The Legacy of Hiroshima

Fallout: A Historian Reflects on America's Half-Century Encounter with Nuclear Weapons. By Paul Boyer. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998. Pp. 280. 39.95 (hb); 17.95 (pb).

Nuclear Annihilation and Contemporary American Poetry. By John Gery. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996. Pp. 235. $49.95.

Hiroshima's Shadow. Edited by Kai Bird and Lawrence Lifschultz. Stony Creek, CT: The Pamphleteer's Press, 1998. Pp. 584. $35.95 (hb); $25 (pb).

Sometimes the brief conversations we have with strangers are the most memorable of our lives. I remember vividly an encounter on October 22, 1962, the first frantic day of the Cuban missile crisis. A sophomore at UCLA, I joined fellow staff members of the campus newspaper to watch on television at 4 p.m. President Kennedy's address to the nation, in which he announced a blockade of Soviet merchant ships, presumably laden with intermediate-range nuclear missiles, sailing toward bases in Cuba. Ninety ships of the American fleet, backed up by sixty-eight aircraft squadrons and eight aircraft carriers, were moving into position to intercept the Soviet ships. "Let no one doubt that this is a difficult and dangerous effort. . . . No one can foresee precisely what course it will take or what costs or casualties will be incurred," he said. Given Nikita Khrushchev's bellicose rhetoric leading up to the event, one possible scenario was that a confrontation at sea would quickly escalate into an exchange of nuclear firepower between the two nations. I left the campus in a state of terror, trying to suppress images of "casualties" resulting from this superpower war of nerves. Walking to my car I noticed another anguished young man, who crossed the street and confronted me: "Do you think this is it?" "What do you mean?" I asked, to delay the question I knew was coming. "I mean, do you think this is the end?" We exchanged a long look of utter hopelessness. I realized that I could not say or think with certainty, No, this can't be the end! He drifted away despairingly. A momentary encounter, and yet the trauma induced by not being able to deny that the end of the world could occur in a matter of days, or hours, made a wound in my consciousness that thirty-seven years have not begun to heal.

This hallucinatory spot of time is a small example of what Paul Boyer calls "cultural fallout" or "nuclear jitters" in his latest book on the social ramifications of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the nuclear arms race that ensued during the Cold War period. Boyer's earlier book, By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (1985), focused on the first five years of the nuclear era, showing how "the imagination of disaster," to use Henry James's seminal phrase, saturated American culture, and how the U.S. government labored to neutralize anxieties by promoting atomic energy as a beneficent force likely to change everyone's life for the better. Fallout is not a monograph but a collection of writings from diverse publications—The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, The Nation, The New Republic, Journal of the American Medical Association, and other sources, including books of essays by different hands—all concerned with America's half-century involvement with nuclear weapons.

A recent survey showed that young people, asked to name the most important technological invention of the twentieth century, were divided between antibiotics and the computer. Boyer obviously believes that humanity will be very fortunate indeed if at the end of the next century nuclear weapons technology does not top the list. He notices a substantial ebbing of interest in nuclear issues proceeding from diminished fear following the end of the Cold War. (At this writing, recommendations for increased military funding to develop a missile defense system seem likely to renew the national debate over nuclear issues.) Boyer observed the same cycle of complacency following the test-ban treaty in the early 1960s and the "Star Wars" defense initiative proposed by President Reagan, in part to blunt the momentum of the nuclear freeze movement, in the 1980s. There is an instinctive desire in the body politic to put nuclear weapons out of mind, but history shows that whatever is repressed in our day-to-day consciousness returns with a violent vengeance in the popular media, which continue to feature threats of annihilation in the most lurid forms imaginable. Boyer's book is a sober intellectual reminder that the subject is in fact inescapable, and that the "destabilized and decentered world" that has succeeded the bipolar Cold War structure threatens us in both familiar and unfamiliar ways. Fallout, among its other purposes, tries to count the ways.

