A Vision of Ourselves

The potential significance of Hiroshima was never lost on Americans. Even bathed in the kissing and weeping at the end of the war, people realized that the remarkable Bomb that felled an empire and brought the world to rapt attention was not going to be a gift without a price. In the Aug. 20, 1945, issue of TIME, James Agee looked ahead: "With the controlled splitting of the atom, humanity, already profoundly perplexed and disunified, was brought inescapably into a new age in which all thoughts and things were split--and far from controlled." Agee was anticipating an opposition between people and their invention that would widen rapidly as the century continued, until eventually Americans would almost come to believe that the Bomb had invented itself. The new age would be seen not as a time of what people did, but of what was done to them.

Forty years now we have been living in that age, no longer new, yet nothing has replaced it. Those born in the atomic age most likely will die in the atomic age, if they do not die because of it. What people saw in Hiroshima was not only the suffering of people; the devastation of a city; the conclusion of a long and deadly war; the development of a scientific-military partnership; a new set of rules for U.S. Presidents and for international politics. It was a vision of the future, a forecast of the world's destruction. We did not like what we saw.

We therefore went about the business of accommodating that unhappy vision, and avoiding it at the same time. Both ends were achieved in the culture, where the collective consciousness could make its fears decorative. Ever since Hiroshima the Bomb has been at the center of films, books, plays, paintings, songs, intellectual life. It has not always played the same part. In the years immediately after Hiroshima, the public seemed not to want to confront the Bomb directly, and so created a culture in which the end of the world was given a sidelong glance. Lately, we cannot seem to get enough of the Bomb, and stare with a hypnotic fixation.

In a way, the world of politics brought about both extreme reactions because the Bomb, of necessity, was kept secret from the public before it was first used and, perhaps of necessity, has been treated by those in charge of it as a secret ever since. What are secrets to governments are mysteries to the public; no one outside of a very few people in power has ever understood how nuclear weapons are developed, or why. Suddenly there was Hiroshima, suddenly the hydrogen bomb, suddenly the MIR Vs. Yet while the machinations of the experts and professionals have remained hidden from the public, the effects of the weapons have been continually described and displayed. In the space between secret processes and demonstrated effects, the public imagination has produced works in which the ends were always clear, and thus focused upon, and the means obscure, and thus ignored.

What people saw initially in Hiroshima seems to have scared them more profoundly than they realized they could be scared. In 1946, W.H. Auden coined the term the age of anxiety. But anxiety did not begin to plumb the peculiar fear engendered by the Bomb: not only the image of world death, unwarned of, unsignaled, but of death-in-life, be-numbed survivors of an atomic explosion wandering poisoned and helpless as the Hiroshima citizens Yoshitaka Kawamoto saw the morning of the bombing. Or, less dramatically, wandering in a world so near the brink of atomic war that they could no longer live freely and wholeheartedly, a world in which it feels dead to be alive. Yale Professors Robert J. Lifton and Kai Erikson defined the psychological boundaries of that world: "The question so often asked, 'Would the survivors envy the dead?' may turn out to have a simple answer. No, they would be incapable of such feelings. They would not so much envy as, inwardly and outwardly, resemble the dead."

Responding to such an image, American culture of the late 1940s and early 1950s absorbed a whole range of fictional characters who were at once alive, dead and menacing. Frankenstein, created by Mary Shelley in 1818, came into his own. The Frankenstein movies starring Boris Karloff were produced in the 1930s, but not until 20 years later, when these films found a showcase on television, did the American imagination fully respond. Like the Dracula, mummy and zombie films of the same period, which were almost equally popular, the Frankenstein story was not only of the living dead, but contained the additional element of science run amuck, which allowed another connection to be made to nuclear threat. Here was the atomic tale writ wild. Brilliant Dr. Frankenstein, tampering with nature, gums up an experiment intended to safeguard life and make men immortal, and suddenly a little girl lies dead in the monster's arms. Not since Daedalus had a technological feat backfired more painfully.

