces back to the 18th century, but the crucial phase took place in a suitably dark period of human history – World War II.</p>
<p>The concept of a body that would trap light, thereby becoming invisible to the rest of the universe, had first been considered by the natural philosophers John Michell and later Pierre-Simon Laplace in the 18th century. They used Newton’s gravitational laws to calculate the escape velocity of a light particle from a body, predicting the existence of stars so dense that light could not escape from them. Michell called them “dark stars”.</p>
<p>But after the discovery that light took the form of a wave in 1801, it became unclear how light would be affected by the Newtonian gravitational field, so the idea of dark stars was dropped. It took roughly 115 years to understand how light in the form of a wave would behave under the influence of a gravitational field, with Albert Einstein’s <a href="http://myweb.rz.uni-augsburg.de/%7Eeckern/adp/history/einstein-papers/1916_49_769-822.pdf">General Relativity Theory</a> in 1915, and Karl Schwarzschild’s <a href="https://www.jp-petit.org/Schwarzschild-1916-interior-de.pdf">solution to this problem</a> a year later.</p>
<p>Schwarzschild also predicted the existence of a critical circumference of a body, beyond which light would be unable to cross: the Schwarzschild radius. This idea was similar to that of Michell, but now this critical circumference was understood as an impenetrable barrier. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/250670/original/file-20181214-185237-6ibiwo.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/250670/original/file-20181214-185237-6ibiwo.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=540&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250670/original/file-20181214-185237-6ibiwo.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=540&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250670/original/file-20181214-185237-6ibiwo.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=540&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250670/original/file-20181214-185237-6ibiwo.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=679&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250670/original/file-20181214-185237-6ibiwo.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=679&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250670/original/file-20181214-185237-6ibiwo.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=679&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Schwarzchild radius.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Black_hole_details.JPG#/media/File:Black_hole_details.JPG">Tetra Quark/Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It was only in 1933 that George Lemaître <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1018855621348">showed</a> that this impenetrability was only an illusion that a distant observer would have. Using the now famous Alice and Bob illustration, the physicist hypothesised that if Bob stood still while Alice jumped into the black hole, Bob would see Alice’s image slowing down until freezing just before reaching the Schwarzschild radius. Lemaître also showed that in reality, Alice crosses that barrier: Bob and Alice just experience the event differently.</p>
<p>Despite this theory, at the time there was no known object of such a size, nothing even close to a black hole. So nobody believed that something similar to the dark stars as hypothesised by Michell would exist. In fact, no one even dared to treat the possibility with seriousness. Not until World War II.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/what-would-happen-if-earth-fell-into-a-black-hole-53719">What would happen if Earth fell into a black hole?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>From dark stars to black holes</h2>
<p>On September 1 1939, the Nazi German army invaded Poland, triggering the beginning of the war that changed the world’s history forever. Remarkably, it was on this very same day that the first academic paper on black holes was published. The now acclaimed article, <a href="https://journals.aps.org/pr/abstract/10.1103/PhysRev.56.455">On Continued Gravitational Contraction</a>, by J Robert Oppenheimer and Hartland Snyder, two American physicists, was a crucial point in the history of black holes. This timing seems particularly odd when you consider the centrality of the rest of World War II in the development of the theory of black holes.</p>
<p>This was Oppenheimer’s third and final paper in astrophysics. In it, he and Snyder predict the continued contraction of a star under the influence of its own gravitational field, creating a body with an intense attraction force that not even light could escape from it. This was the first version of the modern concept of a black hole, an astronomical body so massive that it can only be detected by its gravitational attraction.</p>
<p>In 1939, this was still an idea that was too strange to be believed. It would take two decades until the concept was developed enough that physicists would start to accept the consequences of the continued contraction described by Oppenheimer. And World War II itself had a crucial role in its development, because of the US government’s investment in researching <a href="https://theconversation.com/first-atomic-bomb-test-may-mark-the-beginning-of-the-anthropocene-36912">atomic bombs</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/250671/original/file-20181214-185249-11wrp18.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/250671/original/file-20181214-185249-11wrp18.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=513&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250671/original/file-20181214-185249-11wrp18.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=513&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250671/original/file-20181214-185249-11wrp18.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=513&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250671/original/file-20181214-185249-11wrp18.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=645&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250671/original/file-20181214-185249-11wrp18.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=645&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250671/original/file-20181214-185249-11wrp18.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=645&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Einstein and Oppenheimer, around 1950.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Robert_Oppenheimer#/media/File:Einstein_oppenheimer.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Reborn from the ashes</h2>
<p>Oppenheimer, of course, was not only an important character in the history of black holes. He would later become the head of the <a href="https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/manhattan-project">Manhattan Project</a>, the research centre that led to the development of atomic weapons.</p>
<p>Politicians understood the importance of investing in science in order to bring military advantage. Consequently, across the board, there was wide investment in war-related revolutionary physics research, nuclear physics and the development of new technologies. All sorts of physicists dedicated themselves to this kind of research, and as an immediate consequence, the fields of cosmology and astrophysics were mostly forgotten, including Oppenheimer’s paper.</p>
<p>In spite of the decade lost to large-scale astronomical research, the discipline of physics thrived as a whole as a result of the war – in fact, military physics ended up augmenting astronomy. The US left the war as the centre of modern physics. The number of PhDs <a href="http://web.mit.edu/dikaiser/www/Kaiser.ColdWarReq.pdf">skyrocketed</a>, and a new tradition of postdoctoral education was set up. </p>
<p>By the end of the war, the study of the universe was rekindled. There was a renaissance in the once underestimated theory of general relativity. The war changed the way we do physics: and eventually, this led to the fields of cosmology and general relativity getting the recognition they deserve. And this was fundamental to the acceptance and understanding of the black holes.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/new-detections-of-gravitational-waves-brings-the-number-to-11-so-far-107962">New detections of gravitational waves brings the number to 11 – so far</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Princeton University then became the centre of a new generation of relativists. It was there that the nuclear physicist, John A Wheeler, who later popularised the name “black hole”, had his first contact with general relativity, and reanalysed Oppenheimer’s work. Sceptical at first, the influence of close relativists, new advances in computational simulation and radio technology – developed during the war – turned him into the greatest enthusiast for Oppenheimer’s prediction on the day that war broke out, September 1 1939. </p>
<p>Since then, new properties and types of black holes have been theorised and discovered, but all this only culminated in 2015. The measurement of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-are-gravitational-waves-53239">gravitational waves</a> created in a black hole binary system was the first concrete proof that black holes exist.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/107298/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Carla Rodrigues Almeida does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The crucial phase of our discovery of black holes took place in a suitably dark period of human history – World War II.
Carla Rodrigues Almeida, Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/100452
2018-09-03T20:05:25Z
2018-09-03T20:05:25Z
World politics explainer: The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/234600/original/file-20180903-41729-1xnbp60.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">It's been more than 70 years since an atomic weapon was used in warfare, but the global nuclear weapons stockpile still stands at more than 14,000 warheads.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">U.S. National Archives and Records Administration</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This is the second in a <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/world-politics-explainer-59420">series</a> of explainers on key moments in the past 100 years of world political history. In it, our authors examine how and why an event unfolded, its impact at the time, and its relevance to politics today.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, on August 9, 1945, the US dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki. These remain the only two instances of <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/bombing-of-hiroshima-and-nagasaki">nuclear weapons being used in warfare</a> to this day.</p>
<p>The second world war commenced in 1939. While the war in Europe ended on May 8, 1945, the war in the Pacific only ended with Japan’s unconditional surrender to the Allies on August 15, 1945. </p>
<p>The atomic bombing of Japan was a hugely significant final act of the most destructive global conflict in human history. Simultaneously, it signalled the dawn of the atomic age, the arms race between the US and the Soviet Union and - before too long - the cold war. </p>
<h2>What is an atomic bomb?</h2>
<p>To answer this question, it is helpful to define some central chemical principles. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/231619/original/file-20180813-2912-35vtpl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/231619/original/file-20180813-2912-35vtpl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=706&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/231619/original/file-20180813-2912-35vtpl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=706&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/231619/original/file-20180813-2912-35vtpl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=706&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/231619/original/file-20180813-2912-35vtpl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=888&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/231619/original/file-20180813-2912-35vtpl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=888&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/231619/original/file-20180813-2912-35vtpl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=888&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Labelled atom.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-vector/icon-structure-nucleus-atom-around-gamma-1033961524?src=bAiHaW5ZkXauww5eZr6_Vw-1-5">Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>An <a href="https://www.livescience.com/37206-atom-definition.html">atom</a> is the basic unit of <a href="https://www.thoughtco.com/definition-of-matter-and-examples-604565">matter</a>. The nucleus of an atom is made of smaller <a href="https://science.howstuffworks.com/nuclear-bomb1.htm">particles</a> called protons and neutrons. Other atomic particles called electrons surround the nucleus. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.thoughtco.com/definition-of-element-chemistry-604452">Elements</a> are the simplest chemical substances and consist of atoms that all have the same number of protons. </p>
<p>In the 1930s, scientists showed that <a href="https://science.howstuffworks.com/nuclear-bomb2.htm">nuclear energy</a> could be released from an atom, either by splitting the nucleus (<a href="http://www.atomicarchive.com/Fission/Fission1.shtml">fission</a>) or fusing two smaller atoms to form a larger one (<a href="http://www.atomicarchive.com/Fusion/Fusion1.shtml">fusion</a>).</p>
<p>As the second world war erupted, intense research focused on how to artificially <a href="https://science.howstuffworks.com/nuclear-bomb3.htm">induce</a> nuclear fission by firing a free neutron into an atom of radioactive <a href="http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/introduction/what-is-uranium-how-does-it-work.aspx">uranium</a> or <a href="https://www.livescience.com/39871-facts-about-plutonium.html">plutonium</a>. Through their efforts, scientists found a way to induce a <a href="https://cnduk.org/how-do-nuclear-weapons-work/">chain reaction</a> within a bomb that would generate an unprecedented amount of energy.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_pY5HeZpNr8?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">A quick explainer on nuclear fission.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The impact of the bombs</h2>
<p>An atomic bomb causes <a href="https://science.howstuffworks.com/nuclear-bomb8.htm">massive destruction</a> through intense heat, pressure, radiation and radioactive fallout. At the hypocentre (centre of the blast), the heat is so intense, it vaporises people and buildings.</p>
<p>Between <a href="http://www.thejournal.ie/years-killed-individuals-tragedy-hiroshima-nagasaki-2238080-Aug2015/">60,000-80,000 people</a> were killed instantly when the bomb detonated over Hiroshima and an estimated <a href="http://www.city.hiroshima.lg.jp/www/contents/1319174554447/index.html">140,000 died</a> from acute effects of the bomb before the end of the year. The death toll increased to <a href="https://cnduk.org/hiroshima-the-truth-about-the-bombing/">over 200,000 people</a> in subsequent decades, as people died from cancers and other diseases linked to <a href="https://k1project.columbia.edu/news/hiroshima-and-nagasaki">radiation poisoning</a>.</p>
<p><em><strong>Warning:</strong> the video below includes graphic imagery</em></p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2lDFLLKSkUg?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Cartoon depicting the horrors of the Hiroshima bombing on the city’s residents.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In addition to the human toll, almost 63% of Hiroshima’s buildings were destroyed and a further 29% damaged by the bomb. The <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/08/06/69-years-after-hiroshima-a-look-at-the-dome-that-survived/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.c08ca265e64d">Genbaku (Atomic Bomb) Dome</a> was the only building left standing near the hypocentre. Today, it is preserved at the Peace Memorial Park and the city has been rebuilt around it. </p>
<p>The total death toll in Nagasaki was lower in comparison, as parts of the city were shielded by mountains. Still, <a href="http://www.aasc.ucla.edu/cab/200708230009.html">at least 75,000 people</a> died there in total. </p>
<p>Nagasaki receives <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-08-07/psaltis-what-about-nagasaki/6680386">less attention</a> in analysis of the bombings, despite being the <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/nagasaki-the-last-bomb">last place</a> a nuclear weapon was used in warfare. <a href="https://www.democracynow.org/2018/8/9/73_years_after_us_dropped_atom">Hibakusha</a> - the Japanese term for explosion-affected people - continue to campaign for Nagasaki to retain its sad distinction. </p>
<h2>Why did the US use the bomb?</h2>
<p>Few historical questions are subject to such enduring <a href="https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/debate-over-bomb">controversy</a> as this one. It is impossible to properly address the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/05/opinion/blood-on-our-hands.html">competing perspectives</a> in this article. I recommend <a href="http://isaacmeyer.net/?s=hiroshima">this episode</a> of the History of Japan podcast by historian Isaac Meyer for an airing of the conflicting arguments for and against the use of the bombs.</p>
<p>Briefly, “<a href="https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-05-27/the-atomic-bomb-was-necessary-to-force-a-prompt-japanese-surrender">traditionalist</a>” accounts of the bombings have argued that the bombs were necessary to force Japan’s surrender. They also claim that a land invasion of Japan by US and Soviet forces would have taken <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1946/12/if-the-atomic-bomb-had-not-been-used/376238/">many more lives</a> than the bombs did. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/world-politics-explainer-the-great-war-wwi-100462">World politics explainer: The Great War (WWI)</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Some have noted that the <a href="http://nation.time.com/2012/03/27/a-forgotten-horror-the-great-tokyo-air-raid/">fire-bombing</a> of Tokyo and other Japanese cities during the war also inflicted devastating casualties. Questions of <a href="http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/09/22/tokyo-hiroshima/">moral distinction</a> between atomic and other types of bombings have therefore been raised. </p>
<p>In contrast, “<a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/why-the-us-really-bombed-hiroshima/">revisionist</a>” accounts have claimed that Japan’s surrender could have been secured if the US had guaranteed that Emperor Hirohito would be allowed to remain on the throne. They suggest Japan was more compelled to surrender by the Soviet invasion of Manchuria in the same week of August 1945 than by the atomic bombings. </p>
<p>Perhaps, some revisionists argue, the US actually wanted to prove its <a href="https://cnduk.org/why-the-atom-bomb-was-dropped-on-japan-2/">superior military capacity</a> to the Soviet Union and was determined to use the atomic bombs for that purpose. </p>
<p>Either way, the wartime alliance between the US and USSR soon dissolved into intense rivalry, which continues to influence global relations seven decades on. </p>
<p>Early in the 21st century, historian <a href="http://www.johndclare.net/cold_war5.htm">John Clare</a> exposed this key enduring legacy of the bombings:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When I first started teaching, we just taught that the atomic bomb brought the war to an end. Only recently have we come to appreciate that the last shot of the second world war was also the opening scene of the cold war – that the bomb was a cause as much as a conclusion.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Memorialising the impacts of the atomic bombings</h2>
<p>In June, I visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. It was an overwhelming and emotional experience, not least because the park and museum were filled with Japanese schoolchildren paying respect to the dead and learning about the consequences of nuclear warfare.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/231639/original/file-20180813-2909-f7kfh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/231639/original/file-20180813-2909-f7kfh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/231639/original/file-20180813-2909-f7kfh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/231639/original/file-20180813-2909-f7kfh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/231639/original/file-20180813-2909-f7kfh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/231639/original/file-20180813-2909-f7kfh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/231639/original/file-20180813-2909-f7kfh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Children’s peace memorial, Hiroshima.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Amy Maguire</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The film, <a href="https://www.hiro-tsuitokinenkan.go.jp/Movie/d_2018_en.html">The Twinkling Stars Know Everything</a>, is showing throughout 2018 in a memorial hall at the park. It shows a collection of memoirs by parents of junior high school students killed by the bomb.</p>
<p>The Peace Memorial Museum reveals the scale of instant destruction as the bomb detonated. The museum also traces, through a series of confronting exhibits, the pain and terror of those who died slowly from horrific burns and the effects of radiation. Visitors learn about the <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3907953/">lingering impacts</a> of radiation exposure on victims and their descendants, including pregnancy loss, birth defects and untold psychological damage.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/ban-the-bomb-70-years-on-the-nuclear-threat-looms-as-large-as-ever-45491">Ban the bomb: 70 years on, the nuclear threat looms as large as ever</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The most famous child victim, <a href="http://sadakosasaki.com/">Sadako Sasaki</a>, was two years old when the bomb fell in Hiroshima. She was apparently uninjured by the blast, but was exposed to toxic “black rain” as she fled the city with her family. Nine years later, Sadako developed radiation-induced leukaemia and died soon after at the age of 12. She had famously folded more than <a href="http://hibakushastories.org/why-disarmament-education/making-paper-cranes-in-memory-of-sadako-sasaki/">1,000 paper cranes</a> in the hope of recovery.</p>
<p>I saw schoolchildren honouring Sadako and all the lost children at the Children’s Peace Memorial. Each day, thousands more paper cranes are delivered to honour their memory and as a call for peace. </p>
<h2>Contemporary relevance: the agenda of denuclearisation</h2>
<p>The <a href="http://a-bombdb.pcf.city.hiroshima.jp/pdbe/search/col_testify">Peace Memorial Museum</a>, and <a href="http://www.mayorsforpeace.org/english/outlines/index.html">Mayors for Peace</a> project, share the dual aims of informing people about the impacts of nuclear warfare and calling for denuclearisation. </p>
<p>Nuclear weapons are depicted as so inhumane as to justify global prohibition of their production, retention or use. Any <a href="https://www.uow.edu.au/%7Ebmartin/pubs/82cab/">future</a> nuclear <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidbressan/2017/08/12/even-a-small-nuclear-war-would-still-have-effects-on-global-scale/">warfare</a> is predicted to have far more severe <a href="https://theconversation.com/even-a-minor-nuclear-war-would-be-an-ecological-disaster-felt-throughout-the-world-82288">humanitarian</a> and <a href="https://medium.com/freeman-spogli-institute-for-international-studies/how-nuclear-war-would-affect-the-world-climate-and-human-health-8b40b4668074">environmental</a> consequences than the 1945 strikes on Japan. </p>
<p>Denuclearisation advocacy has also been taken up globally in recent years. In 2017, the <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2017/">Nobel Peace Prize</a> was awarded to ICAN - the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons – which successfully lobbied the UN General Assembly to hold a <a href="https://www.un.org/disarmament/tpnw/index.html">conference</a> to negotiate a treaty banning nuclear weapons. </p>
<p>The text of the <a href="https://treaties.un.org/doc/Treaties/2017/07/20170707%2003-42%20PM/Ch_XXVI_9.pdf">Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons</a> was adopted by <a href="https://www.un.org/disarmament/wmd/nuclear/tpnw/">122 states</a> in 2017. States that wish to become parties to the treaty must commit to the total elimination of nuclear weapons. As of today, <a href="http://www.icanw.org/status-of-the-treaty-on-the-prohibition-of-nuclear-weapons/">60 states have signed</a> the treaty, and of those, <a href="https://www.un.org/disarmament/list-of-countries-which-signed-tpnw-on-opening-day-20-september-2017/">13 have ratified it</a>. Thirty-seven more ratifications are needed to make the treaty binding. </p>
<p>However, <a href="http://www.icanw.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Nuclear-Weapons-Ban-Monitor.pdf">none</a> of the nine nuclear powers (United States, Russia, United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea) support the ban. </p>
<p>Australia’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/as-the-world-pushes-for-a-ban-on-nuclear-weapons-australia-votes-to-stay-on-the-wrong-side-of-history-68337">refusal to endorse</a> the ban is tied to this political reality. It is one of 30 “<a href="http://www.icanw.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Nuclear-Weapons-Ban-Monitor.pdf">nuclear-weapon-endorsing-states</a>” who rely on the nuclear “protection” of allies. The government argues for a “<a href="https://dfat.gov.au/international-relations/security/non-proliferation-disarmament-arms-control/nuclear-weapons/Pages/australias-nuclear-non-proliferation-and-disarmament-policy.aspx">building blocks</a>” approach instead, favouring incremental steps towards nuclear disarmament. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/australia-must-sign-the-prohibition-on-nuclear-weapons-heres-why-83951">Australia must sign the prohibition on nuclear weapons: here's why</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>However, the global nuclear weapons stockpile still stands at <a href="https://www.ploughshares.org/world-nuclear-stockpile-report">over 14,000 warheads</a>, despite decades of disarmament efforts. 92% of these weapons are held by the US and Russia. The people of Japan, very recently, have had legitimate cause to fear the <a href="http://www.iai.it/en/pubblicazioni/japans-view-north-korean-threat">nuclear threat</a> posed by North Korea. </p>
<p>The cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki continue to work hard to ensure that the consequences of the atomic bombings are not lost to history. The Peace Memorial Museum reminds all who visit of the devastation that nuclear weapons could unleash if used again. Our shared humanity demands a denuclearised future.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/100452/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Amy Maguire is a member of Amnesty International and a Co-Chair of the Indigenous Rights Subcommittee, Australian Lawyers for Human Rights. </span></em></p>
When the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, it unleashed one of the most devastating events in history, which still has implications today.