Hiroshima is the code-name and the paradigm for "the phenomeon of unintended consequences" that Boyer studies throughout the book. By this he means that all offensive actions threatened or deployed against others in the nuclear age inevitably have a reciprocal effect on oneself. No sooner did America reduce two Japanese cities to radioactive rubble than the public imagination in America created a stockpile of nightmare scenarios about this nation's future devastation. The Bomb thatFell on America, a pamphlet poem of 1946 by Hermann Hagedorn, catches the sense of the situation. Recycling some material from his earlier book, Boyer notes that newspaper editorials and cartoons immediately following Hiroshima initiated the mordant belief that the mobilization of the nuclear juggernaut foreshadowed its likely use, probably in a much more sophisticated form, against American cities. Likewise, the U. S. government's intention to frighten the Soviet Union away from militaristic policies by brandishing the bomb had exactly the opposite effect: it provoked the Soviet leaders into a frenzy of copycat engineering until they too had the A-bomb and then the H-bomb. The Frankenstein myth was quickly pressed into service as the presiding narrative of the postwar period.

Hiroshima exists as "a kind of hole in human history," in Mary McCarthy's phrase. Boyer calls it "a radical turning point in human history." The decision to drop the bomb is one of the most controversial political acts of this century, and Boyer presents the evidence that supports his own view that Japan, battered by military reversals in the southern islands and fearful of Russian entry into the war against the imperial armies in China, Manchuria, and Korea, was clearly suing for peace in the weeks and days before the sixth of August so that a little patience and diplomacy would have forestalled the need for a superweapon. He considers the argument that, in Truman's words, "a half-million American casualties" (he later upped the number to a million) would result if the Allies had to invade Japan, and finds it wanting. And he documents the racism that clearly underlay the decision to drop the bomb, noting that after four years of superheated patriotic rhetoric following Pearl Harbor, there was sentiment in the U.S. for wiping out the entirety of the Japanese nation, not only two of its cities. In one of the book's best chapters, Boyer shows that President Truman was representative of the American public in the way that he defended and even exulted in the atomic bomb in his official pronouncements—"This is the greatest thing in history," he declared—but worried about its effects in his private diaries and letters. Truman could be belligerent in memoranda and press conferences, warning his Communist antagonists that he could take out their cities, too, but when General MacArthur strategized aloud about using the atomic bomb to resolve the maddeningly inconclusive Korean War, Truman fired him. He was equally appalled by advice that he use the bomb to quicken an end to the Berlin blockade crisis. Keeping one's balance in an apocalyptic era has been difficult for all politicians, but Truman, especially, felt the burden of unprecedented power.

Truman emerges as a complex figure in Boyer's account, a representative man caught in a dilemma of tragic proportions. Boyer, a social activist as well as an academic, definitely wants to identify heroes and villains in his narrative. The villains include many hawkish bureaucrats, military and political, who concealed the horror of Hiroshima from the public by actively censoring reportage well into the 1950s and whose scenarios for the future consisted of little else but plans for the obliteration of the Soviet Union and China; propagandists like Bernard Baruch who stampeded the public into a virulent anti-communism that justified a massive buildup of nuclear weapons; scientists like Edward Teller who either for ideological or professionally self-serving reasons demanded and engineered bigger and scarier bombs; and plenty of journalists, like William L. Laurence of the New York Times, who uncritically reprinted whatever pro-nuclear handout was given them by the men in charge. (And what a gendered subject this is! Helen Caldicott, anti-nuclear crusader, is the only woman mentioned in a torrent of names throughout the book.)

The heroes are those who uncover and report the truth about the effects of nuclear warfare, beginning with the facts on the barren ground. John Hersey gets credit for his landmark chronicle, Hiroshima (1946), though Boyer is troubled by the documentary nature of his account: "Hersey's restrained, uninflected New Yorker prose offered a kind of expiation and catharsis, a closing of accounts on a troubling episode, rather than a challenge to push on to a deeper, more threatening engagement with it." He prefers David Bradley's angrier book No Place to Hide (1948), with its protests about the poor treatment of bombing victims and its clear warnings about nuclear dangers. Though Boyer neglects some important books in the field—for example, Spencer R. Weart's Nuclear Fear (1988) and Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell's Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial (1995)—he pays tribute in historiographical passages to the crusade among his fellow scholars to locate and publicize the life-and-death information hidden on purpose or by accident.