King Kong was also revived as part of the folklore of the era, eliciting an audience's sympathies by representing a force taken out of nature and abused. The innocent atom wore a gorilla suit. But new figures arose as well. Stories about whole galaxies demolished by radiation were common; the Japanese, as if performing for Americans the dual function of accusation and exculpation, produced dozens of English-dubbed movies about radioactive monsters from the sky or the deep. More subtle were such films as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which simultaneously confronted the fear of death-in-life and embraced it; people might be better off devoid of emotions (read normal life). The effect was to make a pre-emptive strike against the Bomb.

It is even possible to see the films of the early 1950s not just as anti-Bomb, but anti-Communist. The nation was being told that it was better to be dead than Red, with the implication that the two conditions were indistinguishable. Thus images of de-spirited human beings may have represented victims of a dual menace. In practical terms the two threats could be viewed as one and the same; surrender to the Soviet way of life, which was seen as death-in-life, would first entail a nuclear war. The central danger of the undead creatures--that they had expansionist tendencies to make the entire world undead--may have cooperated nicely with the scares of the times.

Exceptions to these indirect dealings existed too. In 1958, Tom Lehrer was singing We Will All Go Together When We Go ("universal bereavement,/ an inspiring achievement"). Robert Lowell, ahead of his time in such things, wrote Fall 1961: "All autumn the chafe and jar/ of nuclear war;/ we have talked our extinction to death." Marguerite Duras's Hiroshima, Mon Amour might also be judged an exception to the indirectness of the period. In some respects, Hiroshima, Mon Amour is not about Hiroshima at all, only using the occasion as a locus for showing how people learn to deal with a tragic past--in the case of the woman in the story, a past that has nothing to do with Hiroshima. Yet choosing Hiroshima as the context, the witness box, for the woman's revelation is a way of saying: here is the place one either remembers or forgets, and the consequence of forgetting is Hiroshima.

The majority reaction of the era, however, still was not to look squarely at what was feared. Literature took a very sidelong glance. In what other age would the perpetually haunted and displaced hero have emerged with such stature? In what other age would a writer like Kafka have been made so welcome: characters lost in and tormented by agnostic society, unaware of the location and identities of their enemies, feeling peril and persecution for unspecified crimes, and yet not innocent either?

In the 1960s the indirect approach to the Bomb seemed to be changing. In 1963 Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds was produced, and in 1964 Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. One was a standard something-is-wrong-with-nature film that made monsters of benignities, the other a headlong black-comic attack on the nuclear threat. Dr. Strangelove even incorporated the subtheme of nature out of control in the Bomb-crazy Dr. Strangelove's right arm, which goes its own way, fondly recalls the doctor's Nazi days and at one point attempts to strangle its "master." Commercially, if not critically, The Birds was the more successful of the two films, even though the character of the mad nuclear scientist (always suspect) became a permanent part of national folklore. Still, it seemed that we were not quite ready for so relentless a contemplation of nuclear disaster, especially one that began with the onscreen demurrer, "It is the stated position of the U.S. Air Force that their safeguards would prevent the occurrence of such events as are depicted in this film."

For the following decade, to the mid-1970s, the American public seemed to be supplied with diversions from the choice of either a direct or an indirect apprehension of the Bomb. One was the introduction into the culture of explicit sex and explicit violence--the explicitness seeming more significant than either sex or violence per se, and perhaps indicating a desire to take revenge on some threatening situation, if not the one that might have been uppermost in people's minds. Fictional heroes of the period may have offered similar distractions, functioning as little "bombs" in their own right. McMurphy of Ken Kesey's novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Yossarian of Joseph Heller's Catch-22 were at war with the world, and both nuked the societies that sought to contain them. One took on the scientists, the other the military: a one-two punch for the common man. Perhaps these explosions were not diversions after all but more sophisticated signs of frustration with a world where one's possibilities seemed to be denied and threatened with extermination.

Then, too, perhaps we were no longer so troubled by the Bomb, the initial shock having worn off. Like Lowell, Americans may have grown weary of talking, or dreaming, their extinction to death. The '50s and early '60s, the time of the horror film, were also the time of bomb shelters and "duck and cover" instructions to schoolchildren, who, like Kawamoto in the '40s, were taught to hide under desks in a bombing attack. The combination of fright and absurdity might have been enough to put the Bomb on the shelf for a while.

And there was Viet Nam, destructive and tragic in all other respects, but in terms of the tensions of the atomic age, a possible source of relief. Americans were engaged in a conventional war again, difficult enough without thoughts of the Bomb.

