Attempting to Know the Nuclear Unknown

One thing that struck me from the text, or what I was most drawn to, was Lifton’s interaction with the survivors of Hiroshima. I’ve always been interested in nuclear weapons, whether their use in World War II, the arms race during the Cold War, or, in terms of my fiction, the development and testing of hydrogen bombs in the Pacific. In my research and reading of other texts outside of Witness to an Extreme Century, I’ve found that the focus is often on, as Lifton explores, the technological aspects of the weapons or the military and sociopolitical implications that their use and existence has caused. So little do we hear about the hibakusha, a term I was glad to see Lifton use when referring to the survivors. “The explosion-affected people” are so often glossed over when discussing the bombing of Hiroshima and to read about Lifton’s experiences dealing with survivors sixteen years after Fat Man was dropped on the city and his personal evolution in dealing with them was fascinating. It makes me want to read Death in Life and see how it contrasts to other works.

By other works I mean specifically Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which, as the title implies, details the construction of the weapon, but I’m more interested in comparing it to George Weller’s book First into Nagasaki. That text, which compiles Weller’s previously censored writing (it was written in 1945 but not released until 2006) on the subject of slipping away from his military supervisors to visit the titular city before it was able to be “sanitized” for reporters is a fascinating read into an American in Japan directly after the end of the war, as opposed to Lifton’s experience over a decade later, when the world was changed but people still felt that resentment.

The distrust that he explores in the text of the survivors for Americans wasn’t something I had considered but made so much sense that I couldn’t believe it hadn’t struck me before. Of course the US would want to be examining the hibakusha, because if we could understand what happened to them because of our choice to drop the bomb, we could better understand what would happen if more were to drop in the Cold War.

I find myself agreeing with how Lifton characterizes the bomb in the beginning of chapter eight, when he describes it not only destroying cities and bodies but having “an all-enveloping impact on the mind” and that “anyone could be entrapped by it,” especially “people who sought to engage it with their imaginations.” It’s something we can’t fundamentally understand, despite how we try. There can be interviews or documentation and endless exploration, but we, nearly seventy years later, cannot fully understand what it was like, nor should we. And perhaps that is why I am drawn to it (I always have been, and remember having fears of nuclear annihilation as a child growing up at the end of the Cold War thanks to various films my father let me watch with him), because it’s something that is both known and documented but ultimately and always unknowable.