If historians emerge as heroes because of their indefatigable archival research into (formerly) classified documents, so too do some doctors who resisted their profession's inclination to support the growth of the nuclear industry. As Boyer tells it, "In the later 1940s, the organized medical profession wholeheartedly lent its prestige and organizational strength to the government's civil-defense program, including the systematic effort to downplay the radiation hazards of atomic war and persuade the public that with sufficient preparation, American society could absorb a large-scale atomic attack with a minimum of disruption." Physicians who broke ranks and declared that prevention of war was the only responsible therapy, who organized groups like SANE, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and The Committee for Nuclear Information, provided data that embarrassed the more zealous advocates of nuclear strategy.

Policy-makers like Henry Kissinger, for example, opposed media efforts to imagine and document in any detail what a nuclear attack might actually look like. One recalls Kissinger's alarmed outcry after the showing on television of The Day After, a movie that presented scenes of a Midwestern American locale transformed into Hiroshima. Americans should not be shown such images because they can't handle the truth, Kissinger insisted; such movies only inspire dread and panic in the public political culture; matters of nuclear policy must be left to experts like himself. On the contrary, according to Boyer, "surveying the half-century history of U.S. nuclear-weapons research and testing, one can hardly avoid the conclusion that time and again it was people' or at least local groups of politically attentive citizens, who proved wiser and more responsible than the experts." And creative media figures who employed nuclear themes in their products can be labeled heroes as well. Boyer examines the subversive film Dr. Strangelove as an eruption of crude Rabelaisian humor that exploded much of the false sanctity that people like Herman Kahn, Teller, and Kissinger had wrapped themselves in as hierophants of the Higher Mysteries of nuclearism. The cleansing and scornful laughter provoked by that film opened the way to books and movies in abundance that clarified some crucial issues facing the nation, though of course these issues were often sensationalized by best-sellers and big-budget action movies as well. As Boyer points out, the public can become numbed by repeated narratives of nuclear jeopardy, and in periods when international tensions cool off, people may forget entirely about simmering long-range problems like nuclear waste. Nevertheless, Boyer affirms that we need artists to confront our historical condition and play out every imaginable scenario to keep us alert and reform-minded.

The limitations of a patchwork book like this one are familiar to all readers. In spite of Boyer's headnotes and framing prefaces, the essays have a somewhat arbitrary organization and they are of uneven rhetorical effect. A book review abuts a sustained scholarly essay; a polemical piece precedes a dispassionate one. Scholarly apparatus appearing in the original publications have been dropped. One reads such a book for the cumulative weight of its occasional insights, not for any coherent argumentative schema or narrative continuity. There is overlap and repetition; the phrase "as we have seen" gets pressed into service a good deal. But I found essays that presented material new to me. For example, a chapter from Boyer's book When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (1992) offers a fascinating survey of evangelical prophecy about the end of the world stimulated by the invention of nuclear weapons. The question of whether these apocalyptic prophecies actually endanger nations and peoples, because they so often envision nuclear weapons as part of God's plan, needs more attention from theologians and moralists than it has received. And I am grateful for observations like the following:

 
A statistic from elsewhere in Boyer's book notes that in a poll conducted in 1969, the same year as the poll described above, only 2 percent of respondents listed nuclear war as one of their most important concerns. As so often in this murky area, facts seem either paradoxical or contradictory. Nevertheless, one would like to believe that each generation inheriting the earth has a greater revulsion against nuclear weapons than its predecessors.

 
As a cultural historian Boyer possesses the indispensable character trait of doggedness: he roots out revealing documents buried hundreds of miles deep, he describes ephemeral tracts and position papers spanning six decades, and he catalogues multitudinous examples of nuclearist discourse in the popular culture. Did he actually play any rounds of Nintendo's Dixie Kong's Double Trouble so he could report the degree of nuclear danger in its Cold War scenarios? Did he sit through the film Jackie Chan'sFirst Strike so that he could take note of the stolen nuclear warheads that form its formulaic plot? Did he read every word of all those thousand-page Tom Clancy novels to bring us news of their apocalyptic attitudes? If one's working thesis is that the culture has been thoroughly saturated with nuclear imagery, one is condemned to recover evidence from all of its sources, a task of almost unimaginable tedium.