But then, in the late 1970s, really for the first time in more than 30 years, people started looking at the Bomb head on:

In art, Erika Rothenberg created an acrylic in 1982 called Pushing the Right Buttons, a painting of two buttons, the one on top labeled "Launch" and the one beneath it "Lunch." Alex Grey, in 1980, painted Nuclear Crucifixion, an oil on linen reminiscent of Matthias Gruenewald's painting in the 16th century, except here Jesus is crucified in a mushroom cloud. Michael Smith and Alan Herman produced a mixed-media work in 1983 called Government Approved Home Fallout Shelter Snack Bar, a survivalist food counter for the prudent nuclear family, equipped with provisions and three stools. In 1981 Robert Morris created a huge work for the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, titled Jornada del Muerto, after the site of the Trinity test. Morris' effort includes a drawing called The Miyuki Bridge, the bridge to which Kawamoto fled on Aug. 6, 1945, and photographs of Einstein and Oppenheimer juxtaposed with that of a torn and burned boy.

In the theater, Arthur Kopit wrote the End of the World in 1984, a serious comedy in which one of the characters says, "So I sometimes think, now it's all over and we're up there in the big debriefing space in the sky, and the good Lord decides to hold a symposium 'cause he's curious: How did this thing happen? And everybody says, 'Hey, don't look at me, I didn't wanna do it!' The end result being that everyone realizes no one wanted to do it!' " Other signs of the times are noisier. Video games enable players to nuke planets and stars. A rock group calls itself the B-52s. Who does not know the Grateful Dead?

The literature produced about the Bomb in the past few years has created a small industry. There have been recent novels about the "end," notably Denis Johnson's Fiskadoro, a story of survival in a contaminated world, like Nevil Shute's 1957 best seller On the Beach. A book of drawings by atom bomb survivors, The Unforgettable Fire, had great public impact in 1982 when the first American edition appeared. At least one major poet recently turned his hand to this subject. Robert Penn Warren's New Dawn chronicles the Enola Gay's mission from the takeoff on Tinian, to the flight over the Aioi Bridge--"Color/ Of the world changes. It/ Changes like a dream." The poem ends with an account of the flyers' celebrations, and then after:

Some men, no doubt, will, before sleep, consider One thought: I am alone. But some. In the mercy of God, or booze, do not

Long stare at the dark ceiling.

There is seemingly no end to the nonfiction works on this subject. Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth seized broad public attention in 1982 and opened the way to hundreds of books a year since then on arms control, arms negotiations, plans for peace, manuals on how to survive nuclear catastrophes. In the past two or three years, an entire intellectual community has been born around the Bomb, a portable Algonquin Round Table (minus the wit) made up of such people as McGeorge Bundy, George Kennan, Harold Brown, Robert McNamara and several retired military leaders, many of whom were among the policymakers who originally protected the secrecy of the Bomb and who have now gone public with strategic theories and proposals for arms limitations.

As these books and essays were being written, there were other diverse signs that the country was ready to look directly at the Bomb. Surveys begun in 1978 by John Mack, a psychiatrist at the Harvard Medical School, found that large percentages of schoolchildren experience a high degree of fear about impending nuclear war. Harvard's Robert Coles, the author of Children of Crisis, disputes such findings with research of his own. In Coles' studies the only children who worried inordinately about the Bomb were those whose parents were directly involved with antinuclear movements.

In 1983 the American Catholic bishops also addressed the nuclear issue squarely with their provocative pastoral letter: "The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response." Erupting from a church history that either ignored nuclear weapons or, in the nationalistic enthusiasms of some clergymen, saw such weapons as new arms for Christian soldiers, the bishops suddenly leaped forward: "We cannot avoid our responsibility to lift up the moral dimensions of the choices before our world and nation." They emphasized that they were speaking purely from a moral pulpit, "as pastors, not politicians." No sooner had they spoken, however, than many conservative American Catholics, among others, faulted their logic: the moral issue of the Bomb could not be dissociated from political processes; the bishops were at best naive, at worst disingenuous. One direct assault evidently deserved another.

