you and the atomic bomb essay

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You and the Atom Bomb

This material remains under copyright in some jurisdictions, including the US, and is reproduced here with the kind permission of  the Orwell Estate . The Orwell Foundation is an independent charity – please consider  making a donation  or becoming a Friend of the Foundation to help us maintain these resources for readers everywhere. 

Considering how likely we all are to be blown to pieces by it within the next five years, the atomic bomb has not roused so much discussion as might have been expected. The newspapers have published numerous diagrams, not very helpful to the average man, of protons and neutrons doing their stuff, and there has been much reiteration of the useless statement that the bomb “ought to be put under international control.” But curiously little has been said, at any rate in print, about the question that is of most urgent interest to all of us, namely: “How difficult are these things to manufacture?”

Such information as we – that is, the big public – possess on this subject has come to us in a rather indirect way, apropos of President Truman’s decision not to hand over certain secrets to the USSR. Some months ago, when the bomb was still only a rumour, there was a widespread belief that splitting the atom was merely a problem for the physicists, and that when they had solved it a new and devastating weapon would be within reach of almost everybody. (At any moment, so the rumour went, some lonely lunatic in a laboratory might blow civilisation to smithereens, as easily as touching off a firework.)

Had that been true, the whole trend of history would have been abruptly altered. The distinction between great states and small states would have been wiped out, and the power of the State over the individual would have been greatly weakened. However, it appears from President Truman’s remarks, and various comments that have been made on them, that the bomb is fantastically expensive and that its manufacture demands an enormous industrial effort, such as only three or four countries in the world are capable of making. This point is of cardinal importance, because it may mean that the discovery of the atomic bomb, so far from reversing history, will simply intensify the trends which have been apparent for a dozen years past.

It is a commonplace that the history of civilisation is largely the history of weapons. In particular, the connection between the discovery of gunpowder and the overthrow of feudalism by the bourgeoisie has been pointed out over and over again. And though I have no doubt exceptions can be brought forward, I think the following rule would be found generally true: that ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance. Thus, for example, tanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon – so long as there is no answer to it – gives claws to the weak.

The great age of democracy and of national self-determination was the age of the musket and the rifle. After the invention of the flintlock, and before the invention of the percussion cap, the musket was a fairly efficient weapon, and at the same time so simple that it could be produced almost anywhere. Its combination of qualities made possible the success of the American and French revolutions, and made a popular insurrection a more serious business than it could be in our own day. After the musket came the breech-loading rifle . This was a comparatively complex thing, but it could still be produced in scores of countries, and it was cheap, easily smuggled and economical of ammunition. Even the most backward nation could always get hold of rifles from one source or another, so that Boers, Bulgars, Abyssinians, Moroccans – even Tibetans – could put up a fight for their independence, sometimes with success. But thereafter every development in military technique has favoured the State as against the individual, and the industrialised country as against the backward one. There are fewer and fewer foci of power. Already, in 1939, there were only five states capable of waging war on the grand scale, and now there are only three – ultimately, perhaps, only two. This trend has been obvious for years, and was pointed out by a few observers even before 1914. The one thing that might reverse it is the discovery of a weapon – or, to put it more broadly, of a method of fighting – not dependent on huge concentrations of industrial plant.

From various symptoms one can infer that the Russians do not yet possess the secret of making the atomic bomb; on the other hand, the consensus of opinion seems to be that they will possess it within a few years. So we have before us the prospect of two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds, dividing the world between them. It has been rather hastily assumed that this means bigger and bloodier wars, and perhaps an actual end to the machine civilisation. But suppose – and really this the likeliest development – that the surviving great nations make a tacit agreement never to use the atomic bomb against one another? Suppose they only use it, or the threat of it, against people who are unable to retaliate? In that case we are back where we were before, the only difference being that power is concentrated in still fewer hands and that the outlook for subject peoples and oppressed classes is still more hopeless.