But there is one type of discourse Boyer leaves virtually untouched, and that is poetry. Tom Lehrer's clever songs are referenced three times in the book, but only one poem (by William Dickey) is discussed, and that is only because it remarks on John Hersey's Hiroshima. In my reading in this area I have found this to be standard practice. In Lifton and Mitchell's Hiroshima in America, for example, poetry goes unmentioned for some four hundred pages, till the final two pages of the appendix. This continued neglect has left the field wide open for a book-length study of the subject, and in Nuclear Annihilation and Contemporary AmericanPoetry John Gery has undertaken it with impressive results. (Too late for his consideration but useful as a complement to his study is an anthology of 1995, Atomic Ghost: Poets Respond to the Nuclear Age, edited by John Bradley, from Coffee House Press.) Any future historical study of nuclear culture that does not make use of this one will be incomplete.

Gery's premise is that all thinking about nuclear weapons is symbolic thinking, since only a minuscule percentage of the world's population has any experience of or contact with such weapons and their catastrophic consequences. The real work of the creative imagination cannot be the roller-coaster ride of anxiety and relief provided by action movies and trashy best-sellers, but the "reconstructive" labor, performed by the culture's acknowledged experts in symbol-making, of credibly imagining a future in which the nuclear threat is radically diminished as an obsession. "[Poetry's] impact may be neither readily felt, nor easily measured," Gery writes, "yet by cracking open 'our modes of thinking,' reconfiguring our language and scrutinizing how we imagine ourselves in the nuclear era, in the long run its importance may well rival that of international diplomacy for the reduction of nuclear arms or scientific discoveries that render radioactivity less menacing." Gery's assumption in such a jaw-dropping assertion is that of Percy Shelley when he called poets "the unacknowledged legislators of the world." Poets model for mankind the semi-magical ways of thinking that allow us to achieve control over the technological monsters our fears and brute instincts of aggression have sent into the world, and to the extent that those models influence leaders and public alike, at however many removes, they have a spiritual effect akin to that of religion and science.

Gery's subtitle for the book is "Ways of Nothingness," a phrase he borrows from something a Hiroshima survivor told Robert Jay Lifton. By taking the full horror of the atomic explosion into his psyche, by bravely occupying the void created at the center of his mental world, this survivor could travel ground zero with a "double consciousness" and rebuild the ruins of his personal universe one day at a time. Poets, Gery believes, can explore in lyric and dramatic forms that way of nothingness, not to exorcise the nuclear shadow (it will never go away) but to help us think and feel our way through its ubiquitous and permanent presence in our lives. Put another way, poets can offer consolation and understanding to the entire world community on this fatality just as they have comforted individuals fearful of death. Now that we as a world community face not just personal physical deaths but the prospect of a "second death," the extinction of the species, of time and culture and history itself, we require modes of intellection virtually unprecedented in the literary tradition.

Gery begins with a theoretical chapter that summarizes the arguments of authors like Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno, Edith Wyschogrod, Robert Jay Lifton, Terrence Des Pres, Jonathan Schell, and Jacques Derrida. Perhaps "diagnoses" is a better word than ." The wound to human consciousness occasioned by Hiroshima and its aftermath, these authors agree, is indisputable and irremediable. Perhaps the wound has made art itself a victim, and nothing can be said or created that does not seem trivial in the context of a future vulnerable to total annihilation. Or perhaps art can enliven us, provoke and startle us, out of the insensible spectatorial trance we fall into when we gaze at the Medusa-head of nuclear war. If we feel not quite alive, not quite wholly existent as our forefathers and foremothers did because the future of their world was secure, serious art can teach us to "think about nothing" and by doing so cause us to think dialectically about something that is not nothing; in short, how to "confront annihilation's otherness without capitulating to its seductive power." This is the most challenging and ambitious chapter in the book, sometimes unnecessarily opaque (as when Derrida takes center stage) but essential prefatory material for what follows.

Gery lays out a spectrum of rhetorical strategies, chapter by chapter, by which modern poets have coped with the condition of nuclearism. In each chapter he first surveys a number of discrete examples, and then presents an extended discussion of one author. In the second chapter, on protest poetry, we hear of the most familiar and accessible subgenre of verse on this topic. Protest poems are a recognizable form of civic action, assertions of the individual as a moral monitor of the government. Politicians may never hear or read a protest poem, but such poems galvanize the power of resistance and strengthen the dissident conscience in ways that have incalculable effects as such discourse percolates upward toward the Thrones and Dominations of a political system. Gery cites Allen Ginsberg's "Plutonium Ode" as the most famous nuclear protest poem, and also discusses work by Sonia Sanchez, Daniel Berrigan, Gary Snyder, and Alan Williamson. He then provides an extended analysis of Denise Levertov's many poems, angry and ruminative, about the nuclear condition. It is the nature of protest poetry that it tends to approach but never transform the deepest imperatives outlined by the theorists mentioned above. Levertov writes movingly about the possibilities for spiritual renewal—she became increasingly religious toward the end of her life—but in a passage like the following one senses not much more than an elaboration of the slogan, "Give Peace a Chance":