Television has offered the most direct and dramatic presentations of the Bomb in recent years. In 1983 the TV movie The Day After shook much of the public, at least for a short while, with scenes of missiles shooting out of silos in Kansas cornfields and of dazed Midwesterners bravely trying to go on in the aftermath of a nuclear assault. (Kawamoto's criticism of The Day After was that the survivors would never have been that alert.) Other new films and television movies like Threads have graphically shown devastated cities and families, bodies crushed by buildings, the disintegration of flesh. None of these works deals realistically (if at all) with the political processes by which a nuclear war might be started, only with the dire consequences. That is typical of most recent cultural representations. If the popular imagination refused to touch the Bomb 30 years ago, it seems desperate to embrace the thing today.

Of course, both types of reactions, being extremes, may have little to do with the real fears of people; that is, the private feelings of an individual that his life is in a constant state of jeopardy, and that there is no course available but to live either sybaritically or timorously until the occasion of the inevitable boom. Cultural manifestations of public feelings are not very hard to read, but people are a lot more complicated than the things they produce to represent them. No film, book, play or game ever tells how seriously we take even our own ideas. It is possible that many of these works merely indicate how the public believes it ought to feel about the Bomb, or are part of the eschatological tendencies of any age.

Also, what appears to be antinuclear anger or trepidation in the country may simply be part of the perpetual up and-down attitude toward technology in general. Drs. Frankenstein and Strangelove are monsters to the Luddite sensibility quite apart from thoughts of a nuclear winter. It may be that after Hiroshima, Americans were no longer so keen on their seemingly infinite capacity to make things work, that the technological success of Hiroshima took the heart out of American can-do self-esteem. (At Los Alamos, a code name for the Bomb was the "gadget.") On this basis, one might work up an elaborate psychological theory explaining the subsequent fall of America's industry and the rise of Japan's as products of a national guilty conscience. But the American impulse to deplore and fret over mechanical progress has always been as strong as the impulse to pursue it; we condemned the car, which we love, long before we condemned the Bomb.

As for the feeling of powerlessness the Bomb engenders, that may be no different from the feeling of powerlessness brought by the domination of the state. Since the state controls the Bomb, it is easy to link the two as the same source of discomfort, and since the power of the state and the Bomb grew up together, they may be confused unconsciously. The trouble is that so many threats are attached to modern life that even something as blatant as a nuclear weapon cannot always be distinguished in an array that includes every terror from cancer and insanity to a telephone call in the middle of the night.

Yet there can be no question that the Bomb's presence has abetted, if not exclusively accounted for, much of what is nerve-racking and unsatisfactory in the world: a feeling of dislocation; aimlessness; loneliness; dim perceptions of unidentified dangers. Once the Bomb was used and the enormity of its effects realized, it had the impact of Copernicus, Darwin, Freud--of any monumental historical theory that proved, fundamentally, how small people are, how accidental their prominence, how subject to external manipulation. When the Bomb dropped, people not only saw a weapon that could boil the planet and create a death-in-life; they saw yet one more proof of their impotence. We live in a world of "virile weapons and impotent men," wrote the French historian, Raymond Aron, shortly before his death in 1983. We saw a vision of the future in Hiroshima, but we also saw ourselves, and (again) we did not like what we saw.

So what is there to do about the Bomb, which may be reduced in numbers but not removed? The answer seems to be: nothing. Citizens of nations were introduced to the art of modern warfare by the institution of strategic bombing, but unfortunately they were introduced solely as targets. The only maneuverability given ordinary people is how they may think about the Bomb. Is it possible to do that less fearfully and more clearly? Americans do not really believe in the Apocalypse, no matter how many movies we watch. One way or another in the next few years, we will want to stop looking too indirectly or too directly, and quietly come to terms with the Bomb.

Coming to terms with the Bomb means first accepting a basic fact about nature. When the Bomb was dropped, much was made of how man had conquered nature, exposed its deepest mysteries; in a sense, how nature, like Japan, had been brought to its knees. Yet it did not take long for the realization to sink in that the splitting of the atom not only gave people no greater authority over nature than they had before, it proved how helpless they were when handling natural forces. Since that time, there seems to have been a general divorce of human life from other natural phenomena. It is as if people concluded that with atomic chain reactions nature played a trick on the world, and is no longer to be trusted as an ally.

