At 8AM ON AUGUST 6, 1945, AIR raid wardens in Hiroshima gave the “all clear” signal. The three American planes flying above the Japanese city seemed to be on a reconnaissance mission. People emerged from basements, went outside, returned to work. Fifteen minutes later one of those planes, a B29 Superfortress, dropped the first atomic bomb used on a civilian population. The bomb, nicknamed “Little Boy”, exploded above Hiroshima with a force equal to 20 million tons of TNT. Temperatures at the point of detonation reached more than 500,000C. Roughly half of the city’s population was killed or seriously wounded in an instant. Everything within three miles was heavily damaged. Windows shattered as far as 12 miles away. The prevailing wind at 8.15 had been about 5mph, but within moments of the blast 40mph winds created a firestorm. Dust and debris rose 70,000 feet (21,000m) into the air. US government investigators later concluded that Little Boy had performed “exactly as according to design”. Robert Lewis, co-pilot of the B29, watched Hiroshima vanish beneath a mushroom cloud and recorded in his journal: “My God, what have we done?”
Three days later Nagasaki was destroyed by an atomic bomb called “Fat Man” — and the day after that, the Japanese leadership decided to surrender. In the United States the Bomb was proudly viewed as a technological marvel, the “ultimate weapon” that had ended the Second World War and saved the lives of thousands of American servicemen preparing to invade Japan.
Newspaper accounts dwelled on the awesome power of the atomic bomb, the details of its construction, its potential in future warfare. William Shawn, the managing editor of The New Yorker, thought that a crucial aspect of the story was being neglected: what was it like to have one of these bombs dropped on your city? Shawn asked the American journalist John Hersey to write about the bomb’s impact on ordinary people in time for the first anniversary of its use. Hiroshima , the book that emerged, proved to be not only one of the most influential literary works of the 20th century — paving the way at The New Yorker for other classics of long-form reportage, such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood — but also a work that’s unfortunately relevant today, amid the nuclear proliferation, and sacred terrorism of our age.
Hersey was the right man for the job, a war correspondent who knew Asia well. He was 31 and had been born in Tsientsin, China. He learnt Chinese before he learnt English. He later attended Yale and Cambridge universities, then worked as an editor at Time magazine. After Pearl Harbor, Hersey covered the war for Time and for Life and wrote several books based on his experiences in combat. His first novel, A Bell for Adorno (1944), the tale of an American officer assigned to govern a small town in Sicily, won a Pulitzer Prize.
Hersey visited Japan for several weeks late in the spring of 1946, interviewed Hiroshima survivors, returned to the United States, wrote furiously, and submitted a 31,000-word manuscript to The New Yorker. It followed the lives of six people — a filing clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, the owner of a private hospital, a young widow, a surgeon at the Red Cross Hospital, a German Jesuit priest, and a pastor at the Hiroshima Methodist church — from the moment of the bomb’s detonation through the nightmare and devastation of the following year. Without preaching or moralising, Hersey described what happened to the people of Hiroshima. The facts spoke eloquently for themselves. He had originally hoped that the article would run in four parts. Instead Shawn persuaded The New Yorker’s editor, Harold Ross, to devote an entire issue to the piece.
Readers expecting The New Yorker’s usual light-hearted fare were stunned to find a lengthy description of what an atomic bomb does to people. Aside from advertisements and the “Goings on About Town” section, the magazine was devoted entirely to Hersey’s account. When the issue hit the newsstands in August 1946 it sold out within hours. No other magazine article has had such a profound effect. It presented a reality that most people had suspected but had been suppressed. It created sympathy for an enemy recently despised. It took the wind out of American triumphalism and created grave doubts about the atomic bomb. A month later the American Broadcasting Company cancelled half an hour of its programming for four nights so that actors could read the article over the radio. The text was broadcast by the BBC and by radio networks in Canada and Australia. In October, the article appeared as a book, Hiroshima. Hundreds of thousands of copies were distributed free by the Book-of-the-Month Club.
Hiroshima is full of apocalyptic scenes and imagery: a city in flames; voices crying out from the rubble; the dead and dying silently lying on the grass in a bucolic park; burn victims, horribly disfigured, wandering through streets like zombies; clothing patterns seared into the skin by the sudden flash; the lone surgeon in a six-hundred bed hospital, crammed with ten thousand people, bandaging wounds like an automaton. But the book is much more than a catalogue of the grotesque. It is a page-turner, a true story that continually defies belief. Hersey shows the horror but never lingers too long. For all the death and despair, in the end Hiroshima is oddly life-affirming. It is the story of six survivors. In an afterword written in 1985, Hersey describes the mundane lives later enjoyed by a few of these victims. Their perseverance suggests that the capacity to endure can overcome the instinct to destroy.
Hiroshima has grown more timely in the four decades since its publication. Today some of the most moderate and sober members of the American foreign policy establishment believe that a nuclear weapon is likely to be used against civilians during the next decade. In the worldview of radical Islamicists, New York City, London, and Washington, DC, constitute an axis of evil. William Perry, who was Secretary of State during the Clinton Administration, thinks there’s a 50-50 chance that a large city will soon be destroyed by a nuclear bomb.
Graham Allison, the founding dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, says the likelihood is greater than that. In his recent book Nuclear Terrorism (Times Books, USA, 2004), Allison gives an unsettling account of what would happen if a ten kiloton bomb (less powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima) exploded in Times Square. About half a million people would be killed instantly. Allison’s website, www.nuclearterror.org, shows what such a bomb would do to any city in the United States, once you type in its zip code. According to former Governor Thomas Kean, who co-chaired the 9/11 Commission, Osama bin Laden has not only studied Hiroshima, but has already tried to obtain nuclear weapons, convinced that the destruction of an American city would lead the United States to remove its troops from the Middle East.
Hersey died in 1993, having written more than two dozen books. None of them, however, approached the grandeur of Hiroshima. Six years ago the journalism school at New York University compiled a list of the 100 most important works of American journalism. I generally can’t stand such lists, but I agree with the ranking that Hiroshima was given: No 1. (Silent Spring was No 2; Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate reporting, No 3.) Hiroshima confronts one of history’s most important events with fierce honesty and compassion. “Few of us have as yet comprehended the all but incredible destructive power of this weapon,” the editors of The New Yorker wrote in August 1946, making their justification for giving Hersey’s article so much space: “and everyone might well take time out to consider its terrible implications”.
Eric Schlosser’s most recent book is Reefer Madness . . . and Other Tales from the American Underground (Penguin)
HIROSHIMA
by John Hersey
Penguin Modern Classics, £7.99; 208pp
£7.59 (free p&p) 0870 1608080
www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
How the bomb was born ... and used
1938 The process of fission — in which the energy stored in the nucleus of an atom is released — is discovered by German scientists.
1939 Albert Einstein warns President Roosevelt that recent research makes the construction of “extremely powerful bombs” conceivable, using radioactive materials such as uranium or plutonium.
1942 Roosevelt approves plans for the production of an atomic bomb, under the Manhattan Project. Some $2 billion is required to obtain sufficient materials.
1945 July The first nuclear test explosion is conducted in the New Mexico desert.
1945 August “Little Boy” is dropped on Hiroshima, killing at least 70,000.
1996 September Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty adopted. Between 1945 and this date more than 2,000 nuclear test explosions had been registered worldwide. How the Bomb was born ... and used