When James Burnham wrote The Managerial Revolution it seemed probable to many Americans that the Germans would win the European end of the war, and it was therefore natural to assume that Germany and not Russia would dominate the Eurasian land mass, while Japan would remain master of East Asia. This was a miscalculation, but it does not affect the main argument. For Burnham’s geographical picture of the new world has turned out to be correct. More and more obviously the surface of the earth is being parcelled off into three great empires, each self-contained and cut off from contact with the outer world, and each ruled, under one disguise or another, by a self-elected oligarchy. The haggling as to where the frontiers are to be drawn is still going on, and will continue for some years, and the third of the three super-states – East Asia, dominated by China – is still potential rather than actual. But the general drift is unmistakable, and every scientific discovery of recent years has accelerated it.

We were once told that the aeroplane had “abolished frontiers”; actually it is only since the aeroplane became a serious weapon that frontiers have become definitely impassable. The radio was once expected to promote international understanding and co-operation; it has turned out to be a means of insulating one nation from another. The atomic bomb may complete the process by robbing the exploited classes and peoples of all power to revolt, and at the same time putting the possessors of the bomb on a basis of military equality. Unable to conquer one another, they are likely to continue ruling the world between them, and it is difficult to see how the balance can be upset except by slow and unpredictable demographic changes.

For forty or fifty years past, Mr. H. G. Wells and others have been warning us that man is in danger of destroying himself with his own weapons, leaving the ants or some other gregarious species to take over. Anyone who has seen the ruined cities of Germany will find this notion at least thinkable. Nevertheless, looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity. James Burnham’s theory has been much discussed, but few people have yet considered its ideological implications – that is, the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of “cold war” with its neighbours.

Had the atomic bomb turned out to be something as cheap and easily manufactured as a bicycle or an alarm clock, it might well have plunged us back into barbarism, but it might, on the other hand, have meant the end of national sovereignty and of the highly-centralised police State. If, as seems to be the case, it is a rare and costly object as difficult to produce as a battleship, it is likelier to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a “peace that is no peace”.

Tribune , 19 October 1945

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Orwell and the Atomic Bomb

5th August 2020 by Richard Lance Keeble

George Orwell’s reflections about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August seventy-five years ago – in a wide range of writings – are among his most important and insightful.

His first major statement comes in an essay, ‘You and the Atom Bomb’, published in Tribune on 19 October 1945 where he concentrates on the Bomb’s impact on the state. ‘The discovery of the atomic bomb, so far from reversing history, will simply intensify the trends which have been apparent for a dozen years at least,’ he says. The great age of democracy and of national self-determination was the age of the musket and the rifle. Most nations could get hold of rifles so that Boers, Bulgars, Abyssinians, Moroccans and Tibetans could fight for independence, sometimes with success. Thereafter, every development in military technique has favoured the state. In 1939, there were only five states capable of waging war on the grand scale – now there are only three – and perhaps only two.

He writes: ‘So we have before us the prospect of two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds dividing the world between them. … It has been rather hastily assumed that this means bigger and bloodier wars and perhaps an actual end to the machine civilization. But suppose – and really this is the likeliest development – that the surviving great nations make a tacit agreement never to use the atomic bomb against one another ? Suppose they only use it, or the threat of it, against people who are unable to retaliate ? In that case, we are back to where we were before, the only difference being that power is concentrated in still fewer hands and that the outlook for subject peoples and oppressed classes is still more hopeless.’ The outcome is indefinite ‘peace that is no peace’.

This is Orwell, then, in his bleakest mood. Is there any hope ? Only if cheap and easily manufactured weapons can be developed that are ‘not dependent on huge concentration of industrial plant’.

He takes James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution (1941) to task for predicting that Germany, not Russia, would dominate the Eurasian land mass. Yet Burnham’s essential world view has turned out correct. ‘More and more obviously, the surface of the earth is being parcelled off into three great empires, each self-contained and cut off from contact with the wider world and each ruled, under one guise or another, by a self-elected oligarchy.’ Without directly saying so, Orwell suggests that most likely some combination of Western Europe and the United States, a nuclear-armed Soviet Union and East Asia, led by China, will dominate this new, permanent state of ‘cold war’. All this clearly anticipates the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four in which three super-states, Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, are at constant war. As Dorian Lynskey comments in The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 (2019): ‘Having invented the phrase “cold war”, he also anticipated the doctrine of mutual assured destruction.’

