FREE ESSAY ON ATOMIC BOMB

ATOMIC BOMB

The Atomic Bomb and its Effects on Post-World War II American LiteratureRob GioielliMrs.
McFarlanSenior English6 Dec. 1994Gioielli 1Rob GioielliMrs. McFarlanSenior English 6 Dec.
1994Then a tremendous flash of light cut across the sky . Mr. Tanimoto has a distinct
recollection that it traveled from east to west, from the city toward the hills. It
seemed like a sheet of sun. ?John Hersey, from Hiroshima, pp.8 On August 6, 1945, the
world changed forever. On that day the United States of America detonated an atomic bomb
over the city of Hiroshima. Never before had mankind seen anything like. Here was
something that was slightly bigger than an ordinary bomb, yet could cause infinitely more
destruction. It could rip through walls and tear down houses like the devils wrecking
ball. In Hiroshima it killed 100,000 people, most non-military civilians. Three days
later in Nagasaki it killed roughly 40,000 . The immediate effects of these bombings were
simple. The Japanese government surrendered, unconditionally, to the United States. The
rest of the world rejoiced as the most destructive war in the history of mankind came to
an end . All while the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki tried to piece together what
was left of their lives, families and homes. Over the course of the next forty years,
these two bombings, and the nuclear arms race that followed them, would come to have a
direct or indirect effect on almost every man, woman and child on this Earth, including
people in the United States. The atomic bomb would penetrate every fabric of American
existence. From our politics to our educational system. Our industry and our art.
Historians have gone so far as to call this period in our history the ?atomic ageO for
the way it has shaped and guided world politics, relations and culture. The entire
history behind the bomb itself is rooted in Twentieth Century physics. At the time of the
bombing the science of physics had been undergoing a revolution for the past thirty-odd
years. Scientists now had a clear picture of what the atomic world was like. They new the
structure and particle makeup of atoms, as well as how they behaved. During the 1930Os it
became apparent that there was a immense amount of energy that would be released atoms of
Gioielli 2certain elements were split, or taken apart. Scientists began to realize that
if harnessed, this energy could be something of a magnitude not before seen to human
eyes. They also saw that this energy could possibly be harnessed into a weapon of amazing
power. And with the advent of World War Two, this became an ever increasing concern. In
the early fall of 1939, the same time that the Germans invaded Poland, President
Roosevelt received a letter from Albert Einstein, informing him about the certain
possibilities of creating a controlled nuclear chain reaction, and that harnessing such a
reaction could produce a bomb of formidable strength. He wrote: This new phenomena would
lead also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable, though much less
certain-that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed (Clark
556-557).The letter goes on to encourage the president to increase government and
military involvement in such experiments, and to encourage the experimental work of the
scientists with the allocation of funds, facilities and equipment that might be
necessary. This letter ultimately led to the Manhattan Project, the effort that involved
billions of dollars and tens of thousands of people to produce the atomic bomb. During
the time after the war, until just recently the American psyche has been branded with the
threat of a nuclear holocaust. Here was something so powerful, yet so diminutive. A bomb
that could obliterate our nations capital, and that was as big as somebodies backyard
grill. For the first time in the history of human existence here was something capable of
wiping us off the face of the Earth. And most people had no control over that destiny. It
seemed like peoples lives, the life of everything on this planet, was resting in the
hands of a couple men in Northern Virginia and some guys over in Russia. The atomic bomb
and the amazing power it held over us had a tremendous influence on American Culture,
including a profound effect on American Literature. After the war, the first real piece
of literature about the bombings came in 1946. The work Hiroshima, by Jon Hersey, from
which the opening quote is taken, first appeared as a long article in the New Yorker,
then shortly after in book form. The book is a non-fiction account of the bombing of
Hiroshima and the immediate aftermath. It is told from the point-of-view of six
hibakusha, or ?survivorsO of the atomic blast. In four chapters Hersey traces how the
these people survived the blast, and what they did in following weeks and months to pull
their lives together Gioielli 3and save their families. The book takes on a tone of
sympathy and of miraculous survival ?that these people were lucky enough to survive the
blast. He focuses not on the suffering of the victims but on their courage (Stone, 7).