Coming to terms with nature simply means coming to terms with its neutrality, and that ultimately means coming to terms with oneself. If some "trick" was played by nuclear fission, it was people who played the trick on themselves. In a lecture to fellow scientists, Oppenheimer said, "In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose." Oppenheimer's presumption is that the physicists, as people, had not known sin before making the Bomb, which sounds like wishful confessing. Nature is what people choose to make of it.

This much we already know of ourselves: we kill one another, and from age to age we will always find instruments to suit that predisposition. In a way, the Bomb may have curbed the killer instinct because of the immensity of its power. People will not, cannot use absolutely any weapons they choose anymore. But the instinct is there still, storming back and forth like a shark beyond the reef. Whatever fears the Bomb has brought, the fear of our murderous capacities is deeper. However monstrous our visions of the Bomb's future, they were only mirrors of what we did, and would probably do again, if we could get away alive. Captain Robert Lewis, co-pilot of the Enola Gay, looked down on Hiroshima and asked, "My God, what have we done?" We did what we always do.

Yet coming to terms with oneself also means coming to terms with responsibilities. Taking responsibility for one's actions and decisions seems out of fashion in the atomic age, but in that TIME article of Aug. 20, 1945, James Agee immediately saw that individual responsibility was at the heart of Hiroshima: "When the Bomb split open the universe and revealed the prospect of the infinitely extraordinary, it also revealed ... that each man is eternally and above all else responsible for his own soul." Responsibility for one's own soul inevitably involves others, since no one judges the quality of his soul in isolation. If what we saw in Hiroshima was ourselves, we saw everyone else at the same time. Everybody lives in Hiroshima.

In the end we face a hard, self-evident fact: whether because we dropped the Bomb, or because we live in its shadow, or because we are able to use it, we have created an enormous handicap for ourselves, and we will have to learn to survive and endure in spite of that handicap. The handicap will not disappear. It only remains to be seen if we will disappear, or if, by an effort of will and judgment, we can make our handicap work in our favor, never pretending that we are anything but imperfect, yet also understanding that imperfection is a state of grace, a gift tied directly to a perception of common humanity.

Suzuko Numata understands this effort. She is a tiny woman of 61 who, like Yoshitaka Kawamoto, was not far from the hypocenter when the atom bomb exploded. Like Kawamoto, Numata devotes much of her time to speaking to schoolchildren about her experiences on Aug. 6. She spends her private hours in her orderly, sun-filled house on a canal, tending a small garden bright with hydrangeas, peonies, red camelias, sweet daphne and amaryllis; and taking care of several cats and a large, cheerful doll that sits near the porch and whose outfits she changes according to the seasons. Numata smiles easily when she talks. She enjoys watching the ballet on television, and she moves her hands to the steps of the dancers.

She grew up in Hiroshima, the eldest daughter in a family of five. She took lessons on the harp and in folk dance and ballet. "I loved to dance. My dancing made my parents happy." Like all Japanese young women at that time, Numata anticipated a life of marriage and children, and she was engaged to marry a soldier. The wedding was planned for some time shortly after Aug. 8, 1945, when her fiance was expected home on leave.

When the Bomb fell, Numata, then 21, was working in a military communications office. The building collapsed in the explosion, and her left ankle was severed. That night she was taken to a hospital, where she remained for three days with no doctor, no nurse or medicine. Her left leg became gangrenous. She believed she was going to die. She hoped that her fiance would visit her, but, as she learned from his parents a few days later, the young man had been killed in action in July. Her third day in the hospital, a doctor came, examined her leg and told her that it would have to be amputated to save her life.

"I said, 'Doctor, if I lose my leg, I will never be married, never work again.' And the doctor said, 'You are not the only patient here. Think hard about your choice by the time I return.' I was in despair. All I ever hoped for was to be taken away in a single act. I wanted to die."

In the dark, Numata heard the voices of three other victims, who advised her what to do. The first voice spoke gibberish; "I could not even make out if it was the voice of a man or woman." The second voice was somewhat clearer but faint. She could not understand what that voice was saying either.

"The third person, too, was gasping. But I could hear the words. He said, 'All of us here are going to die at any moment. But you ... if your leg is amputated, you still would live. Live. Take the operation, and live. '

"So I decided, and I said, 'Bring the doctor.' "