 
Gery credits Levertov with developing a poetry that manages to sound the alarm without becoming either histrionic or disillusioned. Ginsberg's ode may be more superficially appealing because of its dynamic chant and phantasmagoric imagery, but Levertov's quieter poems carry more conviction as well as more consolation; they do more than stamp their foot and demand loudly that the Plutonium monster go away. I agree with Gery that they are the consummate examples of this fundamental response to the nuclear era.

Chapter 3 is devoted to "The Apocalyptic Lyric," which Gery defines as a poem dominated by some metaphorical re-imagining of annihilation. Poets facing the nuclear threat are understandably divided, he points out, between wanting to use familiar tropes (the mushroom cloud, the blast blossoming in the sky) to render the inconceivable devastation of a nuclear blast, or to use strange and sublime imagery to wrench the reader's mind around to a wholly new conception of nothingness and extinction. Nuclear technology has "demythologized" the totality of human symbolic thinking, he claims; now poets must seize the initiative and re-symbolize the public imagination by means of speculative figures of speech. Metaphors are means of resisting the power of the bomb, but they also run the risk of dulling our sensitivity to reality by aestheticizing or poeticizing it. Gery considers the case of Paul Zimmer, one of only two significant poets he knows of (John Engels is the other) who actually experienced bomb blasts up close, during the mid-1950s when he served in the U. S. Army in Nevada. (One of the useful purposes served by thematic studies like this one is to bring to the foreground interesting poets like Zimmer who get lost in standard chronicles of contemporary poetry.) Zimmer's poems, along with those of Toi Derricote and Adrienne Rich, find analogues in our familiar landscape for the experience of nuclear terror, often suggesting our complicity with warmakers in the tropes they choose (domestic violence, or violence against animals). Richard Wilbur is the subject of extended coverage in this chapter, and Gery offers good reasons why Wilbur's poems, especially "Advice to a Prophet" and "In the Field" rank among the greatest on this subject. Surely, readers would forgive Gery if he had cast his glance across the Atlantic just once in the book and remarked on Ted Hughes's volume Crow (1970), arguably the most ambitious and successful effort in our time to conceptualize the "nothingness" of a nuclear future:

 
Wilbur's and Hughes's poems describe the way the imagination is changed in the course of contemplating the prospect of annihilation. Chapter Four, on "Psychohistorical Poetry," studies poets who "reconfigure [the nuclear threat] in the context of world history, national or group rituals, psychic . . . phenomena, or myth." Whether it's the poet Ai writing about J. Robert Oppenheimer or Celia Gilbert imagining the bombing of Hiroshima through the eyes and actual words of a pilot, or Marc Kaminsky using the words of the hibakushas or survivors of Hiroshima, these poems try for an alienation effect or psychic distancing that gives readers a more capacious sense of the nuclear condition. (Gery finds that some poets, like Frederick Turner, achieve a psychic and historical distance that is too remote to adequately cope with the facts on the ground.) He devotes extended attention to James Merrill's book-length poem, The Changing Light at Sandover, which delves into the cultural ideology behind nuclearism. Merrill's poem, based on readings of the Ouija board, is peculiar and often incoherent, but it remains one of the most complex and sustained meditations on the spiritual crisis of nuclear culture that we have. The poem is so skeptical about everything that it ideally creates in the reader a resistance to all the narrow scientific practices and political orthodoxies that breed technologies of overwhelming power. It brings to mind the epics of Blake and Shelley in its mind-transforming visionary rhetoric.