The following passage from the first chapter shows this:A hundred thousand people were
killed by the bomb, and these six were among the survivors. They still wonder why they
lived when so many others died. Each of the counts many small items of chance or
volition?a step taken in time, a decision to go indoors, catching one streetcar instead
of the next?that spared him. And each that in the act of survival he lived a dozen lives
and saw more death than he ever thought he would see. At the time, none of them knew
anything (4). Hersey was attempting to chronicle what had happened at Hiroshima, and to
do so fairly. And in emphasizing the survival instead of the suffering he does not make
his book anti-American or something that condemns the dropping of the bomb. He simply
gives these peoples accounts of how they survived in a tone that is more journalistic
than sensationalistic. The book empathizes with their plight while it also gives an
American explanation for the bombing (Stone, 7). That it was an act of war to end the war
as quickly and as easily as possible, and to save more lives in the long run. Hersey did
all this to provide what he considered an evenhanded portrayal of the event, but he also
did not want to cause much controversy. Although it could be criticized for not giving a
more detailed account of the suffering that occurred, and that it reads more like a
history book than a piece of literature, HerseyOs book was the first of its kind when it
was published. Up until then all accounts of the Hiroshima bombing writings about it took
the slant that Japanese had ?deserved what we had given themO, and that we were good
people for doing so. These accounts were extremely prejudicial and racist. (Stone, 4)
Hersey was the first to take the point of view of those who had actually experienced the
event. And his work was the transition between works that glorified thedropping of the
atomic bomb, to those that focused on its amazing destructive powers, and what they could
do to our world. During the period immediately after the war, not much information was
available to general public concerning what kind of destruction the atomic bombs had
actually caused in Japan. But starting with HerseyOs book and continuing with other
non-fiction works, such as David Bradley's No Place To Hide, which concerned the Bikini
Island nuclear tests, Americans really began to get a picture of the awesome power and
destructiveness of nuclear weapons. They saw that these really Gioielli 4were doomsday
devices. Weapons that could change everything in an instant, and turn things into nothing
in a moment. It was this realization that had a startling effect on American culture and
literature. Some Americans began to say ?At any time we could all be shadows in the blast
wave, so whatOs the point?O. This viewpoint manifested itself in literature in something
called the ?apocalyptic temperO; an attitude or a tone dealing with a forthcoming end to
the world. Also, many people, because of this realization of our impending death, were
beginning to say that maybe their was something inherently wrong with all of this. That
nuclear weapons are dangerous to everyone, no matter what your political views or where
you live, and that we should do away with all of them. They have no value to society and
should be destroyed. This apocalyptic temper and social activism was effected greatly in
the early Sixties by the Cuban Missile Crisis. When Americans saw, on television, that
they could be under nuclear attack in under twenty minutes, a new anxiety about the cold
war surfaced that had not been present since the days of McCarthy. And this new anxiety
was evidenced in works that took on a much more satirical tone. And one of the works that
shows this satiric apocalyptic temper and cynicism is Kurt Vonnegut's Cats Cradle.
Vonnegut, considered by many to be one of Americas foremost living authors, was himself a
veteran of World War Two. He, as a prisoner of war, was one of the few survivors of the
fire-bombing of Dresden. In Dresden he saw what many believe was a more horrible tragedy
than Hiroshima. The allied bombs destroyed the entire city and killed as many people, if
not more, than were killed in Hiroshima. He would eventually write about this experience
in the semi-autobiographical Slaughterhouse-Five. This novel, like Cats Cradle, takes a
very strong anti-war stance. But along with being an Anti-war book, Cats Cradle is an
excellent satire of the Atomic Age. It is essentially the story of one man, an author by
the name of John (or Jonah) and the research he is doing for a book on the day the bomb
exploded in Hiroshima. This involves him with members of the Dr. Felix Hoenikker
family?the genius who helped build the bomb?and their adventures. In the book Vonnegut
paints an imaginary world where things might not seem to make any Gioielli 5sense. But
there is in fact an amazing amount of symbolism, as well as satire. Dr. Hoenikker is an
extremely eccentric scientist who spends most of his time in the lab at his company. He
is interested in very few things, his children not among them. His children are almost
afraid of him. One of the few times he does try to play with his children is when he
tries to teach the game of cats cradle to his youngest son, Newt. When he is trying to
show newt the game Newt gets very confused. In the book, this is what Newt remembered of
the incident:?And then he sang, ORockabye catsy, in the tree topO;he sang, O when the
wind blows, the cray-dull will fall. Down will come cray-dull, catsy and all.O ?I burst
into tears. I jumped up and ran out of the house as fast as I could.O(18)What Newt
doesnOt remember is what he said to his Father. Later in the book we find this out from
Newts sister, Angela that newt jumped of his fatherOs lap screaming ? No cat! No cradle!
No cat! No cradle!O(53) With this scene, Vonnegut is trying to show a couple of things.
