The bomb that, 80 years later, continues to fall among us

That glow never dissipated. From that day on, a kind of inverted sun exploded in Hiroshima, unleashing a series of unpredictable ferments, a split occurred in the fabric of reality. Whatever our astrological chart on the day we were born, from that moment on, we would be condemned to live under the sign of that threat. The phenomenon was so unexpected and terrifying that the survivors could not prevent a certain aesthetic glow from contaminating their memories of the horrors they had confronted. Just seconds after the detonation of the Little Boy bomb, at an altitude of about 600 meters, a heat wave with temperatures exceeding 4,000°C expanded over a radius of more than two kilometers. This glow instantly charred exposed surfaces—and, by contrast, left permanent shadows imprinted on the concrete, steps, parapets, and walls of public buildings. Those bodies evaporated in an instant, but left a negative silhouette on the cement.

According to the description of Cormac McCarthy, one of the few modern narrators capable of conjuring a scene of desolation reminiscent of biblical catastrophes, suddenly everything seemed covered in rust, and there were charred carcasses of streetcars parked in the streets. The glass had melted from the frames and pooled on the brick floor. Sitting on the blackened springs were the charred skeletons of the passengers, their clothes and hair gone, blackened strips of flesh hanging from their bones. Their eyes were cooked, ripped from their sockets. Lips and noses destroyed by the flames. Sitting on the benches, laughing. The living wandered about, but had nowhere to go. They advanced into the river by the thousands, and there they died. They looked like insects, as no direction was preferable to another. Burning people crawled among the corpses like a horrific spectacle in a vast crematorium. They simply thought it was the end of the world. It hardly occurred to them that this had anything to do with the war. They carried their skin in a bundle before them, in their arms, as if it were clean laundry, keeping it from dragging in the rubble and ash.

The survivors had no idea what had fallen upon them, and it fell to US President Harry S. Truman to make the announcement, upon returning from the Potsdam Conference, in a broadcast from the Atlantic aboard the USS Augusta, informing the world that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. "Sixteen hours ago, an American plane dropped a bomb on Hiroshima, a major Japanese military base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of TNT. (...) It is an atomic bomb. It is the taming of the fundamental force of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its energy has now been unleashed against those who brought war to the Far East." He also made a point of emphasizing that if Japan did not sign its surrender immediately, it could "expect a rain of ruin from the sky such as has never before been seen on this Earth." The American leader added that Little Boy contained an explosive charge equivalent to more than 20,000 tons of TNT, making it by far the largest bomb ever used in the history of warfare.

Three days later, the US dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki, and Japan surrendered. There was no further explanation, and in an effort to control information, US authorities severely limited the dissemination of facts on the ground, beyond the obvious evidence that each of those cities was destroyed by a single bomb.

The news caused little commotion in the United States. In his speech announcing the bombing of Hiroshima, President Truman expressed the sentiment of the vast majority of Americans by declaring that, with the atomic attack, the Japanese had reaped the storm they had sown; that attack was paying back the accumulated interest of the four years since the attack on Pearl Harbor. It's worth remembering that, at the time, hatred of the Japanese far exceeded hatred of the Germans. A poll conducted in mid-August revealed that 85% of respondents approved of the use of the bombs, and in another poll conducted around the same time, 23% regretted that the US had not had the opportunity to use "many more bombs before Japan had a chance to surrender."

In the months that followed, the American public was not confronted with the devastation wrought by the bombs, only able to admire images of mushroom clouds and hear triumphant descriptions given by the bomber crews themselves. Photographs of the devastated landscape of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were published in newspapers and magazines, but they seemed more like propaganda for American military might. And besides, after years of bombarding the public daily with images of devastated cities—from London to Warsaw, Manila, Dresden, Chungking, and so many others—none of it managed to elicit an emotional response.

Reporter John Hersey, who had spent his last years covering the war in Europe and the Pacific, also had no sympathy for the Japanese. He had referred to the Japanese as "physically stunted" and "a swarm of intelligent little animals." Standing over six feet tall, Hersey was a striking figure, educated at Hotchkiss and Yale, and always maintained a humble, self-effacing demeanor. He lived in New York, and everything seemed to be going well for him, making him a rising star in the city's editorial circles. He was 31 when the war ended, and having returned from another assignment in Moscow, he had just won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel "A Bell for Adano," set during the turbulent wartime in Sicily.