Amy Maguire, Senior Lecturer in International Law and Human Rights, University of Newcastle
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/90360
2018-02-22T14:36:25Z
2018-02-22T14:36:25Z
Operation Gunnerside: The Norwegian attack on heavy water that deprived the Nazis of the atomic bomb
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/207345/original/file-20180221-132642-1euc63m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=16%2C174%2C3626%2C2293&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Nazi atomic effort relied on work done in this remote lab.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vemork_Tinn.jpg">grob831</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>After handing them their suicide capsules, Norwegian Royal Army Colonel Leif Tronstad informed his soldiers, “I cannot tell you why this mission is so important, but if you succeed, it will live in Norway’s memory for a hundred years.”</p>
<p>These commandos did know, however, that an earlier attempt at the same mission by British soldiers had been a <a href="http://sciencenordic.com/heavy-water-mission-failed">complete failure</a>. Two gliders transporting the men had both crashed while en route to their target. The survivors were quickly captured by German soldiers, tortured and executed. If similarly captured, these Norwegians could expect the same fate as their British counterparts, hence the suicide pills.</p>
<p>Feb. 28 marks the 75th anniversary of Operation Gunnerside, and though it hasn’t yet been 100 years, the memory of this successful Norwegian mission remains strong both within Norway and beyond. Memorialized in <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059263/">movies</a>, <a href="http://nealbascomb.com/books-bascomb/the-winter-fortress/">books</a> and TV <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/watching/recommendations/the-heavy-water-war">mini-series</a>, the winter sabotage of the Vemork chemical plant in <a href="https://www.citypopulation.de/php/norway-admin.php?adm1id=08">Telemark County</a> of <a href="http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/world-war-two/world-war-two-in-western-europe/the-attack-on-western-europe/the-occupation-of-norway/">Nazi-occupied Norway</a> was one of the most dramatic and important military missions of World War II. It put the German nuclear scientists months behind and allowed the United States to overtake the Germans in the quest to produce the first atomic bomb.</p>
<p>While people tend to associate the United States’ atomic bomb efforts with Japan and the war in the Pacific, the <a href="http://www.history.com/topics/the-manhattan-project">Manhattan Project</a> – the American program to produce an atomic bomb – was actually undertaken in reaction to <a href="https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/german-atomic-bomb-project">Allied suspicions that the Germans were actively pursuing such a weapon</a>. Yet the fighting in Europe ended before either side had a working atomic bomb. In fact, a <a href="https://www.army.mil/article/148701/100_ton_event_served_as_dress_rehearsal_for_trinity_site">rehearsal for Trinity</a> – America’s first atomic bomb test detonation – was conducted on May 7, 1945, the very day that Germany surrendered.</p>
<p>So the U.S. atomic bomb arrived weeks too late for use against Germany. Nevertheless, had the Germans developed their own bomb just a few months earlier, the outcome of the war in Europe might have been completely different. The months of setback caused by the Norwegians’ sabotage of the Vemork chemical plant may very well have prevented a German victory.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/207351/original/file-20180221-132657-aojb25.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/207351/original/file-20180221-132657-aojb25.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/207351/original/file-20180221-132657-aojb25.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=439&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/207351/original/file-20180221-132657-aojb25.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=439&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/207351/original/file-20180221-132657-aojb25.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=439&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/207351/original/file-20180221-132657-aojb25.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=551&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/207351/original/file-20180221-132657-aojb25.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=551&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/207351/original/file-20180221-132657-aojb25.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=551&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">The Norwegian saboteurs’ target.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vemork,_Rjukan_-_no-nb_digifoto_20151127_00149_NB_MIT_FNR_14085.jpg">Jac Brun</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<h2>Nazi bomb effort relied on heavy water</h2>
<p>What Colonel Tronstad, himself a prewar <a href="https://www.ntnu.no/forskning/kjentealumni/tronstad">chemistry professor</a>, was able to tell his men was that the Vemork chemical plant made “heavy water,” an important ingredient for the Germans’ weapons research. Beyond that, the Norwegian troops knew nothing of atomic bombs or how the heavy water was used. Even today, when many people have at least a rudimentary understanding of atomic bombs and know that the source of their vast energy is the splitting of atoms, few have any idea what heavy water is or its role in splitting those atoms. Still fewer know why the German nuclear scientists needed it, while the Americans didn’t.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/207357/original/file-20180221-132642-1netn5x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/207357/original/file-20180221-132642-1netn5x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/207357/original/file-20180221-132642-1netn5x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=344&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/207357/original/file-20180221-132642-1netn5x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=344&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/207357/original/file-20180221-132642-1netn5x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=344&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/207357/original/file-20180221-132642-1netn5x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=432&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/207357/original/file-20180221-132642-1netn5x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=432&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/207357/original/file-20180221-132642-1netn5x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=432&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Normal hydrogen, left, has just a proton; deuterium, the heavy form of hydrogen, right, has a proton and a neutron.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Izotopii_hidrogenului.png">Nicolae Coman</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
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<p>“Heavy water” is just that: water with a molecular weight of 20 rather than the normal 18 atomic mass units, or amu. It’s heavier than normal because each of the two hydrogen atoms in heavy H2O weighs two rather than one amu. (The one oxygen atom in H2O weighs 16 amu.) While the nucleus of a normal hydrogen atom has a single subatomic particle called a <a href="http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/proton">proton</a>, the nuclei of the hydrogen atoms in heavy water have both a proton and a <a href="http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/neutron">neutron</a> – another type of subatomic particle that weighs the same as a proton. Water molecules with heavy hydrogen atoms are extremely rare in nature (less than one in a billion natural water molecules are heavy), so the Germans had to artificially produce all the heavy water that they needed.</p>
<p>In terms of their chemistries, heavy water and normal water behave very similarly, and you wouldn’t detect any differences in your own cooking, drinking or bathing if heavy water were to suddenly start coming out of your tap. But you would notice that <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLiirA5ooS0">ice cubes made from heavy water sink</a> rather than float when you put them in a glass of normal drinking water, because of their increased density.</p>
<p>Those differences are subtle, but there is something heavy water does that normal water can’t. When fast neutrons released by the splitting of atoms (that is, nuclear fission) pass through heavy water, interactions with the heavy water molecules cause those neutrons to slow down, or <a href="http://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Neutron_moderator">moderate</a>. This is important because slowly moving neutrons are more efficient at splitting uranium atoms than fast moving neutrons. Since neutrons traveling through heavy water split atoms more efficiently, less uranium should be needed to achieve a <a href="https://www.britannica.com/science/critical-mass">critical mass</a>; that’s the minimum amount of uranium required to start a spontaneous chain reaction of atoms splitting in rapid succession. It is this chain reaction, within the critical mass, that releases the explosive energy of the bomb. That’s why the Germans needed the heavy water; their strategy for producing an atomic explosion depended upon it.</p>
<p>The American scientists, in contrast, had chosen a different approach to achieve a critical mass. As I explain in my book, “<a href="https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10691.html">Strange Glow: The Story of Radiation</a>,” the U.S. atomic bomb effort used <a href="http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/conversion-enrichment-and-fabrication/uranium-enrichment.aspx">enriched</a> uranium – uranium that has an increased concentration of the easily split <a href="http://www.chemistrylearner.com/uranium-235.html">uranium-235</a> – while <a href="https://cen.acs.org/articles/93/i39/Nuclear-Forensics-Shows-Nazis-Nowhere.html">the Germans used unenriched uranium</a>. And the Americans chose to slow the neutrons emitted from their enriched uranium with more readily available graphite, rather than heavy water. Each approach had its technological trade-offs, but the U.S. approach did not rely on having to synthesize the extremely scarce heavy water. Its rarity made heavy water the Achilles’ heel of the German nuclear bomb program.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/FcOK87ev8jU?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The Norwegian army has a long history of soldiers on skis, which continues to the present day.</span></figcaption>
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<h2>Stealthy approach by the Norwegians</h2>
<p>Rather than repeating the British strategy of sending dozens of men in gliders, flying with heavy weapons and equipment (including bicycles!) to traverse the snow-covered roads, and making a direct assault at the plant’s front gates, the Norwegians would <a href="https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol36no3/html/v36i3a11p_0001.htm">rely on an alternate strategy</a>. They’d parachute a small group of expert skiers into the wilderness that surrounded the plant. The lightly armed skiers would then quickly ski their way to the plant, and use stealth rather than force to gain entry to the heavy water production room in order to destroy it with explosives.</p>
<p>Six Norwegian soldiers were dropped in to meet up with four others already on location. (The four had parachuted in weeks earlier to set up a lighted runway on a lake for the British gliders that never arrived.) On the ground, they were joined by a Norwegian spy. The 11-man group was initially slowed by severe weather conditions, but once the weather finally cleared, the men made rapid progress toward their target across the snow-covered countryside.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/207339/original/file-20180221-132660-172g8a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/207339/original/file-20180221-132660-172g8a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/207339/original/file-20180221-132660-172g8a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=922&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/207339/original/file-20180221-132660-172g8a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=922&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/207339/original/file-20180221-132660-172g8a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=922&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/207339/original/file-20180221-132660-172g8a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/207339/original/file-20180221-132660-172g8a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/207339/original/file-20180221-132660-172g8a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Bridge in to the Vemork site.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bridge_Vemork.jpg">martin_vmorris</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
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<p>The Vemork plant clung to a steep hillside. Upon arriving at the ravine that served as a kind of protective moat, the soldiers could see that attempting to cross the heavily guarded bridge would be futile. So under the cover of darkness they descended to the bottom of the ravine, crossed the frozen stream, and climbed up the steep cliffs to the plant, thus completely bypassing the <a href="https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search;_ylt=A0LEVitaYYNaHC4Aj80PxQt.?p=view+from+vemork+bridge&fr=yhs-Lkry-SF01&fr2=piv-web&hspart=Lkry&hsimp=yhs-SF01&type=Tarrv_A01IK_set_bfr#id=1&vid=d0a070170d1bd76ea7a80d96adc314d3&action=view">bridge</a>. The Germans had thought the ravine impassible, so hadn’t guarded against such an approach.</p>
<p>The Norwegians were then able to sneak past sentries and find their way to the heavy water production room, relying on maps of the plant provided by <a href="https://www.geni.com/projects/Norwegian-Resistance-Movements-during-WWII/25591">Norwegian resistance</a> workers. Upon entering the heavy water room, they quickly set their timed explosives and left. They escaped the scene during the chaotic aftermath of the explosion. No lives were lost, and not a single shot was fired by either side.</p>
<p>Outside the plant, the men backtracked through the ravine and then split into small groups that independently skied eastward toward the safety of <a href="http://www.historyisnowmagazine.com/blog/2017/12/18/was-sweden-really-neutral-in-world-war-two#.WoMRboJG0UE=">neutral Sweden</a>. Eventually, each made his way back to their Norwegian unit stationed in Britain.</p>
<p>The Germans were later able to rebuild their plant and resume making heavy water. Subsequent <a href="https://ww2db.com/facility/Vemork_Heavy_Water_Plant/">Allied bomber raids on the plant</a> were not effective in stopping production due to the plant’s heavy walls. But the damage had already been done. The German atomic bomb effort had been slowed to the point that it would never be finished in time to influence the outcome of the war.</p>
<p>Today, we don’t hear much about heavy water. Modern nuclear bomb technology has taken other routes. But it was once one of the most rare and dangerous substances in the world, and brave soldiers – both <a href="http://www.aircrashsites-scotland.co.uk/raf-skitten-meml.htm">British</a> and <a href="https://www.tracesofwar.com/sights/15603/Memorial-Resistance-Fighters-Vemonk.htm">Norwegian</a> – fought courageously to stop its production.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/90360/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Timothy J. Jorgensen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Feb. 28 marks the 75th anniversary of Operation Gunnerside. A stealthy group of skiing commandos took out a crucial Nazi facility and stopped Hitler from getting the atomic bomb.
Timothy J. Jorgensen, Director of the Health Physics and Radiation Protection Graduate Program and Associate Professor of Radiation Medicine, Georgetown University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/87154
2017-11-30T18:07:28Z
2017-11-30T18:07:28Z
Atomic age began 75 years ago with the first controlled nuclear chain reaction
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/197029/original/file-20171129-12027-8o9l1v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=67%2C323%2C2806%2C1980&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">For the first time, human beings harnessed the power of atomic fission.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Atomic_Man_-_panoramio.jpg">Keith Ruffles</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Over Christmas vacation in 1938, physicists <a href="https://www.atomicheritage.org/profile/lise-meitner">Lise Meitner</a> and <a href="https://www.atomicheritage.org/profile/otto-frisch">Otto Frisch</a> received puzzling scientific news in a private letter from nuclear chemist <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1944/">Otto Hahn</a>. When bombarding uranium with neutrons, Hahn had made some surprising observations that went against everything known at the time about the dense cores of atoms – their nuclei. </p>
<p>Meitner and Frisch were able to provide an explanation for what he saw that would revolutionize the field of nuclear physics: A uranium nucleus could split in half – or fission, as they called it – producing two new nuclei, called fission fragments. More importantly, this fission process releases huge amounts of energy. This finding at the dawn of World War II was the start of a scientific and military race to understand and use this new atomic source of power.</p>
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<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Leo Szilard lectures on the fission process.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/argonne/9623642054">Argonne National Laboratory</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The <a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/143239a0">release of these findings</a> to the academic community immediately inspired many nuclear scientists to investigate the nuclear fission process further. Physicist <a href="https://www.atomicheritage.org/profile/leo-szilard">Leo Szilard</a> made an important realization: if fission emits neutrons, and neutrons can induce fission, then neutrons from the fission of one nucleus could cause the fission of another nucleus. It could all cascade in a self-sustained “chain” process.</p>
<p>Thus began the quest to experimentally prove that a nuclear chain reaction was possible – and 75 years ago, researchers at the University of Chicago succeeded, opening the door to what would become the nuclear era.</p>
<h2>Harnessing fission</h2>
<p>As part of the <a href="https://www.energy.gov/management/office-management/operational-management/history/manhattan-project">Manhattan Project</a> effort to build an atomic bomb during World War II, Szilard worked together with <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1938/">physicist Enrico Fermi</a> and other colleagues at the University of Chicago to create the world’s first experimental nuclear reactor.</p>
<p>For a sustained, controlled chain reaction, each fission must induce just one additional fission. Any more, and there’d be an explosion. Any fewer and the reaction would peter out.</p>
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<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Nobel Prize winner Enrico Fermi led the project.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/argonne/5039457612">Argonne National Laboratory</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In earlier studies, Fermi had found that uranium nuclei would absorb neutrons more easily if the neutrons were moving relatively slowly. But neutrons emitted from the fission of uranium are fast. So for the Chicago experiment, the physicists used graphite to slow down the emitted neutrons, via multiple scattering processes. The idea was to increase the neutrons’ chances of being absorbed by another uranium nucleus.</p>
<p>To make sure they could safely control the chain reaction, the team rigged together what they called “control rods.” These were simply sheets of the element cadmium, an excellent neutron absorber. The physicists interspersed control rods through the uranium-graphite pile. At every step of the process Fermi calculated the expected neutron emission, and slowly removed a control rod to confirm his expectations. As a safety mechanism, the cadmium control rods could quickly be inserted if something started going wrong, to shut down the chain reaction.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/197026/original/file-20171129-12059-orq2um.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/197026/original/file-20171129-12059-orq2um.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/197026/original/file-20171129-12059-orq2um.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=297&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197026/original/file-20171129-12059-orq2um.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=297&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197026/original/file-20171129-12059-orq2um.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=297&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197026/original/file-20171129-12059-orq2um.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=373&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197026/original/file-20171129-12059-orq2um.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=373&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197026/original/file-20171129-12059-orq2um.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=373&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Chicago Pile 1, erected in 1942 in the stands of an athletic field at the University of Chicago.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/argonne/12371772445">Argonne National Laboratory</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>They called this <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pile-1">20x6x25-foot setup</a> <a href="https://www.uchicago.edu/features/how_the_first_chain_reaction_changed_science/">Chicago Pile Number One</a>, or CP-1 for short – and it was here they obtained world’s the first controlled nuclear chain reaction on December 2, 1942. A single random neutron was enough to start the chain reaction process once the physicists assembled CP-1. The first neutron would induce fission on a uranium nucleus, emitting a set of new neutrons. These secondary neutrons hit carbon nuclei in the graphite and slowed down. Then they’d run into other uranium nuclei and induce a second round of fission reactions, emit even more neutrons, and on and on. The cadmium control rods made sure the process wouldn’t continue indefinitely, because Fermi and his team could choose exactly how and where to insert them to control the chain reaction.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/197021/original/file-20171129-12035-4shqnh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/197021/original/file-20171129-12035-4shqnh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/197021/original/file-20171129-12035-4shqnh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=534&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197021/original/file-20171129-12035-4shqnh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=534&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197021/original/file-20171129-12035-4shqnh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=534&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197021/original/file-20171129-12035-4shqnh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=671&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197021/original/file-20171129-12035-4shqnh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=671&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197021/original/file-20171129-12035-4shqnh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=671&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A nuclear chain reaction. Green arrows show the split of a uranium nucleus in two fission fragments, emitting new neutrons. Some of these neutrons can induce new fission reactions (black arrows). Some of the neutrons may be lost in other processes (blue arrows). Red arrows show the delayed neutrons that come later from the radioactive fission fragments and that can induce new fission reactions.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nuclear_fission_chain_reaction.svg">MikeRun modified by Erin O’Donnell, MSU</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Controlling the chain reaction was extremely important: If the balance between produced and absorbed neutrons was not exactly right, then the chain reactions either would not proceed at all, or in the other much more dangerous extreme, the chain reactions would multiply rapidly with the release of enormous amounts of energy.</p>
<p>Sometimes, a few seconds after the fission occurs in a nuclear chain reaction, additional neutrons are released. Fission fragments are typically radioactive, and can emit different types of radiation, among them neutrons. Right away, Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1963/wigner-facts.html">Eugene Wigner</a> and others recognized the importance of these so-called “delayed neutrons” in controlling the chain reaction.</p>
<p>If they weren’t taken into account, these additional neutrons would induce more fission reactions than anticipated. As a result, the nuclear chain reaction in their Chicago experiment could have spiraled out of control, with potentially devastating results. More importantly, however, this time delay between the fission and the release of more neutrons allows some time for human beings to react and make adjustments, controlling the power of the chain reaction so it doesn’t proceed too fast.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/197198/original/file-20171130-30931-1ebeuxu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/197198/original/file-20171130-30931-1ebeuxu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/197198/original/file-20171130-30931-1ebeuxu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=614&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197198/original/file-20171130-30931-1ebeuxu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=614&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197198/original/file-20171130-30931-1ebeuxu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=614&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197198/original/file-20171130-30931-1ebeuxu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=771&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197198/original/file-20171130-30931-1ebeuxu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=771&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197198/original/file-20171130-30931-1ebeuxu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=771&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Nuclear power plants operate in 30 countries today.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Plant-Vogtle/05d857a8e2c640adacf01d8e0dcf77ca/1/0">AP Photo/John Bazemore</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The events of December 2, 1942 marked a huge milestone. Figuring out how to create and control the nuclear chain reaction was the foundation for the 448 nuclear reactors producing energy worldwide today. At present, 30 countries include nuclear reactors in their power portfolio. Within these countries, <a href="https://www.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails.aspx?current=US">nuclear energy contributes on average 24 percent</a> of their total electrical power, ranging as high as <a href="https://www.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails.aspx?current=FR">72 percent in France</a>.</p>
<p>CP-1’s success was also essential for the continuation of the Manhattan Project and the creation of the <a href="https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/bombings-hiroshima-and-nagasaki-1945">two atomic bombs used during World War II</a>.</p>
<h2>Physicists’ remaining questions</h2>
<p>The quest to understand delayed neutron emission and nuclear fission continues in modern nuclear physics laboratories. The race today is not for building atomic bombs or even nuclear reactors; it’s for understanding of basic properties of nuclei through close collaboration between experiment and theory. </p>
<p>Researchers have observed fission experimentally only for a small number of <a href="http://edtech2.boisestate.edu/lindabennett1/502/atoms_isotopes.html">isotopes</a> – the various versions of an element based on how many neutrons each has – and the details of this complex process are not yet well-understood. State-of-the-art theoretical models try to explain the observed fission properties, like how much energy is released, the number of neutrons emitted and the masses of the fission fragments.</p>
<p>Delayed neutron emission happens only for nuclei that are not naturally occurring, and these nuclei live for only a short amount of time. While experiments have revealed some of the nuclei that emit delayed neutrons, we are not yet able to reliably predict which isotopes should have this property. We also don’t know exact probabilities for delayed neutron emission or the amount of energy released – properties that are very important for understanding the details of energy production in nuclear reactors.</p>
<p>In addition, researchers are trying to <a href="https://science.energy.gov/ascr/highlights/2015/ascr-2015-08-a/">predict new nuclei where nuclear fission might be possible</a>. They’re building new experiments and powerful new facilities which will provide access to nuclei that have never before been studied, in an attempt to measure all these properties directly. Together, the new experimental and theoretical studies will give us a much better understanding of nuclear fission, which can help improve the performance and safety of nuclear reactors.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/197077/original/file-20171130-12069-1jxmxhk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/197077/original/file-20171130-12069-1jxmxhk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/197077/original/file-20171130-12069-1jxmxhk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197077/original/file-20171130-12069-1jxmxhk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197077/original/file-20171130-12069-1jxmxhk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197077/original/file-20171130-12069-1jxmxhk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197077/original/file-20171130-12069-1jxmxhk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197077/original/file-20171130-12069-1jxmxhk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Artist’s rendition of two merging neutron stars, another situation where fission occurs.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/12740">NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/CI Lab</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Both fission and delayed neutron emission are processes that also happen within stars. The <a href="https://theconversation.com/cosmic-alchemy-colliding-neutron-stars-show-us-how-the-universe-creates-gold-86104">creation of heavy elements, like silver and gold</a>, in particular can depend on the fission and delayed neutron emission properties of exotic nuclei. Fission breaks the heaviest elements and replaces them with lighter ones (fission fragments), completely changing the element composition of a star. Delayed neutron emission adds more neutrons to the stellar environment, that can then induce new nuclear reactions. For example, nuclear properties played a vital role in the <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-astrophysicists-are-over-the-moon-about-observing-merging-neutron-stars-84957">neutron-star merger event</a> that was recently discovered by <a href="https://theconversation.com/ligo-announcement-vaults-astronomy-out-of-its-silent-movie-era-into-the-talkies-85727">gravitational-wave and electromagnetic observatories around the world</a>.</p>
<p>The science has come a long way since Szilard’s vision and Fermi’s proof of a controlled nuclear chain reaction. At the same time, new questions have emerged, and there’s still a lot to learn about the basic nuclear properties that drive the chain reaction and its impact on energy production here on Earth and elsewhere in our universe.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/GDUncuEErzQ?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">How the Atomic Age began at UChicago.</span></figcaption>
</figure><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/87154/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Artemis Spyrou receives funding from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy/National Nuclear Security Administration.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Wolfgang Mittig receives funding from NSF.</span></em></p>
By figuring out fission, physicists were able to split uranium atoms and release massive amounts of energy. This Manhattan Project work paved the way both for atomic bombs and nuclear power reactors.