Dr. Hoenikker symbolizes all the scientists who created the atomic bomb. And the cats
cradle is the world and all of humankind combined. Dr. Hoenikker is simply playing, like
he has all his life, that game just happens to involve the fate of the rest of the world.
And little Newt, having a childs un-blinded perception, doesnOt understand the game. He
doesnOt see a cat or a cradle. Like all the games Dr.Hoenikker plays, including the ones
with nuclear weapons, this one is mislabeled. This is just one of the many episodes in
the book that characterizes Dr. Hoenikker as a player of games. He recognizes this in
himself when he gives his Nobel Prize speech:I stand before you now because I never
stopped dawdling like an eight year on a spring morning on his way to school. Anything
can make me stop and wonder, and sometimes learn (17). And the Doctors farewell to the
world is a game he has played, with himself. One day a Marine General asked him if he
could make something that would eliminate mud, so that marines wouldnOt have to deal with
mud anymore. So Dr. Hoenikker thinks up ice-nine, an imaginary substance that when it
comes in contact with any other kind of water, it crystallizes it. And this
crystallization spreads to all the water molecules this piece of water is in contact
with. So to crystallize the mud in an entire armed division of marines, it would only
take a minuscule amount of ice-nine. Dr. Gioielli 6Hoenikker's colleagues see this as
just another example of his imagination at work. But he actually does create a small
chink of ice-nine, and when he dies, each of his children get a small piece of it. They
carry it around with themselves in thermos containers the rest of their lives. At the end
of book one small piece of ice-nine gets out , by mere accident, and ends up
crystallizing the whole world. The game Dr. Hoenikker was playing with himself destroyed
the whole world. The accident that caused the ice-nine to get out could be much like the
accident that could cause World War III. One small thing that sets off an amazing series
of events, like piece of ice-nine just falling out of the thermos. And Dr. Hoenikker,
like the scientists of the world, was playing game and caused it all. Here is a
description of the world after the ice-nine has wreaked its havoc:There were no smells.
There was no movement. Every step I took made a gravelly squeak in blue-white frost. And
every squeak was echoed loudly. The season of locking was over. The Earth was locked up
tight (179).This description eerily resembles what many have said the Earth will look
like during a nuclear winter (Stone, 62). In addition to Dr. Hoenikker and his doomsday
games, Vonnegut provides an interesting analysis of atomic age society with the Bokonon
religion. This religion, completely made up by Vonnegut and used in this novel, is the
religion of every single inhabitant of San Lorenzo, the books imaginary banana republic.
This is the island where Jonah eventually ends up, and where the ice-nine holocaust
originates. (It also, being a Caribbean nation, strangely resembles Cuba.) Bokonon is a
strange religion. It was created by one of the leaders of San Lorenzo, a long time ago.
Essentially, Bokonon is the only hope for all inhabitants of San Lorenzo. Their existence
on the island is so horrible that they have to find harmony with something. Bokononism
gives them that. It is based on untruths, to give San Lorenzans a sense of security,
since the truth provides none. This concept can be summed up in this Bokononist
quotation: ?Live by thefoma* that makes you brave and kind and healthy and happy.
*Harmless untruths (4)O The inhabitants of San Lorenzo do not care what is going on in
their real lives because they have the foma of Bokonon to keep them secure and happy. And
Vonnegut is trying to say that is what is happening to the rest of us. Americans, and the
rest of the world for that matter, have this false sense of security that we are safe and
secure. That in our homes in Indiana with our dogs and Gioielli 7our lawnmowers, we think
we are invincible. Everything will be okay because we are protected by are government.
This is the foma of real life, because we are trying to deny what is really going on.