That was the plan: to dedicate himself to fiction, having already demonstrated his competence as a reporter. But there was still the issue of the atomic bombs, which he pondered after hearing Truman's announcement. It didn't take long for him to realize their grim implications. At the same time, he assumed that a single attack could have an immensely deterrent effect, immediately ending the conflict. But three days later, when the second bomb fell on Nagasaki, he clearly understood that it was a criminal act. He also saw the photographs that were then reproduced, recognizing that while the ruins were striking, they were nonetheless "impersonal, as rubble so often is."

It took several weeks for rumors of numerous cases of radiation sickness to begin circulating in occupied Japan, and from then on, the first echoes of this sinister and hidden element of atomic devastation gradually appeared in the Western press. US authorities rushed to categorically deny all such reports. In late August 1945, The New York Times proved to be as complicit with the executive's strategic foreign policy guidelines as it remains today, publishing a United Press dispatch from Hiroshima, but only after removing references to radiation poisoning. Once suitably doctored, the article grossly misled readers, conveying the idea that the victims were succumbing solely to the type of injuries sustained in a conventional bombing. An accompanying editorial note further asserted that, according to US scientists, the atomic bomb would have "no residual effects in the devastated area."

While it's true that shortly after the bombings, residual radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki dropped to levels that allowed reconstruction to begin, it's also true that less than two months earlier, when they conducted the top-secret Trinity test in New Mexico, scientists involved in the Manhattan Project were concerned that it could ignite the planet's atmosphere. They played the odds, and the truth is that Little Boy's construction proved highly inefficient, and while it contained 64 kilograms of uranium, less than a kilogram underwent nuclear fission. On the other hand, while the effects of the radioactivity dissipated surprisingly quickly, scientists had no idea of its long-term impact, and how tens of thousands of people had absorbed dangerous doses on the morning of the bombings, leaving their health seriously compromised, many of them eventually dying. The officer who had directed the atomic bomb program, Lieutenant General Leslie Groves, dismissed the reports of radiation as propaganda. “I think the best answer to anyone who doubts this is that we didn't start the war, and if they don't like the way we ended it, they should remember who started it.”

By the fall of 1945, reports of numerous cases of radiation sickness were already widespread. Called to testify before a Senate committee on atomic energy, Groves even had the gall to state before a Senate committee that radiation poisoning "is a very pleasant way to die."

It was then that the United States saw the opportunity to claim an epic feat. It was dominated by heroic bravado and fanfare, after a moral and military victory over the Axis powers that, in truth, inspired the best period of its influence in the world, a hope that would instigate bold social and economic reforms. But all of this depended on a sense of pride, which depended on not being able to approach Hitler in its willingness to commit atrocities against its enemies. After the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hersey wrote that if civilization still meant anything, it was necessary to recognize the humanity of its enemies. As the months passed, he realized that this was precisely the missing element in the accounts of the devastation. He saw a decisive flaw, and had the intuition that this was an unprecedented journalistic scoop.

With the support of The New Yorker, he flew to China in early 1946 and, from there, managed to enter Japan, where he obtained permission to visit Hiroshima. He stayed there for two weeks before returning to New York to evade censorship and begin writing. The result was an austere, 30,000-word masterpiece that detailed the experience of six survivors of the atomic attack. That August, the magazine dedicated an entire issue to publishing the report. It had a huge impact and sold out immediately. Einstein ordered a thousand copies. Several other publications paid for its reprint, and Knopf published it as a book under the title Hiroshima . The book was translated into many languages, and millions of copies were sold worldwide.

According to William Langewiesche, a journalist for The New York Times , "today, the text exists almost as an artifact—a brilliant work that has nevertheless lost its power to shake, in part because the stories it contains have already permeated our consciousness about nuclear war." However, in the meantime, and to revive interest in John Hersey's reporting, a book was published five years ago that helps understand the influence and fundamental role that report played in shaking not only the American public but also the global public out of their belligerent stupor and indifference. In Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World (2020), author Lesley M.M. Blume asserts that the report remains relevant today, even if in some respects it was already dated upon publication. In 1946, just a few months after the bomb was detonated, “the US had already begun developing the hydrogen bomb, which would prove many times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Japan.”

“Today’s nuclear arsenals include hundreds of bombs vastly more powerful than Little Boy or Fat Man,” Blume continues. “The most powerful nuclear device ever detonated—the so-called Tsar Bomba, detonated by the Soviets in 1961—was reportedly 1,570 times more powerful than the combined total of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and ten times more powerful than all conventional weapons used during World War II. The current global nuclear arsenal is estimated to contain more than 13,500 warheads. If a war were to break out today, the prognosis for the survival of civilization would be grim; as Einstein said after the bombings of Japan: ‘I do not know how the Third World War will be fought, but I can tell you with what weapons they will fight the Fourth—with stones.’”