Finally, Chapter Five, "The Poetry of Destinerrance," borrows some terms and ideas from Derrida to praise works that may not take nuclear weapons as their subject but in their form reflect the random, uncertain, nihilistic, anarchic, aleatory, or undecideable structures of thinking enforced on an age perched at the boundary of nothingness. Poems by Thom Gunn and C. K. Williams, among others, "risk meaninglessness" in order to model for readers the experience of blankness or emptiness, the evacuation of all those logical supports that nuclearism has rendered absurd in the last half-century. John Ashbery (of course!) is the central figure in this pantheon, and his book Shadow Train is examined as a central work in the tradition pioneered by Eliot's "The Waste Land" and other modernist texts that mark a rupture in the poetic tradition. There is every reason for Gery to pursue the topic this far, both to document the depth of despair to which the spirit descends in the nuclear age (Ashbery's poems, even when comic, concern the devastations of time and loss) and to proffer, however gingerly, the possibility of renewal that experimental poems of this kind offer the reader who follows the way of nothingness. I find some of Gery's readings tendentious, but the book would be less engaging without this bold and suggestive chapter.

Serious books of fiction in English about nuclearism have been much studied by scholars (see Gery's useful bibliography)—for example, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Tim O'Brien's The Nuclear Age, Carolyn See's Golden Days, and Martin Amis's Einstein's Monsters, not to mention the worthiest efforts of science fiction and compelling novels from Japan itself, of which Masuji Ibuse's Black Rain remains the undisputed classic. Commentary on poetry has been scarce, usually in anthologies of protest poetry and special issues of little magazines. Gery's important achievement has been to integrate a field full of fugitive insights into a coherent schema in which the integrity of the poems as linguistic artifacts is fully honored at the same time that their revelations about our precarious life in the next century nourish our ability as citizens to exert control over our fate. For historians and psychologists, especially, Gery's book fills a gap in their own treatments of this subject. Educators in all fields should become better acquainted with the range of texts surveyed in this book, because all the articulate wisdom in the world will be barely enough to avert the danger these poems stare at without blinking.

 
The fiftieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima in 1995 was the occasion for a massive outpouring of books and articles on the event. Lagging somewhat behind, due no doubt to its larger size and ambition, Hiroshima's Shadow appeared from a small press late last year and received virtually no attention. It contains sixty-five pieces, ranging from a page or two to lengthy essays, written during the last half-century, about the place "in the historical consciousness of the United States" of Hiroshima. Hiroshima is an American "legend," the editors claim, every bit as much as Gettysburg, the Alamo, or Little Big Horn. We think we understand it, but then some event, such as the controversy in 1994-5 at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum about displaying the Enola Gay, erupts into a rancorous national debate, and we realize that we are no further enlightened than in 1945. This anthology invites us to revisit the essential question, "Why were Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombed?", and observe how the arguments play out on all sides.

There can be no brief summary of a book which includes profound commentaries by the likes of Albert Camus, Reinhold Niebuhr, Lewis Mumford, Albert Einstein, and Bertrand Russell, as well as many historians. In general, the selections critique the decision to drop the bomb and deplore the revisionist history (especially on the right) that perpetuates the belief in American exceptionalism. The philosopher John Rawls, who calls the bombing of all Japanese cities in 1945 "very great wrongs," offers this cautionary statement: "The way a war is fought and the emotions ending it endure in the historical memory of peoples and may set the stage for future war." I wish to focus on one section of the book only, devoted to the Japanese point of view. In 1995 the Mayor of Hiroshima, Takashi Hiraoka, said in an interview, "No matter how you communicate a tragedy in words, the listener cannot experience it directly." As with the Holocaust, we must listen with special care to those people who did experience firsthand what John W. Dower, writing in Hiroshima in History and Memory, edited by Michael J. Hogan (Cambridge University Press, 1996), calls "nuclear genocide." Their testimony has the power, even when worded somewhat awkwardly, to cut through the abstractions that surround this subject and shock us into a recognition of the human dimensions of the catastrophe.

For example, compare the artful poems by Americans described above with this excerpt from a stark dramatic lyric by Tamiki Hara, a poet who survived the blast at Hiroshima but took his life in 1951 when he heard rumors that the atomic bomb would once again be used in Korea:

 
This is a poem pieced together out of the wretched utterances overheard by the author as he wandered half-mad through the burning streets of Hiroshima. John Gery speaks about the subversion of the poetic tradition by poems that obscure their meanings, but a poem like Hara's violates poetic decorum more radically and troubles the reader more enduringly than verse that merely mystifies. Or consider this passage, from what John W. Dower calls "the single best-known Japanese cry of protest against the bombs":

 
There are no depths to such poems, no hidden meanings recoverable by literary criticism. Like the denatured creatures described in memoirs by survivors, these bodies of language cannot be assimilated into our normal lives; once we confront them, our lives are changed, our consciousness radically reformed.