WeOre in imminent danger of being annihilated at any second, but to deny this very real
danger we are creating a false world so that we may live in peace, however false that
sense of peace may be. Throughout the entire novel Vonnegut gives little snippets of
?calypsosO : Bokonon proverbs written by Bokonon. Verse like:I wanted all things To seem
to make some sense,So we could all be happy, yes,Instead of tense.And I made up liesSo
that they all fit niceAnd made this sad worldA par-a-dise (90).This calypso expresses the
purpose of Bokonon and why it, with its harmless untruths, exists. The following one is
about the outlawing of Bokonon. To make the religion more appealing to the people, the
leaders had it banned, with its practice punishable by death. They hoped that a renegade
religion with a rebel leader would appeal to the people more.So I said good-bye to
government,and I gave my reason:That a really good religionIs a form of treason
(118)These calypsos, and the rest of the book, express the points Vonnegut in a more
abstract , symbolic manner. They only add to the impact of the books message expressing
it in a very short, satirical way. The black humor used when talking about the end of the
world?the nuclear end?was pioneered by Vonnegut. But what many consider to be the the
climax of this pop culture phenomena is Stanley Kubrick's movie, Dr. Strangelove(Stone
69). Subtitled Or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb , this movie was
Kubrick's viewpoint on how mad the entire Cold War and arms race had become. Based a
little known book by English science fiction writer Peter George, Red Alert, the movie is
about how one maverick Air Force general, who is obviously suffering a severe mental
illness, concocts a plan to save the world from the Gioielli 8Communists. He manages to
order the strategic bombers under his command to proceed to their targets in the Soviet
Union. They all believe it is World War Three, and the General, Jack Ripper, is the only
one that can call the planes back. Kubrick's characters: Dr. Strangelove, President
Mertin Muffley, Premier Kissof and others, go through a series a misadventures to try and
turn the planes around. But the one, plane piloted by Major ?KingO Kong, does get
through, and it drops its bombload. This is where Kubrick tries to show the futility of
everything. The governments of both the worlds superpowers have thousands of safeguards
and security precautions for their nuclear weapons. But one man manages to get a nuclear
warhead to be hit its target. And this warhead hits the ?Doomsday DeviceO. The Doomsday
device is the ultimate deterrent, because if you try to disarm it it will go off. It has
the capability to destroy every living human and animal on Earth, and it does So it is
all pointless. We have these weapons, and no matter how hard we try to control them
everyone still dies. And so to make ourselves feel better about all this impending doom,
Kubrick, like Vonnegut, satirizes the entire system. By making such moronic characters,
like the wimpish President Mertin Muffley, Kubrick is saying, similar to Vonnegut with
Dr. Hoenikker, that we are even worse off because these weapons are controlled by people
that are almost buffoonish and childish. General Ripper, the man who causes the end of
the world, is a portrait of a McCarthy era paranoid gone mad. He thinks the communists
are infiltrating and trying to destroy are country. And he says the most heinous
communist plot against democracy is fluoridation of water:Like I was saying, Group
Captain, fluoridation of water is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist
plot we have ever had to face . . . They pollute our precious bodily fluids! (George
97)And General Rippers personal prevention of the contamination of his bodily fluids is
equally perplexing. He drinks only ? . . . distilled water, or rain water, and only grain
alcohol . . .O Kubrick uses this kind of absurd reasoning in his movie to show the absurd
reasoning behind nuclear weapons. Both him and Vonnegut were part of the satirical side
of the apocalyptic temper in the early Sixties. They laughed at our governments, our
leaders, the Cold War and the arms race, and tried to show how stupid it all really was.
But as time moved on, the writers, and the entire country, started to take a less narrow
minded view of things. The counterculture of the Gioielli 9sixties prompted people to
take a closer look at themselves. As thinkers, teachers, lovers, parents, friends and
human beings. And people concerned with nuclear weapons started to see things in a
broader context as well. Nuclear weapons were something that affected our whole
consciousness. The way we grew up, our relationships with others and what we did with our
lives. One of the authors who put this new perspective on things was the activist, social
thinker and poet Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg first made a name for himself in the 1950Os as
one of the foremost of the Beat writers. The Beats in the Fifties were a forerunner of
the more widespread counterculture of the late Sixties and early Seventies. And Ginsberg
evolved into this. He became a devoted leader in the counterculture, who set many
precedents for the Hippie generation. He lived in various communes, delved deeply into
eastern religions and experimented with numerous hallucinogenic drugs. In the earlier
part of his life Ginsberg had been a rebel against society. He was still a rebel but now
he was taking the form of activist. By the Seventies he was involved in many causes that
promoted peace and world harmony. What separated Ginsberg from other activists is that he
was one of the first and original members of many of these movements. Now he was the
father figure to many in the non-mainstream world. While teaching at his school of poetry
in Naropa, Colorado, Ginsberg became involved in protests against the nearby Rock Flats
Nuclear Weapons Factory. During the Summer of 1978 he was arrested for preventing a
shipment nuclear waste from reaching its destination and for numerous other protests
against the facility (Miles 474). From these experiences came two poems ?Nagasaki DaysO
and ? Plutonium OdeO. Both these poems exhibit Ginsberg's more mature style of writing
(Miles 475). The poems are more scholarly, containing many mythological and religious
allusions. But both these characteristics show how post war apocalyptic literature had
evolved. By the Seventies many writers, instead of taking the defeatist, satirical view
like Vonnegut, were beginning to take a make activist standpoint, like Ginsberg.