The Tribune essay significantly draws a response from Alex Comfort, the pacifist with whom Orwell has earlier engaged in a controversy in verse over the cases for and against waging war. Following the spat, the two, remarkably, become friends. In an article in War Commentary , just three weeks after the atomic blasts, Comfort condemns them as acts of ‘criminal lunacy which must be without parallel in recorded history’. Now, in his letter to Tribune , Comfort begins by praising Orwell for putting his finger ‘as usual, on the wider analytical point’ that different types of weapons tend to produce particular types of societies. Yet, he stresses, ‘another conclusion is possible besides mere resignation to the omnipotence of tyrants equipped with nuclear energy. Not only are social institutions dictated by weapon-power: so are revolutionary tactics, and it seems to me that Orwell has made the case for the tactical use of disobedience, which he has tended to condemn in the past as pacifism’.

Early in 1946, Orwell gives a talk to the Red Flag Fellowship and again expresses concern over the coming of the atom bomb. If war breaks out between the US and the USSR, he says, he would choose the US, since, despite all the faults of uncontrolled capitalism, they had at least liberty. The Soviet Union was so despotic there was little hope of liberty ever emerging there.

His fears over the emergence of phony wars between a tiny number of super-states, first expressed in ‘You and the Atom Bomb’, appear again in his essay ‘Toward European Unity’ for the July/August 1947 issue of Partisan Review . Within each nuclear-armed state, he says, the ‘necessary psychological atmosphere would be kept up by complete severance from the outer world and by a continuous phony war against rival states. Civilization of this type might remain static for thousands of years’. As Bernard Crick comments in his 1980 biography: ‘This is Nineteen Eighty-Four .’ But this time a new mood of idealism mixes with the pessimism. There is hope – and it lies in European democratic socialism ‘where people are relatively free and happy and where the main motive in life is not the pursuit of money or power’. ‘Apart from Australia and New Zealand, the tradition of democratic Socialism can only be said to exist … in Scandinavia, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, the Low Countries, France, Britain, Spain and Italy. Only in those countries are there still large numbers of people to whom the word “Socialism” has some appeal and for whom it is bound up with liberty, equality and internationalism.’

Atomic warfare plays a crucial role in Nineteen Eighty-Four . On one occasion, Winston Smith meets Julia, the ‘girl from the Fiction Department’, with whom he has a passionate affair, in the ruins of a church destroyed in a nuclear attack ‘thirty years’ earlier – which suggests the revolution which allowed the Party to seize power occurred in 1954. And when Winston reflects on his childhood in London, one of his earliest memories is of a sudden air raid. ‘Perhaps it was the time when the atomic bomb had fallen on Colchester. He did not remember the raid itself, but he did remember his father’s hand clutching his own as they hurried down, down, down into some place deep in the earth…’

To a certain degree, Orwell’s retreat to the remote Scottish island of Jura in the last years of his life in order to concentrate, away from the drudgery of journalism, on writing what was to become his dystopian masterpiece, was also inspired by his fear of atomic warfare. As he confides to his friend Tosco Fyvel in December 1947: ‘This stupid war is coming off in abt 10-20 years, and this country will be blown off the map whatever happens. The only hope is to have a few animals in some place not worth a bomb.’ And to his friend, Julian Symons, in December 1948, he writes: ‘If the show does start and is as bad as one fears, it would be fairly easy to be self-supporting on these islands provided one wasn’t looted.’