Artemis Spyrou, Associate Professor of Nuclear Astrophysics, Michigan State University
Wolfgang Mittig, Professor of Physics, Michigan State University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/66135
2016-09-28T04:46:33Z
2016-09-28T04:46:33Z
Black Mist Burnt Country asks: what remains after the mushroom cloud?
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/139515/original/image-20160928-30441-1zrc12.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Fifty years after the Maralinga atomic tests, an exhibition grapples with the pain and devastation left behind. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Karen Standke, Road to Maralinga II (detail). Supplied</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Two drawings by Judy Watson make sense of it all. Bomb Drawing 1 and Bomb Drawing 5 are small shadows of light ash on the pages of a sketchbook. They seem so fragile, so small, so empty. Yet their very stillness in what is an often crowded and confused display gives them a sense of authority.</p>
<p><a href="http://blackmistburntcountry.com.au/">Black Mist Burnt Country</a> is a national touring exhibition devised to commemorate one of the great crimes against this country – the <a href="https://theconversation.com/sixty-years-on-the-maralinga-bomb-tests-remind-us-not-to-put-security-over-safety-62441">wilful poisoning of the land and its people</a> by the British Government with the active collusion of the Australian Government. The full extent of the British experiments with atomic weapons on Australian soil took decades to be fully exposed. </p>
<p>The nuclear tests took place over a number of years – starting at Monte Bello in 1952, rolling on to Emu Field and then Maralinga 60 years ago – yet it was not until the 1980s that a Royal Commission headed by James McClelland finally revealed the <a href="http://www.industry.gov.au/resource/Documents/radioactive_waste/RoyalCommissioninToBritishNucleartestsinAustraliaVol%201.pdf">full extent</a> of the poisoning of both land and people.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/139510/original/image-20160928-30448-9argid.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/139510/original/image-20160928-30448-9argid.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/139510/original/image-20160928-30448-9argid.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/139510/original/image-20160928-30448-9argid.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/139510/original/image-20160928-30448-9argid.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/139510/original/image-20160928-30448-9argid.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=603&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/139510/original/image-20160928-30448-9argid.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=603&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/139510/original/image-20160928-30448-9argid.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=603&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Paul Ogier, One Tree.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Supplied</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Despite the aggressive censorship of the media enough was known to trigger public unease at the time they took place. Many artists were among the protesters, some made work in response to the destruction of the land through nuclear explosions. One of the great surprises in Black Mist Burnt Country is a little known painting by Sidney Nolan, painted some time in the 1950s in response to the news of the nuclear tests. </p>
<p>Central Desert: Atomic Test takes as its base a classic Sidney Nolan desert landscape, rocky red mountains against a clear blue sky – but the land at the centre has been blighted and bleached while a mushroom cloud hovers in the sky. At the time he painted it Nolan was living in London, remembering how he had flown over the red land of the outback, imagining how it was being scarred by government intervention.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/139525/original/image-20160928-727-kn8nkq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/139525/original/image-20160928-727-kn8nkq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/139525/original/image-20160928-727-kn8nkq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/139525/original/image-20160928-727-kn8nkq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/139525/original/image-20160928-727-kn8nkq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/139525/original/image-20160928-727-kn8nkq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/139525/original/image-20160928-727-kn8nkq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/139525/original/image-20160928-727-kn8nkq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Left: Aktion hit Fässern, Happening with Barrels, 1992 (detail), Roman Signer. Right: Central Australia: Atomic Bomb, 1952–57, Sidney Nolan.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Museum of Old and New Art, photo not from Black Mist Burnt Country.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>There were two groups who suffered most from the British nuclear tests. The British government seems to have regarded those involved in monitoring the tests as disposable as few precautions were taken for their safety. Not only did many of the military personnel involved suffer ill health and die young, but often their children were born with deformities, except for the ones who were stillborn.</p>
<p>The greatest number of victims however were the Anangu people. First they were driven from their land when it was handed over to the British, then they were poisoned by the black mist as it blew back onto them. </p>
<p>Jessie Boylan’s photographs show both sides to the consequences of this crime. In one, Avon Hudson, the former RAAF officer who publicly exposed the extent of British culpability and Australian complicity, sits in his study, surrounded by cardboard boxes. In the other Yami Lester, who as a child was blinded by the mist, stands staring into the sun with his sightless eyes. Lester also appears in Belinda Mason’s Maralinga, an alarming 3D lenticular holographic photograph, that focuses on Lester’s open unseeing eye.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/139512/original/image-20160928-30438-1uny530.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/139512/original/image-20160928-30438-1uny530.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/139512/original/image-20160928-30438-1uny530.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=444&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/139512/original/image-20160928-30438-1uny530.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=444&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/139512/original/image-20160928-30438-1uny530.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=444&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/139512/original/image-20160928-30438-1uny530.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=558&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/139512/original/image-20160928-30438-1uny530.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=558&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/139512/original/image-20160928-30438-1uny530.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=558&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Jonathan Kumintjarra Brown, Maralinga Atomic Test Dust Storm.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Supplied</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Trevor Nickolls’ painting Revenge of the Stormboy shows the little children caught in the wild chaos of nuclear devastation, and the sense of anger the wider Aboriginal community feels about what happened to the Anangu people, whose land was so lightly taken away from them.</p>
<p>Some of the most moving paintings are by <a href="http://blackmistburntcountry.com.au/index.php/2014/09/27/jonathans-story/">Jonathan Kumintjarra Brown</a>, who was born at the <a href="https://www.findandconnect.gov.au/guide/sa/SE00146">Ooldea Mission</a> but stolen and raised in Melbourne and Sydney. When he was an adult he found his family at Yalata, where the Anangu people had been moved because of the tests. His painting Maralinga has the truth of the land partly obliterated by the bombs while a lizard’s skeleton represents the loss of life. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/139513/original/image-20160928-30441-110ws3n.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/139513/original/image-20160928-30441-110ws3n.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/139513/original/image-20160928-30441-110ws3n.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=685&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/139513/original/image-20160928-30441-110ws3n.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=685&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/139513/original/image-20160928-30441-110ws3n.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=685&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/139513/original/image-20160928-30441-110ws3n.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=860&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/139513/original/image-20160928-30441-110ws3n.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=860&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/139513/original/image-20160928-30441-110ws3n.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=860&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Adam Norton, Prohibited Area. CLICK TO ENLARGE.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Supplied</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Rosemary Laing’s One Dozen Considerations: Totem 1 – Emu shows the landscape of Maralinga, with its weathered stone marker indicating how long this land has been (and will be) poisoned. If there was any logic to the installation, or selection, it would hang near Adam Norton’s Prohibited Area, as Laing’s Totem 2 is a photograph of the original sign Norton mocked-up. </p>
<p>The failure to make this connection highlights the central problem of Black Mist Burnt Country. So many artists have made memorable pieces about this great crime, yet the curators have forgotten that a good exhibition is not simply a gathering of objects. An exhibition is a visual conversation between objects and images, but this has not happened here.</p>
<p>While I really enjoyed seeing once again Ian Howard’s Enola Gay, his 1975 rubbing of the plane that bombed Hiroshima, it does not fit either visually or conceptually in an exhibition about the nuclear tests of the Cold War. Overall the hang of the exhibition makes no sense, which is a shame as both the artists and the idea deserve better.</p>
<p><br></p>
<hr>
<p><em><a href="http://blackmistburntcountry.com.au/">Black Mist Burnt Country</a> is on display at the SH Ervin Gallery until October 30. It will then <a href="http://blackmistburntcountry.com.au/index.php/venues/">tour around Australia</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/66135/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Joanna Mendelssohn has received funding from the ARC through a Linkage Project on the History of Exhibitions of Australian Art and has been a recipient of an ARC LIEF grant for Design and Art of Australia Online.</span></em></p>
The Maralinga atomic tests were devastating to life and land in Central Australia. Black Mist Burnt Country brings together dozens of artistic responses in a powerful, but somewhat incoherent memorial.
Joanna Mendelssohn, Associate Professor, Art & Design: UNSW Australia. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, UNSW Sydney
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62441
2016-09-25T19:30:56Z
2016-09-25T19:30:56Z
Sixty years on, Maralinga reminds us not to put security over safety
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/138727/original/image-20160922-11676-1khqhq1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Blasted trees in the aftermath of a bomb test at Maralinga.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>It is September 27, 1956. At a dusty site called One Tree, in the northern reaches of the 3,200-square-kilometre Maralinga atomic weapons test range in outback South Australia, the winds have finally died down and the countdown begins.</p>
<p>The site has been on alert for more than two weeks, but the weather has constantly interfered with the plans. Finally, Professor Sir William Penney, head of the UK Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, can wait no longer. He gives the final, definitive go-ahead.</p>
<p>The military personnel, scientists, technicians and media – as well as the “indoctrinee force” of officers positioned close to the blast zone and required to report back on the effects of an atomic bomb up close – tense in readiness.</p>
<p>And so, at 5pm, Operation Buffalo begins. The 15-kilotonne atomic device, the same explosive strength as the weapon dropped on Hiroshima 11 years earlier (although totally different in design), is bolted to a 30-metre steel tower. The device is a plutonium warhead that will test Britain’s “Red Beard” tactical nuclear weapon.</p>
<p>The count reaches its finale – <em>three… two… one… FLASH!</em> – and all present turn their backs. When given the order to turn back again, they see an awesome, rising fireball. Then Maralinga’s first mushroom cloud begins to bloom over the plain – by October the following year, there will have been six more.</p>
<p>RAF and RAAF aircraft prepare to fly through the billowing cloud to gather samples. The cloud rises much higher than predicted and, despite the delay, the winds are still unsuitable for atmospheric nuclear testing. The radioactive cloud heads due east, towards populated areas on Australia’s east coast.</p>
<h2>Power struggle</h2>
<p>So began the most damaging chapter in the history of British nuclear weapons testing in Australia. The UK had <a href="http://www.industry.gov.au/resource/Documents/radioactive_waste/RoyalCommissioninToBritishNucleartestsinAustraliaVol%201.pdf">carried out atomic tests</a> in 1952 and 1956 at the Monte Bello Islands off Western Australia, and in 1953 at Emu Field north of Maralinga.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/138731/original/image-20160922-11652-1494gcb.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/138731/original/image-20160922-11652-1494gcb.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=543&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138731/original/image-20160922-11652-1494gcb.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=543&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138731/original/image-20160922-11652-1494gcb.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=543&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138731/original/image-20160922-11652-1494gcb.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=683&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138731/original/image-20160922-11652-1494gcb.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=683&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138731/original/image-20160922-11652-1494gcb.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=683&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">British nuclear bomb test sites in Australia.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jakew/Wikipedia</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The British had requested and were granted a huge chunk of South Australia to create a “permanent” atomic weapons test site, after finding the conditions at Monte Bello and Emu Field too remote and unworkable. Australia’s then prime minister, Robert Menzies, was all too happy to oblige. Back in September 1950 in a phone call with his British counterpart, Clement Attlee, he had said yes to nuclear testing without even referring the issue to his cabinet.</p>
<p>Menzies was not entirely blinded by his well-known anglophilia; he also saw advantages for Australia in granting Britain’s request. He was seeking assurances of security in a post-Hiroshima, nuclear-armed world and he believed that working with the UK would provide guarantees of at least British protection, and probably US protection as well.</p>
<p>He was also exploring ways to power civilian Australia with atomic energy and – whisper it – even to buy an <a href="https://www.nonproliferation.org/wp-content/uploads/npr/walsh51.pdf">atomic bomb with an Australian flag on it</a> (for more background, see <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/historical-journal/article/rethinking-the-joint-project-australias-bid-for-nuclear-weapons-19451960/DCE2FC212FCE7F81F5A6951B21357916">here</a>). While Australia had not been involved in developing either atomic weaponry or nuclear energy, she wanted in now. Menzies’ ambitions were such that he authorised offering more to the British than they requested.</p>
<p>While Australia was preparing to sign the Maralinga agreement, the supply minister, Howard Beale, wrote in a top-secret 1954 cabinet document: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Although [the] UK had intimated that she was prepared to meet the full costs, Australia proposed that the principles of apportioning the expenses of the trial should be agreed whereby the cost of Australian personnel engaged on the preparation of the site, and of materials and equipment which could be recovered after the tests, should fall to Australia’s account.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Beale said that he did not want Australia to be a mere “hewer of wood and drawer of water” for the British, but a respected partner of high (though maybe not equal) standing with access to the knowledge generated from the atomic tests.</p>
<p>That hope was forlorn and unrealised. Australia duly hewed the wood and drew the water at Maralinga, and stood by while Britain’s nuclear and military elite trashed a swathe of Australia’s landscape and then, in the mid-1960s, promptly left. Britain carried out a total of 12 major weapons tests in Australia: three at Monte Bello, two at Emu Field and seven at Maralinga. The British also conducted hundreds of so-called “minor trials”, including the highly damaging Vixen B radiological experiments, which scattered long-lived plutonium over a large area at Maralinga. </p>
<p>The British carried out two clean-up operations – Operation Hercules in 1964 and Operation Brumby in 1967 – both of which made the contamination problems worse.</p>
<h2>Legacy of damage</h2>
<p>The damage done to Indigenous people in the vicinity of all three test sites is immeasurable and included displacement, injury and death. Service personnel from several countries, but particularly Britain and Australia, also suffered – not least because of their continuing fight for the slightest recognition of the dangers they faced. Many of the injuries and deaths allegedly caused by the British tests have not been formally linked to the operation, a source of ongoing distress for those involved.</p>
<p>The cost of the clean-up <a href="http://www.industry.gov.au/resource/Documents/radioactive_waste/martac_report.pdf">exceeded A$100 million</a> in the late 1990s. Britain paid less than half, and only after protracted pressure and negotiations. </p>
<p>Decades later, we still don’t know the full extent of the effects suffered by service personnel and local communities. Despite years of legal wrangling, those communities’ suffering has never been properly recognised or compensated.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/138733/original/image-20160922-11649-1oct9gu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/138733/original/image-20160922-11649-1oct9gu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/138733/original/image-20160922-11649-1oct9gu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138733/original/image-20160922-11649-1oct9gu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138733/original/image-20160922-11649-1oct9gu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138733/original/image-20160922-11649-1oct9gu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138733/original/image-20160922-11649-1oct9gu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/138733/original/image-20160922-11649-1oct9gu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Maralinga landscape today.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wayne England/Wikimedia Commons</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Why did Australia allow it to happen? The answer is that Britain asserted its nuclear colonialism just as an anglophile prime minister took power in Australia, and after the United States made nuclear weapons research collaboration with other nations illegal, barring further joint weapons development with the UK.</p>
<p>Menzies’ political agenda emphasised national security and tapped into Cold War fears. While acting in what he thought were Australia’s interests (as well as allegiance to the mother country), he displayed a reckless disregard for the risks of letting loose huge quantities of radioactive material without adequate safeguards.</p>
<p>Six decades later, those atomic weapons tests still cast their shadow across Australia’s landscape. They stand as testament to the dangers of government decisions made without close scrutiny, and as a reminder – at a time when leaders are once again preoccupied with international security – not to let it happen again.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Liz Tynan will launch her book, <a href="https://www.newsouthbooks.com.au/books/atomic-thunder/">Atomic Thunder: The Maralinga Story</a>, on September 27. A travelling art exhibition, <a href="http://blackmistburntcountry.com.au/">Black Mist Burnt Country</a>, featuring art from the Maralinga lands, will open on the same day.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/62441/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Liz Tynan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
On September 27, 1956, an atomic mushroom cloud rose above the Maralinga plain - the first of seven British bomb tests. Why was Australia so keen to put UK military interests ahead of its own people?