Apocalyptic literature also took on a more mature, scholarly tone, and was more worldly
and had a broader viewpoint. This stanza from ?Nagasaki DaysO shows how Ginsberg is
putting nuclear weapons into the context of the universal:2,000,000 killed in
Vietnam13,000,000 refugees in Indochina 200,000,000 years for the Galaxy to revolve on
its core 24,000 the Babylonian great year24,000 half life of plutoniumGioielli 102,000
the most I ever got for a poetry reading80,000 dolphins killed in the
dragnet4,000,000,000 years earth been born (701)The half life of plutonium is brought
together with dolphins and Indochinese refugees. Also, Ginsberg makes a reference to the
Babylonian great year, which coincides with the half life of plutonium. This cosmic link
intrigued Ginsberg immensely. That fact alone inspired him to right ?Plutonium OdeO. The
whole poem expands on this connection to plutonium as a living part of our universe,
albeit a very dangerous one. Here he mentions the Great Year:Before the Year began
turning its twelve signs, ere constellations wheeled for twenty-four thousand sunny
yearsslowly round their axis in Sagittarius, one hundred sixty-seven thousand times
returning to this night. (702) Ginsberg is also relating the great year, and the half
life of plutonium, to the life of the Earth. The life of the Earth is approximately four
billion years, which is 24,000 times 167,000 (Ginsberg 796) In ?Plutonium OdeO, Ginsberg
talks to plutonium. By establishing a dialogue he gives the plutonium almost human
characteristics. It is something, and is near us every day, and is deadly. In this
passage he is asking how long before it kills us all:I enter your secret places with my
mind, I speak with your presence, I roam your lion roar with mortal mouth.One microgram
inspired to one lung, ten pounds of heavy metal dust, adrift slowly motion over gray
Alpsthe breadth of the planet, how long before your radiance speeds blight and death to
sentient beings. (703) In putting his nuclear fears and worries on the table, and saying
that these things have pertinence to us because they affect how we live our lives and the
entire the universe, Ginsberg is showing how intrigued he is with plutonium in this poem.
By the time Ginsberg was publishing these poems in late 1978, post war literature had
evolved immensely. At first people had no idea about the bomb and its capabilities. Then,
as more information came out about what the bomb could do, they began to began to start
to live in real fear of nuclear weapons. The power of it, a creation by man that could
destroy the world, that was terrifying. Then some artists and writers began to see the
absurdity of it all. They saw that we were under control by people we did not, or should
not, trust, and were a constant state of nuclear Gioielli 11fear. So they satirized the
system unmercifully, and were very apocalyptic in their tone. But then things evolved
from these narrow minded viewpoints, and people began to envision nuclear weapons in the
context of our world and our lives. The atomic bomb and nuclear proliferation affected
all facets of our lifestyle, including what we read. Literature is a reflection of a
countryOs culture and feelings. And literature affected Americans curiosity, horror,
anxiety, cynicism and hope concerning nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons raised questions
that no one had dare ever asked before, and had given them answers that they were afraid
to hear. They have made us think about our place in the universe, and what it all means.
Gioielli 12Works CitedBartter, Martha A. The Way to Ground Zero. New York: Greenwood
Press, 1988. Dewey, Joseph. In a Dark Time. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press,
1990.Dr. Strangelove. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. With Peter Sellers, George C. Scott and Slim
Pickens. Highland Films Ltd., 1966.(This is a novelization of the movie. All qoutations
from the movie were transribed form this book) Einstein, Albert. ?SirO (a letter to
President Franklin D. Roosevelt) Einstein: The Life and Times. Ronald W. Clark. New York:
World Publishing, 1971. 556-557.George, Peter. Dr. Strangelove. Boston: Gregg Press,
1979.Ginsberg, Allen. ?Nagasaki DaysO and ?Plutonium Ode.O Collected Poems: 1947?1980.
Ed. Allen Ginsberg. New York: Harper and Row, 1984. 699-705. Gleick, James. Genius: The
Life and Science of Richard Feynman. New York :Vintage Books, 1992.Hersey, John.
Hiroshima. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985.Miles, Barry. Ginsberg: A Biography. New York:
Harper Perennial, 1989.Stone, Albert E. Literary Aftershocks: American Writers, Readers
and the Bomb. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994.Vonnegut, Kurt. CatOs Cradle. New
York:Dell, 1963.literary specialist.txtRob
Gioiellirrgioie@univscvm.csd.scarolina.eduenglishenglishthe atomic bomb and it's effects
on post wwll american literatureA-Honors High School18 yearsUSAE-mail