Hiroshima's Shadow has essays that defend the decision to drop the bomb on Japanese cities, such as Paul Fussell's classic, "Thank God for the Atom Bomb," and essays that critique that decision, including well-researched ones by Gar Alperovitz and Barton Bernstein, but the most memorable piece of writing, to my mind, is the account by a Japanese doctor, Shuntaro Hida, of his efforts to save the wounded in the first devastating week following the blast. Of course we understand that the firebombing of cities was a "normal" occurrence of World War II, that Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo, to cite the most notorious examples, suffered greater losses of life than did Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and that all sides in the conflict perpetrated atrocious horrors, as the Nazis did in their carpet bombing of cities like Rotterdam and Belgrade, and Japan did in Nanking, Bataan, the Burma Road, and elsewhere; but something different confronted Hida on Day One of the nuclear era. Here is his description of the first victim he encountered when he bicycled into Hiroshima from a nearby farm where he had been tending a sick child:

 
This nameless, genderless phantom, scarcely human, is not offered self-consciously as a symbol, yet "it" seems to appear before the reader, as before the author, as the alien and foreboding figure of some prospective nuclear winter. As the doctor moves among dehumanized creatures like this, and later among those with radiation sickness, their bodies disfigured by keloids, their insides pouring out through orifices, he undergoes experiences he, and other writers in the anthology, can make sense of only through reference to nightmares, depictions of Hell, surrealist art, grotesque fiction such as Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher." The scenes of mass cremation, of amputation, of all the "strange deaths" of the innocents, rebuke the rational argumentation that surrounds this section of the book.

In City of Silence: Listening to Hiroshima (Orbis Books, 1995), Rachelle Linner quotes a remark by a survivor of Hiroshima, "I think it would have been a good thing if, in the course of this war, atom bombs had fallen on every country and the people of all those countries had experienced the atom bomb." The comment is not intended to be vindictive but therapeutic: if everyone had undergone the "victim consciousness" of those who survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki there would not be even the slightest aura of glamour to the apocalyptic imagery of nuclear power. Our substitute for that radical solution must be a constant immersion in the witness provided by the hibakushas and more generally by those who summon the ghosts of Hiroshima as mute appalling symbols of a weapons technology perpetually threatening to surge out of control. Multicultural approaches to modern history theoretically serve the purpose of heightening awareness to the claims of the "Other," but it's also possible that spreading the mystique of oppression-and-victimization so broadly may obscure the uniqueness of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These sites are different from Manzanar and Heart Mountain, the internment camps where Japanese-American citizens were unjustly imprisoned, and from sites where race and gender prejudice stigmatized minorities. To the extent that Hiroshima is eroded or diminished in symbolic significance by polemical overgeneralizations about the ill-treatment of people of color, the world will lose its grasp on the one traumatic fragment of reality it requires in order to think clearly about the unthinkable.

Some recent academic texts have pondered the reason why books and films of extreme violence are so popular in our era. They trace the likes of Stephen King and Nightmare on Elm Street back to the Puritan origins of our culture, to the impact of Gothic elements of Romanticism, to the lawless conditions on the western frontier. But I am persuaded also by an essay by Nobel Prize-winning author Ken zaburo Oe in Hiroshima's Shadow that argues for the nearly irresistible mythic power of the Hiroshima legend in our consciousness: "From the instant the atomic bomb exploded, it became the symbol of all human evil; it was a savagely primitive demon and a most modern curse." The bomb, and the nuclear missiles it fathered, will forever inform the art of all global cultures and the lives of every person on this planet. The books that study their hegemony are not much fun to read but they offer us much-needed ways of thinking, both symbolic and rational, and models for proactive behavior. Oe reminds us that the people, doctors and victims alike, who salvaged their lives in Hiroshima, who did not surrender but struggled to survive, "also salvaged the souls of the people who had brought the atomic bomb." The scholars and creative writers who have appreciated this hard lesson, and who have worked to enhance our understanding of it, may have produced the most important works of this generation.