Liz Tynan, Associate professor and co-ordinator of professional development GRS, James Cook University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/64761
2016-09-01T16:03:25Z
2016-09-01T16:03:25Z
How a rich uranium mine thrust the Congo into the centre of the Cold War
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/136273/original/image-20160901-1043-1ahjf5t.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Enola Gay, a Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber, which dropped the first atomic bomb in history. The bomb was made from Congolese ore.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Reuters</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>During World War II the US sought to secure all the uranium from the Shinkolobwe mine in present-day Democratic Republic of Congo for its atomic bomb project. The ore was the richest in the world. The US, determined to prevent any of it reaching Nazi Germany or later falling into the hands of the Soviet Union, took every precaution – including dispatching spies – to secure the supply of uranium. The story of this race for the ore is told in a newly published book, <a href="http://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/spies-in-the-congo/"><em>Spies in the Congo</em></a>. This edited extract is taken from the book’s concluding chapter.</em></p>
<p>In late 1949 the Soviet Union tested its own atomic bomb, to the profound shock of the US and Britain. Neither of the two had any idea that the Soviet atomic weapons programme was so well advanced. The US had beaten Germany in the first atomic arms race. And for four years, it had enjoyed an absolute monopoly on atomic weapons. But now, a second atomic arms race was under way – and the Cold War heated up dramatically.</p>
<p>The Shinkolobwe mine in Katanga had been reopened in March 1945. It was fully in operation, supplying America with fresh stocks of high grade uranium ore. As a result, observes Congolese historian Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, the Congo was</p>
<blockquote>
<p>an important element of Washington’s geopolitical strategy in the context of the Cold War. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Despite strenuous efforts by the US to find alternative sources of rich ore, Shinkolobwe remained its greatest single source in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In 1947, according to figures from the US Atomic Energy Commission, the US obtained 1,440 tons of uranium concentrates from the Belgian Congo. It obtained none from its own territory and only 137 tons from Canada. </p>
<p>The complex process of importing the ore from the Congo was conducted in absolute secrecy. By 1951, the total quantity of uranium obtained by the US was 3,686 tons, of which the largest amount still came from the Congo – 2,792 tons. A huge amount of money was pumped into building a processing plant near Shinkolobwe and the World Bank extended $70 million in loans to Belgium for the improvement of the Congolese transportation infrastructure to facilitate the export of the ore.</p>
<h2>Political embarrassment for the US</h2>
<p>The US was vigorously seeking new sources of uranium. In 1950, with Britain, it came to an agreement with the white minority government of South Africa — which by now had introduced the system of apartheid — for the exclusive purchase of South African ore. In so doing, comments Thomas Borstelmann in <em><a href="https://books.google.co.ke/books?id=0Hbe80DN2b0C&redir_esc=y">Apartheid’s Reluctant Uncle</a></em>, America compromised its principle of support for the self-determination of all peoples, which had been enshrined in the Atlantic Charter of 1941. </p>
<p>By the end of the Truman administration in January 1953, observes Borstelmann, these dealings with South Africa had become a political embarrassment to the US in the “now vociferous Cold War”.</p>
<p>A serious worry, as during World War II, was the possibility that the enemy might get hold of Congolese ore. This had been anticipated in 1946 by Ernest Bevin, the British Foreign Secretary. According to an entry in the diary of Hugh Dalton, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Bevin wanted to build a road</p>
<blockquote>
<p>right across Africa, passing through the top of French Equatorial Africa and enabling us, if need be, to protect the deposits in the Belgian Congo. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Concern about the mine escalated sharply in Washington after the start of the Korean War in 1950. According to Borstelmann, drawing on official documents, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff began making contingency plans for the “seizure of critical areas in the Congo by force”, in case of a Soviet occupation of Western Europe, including Belgium.</p>
<p>The Joint Chiefs of Staff approved the shipment of $7 million-worth of American military equipment for additional Belgian troops being sent to Katanga, and the CIA planted a “controlled source” in the area to provide early warning of any problems. It also initiated “plans and preparations for covert counter-sabotage”.</p>
<p>In 1953, the US acquired 500 tons from South Africa, which was considerably less than it had hoped for. It was increasingly obtaining uranium from its domestic sources; it also obtained 100 tons from a new source – Portugal. But the Belgian Congo continued to provide the largest amount of ore: 1,600 tons.</p>
<h2>Heightened security around the mine</h2>
<p>The American atomic project was ambitious: it would require 9,150 tons of uranium concentrates per year when in full operation. The 1953 receipts, therefore, were less than half the required amount. Consequently, the procurement of ore was a source of persistent and acute concern for the US. Meanwhile, the protection and defence of Shinkolobwe was expanded substantially. </p>
<p>“Today,” wrote an Italian journalist in 1954, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>it is impossible for a white man to move about unobserved in Shinkolobwe … and for someone to gate-crash the mining zone without the police’s knowledge immediately puts the Union Minière [the huge Belgian company which owned the Shinkolobwe mine] in a state of alarm.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Many voices, he added, were raised about Communist espionage, with the result that the barrier was </p>
<blockquote>
<p>moved another mile from the mine and every road, which for one reason or another passed the zone, was sealed off. In addition, a strict check-up was made on all foreigners who came to Jadotville, the town that had to be passed on the way to Shinkolobwe.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Another visitor in 1954 was astonished when he looked at the local paper to see that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Elisabethville’s newspapers … had startling, inch-high headlines. A Government decree, freshly signed, authorised the shooting on sight of any persons found within the boundaries of the Shinkolobwe uranium mine, who had no right to be there.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Reasons for the official action included the discovery of American journalists lurking behind the bushes near the entrance to the mine, and the alleged uncovering of a Communist plot whereby “red agents” were said to be smuggling away samples of uranium handed over to them by African workers. </p>
<p>A vast military Belgian and NATO air base was built at Kamina in western Katanga, “for the defence of Central Africa against international Communism”. </p>
<h2>The Cold War and decolonisation</h2>
<p>Towards the end of the 1950s the picture regarding Congolese uranium changed. America no longer needed to be worried about supplies of ore, despite its earlier fears. There were two important reasons for this: first, uranium ore had been found in many other parts of the world; and second, new methods of enriching lower grade uranium, to make it fissionable, had been developed. As a result, the US was no longer so dependent on Shinkolobwe, although it continued to be worried about the risk of the Soviets obtaining Congolese ore.</p>
<p>In the same period, the wind of decolonisation was blowing vigorously through the African continent and the people of the Congo demanded independence from Belgium. This became a reality on 30 June 1960. Patrice Lumumba became the Republic of the Congo’s prime minister in the nation’s first democratic elections.</p>
<p>The year before, Lumumba had been asked by some businessmen in New York whether the Americans would still have access to uranium, as they had when the Belgians ran the country. Lumumba’s response was unequivocal. “Belgium doesn’t produce any uranium,” he pointed out, adding that “it would be to the advantage of both our countries if the Congo and the US worked out their own agreements in the future.” But Union Minière took matters into its own hands: by the time of independence, the Shinkolobwe mine had been sealed with concrete.</p>
<p>Kwame Nkrumah, the president of newly independent Ghana, hoped that Africa could remain above the conflict between the West and the Communist nations. “My policy,” he said in 1960, “has always been that at all costs Africa must not be involved in the Cold War.” </p>
<p>But it was unavoidable: the Congo’s resources, including its uranium, had already put the newly independent nation at the very heart of Cold War concerns.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/64761/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Susan Williams has published widely on Africa, decolonisation and the global power shifts of the twentieth century, receiving widespread acclaim for Colour Bar (Penguin, 2006), her book on the founding president of Botswana, which will become a major motion picture entitled 'A United Kingdom' in late 2016. Who Killed Hammarskjöld? (2011) triggered a fresh UN inquiry into the death of the secretary general. </span></em></p>
The Soviet Union tested its own atomic bomb in 1949, to the profound shock of the US. This heated up the Cold War dramatically and thrust the Congo to the centre of American geopolitical strategy
Susan Williams, Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/58567
2016-06-29T10:59:20Z
2016-06-29T10:59:20Z
Bikini islanders still deal with fallout of US nuclear tests, more than 70 years later
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/127827/original/image-20160622-7154-1ilmm3z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">'A-Day' marked the first of 23 atomic bomb explosions at Bikini.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/departmentofenergy/10561812725">Department of Energy</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In 1946, French fashion designer Jacques Heim released a woman’s swimsuit he called the “Atome” (French for “atom”) – a name selected to suggest its design would be as shocking to people that summer as the atomic bombings of Japan had been the summer before.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/127818/original/image-20160622-7203-3ruapq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/127818/original/image-20160622-7203-3ruapq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/127818/original/image-20160622-7203-3ruapq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/127818/original/image-20160622-7203-3ruapq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/127818/original/image-20160622-7203-3ruapq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/127818/original/image-20160622-7203-3ruapq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/127818/original/image-20160622-7203-3ruapq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/127818/original/image-20160622-7203-3ruapq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The scandalous ‘Bikini,’ small enough to fit in a matchbox like the one she’s holding.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Not to be outdone, competitor Louis Réard raised the stakes, quickly releasing an even more skimpy swimsuit. The Vatican found Réard’s swimsuit more than shocking, declaring it to actually be “<a href="http://www.kmswimwear.com/swimwear-timeline/">sinful</a>.” So what did Réard consider an appropriate name for his creation? He called it the “<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/life/fashion/2013/07/history_of_the_bikini_how_it_came_to_america.html">Bikini</a>” – a name meant to shock people even more than “Atome.” But why was this name so shocking?</p>
<p>In the summer of 1946, “Bikini” was all over the news. It’s the name of a small atoll – a circular group of coral islands – within the remote mid-Pacific island chain called the Marshall Islands. The United States had <a href="http://www.rmiembassyus.org/History.htm">assumed control</a> of the former Japanese territory after the end of World War II, just a few months earlier.</p>
<p>The United States soon came up with some very big plans for the little atoll of Bikini. After forcing the <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2015/11/27/a-ground-zero-forgotten/">167 residents</a> to relocate to another atoll, they started to prepare Bikini as an atomic bomb test site. Two test bombings scheduled for that summer were intended to be very visible demonstrations of the United States’ newly acquired nuclear might. <a href="http://time.com/3881386/able-and-baker-photos-from-atomic-bomb-tests-july-1946/">Media coverage</a> of the happenings at Bikini was extensive, and public interest ran very high. Who could have foreseen that even now – 70 years later – the Marshall Islanders would still be suffering the aftershocks from the nuclear bomb testing on Bikini Atoll?</p>
<iframe src="https://www.google.com/maps/embed?pb=!1m18!1m12!1m3!1d54947715.810362644!2d105.33242446439374!3d16.125137160675283!2m3!1f0!2f0!3f0!3m2!1i1024!2i768!4f13.1!3m3!1m2!1s0x644c2180a24fadbf%3A0x4c3f21ce9753a027!2sBikini+Atoll!5e1!3m2!1sen!2sus!4v1466621329499" width="100%" height="450" frameborder="0" style="border:0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<h2>The big plan for tiny Bikini</h2>
<p>According to the testing schedule, the U.S. plan was to demolish a 95-vessel <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/flash/july/bikini46.htm">fleet of obsolete warships</a> on June 30, 1946 with an airdropped atomic bomb. Reporters, U.S. politicians, and representatives from the major governments of the world would witness events from distant <a href="http://time.com/3881386/able-and-baker-photos-from-atomic-bomb-tests-july-1946/">observation ships</a>. On July 24, a second bomb, this time detonated underwater, would destroy any surviving naval vessels.</p>
<p>These two sequential tests were intended to allow comparison of air-detonated versus underwater-detonated atomic bombs in terms of destructive power to warships. The very future of naval warfare in the advent of the atomic bomb was in the balance. Many assumed the tests would clearly show that <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Operation-Crossroads-Atomic-Tests-Bikini/dp/1557509190">naval ships were now obsolete</a>, and that air forces represented the future of global warfare.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/MV3fQterjEg?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Slow motion film of atomic bomb airdropped on Bikini Atoll.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But when June 30 arrived, the airdrop bombing didn’t go as planned. The bomber <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/travel/2002/aug/06/travelnews.nuclearindustry.environment">missed his target by more than a third of a mile</a>, so the bomb caused much less ship damage than anticipated.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/x_LrBm5oVRk?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Color film of underwater atomic bomb near Marshall Islands.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The subsequent underwater bomb detonation didn’t go so well either. It unexpectedly produced a spray of highly radioactive water that extensively contaminated everything it landed on. Naval inspectors couldn’t even return to the area to assess ship damage because of the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKH437o14vA">threat of deadly radiation doses</a> from the bomb’s “<a href="https://www.ready.gov/nuclear-blast">fallout</a>” – the radioactivity produced by the explosion. All future bomb testing was canceled until the military could evaluate what had gone wrong and come up with another testing strategy.</p>
<h2>And even more bombings to follow</h2>
<p>The United States did not, however, abandon little Bikini. It had even bigger plans with bigger bombs in mind. Ultimately, there would be 23 Bikini test bombings, spread over 12 years, comparing different bomb sizes, before the United States finally moved nuclear bomb testing to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLCF7vPanrY">other locations</a>, leaving Bikini to recover as best it could.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/127830/original/image-20160622-7158-1n1hzb0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/127830/original/image-20160622-7158-1n1hzb0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/127830/original/image-20160622-7158-1n1hzb0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=479&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/127830/original/image-20160622-7158-1n1hzb0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=479&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/127830/original/image-20160622-7158-1n1hzb0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=479&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/127830/original/image-20160622-7158-1n1hzb0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=602&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/127830/original/image-20160622-7158-1n1hzb0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=602&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/127830/original/image-20160622-7158-1n1hzb0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=602&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">1956 Operation Redwing bombing at Enewetak Atoll.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.nv.doe.gov/library/photos/photodetails.aspx?ID=1060">National Nuclear Security Administration / Nevada Field Office</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The most dramatic change in the testing at Bikini occurred in 1954, when the bomb designs switched from fission to fusion mechanisms. <a href="http://science.howstuffworks.com/nuclear-bomb4.htm">Fission bombs</a> – the type dropped on Japan – explode when heavy elements like uranium split apart. <a href="http://www.livescience.com/53280-hydrogen-bomb-vs-atomic-bomb.html">Fusion bombs</a>, in contrast, explode when light atoms like deuterium join together. Fusion bombs, often called “hydrogen” or “thermonuclear” bombs, can produce much larger explosions.</p>
<p>The United States military learned about the power of fusion energy the hard way, when they first tested a fusion bomb on Bikini. Based on the expected size of the explosion, a swath of the Pacific Ocean the size of Wisconsin was blockaded to protect ships from entering the fallout zone.</p>
<p>On March 1, 1954, the bomb detonated just as planned – but still there were a couple of problems. The bomb turned out to be 1,100 times larger than the Hiroshima bomb, rather than the expected 450 times. And the prevailing westerly winds turned out to be stronger than meteorologists had predicted. The result? Widespread fallout contamination to islands hundreds of miles downwind from the test site and, consequently, <a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10691.html">high radiation exposures to the Marshall Islanders</a> who lived on them.</p>
<h2>Dealing with the fallout, for decades</h2>
<p>Three days after the detonation of the bomb, radioactive dust had settled on the ground of downwind islands to depths up to half an inch. Natives from badly contaminated islands were evacuated to Kwajalein – an upwind, uncontaminated atoll that was home to a large U.S. military base – where their health status was assessed.</p>
<p>Residents of the Rongelap Atoll – Bikini’s downwind neighbor – received particularly high radiation doses. They had burns on their skin and depressed blood counts. Islanders from other atolls did not receive doses high enough to induce such symptoms. However, as I explain in my book <a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10691.html">“Strange Glow: The Story of Radiation,”</a> even those who didn’t have any radiation sickness at the time received doses high enough to put them at increased cancer risk, particularly for thyroid cancers and leukemia.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/127822/original/image-20160622-7170-hcoj8u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/127822/original/image-20160622-7170-hcoj8u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/127822/original/image-20160622-7170-hcoj8u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/127822/original/image-20160622-7170-hcoj8u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/127822/original/image-20160622-7170-hcoj8u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/127822/original/image-20160622-7170-hcoj8u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/127822/original/image-20160622-7170-hcoj8u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/127822/original/image-20160622-7170-hcoj8u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A Marshall Islands resident has his body levels of radioactivity checked in a U.S. government lab.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/argonne/8167845013">Argonne National Laboratory</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><a href="http://majuro.usembassy.gov/legacy.html">What happened to the Marshall Islanders next</a> is a sad story of their constant relocation from island to island, trying to avoid the radioactivity that lingered for decades. Over the years following the testing, the Marshall Islanders living on the fallout-contaminated islands ended up breathing, absorbing, drinking and eating considerable amounts of radioactivity.</p>
<p>In the 1960s, cancers started to appear among the islanders. For almost 50 years, the United States government studied their health and provided medical care. But the <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-human-radiation-experiments-9780195107920?cc=us&lang=en">government study ended in 1998</a>, and the islanders were then expected to find their own medical care and submit their radiation-related health bills to a <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/bomb/filmmore/reference/primary/tribunal.html">Nuclear Claims Tribunal</a>, in order to collect compensation.</p>
<h2>Marshall Islanders still waiting for justice</h2>
<p>By 2009, the Nuclear Claims Tribunal, funded by Congress and overseen by Marshall Islands judges to pay compensation for radiation-related health and property claims, exhausted its allocated funds with <a href="http://majuro.usembassy.gov/legacy.html#_compensation">US$45.8 million in personal injury claims</a> still owed the victims. At present, about half of the valid claimants have died waiting for their compensation. Congress shows no inclination to replenish the empty fund, so it’s unlikely the remaining survivors will ever see their money.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/127833/original/image-20160622-7154-1d7gidm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/127833/original/image-20160622-7154-1d7gidm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/127833/original/image-20160622-7154-1d7gidm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=476&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/127833/original/image-20160622-7154-1d7gidm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=476&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/127833/original/image-20160622-7154-1d7gidm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=476&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/127833/original/image-20160622-7154-1d7gidm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=599&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/127833/original/image-20160622-7154-1d7gidm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=599&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/127833/original/image-20160622-7154-1d7gidm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=599&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ten years after bombing ended, the U.S. government assured Marshall Islanders a safe return.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/departmentofenergy/10561566153/">Department of Energy</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But if the Marshall Islanders cannot get financial compensation, perhaps they can still win a moral victory. They hope to force the United States and eight other nuclear weapons states into keeping another broken promise, this one made via the <a href="https://www.un.org/disarmament/wmd/nuclear/npt/">Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons</a>.</p>
<p>This international agreement between <a href="http://disarmament.un.org/treaties/t/npt">191 sovereign nations</a> entered into force in 1970 and was renewed indefinitely in 1995. It aims to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and work toward disarmament. </p>
<p>In 2014, the Marshall Islands claimed that the nine nuclear-armed nations – China, Britain, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia and the United States – have not fulfilled their treaty obligations. The Marshall Islanders are <a href="http://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2016-03-07/marshall-islands-begins-world-court-nuclear-disarmament-case">seeking legal action</a> in the United Nations International Court of Justice in The Hague. They’ve asked the court to require these countries to take substantive action toward nuclear disarmament. Despite the fact that India, North Korea, Israel and Pakistan are not among the 191 nations that are signatories of the treaty, the Marshall Islands’ suit still contends that these four nations “have the obligation under customary international law to pursue [disarmament] negotiations in good faith.”</p>
<p>The process is currently stalled due to jurisdictional squabbling. Regardless, experts in international law say the <a href="https://armscontrollaw.com/2014/04/24/marshall-islands-brings-lawsuits-against-all-nine-nuclear-weapons-possessing-states-in-the-international-court-of-justice/">prospects for success</a> through this David versus Goliath approach are slim.</p>
<p>But even if they don’t win in the courtroom, the Marshall Islands might shame these nations in the court of public opinion and draw new attention to the dire human consequences of nuclear weapons. That in itself can be counted as a small victory, for a people who have seldom been on the winning side of anything. Time will tell how this all turns out, but more than 70 years since the first bomb test, the Marshall Islanders are well accustomed to waiting.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/58567/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Timothy J. Jorgensen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
In the summer of 1946, the U.S. government detonated the first of many atomic bomb tests in the Marshall Islands. Seventy years of radiation exposure later, residents are still fighting for justice.