Eight decades later, we are again called upon to discuss the implications not only of this technological effect, but of so many other means that escaped our control and ended up decisively degrading living conditions on the planet. Blume notes that, while the climate emergency has dominated headlines and debates as an existential threat to human survival, nuclear weapons are an even more pressing existential threat, one that, moreover, grows with the insecurity and crises that climate change has triggered. But for now, let's focus on the impact of the two nuclear bombs dropped by the US.

In Hiroshima, that inverted star caused a fissure in the world. Clocks stopped at 8:15 a.m., marking that suspended, frozen moment, as if time itself had been struck, fractured. "The dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, marked the beginning of a new countdown in history," noted Günther Anders. The US government had dropped a uranium bomb, codenamed Little Boy , covered in obscene messages addressed to the Japanese enemy. It was an experimental weapon, and the scientists who created it weren't sure it would work, so the inhabitants of Hiroshima served as guinea pigs. Those directly beneath the bomb's hypocenter were incinerated, erased from existence in an instant. An estimated 70,000 people were burned alive, crushed, or buried under the collapsed buildings, struck by shrapnel and debris. In the hours and days that followed, another 50,000 people would die from their injuries, and even those supposedly spared by the blast would later discover that something was wrong with their bodies, suffering the effects of acute radiation poisoning and dying in the months that followed. In total, the casualties are estimated at 280,000, and even in the midst of the deadliest conflict in history, this level of devastation caused by a single air-dropped device made it clear that the designs of war had suddenly shifted, shifting from domination and conquest to annihilation. Like scars in the fabric of time, countless clocks stuck at 8:15 were found, tracing the instant from which the linearity of time was shattered, leaving us orphaned of continuity. These clocks endure as symbolic corpses of time, reminding us that history can end not in centuries, but in a second. They seem to reject all the time that has been counted since then, making it clear how these 80 years have been lived under the influence of this void, this failure of narrative. From the perspective of these clocks, time has been abolished, and thus, the ghosts would not be those who perished there (those who don't even know they're dead), but us.

The death that was inflicted there on so many simultaneously has the shamelessness of something that isn't even cruel, but emerges with the coldness of something automatic, a chain reaction that introduces the pulse of the machine into the world, the force that transforms beings into numbers. Previous events can be noted, but never, anything on this scale. Life had never been so discredited, reduced to a statistic, to collateral damage in a cold and abstract logic. From that moment on, "the war we fear is always ongoing and never ended, just as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki never stopped falling," as Giorgio Agamben noted. Resuming the debate launched by Karl Jaspers' book *The Atomic Bomb and the Future of Humanity*, to which he imposes a series of reservations, Agamben admits that, "if in the past, as happened in the early days of Christian communities, men developed 'unrealistic representations' of an end of the world, today, for the first time in its history, humanity possesses the 'real possibility' of annihilating itself and all life on earth." Since we are unable to form any analogy that is on par with this very concrete possibility of the destruction of everything, what became clear is that Hiroshima did not fit into any previous moral category. But two years before Jaspers' book appeared, another philosopher of German origin had already taken his findings on the impact of the nuclear bomb on humankind's self-image further. In The Obsolescence of Man , Günther Anders argues that “the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki does not mark an episode in history, but an epochal split: the passage from a time of 'a world without man' to a time of 'a man without a world.' The event is not part of history, but its end point—for humanity as such.”

From the outset, Anders points to the element of blackmail, of constant oppression that a future nuclear disaster places upon us. "The bomb acts not as a means, but by its mere presence. Its existence dissolves history; and it is up to us to deal with it, rather than eliminate it."