After the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four on 8 June 1949, in London, and five days later in New York, Orwell discusses with his publisher, Fredric Warburg, who visits him at Cranham sanatorium, his serious concerns over the misinterpretations of his great novel’s focus – in particular, on its warnings about atomic warfare. In Warburg’s follow-up note on the discussion, which appears in Volume 20 of the Collected Works , edited by Peter Davison, Orwell makes clear that the Soviet Union is not the primary target. Rather, ‘the danger lies in the structure imposed on Socialist and on Liberal capitalist communities by the necessity to prepare for total war with the USSR and the new weapon, of which of course the atomic bomb is the most powerful and the most publicized. But danger lies also in the acceptance of a totalitarian outlook by intellectuals of all colour.’

So right until near the very end of his life, atomic warfare is a major preoccupation of George Orwell – a fact worth remembering as people all around the country gather to mark the 75 th anniversary of the attacks on Japan.

Richard Lance Keeble was chair of The Orwell Society from 2013 to 2020. His latest books are Journalism Beyond Orwell (Routledge 2020) and George Orwell, The Secret State and the Making of Nineteen Eighty-Four (Abramis, 2020).

2 replies on “Orwell and the Atomic Bomb”

Like Orwell, I’m a rightist from a mode that has more currency in European modes than American as most American “conservatives” really are Classical Liberals or economic Libertarians not traditionalists as the USA broke all ties with traditional governance in its War of Independence that really wasn’t a revolution actually! We on the Right need to assess in the age of Maoist China’s COVID 19 the reality of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, whether it was right in being necessary militarily to make peace with beaten Japan because there was no moral justification as it was aimed primarily at civilians not military targets. Also, the results of Maoist China as the last totalitarian Super Power left to keep their system of organized oppression with no one able to censure them due to their weaponry and wealth for it even when their actions affect the peoples of other nations like they have! We Americans lost all moral high ground we could have because in Hiroshima and Nagasaki we did what no other country has done against a foe’s civilian centers to the extent we did it for what I say objectively were negligible military justifications for it! True rightist historian John Toland and George Orwell would have been in agreement on the action of unleashing atomic destruction on densely populated centers twice especially when once was more than enough as the Japanese were trying to make a honorable truce as Toland proves. Sad reality is that it seems the US authorities of the Harry Truman Administration were genuinely more interested to see the extent of the destruction their weapons could do not so much concerned about beating Japan as they knew it was militarily beaten. The Japanese had no Navy nor Air Force left. Tojo had been overthrown by the Emperor who wanted a peaceful truce. Sir Winston Churchill suggested restraint as he was afraid of China going Soviet if the Japanese were removed without there being any resistance to the Stalin’s USSR forces from the East. Japan had been an ally of the U.K.’s in WWI. Like Orwell’s fear of nukes, Churchill’s fear of a communist victory in China was correct! I would argue that the world today is a more scary place because of what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki when negotiations were not utilized in favor of seeing the destructive effects of nukes while paving the way for the Sovietization of Asia which occurred with the Korean and Vietnam Wars as a result! The USSR and all the Powers became interested in acquiring and developing greater nukes once the effects they could do was shown with the atomic effects of nukes not going away with the rubble of explosions like conventional weapons. Is that all a good thing helpful to anybody of any political persuasion? As a Rightist, I’m a Luddite type who says “No”! Personally, as a history researcher and Rightist not happy with Maoist China’s influence in the world, I don’t think the long-term results justified that action when a negotiated settlement could have been pursued for Japan and its anti-communist allies in Asia!

This is a very illuminating article, thank you for publishing it. The Outer Hebrides are a marvelous and (still) quiet place on planet earth. The vision of Mr. Orwell producing his masterpiece 1984 at a rented farmhouse on the Isle of Jura is compelling. Mr. Orwell was unique, perhaps, in that he was able to so clearly and admirably foresee the future. Remember his last words: “It is up to is to prevent it.” IT being the horrific, anti-human, anti-love, anti-sex world painted in the novel 1984. We still have the power to prevent IT, but we must not fail ourselves nor fool ourselves nor turn our backs on our brothers ans sisters.