Timothy J. Jorgensen, Director of the Health Physics and Radiation Protection Graduate Program and Associate Professor of Radiation Medicine, Georgetown University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/45848
2015-08-10T10:50:48Z
2015-08-10T10:50:48Z
Why do we pay so much attention to Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/91187/original/image-20150807-27600-pfuckf.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Atomic cloud over Nagasaki.</span> </figcaption></figure><p>There have been countless articles, protests and commemorations in recent days on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But why is there so much focus on these events? </p>
<p>This may seem an odd question to ask, especially at the time of their 70th anniversaries, but it is not as flippant as it sounds. True, at least <a href="http://www.un.org/disarmament/publications/studyseries/en/SS-1.pdf">200,000</a> people died – an appalling waste of human life and the source of countless personal and family tragedies. But such horrors were anything but unique at that time – the bombing of Hiroshima took place in the context of a war in which, on a reasonable estimate, some <a href="http://http://necrometrics.com/20c5m.htm#Second">60m people</a> were killed. </p>
<p>A high proportion of these were innocent civilians, meaning that the mass murder of non-combatants was already commonplace by the time that this blight reached the unsuspecting and essentially defenceless citizens of Hiroshima. </p>
<p>The city, spared until that point, certainly suffered badly, but it was not the only – let alone the first – metropolis to be struck from the air. Coventry, Hamburg and Berlin, to name but three, were also scenes of aerial devastation. Admittedly, they were wrecked in different fashion. Fleets of aircraft were necessary to flatten them. </p>
<p>By contrast, Hiroshima was destroyed by one bomb from one warplane in one sortie – a startling demonstration of brute force and the escalating power of modern weaponry. Yet, as the US air force had demonstrated earlier in 1945, worse results were obtainable by conventional means. <a href="http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/firebombing-of-tokyo">More people died</a> when Tokyo was firebombed than were killed on the day from the <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/06/hiroshima-atomic-bomb-a-simple-toll-of-a-bell-signals-the-moment-80000-died">blast and flames at Hiroshima</a>. The atomic bomb did the same job more efficiently, but it was the same job.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/91188/original/image-20150807-27568-16v622y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/91188/original/image-20150807-27568-16v622y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=558&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91188/original/image-20150807-27568-16v622y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=558&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91188/original/image-20150807-27568-16v622y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=558&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91188/original/image-20150807-27568-16v622y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=701&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91188/original/image-20150807-27568-16v622y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=701&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91188/original/image-20150807-27568-16v622y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=701&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Tokyo burns under B-29 firebomb assault. May 26, 1945.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Cataclysm</h2>
<p>Widening the context a little further, it is worth stressing that the hostilities in Asia were particularly brutal and Hiroshima was but one cataclysm among many. This was not purely because of the much commented upon hatred, racial and otherwise, that fuelled the Japanese-American contest, intense though that was. Japan had been fighting in China since at least 1937 (<a href="http://http://www.britannica.com/event/Mukden-Incident">arguably since the Mukden Incident of 1931</a>) and little that had taken place in that conflict had conformed to that most unsatisfactory and contradictory of phrases “civilised warfare”. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/91189/original/image-20150807-27617-qz9pjw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/91189/original/image-20150807-27617-qz9pjw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=973&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91189/original/image-20150807-27617-qz9pjw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=973&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91189/original/image-20150807-27617-qz9pjw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=973&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91189/original/image-20150807-27617-qz9pjw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1223&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91189/original/image-20150807-27617-qz9pjw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1223&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91189/original/image-20150807-27617-qz9pjw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1223&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Japanese military close up on Nanking Castle.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The <a href="http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/nanking.htm">rape of Nanking</a>, the capital of Nationalist China, is possibly the best known of these atrocities. However, the fate of Chungking (Chongqing), the city chosen as the replacement capital, demonstrates that it was not alone. Selected as the new seat of government in part for its inaccessibility, Chungking could not be reached by Japanese armies – so a repeat of the pillage suffered by Nanking could not occur. But it could be reached from the air. As a result, from 1938 onwards it was subjected to sustained and continuous aerial attack. In terms of frequency rather than the weight of ordnance dropped upon it, it was one of the <a href="http://ww2today.com/5th-june-1941-thousands-die-in-chungking-raid">most heavily bombed cities</a> of World War II. </p>
<p>Unsurprisingly, the history of these bombing raids is replete with tragic tales of loss and the city undoubtedly suffered badly. That, however, was preferable to Japanese occupation. The miseries of this do not need to be catalogued here, although it says something about their intensity that they are still well remembered in Korea, China and elsewhere in Asia. But it is worth recording that by 1945 <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Enola_Gay_and_the_Court_of_History.html?id=QnzPMHIb3OQC&redir_esc=y">hundreds of thousands</a> of people were dying each month in Japanese occupied Asia, a reminder that the evils of war extended well beyond the battlefield and were not just experienced by the bombed.</p>
<h2>Unremarkable</h2>
<p>None of this makes what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki any less objectionable – no tragedy is any less of a tragedy because there are other tragedies taking place at the same time – but it does make it, in the literal sense, unremarkable. </p>
<p>Nothing illustrates this better than the reaction of the Japanese military leadership to the news of Hiroshima’s destruction. The dominant political authority in Japan in 1945 was the Supreme War Council, a body that brought together in one institution the six main representatives of the army, navy and “civilian” government. </p>
<p>The three most military members of this council were utterly unmoved by the reports of Hiroshima’s fate. For them, the destruction of one more city was no reason to change their plans to fight the war to a victorious conclusion by smashing the long expected American invasion on the beaches. The “civilian” members felt otherwise, but could not carry the day. So no change in policy took place.</p>
<p>The resolve of these soldiers and sailors was also unaffected by news of the similar holocaust that hit Nagasaki three days later; and for the same reason: cities had been destroyed by the US air force at will for months; it was not deemed a new factor. As is well known, the intervention of the Emperor was needed to persuade the army and navy to adopt a different course. Seventy years down the line, the idea that two examples of destruction by atomic bomb would not have any affect on policy seems unbelievable, but by 1945 the banality of mass death and destruction was such that this was the case.</p>
<p>Given this, why should we mark this event after all this time? The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is special not because of the numbers that died nor because of the extent of the destruction, but because of their symbolism. They have come to stand for the future that we want to avoid in a way that some of the other horrors cannot. </p>
<p>Plenty of wars have been fought since 1945 – and many more people have been killed either fighting them or as innocent victims caught up in them. It is a sad reflection on the human condition, but this is unlikely to change. Equally, it is no less tragic that despite the vivid lesson of the Holocaust, acts of genocide still blight our world, as the “ethnic cleansing” in former Yugoslavia and the killings in Rwanda prove. </p>
<p>But the use of atomic weapons in anger has not occurred since those fearsome August days in 1945. Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki helps remind us of the need to keep this lesson firmly to the fore.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/45848/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Matthew Seligmann does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were but two cataclysms among many: in the literal sense, they were unremarkable.
Matthew Seligmann, Reader in Modern History, Brunel University London
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/45213
2015-08-07T10:04:01Z
2015-08-07T10:04:01Z
The little-known history of secrecy and censorship in wake of atomic bombings
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/91069/original/image-20150806-5256-1lzv5b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Two months after the bombing at Hiroshima. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshima_(book)#/media/File:AtomicEffects-Hiroshima.jpg">US Department of Defense</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 70 years ago, is one of the most studied events in modern history. And yet significant aspects of that bombing are still not well known.</p>
<p>I recently published a <a href="http://jsh.oxfordjournals.org/content/48/4/842.abstract">social history</a> of US censorship in the aftermath of the bombings, which this piece is based on. The material was drawn from a dozen different manuscript collections in archives around the US. </p>
<p>I found that military and civilian officials in the US sought to contain information about the effects of radiation from the blasts, which helps explain the persistent gaps in the public’s understanding of radiation from the bombings. </p>
<h2>Heavy handed</h2>
<p>Although everything related to the effects of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs was defined at the time as a military secret, US officials treated the three main effects – blast, fire, and radiation – very differently. They publicized and celebrated the powerful blast but worked to suppress information about the bombs’ radiation.</p>
<p>The world learned a month later a few details about that radiation – that some type of “atomic plague” related to the atomic bomb was causing death and illness in the two bombed cities. But for years radiation remained the least publicized and least understood of the atomic bomb effects. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/91066/original/image-20150806-5263-eiwtl9.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/91066/original/image-20150806-5263-eiwtl9.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/91066/original/image-20150806-5263-eiwtl9.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=860&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91066/original/image-20150806-5263-eiwtl9.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=860&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91066/original/image-20150806-5263-eiwtl9.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=860&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91066/original/image-20150806-5263-eiwtl9.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1081&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91066/original/image-20150806-5263-eiwtl9.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1081&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91066/original/image-20150806-5263-eiwtl9.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1081&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A formerly classified correspondence provides guidelines on disclosure and censorship.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">National Archives</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>To this day we have no fully accepted accounting of the <a href="http://www.stat.ucla.edu/%7Edinov/courses_students.dir/data.dir/AtomicBombSurvivorsData.htm">atomic bomb deaths in both cities</a>; it has remained highly contested because of the politics surrounding the bombing, because of problems with the wartime Japanese census, and, importantly, because of the complexity of defining what constituted radiation-caused deaths over decades.</p>
<p>In my research, I found US officials controlled information about radiation from the atomic bombs dropped over Japan by censoring newspapers, by silencing outspoken individuals, by limiting circulation of the earliest official medical reports, by fomenting deliberately reassuring publicity campaigns, and by outright lies and denial.</p>
<p>The censorship of the Japanese began quickly. As soon as Japanese physicians and scientists reached Hiroshima after the bombing, they collected evidence and studied the mysterious symptoms in the ill and dying. American officials confiscated Japanese reports, medical case notes, biopsy slides, medical photographs, and films and sent them to the US where much remained classified for years (some for decades). </p>
<p>Historians note the irony of American Occupation officials claiming to bring a new freedom of the press to Japan, but censoring what the Japanese said in print about the atomic bombs. One month after the war ended, Occupation authorities restricted public criticism of the US actions in Japan and denied any radiation aftereffects from exposure to the nuclear bombs. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/91068/original/image-20150806-5209-1oflma.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/91068/original/image-20150806-5209-1oflma.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/91068/original/image-20150806-5209-1oflma.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=610&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91068/original/image-20150806-5209-1oflma.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=610&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91068/original/image-20150806-5209-1oflma.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=610&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91068/original/image-20150806-5209-1oflma.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=767&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91068/original/image-20150806-5209-1oflma.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=767&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91068/original/image-20150806-5209-1oflma.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=767&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A Navy photographer takes a picture of a Japanese soldier walking amid the ruins of Hiroshima.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">US National Archives</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the US, too, newspapers omitted or obscured anything about radiation or ongoing radioactivity. Military officials encouraged editors to continue some kind of wartime censorship especially about the bombs’ radiation. Four official US investigating teams sent to Japan in the months immediately after the surrender wrote reports about the biomedical effects of the two atomic bombs. Several of the reports
minimized the radiation effects and all received classifications as secret or top secret so the circulation of the majority of their information remained constrained for years.</p>
<h2>Traditional ‘combat’ bomb</h2>
<p>The censorship has several explanations.</p>
<p>Even Manhattan Project scientists had only theoretical calculations about what to expect about the bombs’ radiation. As scientists studied the complex effects in the next years, the US government classified information from Japan as well as related radiation information from medical research and the atomic bomb tests at the Nevada Test Site. </p>
<p>American officials wanted reassurance that Allied troops landing in Japan would not be endangered by any remaining radiation. Based on pre-bomb calculations, US officials did not think that US troops would be endangered by exposure to residual radiation but the concept of radiological weapons and uncertainty created fear.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/91072/original/image-20150806-5236-d4zq8r.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/91072/original/image-20150806-5236-d4zq8r.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/91072/original/image-20150806-5236-d4zq8r.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=485&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91072/original/image-20150806-5236-d4zq8r.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=485&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91072/original/image-20150806-5236-d4zq8r.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=485&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91072/original/image-20150806-5236-d4zq8r.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=609&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91072/original/image-20150806-5236-d4zq8r.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=609&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91072/original/image-20150806-5236-d4zq8r.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=609&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Photograph taken at a Roman Catholic church in Nagasaki circa 1945.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">US National Archives</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>An additional explanation for the censorship of information pertaining to radiation is that US officials did not want the new weapon to be associated with radiological or chemical warfare, both of which were expanding in scope and funding after the war. Those associated with the atomic bomb wanted it to be viewed as a powerful but regular military weapon, a traditional “combat bomb.”</p>
<p>The results of the radiation censorship campaign have been hard to pin down both because of the nature of the silencing itself (including its incompleteness), and because knowledge leaked into public awareness in many ways and forms. </p>
<p>Historian Richard Miller <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/3105560?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">observes</a> that, “In the long run, the radiation from the bomb was more significant than the blast or thermal effects.” Yet, for years that radiation remained the least publicized and least understood of the atomic bomb effects.</p>
<h2>Legacy of secrecy</h2>
<p>Censorship about the radiation deaths and sickness from the atomic bombs in Japan was never, of course, entirely successful. </p>
<p>American magazines featured fictional stories about cities ravaged by radiation. John Hersey’s searing account, Hiroshima, became a bestseller in 1946 just as the summer’s “<a href="http://www.atomicheritage.org/history/operation-crossroads">Crossroads</a>” atomic bomb tests in the Pacific received massive publicity including reports about the disastrous radioactive spray that contaminated eighty of the Navy’s unmanned test vessels.</p>
<p>Campaigns from governmental officials as well as military, scientific and industrial leaders sought to ease the public’s fears with the alluring promises of miraculous medical cures and cheap energy from commercial nuclear power. </p>
<p>Historians have described the American public’s reactions to Hiroshima as “muted ambivalence” and “<a href="http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people/Lifton/lifton-con3.html">psychic numbing</a>.” Historian <a href="http://uncpress.unc.edu/books/T-1000.html">John Dower observes</a> that although Americans demonstrated a longterm cyclical interest in what happened “beneath the mushroom cloud,” the nation’s “more persistent response to Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been "the averted gaze.” </p>
<p>Secrecy, extraordinary levels of classification, lies, denial, and deception became the chief legacy of the initial impulse to censor radiation information from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Additional reading:</em></p>
<ul>
<li><p>Eisei Ishikawa and David L. Swain, translators. The Committee for the Compilation of Materials on Damage Caused by the Atomic Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. <a href="https://www.questia.com/library/100976124/hiroshima-and-nagasaki-the-physical-medical-and">Hiroshima and Nagasaki</a>, the Physical, Medical, and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings (New York, 1981),</p></li>
<li><p>Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, <a href="http://www.biblio.com/9780380727643">Hiroshima in America;</a> a Half-Century of Denial (New York, 1995). </p></li>
<li><p>Richard L. Miller, <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/3105560?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">Under the Cloud</a>; the Decades of Nuclear Testing (New York, 1986).</p></li>
<li><p>John Dower, Introduction in Michihiko Hachiya, <a href="http://uncpress.unc.edu/books/T-1000.html">Hiroshima Diary</a>: The Journal of a Japanese Physician, August 6-September 30, 1945. Fifty Years Later (Chapel Hill, 1955; 1995).</p></li>
</ul><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/45213/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Janet Farrell Brodie does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
US military censors contained information after the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, leaving Americans with a limited understanding of the impact of radiation.