It seemed as if the hour those clocks marked was the last, and that from that moment on, time ceased to count humanly. From that moment on, our imagination would always lag behind our capacity to cause a level of destruction that leaves us all adrift. "With the bomb, time was abolished. There is no longer any interval between command and extinction. In this atomic regime, every decision is at the same time a final form," writes Anders. We began to live under the weight of a sky that could crush us without the slightest warning. Something unimaginable shook us the moment the sky descended and turned inside out. The shadows on the wall remained, negative impressions of bodies suddenly evaporated by the heat of the explosion, signaling a type of death that reality had not yet witnessed, a death that seemed to surpass the body, leaving the impression of an absence wounding reality. Anyone who bothered to imagine the worst, no matter how much their apocalyptic anxiety spurred them on, would never grasp the hallucinatory dimension of a world in which even a single mistake can end our collective existence. Breathless from exhaustive surveillance, breathless from the oppression of this pervasive threat, we were forced to give in, to trivialize that occurrence, and from that moment on, we became a race in denial. Anders was the one who best expressed that evolutionary step taken through war, which disrupted the very possibility of history, since "what is at stake is no longer a conflict between nations, but the survival of the human species as a historical subject."

"When a bomb is dropped from immeasurable heights, reality ceases to resemble reality; it begins to resemble a world of dolls," Anders emphasizes. "Today's immorality does not reside in sensuality, infidelity, or exploitation—it resides in a lack of imagination. And the first postulate of our time is this: expand your imagination so you know what you are doing." This author also points out a terrible irony: how the nuclear bomb first had a unifying effect on humanity, while the first time we recognized ourselves as such came from this possibility of destroying ourselves all at once. "What religions and philosophies, empires and revolutions could not achieve—to make us truly human—it was the bomb that achieved it." The bomb thus created, negatively, an existential totality. At the same time, it altered the horizon of experience for the entire species. "It hangs like a dark cloud over all future generations. It is not a prophecy, but a fact: the bomb, as humanity's technological alliance against itself." For Anders, the very fact that life still existed was a mere coincidence, and it subsisted as a residue. Essentially, what he predicted long before it became clear was the profound crisis of imagination that, today, is evident in so many of the contradictions that have come to define daily life itself. According to him, the essential element of his analysis lies in what he calls the "Promethean gap," that is, the gap between what we can manufacture and what we can imagine or take responsibility for. Our shame had ceased to be configured on a moral level, taking on a Promethean aspect: we are ashamed of having manufactured a monster we cannot even imagine. The challenge to consciousness arose from this paradox, in which the prodigies of technology went beyond the very limits of imagination, assuming a dimension both symbolic and destructive, entirely beyond the control of those who produced them. "The political has been replaced by the apocalyptic," Anders determined, and this is because the atomic bomb could no longer be considered a weapon. "It is an end-of-the-world device."

From that moment on, our worst anxieties were justified, since the terror came not from the bomb, but from ourselves, from the feeling that we are illiterate about our own actions. In Fallout, Blume mentions how a recent survey of three thousand Americans revealed that a third of those surveyed would support a preemptive nuclear strike against an external enemy like North Korea, even if it meant the deaths of a million North Korean civilians. Thus, the real scandal after the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is not so much the level of destruction they cause, but the degree of indifference that leads a population to feel justified in precipitating the enemy in a scenario of absolute terror to dispel that fear. Therefore, what becomes clear is that the Hiroshima explosion was theological in nature, abolishing the gap between decision and destiny. If before the bomb, there was war and there was peace, there was combat and there was a truce, after it, everything happens simultaneously; there is no longer a civilian territory. All geography has been nuclearized, all politics has become terminal geopolitics.

And the most terrifying thing is that the bomb cannot be considered a disaster, since it did not arise from a mistake, but rather the result of an absolute technical success. The bomb was pregnant with all negativity, marking a break in which evil no longer sees reason to hide or dissemble. It is not an accident, but a product of excellence. The nuclear man inhabits the unthinkable as if it were his home. The most radical indifference has become the code he carries and transmits. We produce instant death and speak of this eventuality not as a form of constant oppression, but rather as "deterrence." But who deters whom? The weapon that no longer needs to be used proves more effective than the one that kills, because it paralyzes the spirit. As Anders noted, "deterrence is not a peaceful strategy, but a permanent psychic war." "As long as the bomb exists, Hiroshima is everywhere. Hiroshima has not passed. Hiroshima is our state."

Thus, from the moment that flash of light erupted, that beam of a thousand concentrated suns, we were captivated by the power of technology, and we began to live under a sky that is no longer merely meteorological, but eschatological, as Anders puts it. Thus, what is imposed upon us as an essential task is to force our consciousness to catch up with technology. "Our task is to radicalize our imagination. Otherwise, we will continue to live like sleepwalkers in the atomic age," warns the German philosopher. To escape this element of war that fills the horizon entirely, it becomes necessary to invent a morality commensurate with our capacity for destruction. Until we do, we are nothing more than ghosts still breathing. The living dead of the coming catastrophe.