This weekend, for reasons best known to my subconscious, I’ve been re-reading Richard Rhodes’ classic “The Making of the Atomic Bomb”. It is a wonderfully rich work of history, as well as a deeply-felt scientific elegy. Among other things, Robert Oppenheimer is such a fascinating and conflicted character, a point driven home by Oppenheimer’s famously mixed remembrance of the moments after the Trinity test (the last sentence, in particular, has always stayed with me):
We waited until the blast had passed, walked out of the shelter and then it was extremely solemn. We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, from the Bhagavad-Gita: Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him he takes on his multi-armed form. and says, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.
As an aside, it is hard not to read the book without revisiting the human and heartbreaking “Unforgettable Fire”, a Japan Broadcasting Corporation collection containing drawings by atomic bomb survivors. See this and this for examples.
Related posts:
See also Japan at War – An Oral History by Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore F. Cook.
The last chapter of the book is an interview with Hayashi Shigeo, a photographer with a Japanese research team that visited Nagasaki in the days after the war.
“I went to the Mitsubishi arsenal and was photographing the torpedo plant. I was being escorted around by a Mitsubishi man. At some point he said to me, “This is where we made the first torpedoes, the ones dropped on Pearl Harbor at the onset of the Pacific War.” The wrenches and other tools used by the workers were lying there, all around me, as if they’d been set down a minute ago. I could have reached out myself and picked them up. Finally, he said quietly, “Mr. Hayashi, the very first torpedo was launched from here in Nagasaki, and in the end here’s were we were stabbed to death. We fought a stupid war, didn’t we?” The two of us just stood there in silence.
I wonder if our world leaders read blogs. They have a lot of thoughtful common sense.
Yes, it a great book. It espceially struck me when he compared the scale of the effort to build the bomb to that of the US car industry…. built from scratch in 2 years!
Read it at the University of Ottawa, for a philosophy elective in our engineering program. Excellent book, and that phrase has occupied a spot in my memory as well.