Janet Farrell Brodie, Professor of History, Claremont Graduate University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/45622
2015-08-06T12:21:03Z
2015-08-06T12:21:03Z
Hiroshima: stifled stories and one man’s memory of a cataclysm
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/91003/original/image-20150806-5256-1vxdwv2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Luciano Mortula/Shutterstock.com</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The two atomic bombs dropped on Japan in August 1945 killed <a href="http://www.un.org/disarmament/publications/studyseries/en/SS-1.pdf">more than 200,000 people</a>. The total population of Hiroshima at the time was about 350,000 and all would have experienced the effects of the atomic blast in various ways. In addition, an estimated 78,000 experienced radiation when they came into the city. </p>
<p>Of Hiroshima’s buildings, 92% were burned down – and Koreans, Russians, American POWs as well as Japanese were victims of the bombing. Many more died in subsequent decades due to the effects of radiation sickness.</p>
<p>The average age of survivors is now <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/70-years-later-hiroshima-survivors-have-a-plan-to-keep-memories-alive/2015/08/05/eefe20e6-39ef-11e5-8993-0b783c1d6d37_story.html">80 years old</a>. In five years’ time, it is likely that very few of these first-hand witnesses will be around to remember the event. And yet many of the stories of these people were, until recently, in danger of being lost forever due to the culture of silence that surrounds the survivors in Japan.</p>
<p>Their stories were stifled from the very beginning. Directly after the war in US-occupied Japan (1945-1952) even the word “atomic bomb”, <em>genbaku</em> in Japanese, was censored. And when the US left in 1952, the stories of the survivors were marginalised in the history of World War II as part of a post-war reconstruction which involved a deliberate collective amnesia.</p>
<p>Despite being ignored in the history books and ostracised culturally due to the cruel nature and genetic effects of atomic bomb sickness, those from Hiroshima and Nagasaki started to take action immediately after the bombing to preserve the memories of their city. They coined the English phrase No More Hiroshimas as early as 1946, and became their own cultural historians, raising funds internationally as well as locally to build memorials and museums. </p>
<p>Hiroshima’s Peace Park lies directly over the site of the dropping of the original atomic bomb. The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum aims to preserve the material damage and the stories of the survivors. Due to these efforts, Hiroshima is now one of the most visited cities in Japan. According to the most recent statistics available, <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2014/06/01/travel/hiroshima-peace-museum/">363,000</a> tourists visited Hiroshima City in 2012.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/91004/original/image-20150806-5233-1y4bgjo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/91004/original/image-20150806-5233-1y4bgjo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91004/original/image-20150806-5233-1y4bgjo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91004/original/image-20150806-5233-1y4bgjo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91004/original/image-20150806-5233-1y4bgjo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91004/original/image-20150806-5233-1y4bgjo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91004/original/image-20150806-5233-1y4bgjo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Tricycle and Helmet at Hiroshima Peace Museum.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/soberch/2830106167/in/photolist-5j62XV-85XXWE-85XY2C-2qiGF-2Fyh4N-qbBCJM-2XuJY-2Xvav-2Xv9E-2XsLD-2Xv1a-2XuxY-2Xv1v-2XsKr-2XuCH-2XsAM-2Xuw5-2Xuvq-2XsYH-2XsMG-2XuSg-2XsY9-fAJbwo-fAJbQm-fAJbGY-fAJc99-fAJcfN-fAtUig-fAtUHD-fAtU7t-2uq8dt-y53Dj-jtinL-2Xv7R-mpF17-2XsBG-2Xv8G-2Xveu-rz7hb-2Xv7g-2Xv8b-2XuJt-2Xv7C-2XuVY-2XsBt-2XvdJ-2XsE6-9eVAba-2XuRs-2XuJ7">soberch/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Survivors’ stigma</h2>
<p>In Japan atomic bomb survivors are called <em>hibakusha</em>; <em>hibaku</em> meaning “sunbomb”, and <em>sha</em> “person”. They chose this term themselves in order not to use the Japanese term for survivor, out of respect for those who died. Despite the efforts of some in Hiroshima, many <em>hibakusha</em> still fear negative responses from society if they share their experience of the event. </p>
<p>The majority of the younger generation in Japan outside Hiroshima and Nagasaki have little awareness of the survivors, or indeed the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, because of the way the subject is taught. Indeed, many young people say that the issue isn’t relevant to their lives and to their society.</p>
<p>There remains a social stigma attached to being a survivor. The norm is still for most to die in silence. Those who do speak out to journalists or researchers generally do so without their family members knowing. Frequently it is their grandchildren who encourage survivors to speak out – and it will be their descendants who will bear the responsibility for preserving and passing on the memories to the next generation.</p>
<p>Over the past three years I have been researching the narratives of the <em>hibakusha</em> of Hiroshima. I initially found that many survivors were wary of researchers. They often felt that their stories had been sensationalised; they were afraid of other people knowing they had been in the atomic bombing. One interpreter told me she had stopped working with foreign researchers. </p>
<p>But the situation is changing. As memory studies historians have pointed out, in the last few years there has been what <a href="http://www.columbia.edu/cu/german/people/huyssen.html">Andreas Huyssen</a> describes as a “memory boom”. The voices of the survivors have finally started to be heard and promoted.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90922/original/image-20150805-22485-kh97i4.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90922/original/image-20150805-22485-kh97i4.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90922/original/image-20150805-22485-kh97i4.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90922/original/image-20150805-22485-kh97i4.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90922/original/image-20150805-22485-kh97i4.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90922/original/image-20150805-22485-kh97i4.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90922/original/image-20150805-22485-kh97i4.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Interviewing survivors.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Elizabeth Chappell</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Official bodies both in Japan and internationally – the Foreign Ministry of Japan and the UN Office of Disarmament Affairs – are starting to wake up to the needs of the memory boom. Local histories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have become recognised to be a global concern as people around the world become more aware of the dangers of nuclear warfare. One Hiroshima survivor, <a href="http://www.hibakushastories.org/meet-the-hibakusha/meet-setsuko-thurlow/">Setsuko Thurlow</a>, a Canadian émigré, has worked closely with Clifton Daniel Truman (the grandson of US president at the time of the bombings, Harry S Truman) to promote the stories of survivors worldwide. </p>
<h2>More than words</h2>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90998/original/image-20150806-5241-rmi43n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90998/original/image-20150806-5241-rmi43n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90998/original/image-20150806-5241-rmi43n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90998/original/image-20150806-5241-rmi43n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90998/original/image-20150806-5241-rmi43n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90998/original/image-20150806-5241-rmi43n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90998/original/image-20150806-5241-rmi43n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90998/original/image-20150806-5241-rmi43n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Mr Tanabe dressed in Samurai armour in the 1930s.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But words sometimes don’t go far enough. So some survivors have released extraordinary creative projects in order to convey the complete destruction they experienced. One survivor I interviewed was <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/jul/24/secondworldwar.japan">Masaaki Tanabe</a>, who has worked on the “ground zero restoration series”, a series of films which reconstruct the city of Hiroshima in computer graphics. </p>
<p>In the latest film, <a href="http://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/english/news/worldupdate/20150520.html">What Happened that Day</a> (which premiered at the United Nations in New York in April), we are transported to the pre-war landscape of Hiroshima, seen through Tanabe’s childhood memories. With the aid of some CG imaging, we glide through a beautiful city, the Hiroshima of the 1930s, travelling along wide, leafy boulevards. We cross the newly constructed bridges spanning the seven tributaries of the Ota river. We pass under the <em>nori</em> curtains and into the interiors of the shops, only recently graced with electric light. We hear the tinkle of the bell announcing our arrival and survey the tofu, sweets and bicycles on sale. We are permitted entrance into the traditional so-called “eel-design” houses, which appear like those that still stand in Kyoto, and we find actors playing the roles of Tanabe’s own samurai family.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90996/original/image-20150806-5266-1qvspzg.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90996/original/image-20150806-5266-1qvspzg.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90996/original/image-20150806-5266-1qvspzg.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90996/original/image-20150806-5266-1qvspzg.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90996/original/image-20150806-5266-1qvspzg.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90996/original/image-20150806-5266-1qvspzg.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90996/original/image-20150806-5266-1qvspzg.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Artist’s drawing of Tanabe looking at the destroyed city in the aftermath.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>To make the film, Tanabe interviewed more than 300 survivors over a 17-year period so he could recreate an accurate 3D street landscape of the city. Accurate city records were all destroyed in the bombing. There were also very few citizens’ photographs that survived. Tanabe was only able to make the film because his mother had luckily evacuated 50 photo books put together before the bombing started in 1945.</p>
<p>It is only through such profound personal works that we can really start to understand the utter sense of cultural loss that people such as Tanabe experienced. The bomb killed everyone in his family except his grandmother on August 6 1945.</p>
<p>But more such efforts are sorely needed if we are to disperse the mushroom cloud that has obscured the central part survivors’ narratives play in this history.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/45622/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Elizabeth Chappell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The average age of survivors is now 80. In five years, very few of these first-hand witnesses will be around to remember the event. Many of their stories are in danger of being lost forever.
Elizabeth Chappell, PhD Candidate, The Open University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/45275
2015-08-06T10:07:40Z
2015-08-06T10:07:40Z
The deep influence of the A-bomb on anime and manga
<p>At the end of Katsuhiro Otomo’s dystopian Japanese anime film Akira, a throbbing, white mass <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyDl_cOWBCE">begins to envelop Neo-Tokyo</a>. Eventually, its swirling winds engulf the metropolis, swallowing it whole and leaving a skeleton of a city in its wake.</p>
<p>The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – along with the firebombings of Tokyo – were traumatic experiences for the Japanese people. It’s no surprise that for years, the devastation remained at the forefront of their conscience, and that part of the healing process meant returning to this imagery in literature, in music and in art. </p>
<p>The finale of Akira is only one example of apocalyptic imagery in the anime and manga canon; a number of anime films and comics are rife with atomic bomb references, which appear in any number of forms, from the symbolic to the literal. The devastating aftereffects – orphaned kids, radiation sickness, a loss of national independence, the destruction of nature – would also influence the genre, giving rise to a unique (and arguably incomparable) form of comics and animated film.</p>
<p>The directors and artists who witnessed the devastation firsthand were at the forefront of this movement. Yet to this day – 75 years after the bombs – these themes continue to be explored by their successors. </p>
<h2>An iconic filmmaker paves the way</h2>
<p>We can see the lasting images of the firebombings and the atomic bombs in the works of artist and director Osamu Tezuka and his successor, Hayao Miyazaki. Both had <a href="http://japanfocus.org/-Yuki-TANAKA/3412/article.html">witnessed</a> the devastation of the bombings at the end of the war. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90496/original/image-20150731-17156-irffiy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90496/original/image-20150731-17156-irffiy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=688&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90496/original/image-20150731-17156-irffiy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=688&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90496/original/image-20150731-17156-irffiy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=688&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90496/original/image-20150731-17156-irffiy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=865&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90496/original/image-20150731-17156-irffiy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=865&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90496/original/image-20150731-17156-irffiy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=865&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Osamu Tezuka would go on to influence scores of Japanese animators.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/Tezuka_Osamu.JPG">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The bomb became a particular obsession of Tezuka’s. His films and comics both address themes like coping with grief and the idea that nature, in all its beauty, can be compromised by man’s desire to conquer it. </p>
<p>His stories often have a young character who is orphaned by particular circumstances and must survive on his own. Two examples are Little Wansa, about a puppy who escapes from his new owners and spends the series looking for his mother; and Young Bear Cub, who gets lost in the wild and must find his own way back to his family. </p>
<h2>Misuse of technology</h2>
<p>The tensions of technology are apparent in the works of Tezuka and his successors. In Tezuka’s Astro Boy, a scientist attempts to fill the void left by his son’s death by creating a humanlike android named <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3UbaB7oPTw">Astro Boy</a>.</p>
<p>Astro Boy’s father, seeing that technology cannot replace his son completely, rejects his creation, who is then taken under the wing of another scientist. Astro Boy eventually finds his calling and becomes a superhero. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90531/original/image-20150802-17172-1b64145.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90531/original/image-20150802-17172-1b64145.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=442&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90531/original/image-20150802-17172-1b64145.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=442&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90531/original/image-20150802-17172-1b64145.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=442&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90531/original/image-20150802-17172-1b64145.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=555&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90531/original/image-20150802-17172-1b64145.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=555&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90531/original/image-20150802-17172-1b64145.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=555&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Astro Boy is one of many characters symbolizing the fusion of technology and nature, and the tension created by its capacity for both advancement and destruction.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/124561666@N02/14381338346">TNS Sofres/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Like Tezuka, the award-winning animator Hayao Miyazaki witnessed some of the American air raids as a child. </p>
<p>Miyazaki’s work often refers to the abuse of technology, and contains pleas for human restraint. In Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, the radioactive mutants populate the land; at the beginning of the film, the narrator describes the strange, mutated state of Earth as a direct result of man’s misuse of nuclear technology.</p>
<p>In the postwar years, Japan grew into an economic superpower. Possessing a fascination with technology, the country became a world leader in the production of cars and electronics. Yet in characters like Astro Boy, we see some of the tensions of the modern age: the idea that technology can never replace humans, and that technology’s capacity for helping mankind is only equaled by its capacity to destroy it.</p>
<h2>Orphans and mutants</h2>
<p>There were also the aftereffects of the bombs, some of which are still felt today: children left parentless, others (even the unborn) left permanently crippled by radiation.</p>
<p>For these reasons, a recurrent theme in anime films is the orphan who has to survive on his own without the help of adults (many of whom are portrayed as incompetent). </p>
<p>Akiyuki Nosaka relayed his personal experiences as a child during the war in the popular anime film Grave of the Fireflies, which tells the story of a young boy and his sister escaping from the air raids and the firebombings, scraping by on whatever rations they can find during last part of the war.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/4vPeTSRd580?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The trailer for Grave of the Fireflies.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Meanwhile, there are often young, powerful female orphans or independent female youths in Hayao Miyazaki’s works, whether it’s in Kiki’s Delivery Service, Howl’s Moving Castle, or Castle in the Sky. </p>
<p>Likewise, in Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira, <a href="http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/criti_1290-7839_2000_num_7_1_1577">the adults are the ones who squabble</a>: they jockey for power, and their lust for control of the strange, alien technology of Akira causes the atomic-bomb-like catastrophe at the end of the film. The teenaged characters, on the other hand, display common sense throughout the movie.</p>
<p>The message seems to be that adults can be reckless when man’s desire for power and ambition outweigh what is important on Earth. And the children, still untainted by the vices that overtake humanity in adulthood and innocent enough to the point of thinking rationally, are the ones who end up making the most practical decisions overall. </p>
<p>Many families were orphaned by the war, and the bomb as well, so a number of children were also mutated or affected by the bomb. In anime and manga, this is seen in the form of radioactive mutations or having some extraordinary powers, in addition to taking on more adult responsibilities at an early age.</p>
<p>A number of films feature characters who display special powers or abilities, with radiation often being the main cause. Several films exploring the idea of unusual events or experiments resulting in young persons having exceptional abilities include Inazuman in the comic of the same name and the character Ellis in the comic El Cazador de la Bruja (The Hunter of the Witch). </p>
<p>Additionally, the manga series <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCHbF9lG3lE">Barefoot Gen</a> tells the story of a family wiped out by the atomic bomb, with a young boy and his mother the only survivors. Author Keiji Nakazawa loosely <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/keiji-nakazawa-comic-book-artist-who-cast-unflinching-eye-on-hiroshima-bomb-dies/2013/01/10/9fa6faa0-5a85-11e2-9fa9-5fbdc9530eb9_story.html">based these comics on his own life</a>: growing up, Nakazawa watched a sister die several weeks after birth from radiation sickness, and witnessed his mother’s health quickly deteriorate in the years after the war.</p>
<h2>Death, rebirth and hope for the future</h2>
<p>Osamu Tezuka believed that the atomic bomb acted as the epitome of man’s inherent capacity for destruction. Yet while Tezuka commonly referenced death and war, he also believed in the <a href="http://japanfocus.org/-Yuki-TANAKA/3412/article.html">perseverance of mankind</a> and its ability to begin anew. </p>
<p>In a number of his works, both a futuristic and historic Japan are seen, with the themes of death and rebirth being commonly used as plot devices to symbolize Japan’s (and the lives of many Japanese) wartime and postwar experiences, including the aftermath of its destruction after the bombs fell. But much like the Phoenix – the mythical bird that sets itself on fire at the time of its death, only to experience a rebirth – Tezuka’s Japan experiences <a href="http://tezukainenglish.com/wp/osamu-tezuka-manga/manga-m-s/phoenix-manga/">a resurrection</a>, which mirrors Japan’s real-life postwar ascension to world superpower. </p>
<p>In fact, Phoenix was the title of Tezuka’s most popular series, one that the artist considered his magnum opus. The work is a series of short stories dealing with man’s search for immortality (given or taken from the Phoenix, which represents the universe, by man’s drinking some of its blood); some characters appear several times in the stories, mostly from reincarnation, a common precept in Buddhism.</p>
<p>Other filmmakers <a href="http://japanfocus.org/-Susan_J_-Napier/1972/article.html">have repurposed this theme</a>. In Space Cruiser Yamato (also known as Star Blazers), an old Japanese warship is rebuilt into a powerful spaceship and sent off to save a planet Earth succumbing to radiation poisoning. </p>
<p>In essence, what we have seen is that the atomic bomb indeed affected Japan to the point that the works of Tezuka and later artists inspired by him reflect on the bomb’s effects on families, society and the national psyche. Much like the cycle of life, or the immortal Phoenix in Tezuka’s case, Japan was able to reinvent itself and come back strong as a powerful world player capable of starting anew, but with the idea that mankind must learn from its mistakes and avoid repeating history.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/45275/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Frank Fuller does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
In the wake of the atomic bombs, a number of Japanese animators would question mankind’s relationship with technology.
Frank Fuller, Adjunct Professor of Political Science, Villanova University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/45271
2015-08-06T10:07:22Z
2015-08-06T10:07:22Z
Even before Hiroshima, people knew the atomic bomb
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90947/original/image-20150805-22496-1rvnrf4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Americans heard about atomic bombs long before one was actually built.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki#/media/File:Atomic_bombing_of_Japan.jpg">US Department of Defense</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Milton Rothmar, an American Army corporal stationed in Italy, got the news about the Hiroshima bombing from the Armed Forces newspaper <em>Stars and Stripes</em>. He wrote: “The headline said ‘Atomic Bomb.’ To a person who has been raised on stories such as <a href="https://archive.org/details/finalwar00tracgoog">The Final War</a>, this was both a terror and a hope. Man could use this to destroy everything.” </p>
<p>But Rothmar couldn’t suppress his excitement at the prospect that atomic energies might be put to less destructive purposes: “Goddam but it is thrilling to hear the words ‘atomic energy’ used on the radio like they were talking about the latest model car. I feel like shouting to everybody ‘I told you so!’” </p>
<p>His reaction, written down the very day he heard the news, might seem oddly prescient: how did he so quickly understand all the implications and possibilities of what was supposed to be a top-secret weapon? </p>
<p>The answer is that he had been thinking about them for years – and so had many other Americans. The sudden appearance of a real atomic bomb was shocking, but its nature – and the implications of its use – had been talked about for decades. People grappling with the news of Hiroshima did so less by learning new information than by remembering things they had long known. </p>
<h2>Fascinated by radioactivity</h2>
<p>American newspapers were <a href="http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/08/10/the-week-of-the-atom-bomb/">blaring headlines</a> about Hiroshima within hours of the attack. They were based on an <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/primary-resources/truman-hiroshima/">announcement</a> from President Truman that began by describing the astonishing magnitude of the explosion – 2,000 times bigger than anything that had gone before – before explaining that this was possible because the bomb in question “is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe.”</p>
<p>The surprisingly effective <a href="http://www.atomicheritage.org/history/security-and-secrecy">secrecy</a> surrounding the Manhattan Project meant that few were expecting an atomic bomb to appear during the current war. Many who helped make “<a href="http://www.atomicarchive.com/Photos/LBFM/">Little Boy</a>” – the bomb dropped on Hiroshima – possibly never knew what they were working on. But what Truman meant by “atomic bomb” was common knowledge. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90946/original/image-20150805-22499-1i9pysv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90946/original/image-20150805-22499-1i9pysv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90946/original/image-20150805-22499-1i9pysv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=483&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90946/original/image-20150805-22499-1i9pysv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=483&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90946/original/image-20150805-22499-1i9pysv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=483&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90946/original/image-20150805-22499-1i9pysv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=607&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90946/original/image-20150805-22499-1i9pysv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=607&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90946/original/image-20150805-22499-1i9pysv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=607&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Pierre and Marie Curie in the lab where they discovered radium, a material that fascinated the public.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie#/media/File:Pierre_and_Marie_Curie.jpg">Wikipedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Long before August 6, 1945, the public had a clear (and surprisingly accurate) idea of the kind of destruction that a bomb based on the liberation of nuclear energies would be capable of. So many writers explored the idea that the early 20th century is sometimes called the “<a href="http://hilobrow.com/hilobooks/#Radium">Radium Age</a>” of science fiction. Prominent scientists wrote <a href="https://archive.org/details/becquerelrayspro00rayl">popular books</a> on how to experiment with radioactive substances at home. It was a concept as widely known as the <em>Star Trek</em> warp drive might be today. </p>
<p>The result was an intense public <a href="http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/the-first-atomic-age-matthew-lavine/?K=9781137307217">fascination</a> with nuclear energies. Crowds thronged museums to get a glimpse of a speck of radium, thrilled by what newspapers said was a fantastically powerful substance that “leaked” through radioactivity only a tiny fraction of the energy it stored. The great question of the age was whether scientists could find a way to tap that remaining energy, and – if they did – whether they could control it. </p>
<p>Opinions varied.</p>
<p>The case for runaway atomic apocalypses was frequently made by the charter generation of nuclear scientists themselves. Radiochemist Frederick Soddy, in a <a href="https://archive.org/details/interpretationof00sodd">popular series of lectures</a>, imagined that nuclear energy would allow humanity to “make the whole world one smiling Garden of Eden” – and just as easily, with a single mistake, to destroy it. </p>
<h2>Sci-fi to FDR</h2>
<p>Radioactive substances attracted popular attention precisely because of those horrifying implications of their seemingly limitless energy. Even what were meant as dispassionate, educational treatments of the subject tended to become lurid. </p>
<p>As historian Spencer Weart <a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674052338&content=reviews">has noted</a>, the renowned British physicist William Crookes explained the energy in single gram of radium by saying that it was enough to lift the weight of the entire British navy several thousand feet. The unintentionally violent image of the explosive demolition of a military target caught on in the public discourse. It was the logical conclusion of everything else that the newspapers were printing about the fantastical energies locked away in the atom. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90948/original/image-20150805-22474-1e4ds0c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90948/original/image-20150805-22474-1e4ds0c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90948/original/image-20150805-22474-1e4ds0c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90948/original/image-20150805-22474-1e4ds0c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90948/original/image-20150805-22474-1e4ds0c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90948/original/image-20150805-22474-1e4ds0c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90948/original/image-20150805-22474-1e4ds0c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90948/original/image-20150805-22474-1e4ds0c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Science fiction writers, including H G Wells, did much to teach the world about atomic energy well before an actual bomb was produced.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Fiction authors made those implications explicit. </p>
<p>H G Wells coined the term “atomic bomb” in his 1914 novel <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1059/1059-h/1059-h.htm">The World Set Free</a>, which depicted a mid-20th-century war fought with radioactive bombs that exploded – and then kept exploding, poisoning the area with radiation. The novel was dedicated to Soddy, referencing his lectures, and indirectly contributed to real-world nuclear history: it inspired, for example, the physicist <a href="http://www.nuclearfiles.org/menu/library/biographies/bio_szilard-leo.htm">Leo Szilard</a> to think about the implications of his theory of neutron chain reactions. Szilard later <a href="https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Events/1939-1942/einstein_letter.htm">lobbied</a> FDR to start research on a nuclear program.</p>
<p>Wells was neither the first nor the last author to explore the explosive potential of atomic energies. The comic books, pulp <a href="https://archive.org/details/pulpmagazinearchive?and%5B%5D=science%20fiction">science fiction magazines</a>, and popular science literature of the era were shot through with speculation about atom-powered spaceships and radium bombs and radioactive monsters who gave off mysterious rays. </p>
<p>Some were absurd flights of fancy; others were excellent synopses of current nuclear science. Both sorts had the same effect: to perpetuate the discussion about what the atomic future would look like. </p>
<p>That discourse was often quite optimistic – nuclear medicine and cheap electricity were on people’s minds, too – but bombs were always part of it.</p>
<h2>Emotionally fraught</h2>
<p>Oddly enough, atomic bombs were discussed more before the war began than during it, thanks in part to wartime paper restrictions that throttled some science fiction magazines. </p>
<p>The technical issues of building a fission weapon were common knowledge even before the war. Less openly talked about was the possibility that those obstacles might be overcome anytime soon. Military censors discouraged magazines from running stories about atomic bombs, although at least one <a href="http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/03/07/death-dust-1941/">canny publisher</a> argued that they were so common a plot device that to suddenly banish them from print would be to signal the enemy that the United States was making progress on such a weapon. </p>
<p>The months following Hiroshima and Nagasaki were emotionally fraught for Americans: joy at the end of the war mixed uneasily with remorse at the magnitude of destruction and fear that such weapons might someday be used against them. </p>
<p>Atomic bombs and all their moral and technological implications were once again talked about in pulpits, cartoons, newspaper editorials and science fiction. But if it was a more urgent discussion now, it was nevertheless a familiar one.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/45271/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Matt Lavine does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
News of the Hiroshima bombing spread quickly to the US public but, thanks to science fiction writers, atomic bombs were discussed more before the war began than during it.
Matt Lavine, Assistant Professor of History, Mississippi State University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/45471
2015-08-06T05:33:57Z
2015-08-06T05:33:57Z
Hiroshima’s literary legacy: the ‘blinding flash’ that changed the world forever
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90898/original/image-20150805-22471-ceb82j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Museum of Science and Industry in Hiroshima, August 1945.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Everett Historical / Shutterstock.com</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In the year after the atomic bombs were dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August 1945, the events were rarely considered or discussed in the West beyond their strategic or scientific relevance. The experience of individuals on the ground and the confusion that arose at the appearance of radiation sickness were little known.</p>
<p>This was to change on August 31 1946, when the New Yorker devoted an entire issue to an extraordinary feature piece by John Hersey, simply titled <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/world-history/the-true-cost-of-the-hiroshima-bomb-john-herseys-definitive-account-10438653.html">Hiroshima</a>. It sold out within hours and was subsequently published in book form.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90912/original/image-20150805-22496-1lskudf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90912/original/image-20150805-22496-1lskudf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90912/original/image-20150805-22496-1lskudf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=833&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90912/original/image-20150805-22496-1lskudf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=833&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90912/original/image-20150805-22496-1lskudf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=833&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90912/original/image-20150805-22496-1lskudf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1047&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90912/original/image-20150805-22496-1lskudf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1047&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90912/original/image-20150805-22496-1lskudf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1047&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">As it first appeared.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">New Yorker</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Hiroshima was not the most devastating air raid of World War II, but the extreme vulnerability of cities to a single device was a new horror. As such it challenged established ways of thinking and demanded that writers find forms adequate to this new nuclear consciousness. Writing so early in the atomic age and with few precedents on which to draw, Hersey’s achievement is all the more remarkable.</p>
<p>Hersey was a war correspondent, but his prose is notable for its novelistic qualities. Drawing on extensive interviews, his telling of the stories of six survivors is seminal in both historical and literary terms.</p>
<h2>Bearing witness</h2>
<p>Perhaps Hersey’s greatest achievement is to render the Japanese bomb victims human to his American audience. After years of war, after the brutality of the Pacific campaigns, this is an aspect of the attack that had been neglected. By revealing the experience of some of World War II’s final victims Hersey stressed the devastating personal effects of this new and horrifying weapon.</p>
<p>His article does this by coolly confronting us with the physical and psychological traumas of war. When Mr Tanimoto grasps a woman’s hand her skin “slips off in huge, glove-like pieces”. The grotesque results of the bomb become clear; the human body revealed as meat. When Dr Sasaki, overwhelmed in his hospital, becomes “an automaton, mechanically wiping, daubing, winding, wiping, daubing, winding”, we see how the mind’s capacity to empathise closes down in the face of trauma.</p>
<p>As one of the earliest examples of nuclear writing, Hersey’s Hiroshima also pioneers several motifs that shape literary responses to the bomb and through which we still talk about and understand nuclear threat. </p>
<h2>The flash</h2>
<p>Miss Toshiko Sasaki, “a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works”, experiences the explosion as a “blinding flash”. This idea of the atomic flash was itself to become a staple of nuclear literature. The flash is the image with which Hersey begins Hiroshima and it is what connects his protagonists as they look up from different locations in the city and simultaneously become <em>hibakusha</em>, explosion-affected people. The flash is what fixes 8:15am on August 6 1945 as the instant the city turns into an atomic city.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90899/original/image-20150805-22471-1tdnqjq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90899/original/image-20150805-22471-1tdnqjq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90899/original/image-20150805-22471-1tdnqjq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90899/original/image-20150805-22471-1tdnqjq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90899/original/image-20150805-22471-1tdnqjq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=947&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90899/original/image-20150805-22471-1tdnqjq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=947&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90899/original/image-20150805-22471-1tdnqjq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=947&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">8.15am: a wrist watch found in the ruins.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Everett Historical / Shutterstock.com</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The bomb’s capacity to transfix, to illuminate but simultaneously to blind is a preoccupation of nuclear literature. Hersey’s achievement is to find a neutral, unemotional prose that lessens the glare so we see the human stories. </p>
<p>That fear of sudden transformation of the world into something entirely new later came to haunt the Cold War. Douglas Coupland’s retrospective, seemingly autobiographical short story, <a href="http://www.thesatirist.com/books/life_after_god.html">The Wrong Sun</a> (1994) astutely captures this acute nuclear consciousness. The narrator’s everyday life stutters in constant expectation of “The Flash”. He carries on with the mundane routines of life, but sirens or sudden noises induce traumatic moments when briefly, incongruously, he thinks nuclear war imminent.</p>
<h2>One titanic instant</h2>
<p>Hersey mentions tales of blast shadows, imprints on walls or roofs thrown by the bomb’s heat in which people’s final moments are preserved. He notes that fanciful stories accumulate around them. They have continued to, becoming important nuclear motifs.</p>
<p>In Ray Bradbury’s short story <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=t664PQAACAAJ">There Will Come Soft Rains</a> (1950), all that remains of a family are their silhouettes, thrown onto a wall in “one titanic instant”. Most poignantly, the shadow of a young boy, “hands flung into the air”, is cast upon the wall. Higher up is a tossed ball and opposite the boy is a girl, “hands raised to catch a ball which never came down”. More recently, Kamila Shamsie’s beautiful novel <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/mar/07/burnt-shadows-kamila-shamsie-review">Burnt Shadows</a> (2009) takes as its central image the birds, cranes, seared into the flesh of her protagonist Hiroko as her patterned kimono is incinerated by the atomic flash at Nagasaki.</p>
<p>The sense of time being frozen is a repeated nuclear motif. Hersey describes Father Kleinsorge returning to Hiroshima and finding “bicycles, shells of streetcars and automobiles, all halted in mid-motion”. The cusp at which the city “becomes” atomic is briefly preserved and for a few days after the bombing Father Kleinsorge can traverse both its pre-nuclear and nuclear states. Hiroshima is, in this description, the symbolic gateway through which humans enter the nuclear age.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90896/original/image-20150805-22465-ly6wi9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90896/original/image-20150805-22465-ly6wi9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=443&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90896/original/image-20150805-22465-ly6wi9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=443&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90896/original/image-20150805-22465-ly6wi9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=443&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90896/original/image-20150805-22465-ly6wi9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=556&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90896/original/image-20150805-22465-ly6wi9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=556&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90896/original/image-20150805-22465-ly6wi9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=556&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The ruined city.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Everett Historical/Shutterstock.com</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The nuclear uncanny</h2>
<p>Perhaps most interestingly Hersey also broaches the unsettling radioactive legacy of the bombing in his piece. When Miss Sasaki returns to the city just three weeks after the attack she finds an extraordinary profusion of plant life growing in the ruins. It seems so unlikely, so overly abundant, that it “gave her the creeps”. With dubious scientific legitimacy Hersey writes that the bomb “had stimulated” the roots of plants.</p>
<p>The unspoken implication is that some “unnatural” quality of the bomb – radiation presumably – has induced this unsettling abundance. Miss Sasaki’s uneasiness and Hersey’s ambiguous phrasing introduce an important cultural trope through which nuclear technology and materials are experienced and perhaps misunderstood. It is an example of what the anthropologist Joseph Masco calls the “<a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8185.html">nuclear uncanny</a>”: a psychological phenomenon by which the world is experienced as unsettlingly different when thought of as “nuclear”.</p>
<p>In the moving additional chapter to Hiroshima, published on the 40th anniversary of the bombing in 1985, Hersey wrote that the world’s memory was getting “spotty”. Perhaps our cultural memory of atomic attack is spottier still, another 30 years on. So if you haven’t read it before, take some time to read Hiroshima this anniversary weekend. It remains one of the rawest, but most humane, accounts of this world-changing event.</p>
<p>By giving us a glimpse of the human consequences of atomic attack, Hiroshima warns us of our capacity for inhumanity. It remains largely silent on the military and political decisions behind the attack, but is perhaps all the more powerful for that. It asks of us only one terrible thing: that we bear witness to the event; that we remember.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/45471/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Daniel Cordle does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
John Hersey’s article Hiroshima (1946) is seminal in historical and literary terms: the shocking realities of the atomic bomb demanded a new way of writing.
Daniel Cordle, Reader in English and American Literature, Nottingham Trent University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/45102
2015-08-05T20:17:59Z
2015-08-05T20:17:59Z
Atomic amnesia: why Hiroshima narratives remain few and far between
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90682/original/image-20150804-15152-1tu4ncp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A major challenge facing writers who want to take on the Bomb is that conventional description fails.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA/HIROSHIMA PEACE MEMORIAL MUSEUM HANDOUT</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>On this day, August 6, seven decades ago, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and – on August 9 – Nagasaki. While early postwar literature registered fear of atomic warfare, there are only few references to the bomb in contemporary culture. Some argue that the bombings have sunk into the recesses of the collective unconscious.</p>
<p>According to Hiroshima scholar Greg Mitchell in a book he co-authored with Robert Lifton, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/116215.Hiroshima_in_America">Hiroshima in America: A Half Century of Denial</a> (1996), the US government essentially brainwashed the public into thinking the bombings were necessary in order to win the second world war. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90684/original/image-20150804-15113-1ajbb8k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90684/original/image-20150804-15113-1ajbb8k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90684/original/image-20150804-15113-1ajbb8k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=748&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90684/original/image-20150804-15113-1ajbb8k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=748&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90684/original/image-20150804-15113-1ajbb8k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=748&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90684/original/image-20150804-15113-1ajbb8k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=940&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90684/original/image-20150804-15113-1ajbb8k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=940&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90684/original/image-20150804-15113-1ajbb8k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=940&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Colonel Paul W. Tibbets, Jr., Pilot of the Enola Gay, the Plane that Dropped the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima, waving from his cockpit before the takeoff, on Tinian island, 06 August 6, 1945.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA/US National Archive</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Bomb was subsumed within other dominant national narratives, such as a US victory in the Pacific and anxiety over the Cold War. The <a href="http://digital.lib.lehigh.edu/trial/enola/about/">controversy</a> over whether the 50th anniversary exhibit of the Enola Gay (the B-29 plane that dropped the Hiroshima bomb) should celebrate victory or remember the fallen suggests unresolved conflict in the American psyche. </p>
<p>But does this alone explain why Hollywood mostly kept its distance from Hiroshima, or why contemporary novelists (aside from sci-fi authors) largely ignored the subject as a way of investigating human nature and conflict? </p>
<p>Mitchell tells of how US military filmmakers in the immediate aftermath of Hiroshima managed the Japanese footage. Lt.Col. (Ret.) Daniel A. McGovern kept dozens of reels until he was ordered to return to the US and turn them over to the Pentagon. Mitchell <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-mitchell/for-veterans-day-the-grea_b_353270.html">recently explained</a> why this material was kept hidden for decades: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The main reason it was classified was […] because of the horror, the devastation. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>In <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/375402.A_Defence_of_Poetry_and_Other_Essays">A Defence of Poetry</a> (1840) Percy Shelley famously claimed that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90685/original/image-20150804-15127-1we7c5o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90685/original/image-20150804-15127-1we7c5o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90685/original/image-20150804-15127-1we7c5o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=610&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90685/original/image-20150804-15127-1we7c5o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=610&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90685/original/image-20150804-15127-1we7c5o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=610&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90685/original/image-20150804-15127-1we7c5o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=767&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90685/original/image-20150804-15127-1we7c5o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=767&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90685/original/image-20150804-15127-1we7c5o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=767&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A Japanese soldier walking through the area among ruins that resulted from atom bomb blast in Hiroshima, Japan, in September 1945.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA/US National Archives</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A century later in his <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1949/faulkner-speech.html">Nobel prize acceptance speech</a>, William Faulkner revealed a towering obstacle facing any writer up for that challenge. Faulkner cautioned the young writer against writing under fear. </p>
<p>Cursed with the thought of “when will I be blown up,” the young novelist, said Faulkner, must liberate him or herself from this prevailing fear in order to write about matters such as love and honour, pity and pride, that are fundamental to our humanity.</p>
<p>Another notable exception to this silence over Hiroshima is Kurt Vonnegut’s 1963 novel <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4983.Kurt_Vonnegut_s_Cat_s_Cradle?from_search=true&search_version=service">Cat’s Cradle</a>. In this novel, Vonnegut’s narrator attempts to examine a shared responsibility over the horrific event by interviewing ordinary Americans about what they were doing on August 6, 1945. Unforgettable in that novel is the discovery of the children of one of the inventors of the A-bomb.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90688/original/image-20150804-15127-5n6wo6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90688/original/image-20150804-15127-5n6wo6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90688/original/image-20150804-15127-5n6wo6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=890&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90688/original/image-20150804-15127-5n6wo6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=890&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90688/original/image-20150804-15127-5n6wo6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=890&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90688/original/image-20150804-15127-5n6wo6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1118&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90688/original/image-20150804-15127-5n6wo6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1118&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90688/original/image-20150804-15127-5n6wo6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1118&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Kurt Vonnegut in 1972.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A major challenge facing writers who want to take on the Bomb is that conventional description fails. But in his book <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1174891.Nuclear_Fear">Nuclear Fear: A History of Images</a> (1988), Spencer Weart demonstrates how the most enduring description of the atomic cloud as a “mushroom cloud” comes from mythology. He argues that the way we speak about and imagine nuclear weapons, and energy, is drawn from literature, emotions and medieval symbolism.</p>
<p>Faulkner and Vonnegut show us the importance of thinking about and communicating the unthinkable. They insist on the need to reflect on the horrors of warfare and put pressure on the way we choose to either talk or keep silent about the darkness of humanity. </p>
<p>But having the words to describe the event itself doesn’t always ensure an appropriate narrative. In The New Yorker, November 1946, American novelist and political activist Mary McCarthy <a href="http://americainclass.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/mccarthy_onhiroshima.pdf">accused journalists</a> of referring to Hiroshima “in terms of measurable destruction”. But with Hiroshima, she argued, this cannot be done, since “the continuity of life was, for the first time, put into question”.</p>
<p>This sense of unparalleled calamity is registered most movingly among the Hiroshima survivors themselves. Eyewitnesses testify that it was as if everything had ceased to exist. There was nothing left. </p>
<p>In Dr Hachiya’s Diary of Hiroshima, memorialised in Elias Canetti’s essay collection <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Conscience-Words-Ear-Witness/dp/0330293419">The Conscience of Words & Earwitness</a> (1971), the Japanese physician thinks of Pompeii. But as Canetti remarks, nature played no part in Hiroshima. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90692/original/image-20150804-15146-8qki4k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90692/original/image-20150804-15146-8qki4k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90692/original/image-20150804-15146-8qki4k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90692/original/image-20150804-15146-8qki4k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90692/original/image-20150804-15146-8qki4k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90692/original/image-20150804-15146-8qki4k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90692/original/image-20150804-15146-8qki4k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90692/original/image-20150804-15146-8qki4k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Hiroshima Peace Memorial in Hiroshima, Japan.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP Image/NEWZULU/Richard Goldschmidt</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The fact that the bombing was perpetrated by humans, not nature, makes it somehow all the more inadmissible. It testifies to something unspeakable within us. But if Hiroshima and related fears aren’t explored for that reason, profound human anxieties remained unvoiced and repressed. </p>
<p>After all, narrative instructs us in who we are as ethical beings (citizens, in other words) and being ethical in these precarious times must involve acute self-reflection as to what we are capable of doing to each other.</p>
<p>As a means of communicating such profound reflection, Canetti tells us that Dr Hachiya honours the memory of the dead by pilgrimaging to the places where they lived and died, one death at a time. Hachiya does this prayerfully, Canetti writes, in order to provide a balm of respectful words. Today the Hiroshima Peace Memorial is a comparable attempt to mark an absence by paradoxically filling it with meaning. </p>
<p>What was rendered a blank suddenly bereft of human lives and their significance is redeemed by this doctor’s actions and by his journal. Dr Hachiya, and Canetti, bring specific individual lives back from the brink of total erasure that the bombing sought to impose. </p>
<p>They use words to resist this imposition of nothingness, telling a story of loss that will not fade away. May narrative continue to flourish in these precarious times.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/45102/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sofia Ahlberg does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Hollywood has kept its distance from the bombing of Hiroshima, 70 years ago, and novelists, aside from sci-fi authors, have largely ignored the catastrophe as a means of exploring human nature. Why?
Sofia Ahlberg, Lecturer in Contemporary Literature, La Trobe University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/41069
2015-07-16T10:15:41Z
2015-07-16T10:15:41Z
Radiation in the postwar American mind: from wonder to worry
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88423/original/image-20150714-21719-9oc0uv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Blowing up the desert – and people's minds: the first atom bomb test in 1945. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/ctbto/4926598556/">US Government</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>More than seventy five years ago at a remote site in New Mexico, the first test of a nuclear bomb was detonated, producing a <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/primary-resources/truman-bombtest/">massive explosion</a>. The test, which presaged the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Japan in August 1945, forever changed the course of world affairs. Subsequent nuclear explosions, and the radioactive fallout they produced, quickly gave rise to worries over the dangers of radiation.</p>
<p>But what does “radiation” mean? And how have attitudes toward radiation changed over time? </p>
<p>The <a href="https://orise.orau.gov/reacts/guide/define.htm">technical definition</a> aside, for most Americans today, it means something like this: energies, often man-made, usually undetectable, that have <a href="http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/R/bo19804483.html">strange effects</a> on living things. We connect the abstract, physical concept with a personal, biological one. We take special notice when we are exposed to those energies, even briefly. </p>
<h2>The early days: a glowing reception</h2>
<p>In that sense, the age of radiation began in 1895 with the discovery of X-rays. In the <a href="http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/the-first-atomic-age-matthew-lavine/?K=9781137307217">half-century that followed</a>, Americans indulged in <a href="http://www.neatorama.com/2013/11/18/The-Strange-Fate-of-Eben-Byers/">optimistic fantasies</a> about the miracles these energies could perform for better health. But they also quickly learned to <a href="http://www.smithsonianmag.com/ist/?next=/history/clarence-dally-the-man-who-gave-thomas-edison-x-ray-vision-123713565/">fear</a> them. On balance, the anxieties have had greater staying power. </p>
<p>Such reactions came from the many direct, personal experiences Americans had with irradiation in an era when radium and X-ray machines were icons of scientific modernity in the early 20th century. They were hailed as the wonders of the age, presented simultaneously as poisons and cure-alls, perpetual motion machines and planet-busting explosives. Radioactive substances (or plausible fakes thereof) were added to dozens of <a href="http://io9.com/seriously-scary-radioactive-consumer-products-from-the-498044380">everyday consumer products</a>, including toothpaste and lipstick, to enhance them with the mysterious energies of the atom. X-rays were tools of portraiture at the <a href="http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi1494.htm">beauty salon</a> (for hair removal) as well as the hospital. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88424/original/image-20150714-21701-1kb30w1.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88424/original/image-20150714-21701-1kb30w1.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88424/original/image-20150714-21701-1kb30w1.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=601&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88424/original/image-20150714-21701-1kb30w1.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=601&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88424/original/image-20150714-21701-1kb30w1.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=601&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88424/original/image-20150714-21701-1kb30w1.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=755&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88424/original/image-20150714-21701-1kb30w1.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=755&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88424/original/image-20150714-21701-1kb30w1.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=755&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Health and beauty products were often advertised as containing radioactive elements like radium or thorium. Fortunately for consumers, these claims were rarely true.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quackery_involving_radioactive_substances#/media/File:Tho-Radia-IMG_1228.JPG">Rama</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, radioactive substances and irradiating machines came directly under the control of a specific few entities: the government, medical authorities and the scientific community. Tangible experiences of radiation became <a href="http://jhmas.oxfordjournals.org/content/67/4/587.full">muted</a> and rarer for Americans, and gee-whiz speculations about atomic energies in popular literature gave way to soberer considerations of the new nuclear reality. American feelings about radiation became more guarded and more related to their anxieties about the broader world than to their personal experiences. Radiation, always inscrutable, became a tabula rasa.</p>
<p>Physicists <a href="http://uncpress.unc.edu/browse/book_detail?title_id=446">emerged from the war</a> with a <a href="http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/1945-08-12-NYT-Baby-play-with-nice-ball.jpg">fearsome</a> and controversial reputation. Some scientists <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfBLXLz4wQ8">campaigned</a> against further development of nuclear weapons. Many more took Department of Defense funding to do exactly that. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2B8R-umE0s0?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">President Eisenhower announces the Atoms for Peace program in 1953.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Publicly, the government downplayed weapons research while promoting peaceful <a href="http://newbooksinscitechsoc.com/2014/01/07/angela-n-h-creager-life-atomic-a-history-of-radioisotopes-in-science-and-medicine-university-of-chicago-press-2013/">medical applications</a> of new isotopes. The 1953 “Atoms for Peace” media campaign envisioned international cooperation on energy research. Jobs and comfort came from American uranium, the message went. Obsession with the destructive capacity of atomic energy was the province of the Communist bloc.</p>
<p>The atomic peace dividend was real: nuclear power plants built beginning in 1957 became a <a href="http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Country-Profiles/Countries-T-Z/USA--Nuclear-Power/">substantial</a> part of the nation’s electrical production. Before the first commercial plant had been built, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission gleefully predicted a world in which electricity was “<a href="http://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2009/09/too-cheap-to-meter-nuclear-quote-debate.html">too cheap to meter</a>.”</p>
<h2>Fallout becomes a major fear</h2>
<p>But enthusiasm faded as nuclear plants became a reality. The public did not universally trust the <a href="http://www.nrc.gov/about-nrc/history.html#aec">regulators</a> and corporations that oversaw such plants, nor the engineers and scientists behind them. In March of 1979, two reactors melted down: one at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, and one in a <a href="http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20073417,00.html">movie</a>, The China Syndrome. The fact that the real accident was eventually contained without casualties did little to dispel the anxieties given voice by the movie: that nuclear energies were fundamentally beyond the control of fallible and corruptible people. No further plants were approved until 2012.</p>
<p>Radiation anxiety was heightened by the realization that it was becoming harder to avoid. Civilian scientists, refusing to trust “oracles speaking ‘ex cathedra’ from the Atomic Energy Commission,” conducted nationwide tests of <a href="http://www.stlmag.com/How-to-Stop-a-Nuclear-Bomb-The-St-Louis-Baby-Tooth-Survey-50-Years-Later/">baby teeth</a> beginning in 1959. They found clear evidence that fallout from nuclear tests was accumulating in children’s bodies. By 1963, atmospheric tests had been banned, but the sense that radiation was a form of pollution endemic to the new “atomic age” had taken root. Even natural sources of radiation seemed newly threatening. <a href="http://oldweb.northampton.ac.uk/aps/env/wastes/radon_hotline/radonstory.htm">Radon gas</a>, a selling point for early 20th-century health spas, was discovered in the 1980s to be accumulating in dangerous quantities in some residential basements. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xBfZTkuVzt4?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">A terrifying vision of nuclear war: The Day After from 1983.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It was this threat of omnipresent and involuntary irradiation that gave nuclear weapons their real horror. One might survive the initial blast, but the irradiated landscape that awaited the survivors was subtle and menacing. Richard Rhodes credits the grim 1983 TV movie <a href="http://www.pajiba.com/film_reviews/the-day-after-review-the-most-depressing-movie-of-all-time.php">The Day After</a> with Ronald Reagan’s energetic engagement in disarmament talks. </p>
<p>He was hardly the only person so affected. Books and movies that imagined the world after a nuclear war stressed the physical agonies of radiation sickness. But they also reinforced the association between radiation and mutation: fictional post-nuclear landscapes featured radioactive distortions of both <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4URRp39XOo">the body</a> and the <a href="http://the-toast.net/2013/08/08/slightly-less-beloved-classics-a-canticle-for-leibowitz/">social order</a>. Radiation had always been associated with change, but in an era when nuclear energies posed an existential threat to the world, it was harder to believe that such change would be for the better.</p>
<p>If “radiation” is bound up with Americans’ opinions of the people who wield it, then perhaps the most troubling thing about it is how flimsy and circumstantial their monopoly over it is. There is no longer a “secret of the bomb”; only diplomacy or threats prevent states from acquiring nuclear weapons. Even far simpler devices of mass irradiation – so-called “dirty bombs” – alarm people because of anxiety left over from more than a century of encounters with radiant energy. Cold War-style nuclear anxieties have persisted because we fully trust neither the energies nor the human systems in which they are embedded.</p>
<p><em>This article was updated with a new anniversary year.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/41069/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Matt Lavine does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The first atom bomb test seventy years ago today marks the start of a change in Americans’ thinking about radiation. On balance, our nuclear anxieties endure today.
Matt Lavine, Assistant Professor of History, Mississippi State University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/42722
2015-06-08T10:17:18Z
2015-06-08T10:17:18Z
The failed effort to ban the ultimate weapon of mass destruction
<p>A flawed nuclear weapons treaty has finally come unstuck at the United Nations. </p>
<p>For decades, non-nuclear armed states have been asking the nuclear armed states (primarily the US, Russia, Britain, France and China – referred to as the NPT-P5 - but also India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea) to fulfill the promises they have made to eliminate their nuclear weapons.</p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.un.org/en/conf/npt/2015/background.shtml">UN’s meeting</a>, held between April 27 and May 22, was the latest in a set of reviews of the 1970 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). It did not end well. </p>
<h2>Some success but limited</h2>
<p>Held every five years, the NPT reviews assess progress made towards a) preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons; b) enabling states adhering to the treaty to access nuclear technology for peaceful purposes; and c) in moving towards the eventual disarmament of the nuclear weapons held by the P5 states.</p>
<p>The NPT has been remarkably successful in many ways: 191 of the 195 states in the world have signed up, and the treaty’s guiding influence has helped to keep the number of countries acquiring nuclear weapons down to a handful. </p>
<p>Together with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the NPT has been important in regulating the peaceful use of nuclear technology and strengthening the legal case against weapons proliferation. One hundred and eighty-six states have forsworn any ambition to develop nuclear weapons in exchange for a promise made by the nuclear armed states – under <a href="http://www.un.org/en/conf/npt/2015/text.shtml">Article VI of the Treaty</a> – that they will eliminate their nuclear arsenals. </p>
<p>But the treaty’s success in achieving this disarmament has been extremely limited. </p>
<p>This is essentially because the P5 states seem wedded to holding on to their arsenals indefinitely, regardless of the fact that the non-nuclear states have kept their end of the bargain.</p>
<p>It was against this acrimonious background that states gathered between April and May at the UN in New York to review progress. Uppermost in the minds of the non-nuclear states was the need for the P5 to take their disarmament obligations seriously, and their frustration towards the nuclear states was palpably evident. </p>
<p>The non-nuclear states had assiduously conducted studies and reports and put together step-by-step processes and action plans designed to lead the nuclear states to disarmament. </p>
<p>But 45 years after negotiating the NPT and 25 years after the Cold War ended, <a href="https://fas.org/issues/nuclear-weapons/status-world-nuclear-forces/">there are still almost 16,000</a> nuclear weapons in existence, many of them on hair-trigger alert and far more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. </p>
<p>It is an arsenal capable of destroying our world hundreds of times over.</p>
<p>Given this, it was not surprising that last month’s meeting ended with states unable to reach a consensus document. It showed that the majority of states in the world have now given up hope that disarmament can be achieved via the NPT process. </p>
<h2>Enduring Risks</h2>
<p>But the continued possession of nuclear weapons puts all states in the international system at risk. As the non-nuclear states have pointed out over and over again, and as Australia’s <a href="http://dfat.gov.au/international-relations/security/non-proliferation-disarmament-arms-control/nuclear-weapons/canberra-commission/Pages/canberra-commission.aspx">Canberra Commission</a> noted back in 1996, as long as any one state has nuclear weapons, other states will want them too; as long as there are nuclear weapons in existence, there is a strong risk that – sooner or later – they will be used; and any use of nuclear weapons will be catastrophic. We have been fortunate in avoiding a nuclear weapons disaster so far, but there is no guarantee that this luck will hold. </p>
<p>Recent <a href="http://www.npr.org/2014/08/11/339131421/nuclear-command-and-control-a-history-of-false-alarms-and-near-catastrophes">books</a> and <a href="http://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/files/chathamhouse/home/chatham/public_html/sites/default/files/20140428TooCloseforComfortNuclearUseLewisWilliamsPelopidasAghlani.pdf">reports</a> show just how close we have come to nuclear weapons being used – either deliberately or by accident – and reveal an uncomfortable truth: we cannot remain blasé about this situation and continue to run that appalling risk.</p>
<h2>The impasse in New York</h2>
<p>The non-nuclear states had long pinned their hopes on Article VI of the NPT, and many other pledges made by the P5 over the years reiterated this obligation. But last month’s stalemate was the straw that seemed to break the camel’s back. </p>
<p>When the US and Britain (supported by Canada) refused to accept the RevCon’s draft final document - even with its watered-down language on disarmament - it was clear that the existing treaty was going nowhere. These states rejected a proposal to hold a conference to address the establishment of a Middle East WMD Free Zone, something that Arab and other non-aligned states had been repeatedly promised over the past twenty years. </p>
<p>Britain, the US and Canada refused to be bound by what they called an “arbitrary” timetable for such a conference. In reality, they were protecting their regional ally, Israel, which is widely known to possess around 80 nuclear weapons and <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/news/barak-israel-won-t-be-pressured-into-signing-nuclear-non-proliferation-treaty-1.284258">which refuses to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty</a>.</p>
<p>As the South African head of delegation <a href="http://www.un.org/press/en/2015/dc3561.doc.htm">noted</a>,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“The failure on the Middle East leaves us in a perverse situation [in which] a state that is outside of the Treaty has expectations of us and expects us to play by rules it will not play by and be subjected to scrutiny it will not subject itself to.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>She added that, “there was a sense that the NPT had degenerated into minority rule — as in apartheid-era South Africa — where the will of the few reigned supreme over the majority.” </p>
<p>This was perhaps the most telling indictment of the P5’s failure to disarm, and it drew support from the many NGO and academic delegates gathered at the UN’s General Assembly hall observing the process late into the final evening of the conference. </p>
<h2>A new ‘humanitarian initiative’ to ban nuclear weapons</h2>
<p>The result of the diplomatic fracture at the NPT conference is that most non-nuclear armed states will now take their cause elsewhere. </p>
<p>Disappointed that the NPT is really only a charade in which the interests of a small but defiant minority (the nuclear armed states) will inevitably prevail, and with no prospect of nuclear disarmament in sight, 107 states have now signed the “<a href="http://www.icanw.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/HINW14vienna_Pledge_Document.pdf">humanitarian pledge</a>” to work toward a treaty banning nuclear weapons. </p>
<p>This pledge was initiated by Austria in December 2014, following a series of high-level gatherings that explored what has now come to be called the <a href="http://www.chathamhouse.org/about/structure/international-security-department/humanitarian-impact-nuclear-weapons-project">Humanitarian Impacts of Nuclear Weapons</a> (HINW) project. The failure of the NPT process, evident in New York last month, means that these states consider themselves free to pursue the de-legitimization of nuclear weapons in this way. </p>
<p>And this way, with its emphasis on the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons, HINW is rapidly gaining support. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/84181/original/image-20150608-8706-w4dsu3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/84181/original/image-20150608-8706-w4dsu3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/84181/original/image-20150608-8706-w4dsu3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84181/original/image-20150608-8706-w4dsu3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84181/original/image-20150608-8706-w4dsu3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84181/original/image-20150608-8706-w4dsu3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84181/original/image-20150608-8706-w4dsu3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84181/original/image-20150608-8706-w4dsu3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Dr. Strangelove (Peter Sellers in the 1964 film) smiles from beyond the grave.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dr._Strangelove.png">From Wikipedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The HINW project has shown the <a href="http://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/resources/publications-and-research/publications/7422-unspeakable-suffering-the-humanitarian-impact-of-nuclear-weapons">devastating impact</a> that any use of these weapons will have on human life (with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, killed outright in the most gruesome and cruel way, and with ongoing radiation impacts on future generations); on <a href="http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/nuclear/">climate and the environment</a> (where the effects of a nuclear winter are likely to devastate the planet, affecting water resources and food production with <a href="http://www.ippnw.org/pdf/nuclear-famine-ippnw-0412.pdf">up to two billion people facing starvation</a>); and on other aspects of life, leading to a dystopian world barely imaginable to us today.</p>
<p>Not surprisingly, the nuclear armed states (<a href="http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=17323">and some US allies</a>) have <a href="http://www.sipri.org/research/disarmament/eu-consortium/publications/nonproliferation-paper-41">dismissed</a> the humanitarian approach as a diversion from “serious” efforts to address disarmament. </p>
<p>There are also those who think that the ban-treaty envisaged by the non-nuclear states will not bring about disarmament, because the nuclear states will simply <a href="http://www.sipri.org/research/disarmament/eu-consortium/publications/nonproliferation-paper-41">not sign it</a>. </p>
<p>They are right; but this is not necessarily the objective. A <a href="http://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/resources/publications-and-research/publications/8654-a-treaty-banning-nuclear-weapons">treaty banning nuclear weapons</a> will fill the legal gap that currently exists with regard to weapons of mass destruction: both chemical and biological weapons have been successfully banned, but no such ban exists against the most destructive of WMDs, nuclear weapons.</p>
<p>Just as the chemical and biological weapons, and also landmines and cluster munitions, have been outlawed, leading to dramatic reductions in the use of these weapons and an increasing sense that no “civilized” states would use them, so too will a nuclear ban focus on the unacceptable use of nuclear weapons. </p>
<p>In time, and with growing adherence, this ban is likely to be taken seriously by the nuclear weapon states and their allies.</p>
<p>Disarmament may still be a long way off, but at least this new vehicle promises more than the nuclear weapon states in the Non-Proliferation Treaty have been willing to provide. The NPT will continue to exist, as a somewhat hollow five-yearly diplomatic exercise, but there are no illusions now that it can lead to disarmament. </p>
<p>Dispiriting though this might seem, the failed conference now liberates the world to seek safety from nuclear annihilation by other, more promising means. This was the real achievement in New York last month.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/42722/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Marianne Hanson receives funding from the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for research on Revitalizing Disarmament Debates. </span></em></p>
A number of states have given up on pursuing nuclear disarmament through the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Instead they are moving to create a new legal mechanism for banning nuclear weapons
Marianne Hanson, Associate Professor of Internatioanl Relations, The University of Queensland
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.