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Orwell’s 5 greatest essays: No. 4, “You and the Atomic Bomb”

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For anyone interested in the politics of left and right--and in political journalism as it is practiced at the highest level, Orwell’s works are indispensable. This week, in the year marks the 110th anniversary of his birth, we present a personal list of his five greatest essays.

Published a mere two and a half months after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Orwell’s “You and the Atomic Bomb” is notable as one of the first efforts to divine the social and political implications of a new weapon of previously unimaginable power. Its fame arises from Orwell’s coinage of a new term for the permanent standoff the bomb would foster between two great powers, the United States and the Soviet Union: the “cold war.”

The social and political aspects of nuclear weapons had been debated for a year by physicists working on the Manhattan Project, though even most of them--thanks to the requirements of secrecy within the project--were unaware of how far the overall work had progressed until the bombs were dropped on Japan. With the blasts, the issues were thrown open for public debate.

Orwell places the bomb properly within the historical continuum. “It is a commonplace that the history of civilisation is largely the history of weapons,” he writes. “Ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance. Thus, for example, tanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon — so long as there is no answer to it — gives claws to the weak.”

As for the cold war, that infinite “peace that is no peace,” Orwell foresees that it will not be long before the Soviets join the Americans as sole possessors of the bomb’s secrets.

“From various symptoms one can infer that the Russians do not yet possess the secret of making the atomic bomb; on the other hand, the consensus of opinion seems to be that they will possess it within a few years. So we have before us the prospect of two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds, dividing the world between them.”

In at least one regard, Orwell’s vision was no more farsighted than anyone else’s in 1945: What happens when one of those super-states collapses?

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George Orwell and the origin of the term ‘cold war’

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• By Katherine Connor Martin
• October 24 th 2015

On 19 October 1945, George Orwell used the term cold war in his essay “ You and the Atom Bomb ,” speculating on the repercussions of the atomic age which had begun two months before when the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. In this article, Orwell considered the social and political implications of “a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of ‘cold war’ with its neighbors.”

This wasn’t the first time the phrase cold war was used in English (it had been used to describe certain policies of Hitler in 1938), but it seems to have been the first time it was applied to the conditions that arose in the aftermath of World War II. Orwell’s essay speculates on the geopolitical impact of the advent of a powerful weapon so expensive and difficult to produce that it was attainable by only a handful of nations, anticipating “the prospect of two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds, dividing the world between them,” and concluding that such a situation is likely “to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a ‘ peace that is no peac e’.”

Within years, some of the developments anticipated by Orwell had emerged. The Cold War (often with capital initials) came to refer specifically to the prolonged state of hostility, short of direct armed conflict, which existed between the Soviet bloc and Western powers after the Second World War. The term was popularized by the American journalist Walter Lippman, who made it the title of a series of essays he published in 1947 in response to U.S. diplomat George Kennan’s ‘Mr. X’ article, which had advocated the policy of “ containment .” To judge by debate in the House of Commons the following year (as cited by the Oxford English Dictionary ), this use of the term Cold War was initially regarded as an Americanism: ‘The British Government … should recognize that the ‘cold war’, as the Americans call it, is on in earnest, that the third world war has, in fact, begun.” Soon, though, the term was in general use.

The end of the Cold War was prematurely declared from time to time in the following decades—after the death of Stalin, and then again during the détente of the 1970s—but by the time the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, the Cold War era was clearly over. American political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously posited that “what we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such,” with the global ascendancy of Western liberal democracy become an inevitability.

A quarter of a century later, tensions between Russia and NATO have now ratcheted up again, particularly in the wake of the Ukrainian crisis of 2014; commentators have begun to speak of a “ New Cold War .” The ideological context has changed, but once again a few great powers with overwhelming military might jockey for global influence while avoiding direct confrontation. Seventy years after the publication of his essay, the dynamics George Orwell discussed in it are still recognizable in international relations today.

A version of this article first appeared on the OxfordWords blog. 

Image Credit: “General Douglas MacArthur, UN Command CiC (seated), observes the naval shelling of Incheon from the USS Mt. McKinley, September 15, 1950.” Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons .

Katherine Connor Martin is Head of US Dictionaries at Oxford University Press.

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The Atomic Bomb: Arguments in Support Of The Decision

Note: This section is intended as an objective overview of the decision to use the atomic bomb for new students of the issue. For the other side of the issue, go here.

Argument #1: The Atomic Bomb Saved American Lives

The main argument in support of the decision to use the atomic bomb is that it saved American lives which would otherwise have been lost in two D-Day-style land invasions of the main islands of the Japanese homeland. The first, against the Southern island of Kyushu, had been scheduled for November 1 (Operation Torch). The second, against the main island of Honshu would take place in the spring of 1946 (Operation Coronet). The two operations combined were codenamed Operation Downfall. There is no doubt that a land invasion would have incurred extremely high casualties, for a variety of reasons. For one, Field Marshall Hisaichi Terauchi had ordered that all 100,000 Allied prisoners of war be executed if the Americans invaded. Second, it was apparent to the Japanese as much as to the Americans that there were few good landing sites, and that Japanese forces would be concentrated there. Third, there was real concern in Washington that the Japanese had made a determination to fight literally to the death. The Japanese saw suicide as an honorable alternative to surrender. The term they used was gyokusai, or, “shattering of the jewel.” It was the same rationale for their use of the so-called banzai charges employed early in the war. In his 1944 “emergency declaration,” Prime Minister Hideki Tojo had called for “100 million gyokusai,” and that the entire Japanese population be prepared to die.

For American military commanders, determining the strength of Japanese forces and anticipating the level of civilian resistance were the keys to preparing casualty projections.  Numerous studies were conducted, with widely varying results. Some of the studies estimated American casualties for just the first 30 days of Operation Torch. Such a study done by General MacArthur’s staff in June estimated 23,000 US casualties.

U.S. Army Chief of Staff George Marshall thought the Americans would suffer 31,000 casualties in the first 30 days, while Admiral Ernest King, Chief of Naval Operations, put them between 31,000 and 41,000. Pacific Fleet Commander Admiral Chester Nimitz, whose staff conducted their own study, estimated 49,000 U.S casualties in the first 30 days, including 5,000 at sea from Kamikaze attacks.

Studies estimating total U.S. casualties were equally varied and no less grim.  One by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in April 1945 resulted in an estimate of 1,200,000 casualties, with 267,000 fatalities. Admiral Leahy, Chief of Staff to the Commander in Chief, estimated 268,000 casualties (35%).  Former President Herbert Hoover sent a memorandum to President Truman and Secretary of War Stimson, with “conservative” estimates of 500,000 to 1,000,000 fatalities. A study done for Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s staff by William Shockley estimated the costs at 1.7 to 4 million American casualties, including 400,000-800,000 fatalities.

General Douglas MacArthur had been chosen to command US invasion forces for Operation Downfall, and his staff conducted their own study.  In June their prediction was American casualties of 105,000 after 120 days of combat.  Mid-July intelligence estimates placed the number of Japanese soldiers in the main islands at under 2,000,000, but that number increased sharply in the weeks that followed as more units were repatriated from Asia for the final homeland defense.   By late July, MacArthur’s Chief of Intelligence, General Charles Willoughby, revised the estimate and predicted American casualties on Kyushu alone (Operation Torch) would be 500,000, or ten times what they had been on Okinawa.

All of the military planners based their casualty estimates on the ongoing conduct of the war and the evolving tactics employed by the Japanese.   In the first major land combat at Guadalcanal, the Japanese had employed night-time banzai charges—direct frontal assaults against entrenched machine gun positions.  This tactic had worked well against enemy forces in their Asian campaigns, but against the Marines, the Japanese lost about 2,500 troops and killed only 80 Marines.

At Tarawa in May 1943, The Japanese modified their tactics and put up a fierce resistance to the Marine amphibious landings.  Once the battered Marines made it ashore, the 4,500 well-supplied and well-prepared Japanese defenders fought almost to the last man.  Only 17 Japanese soldiers were alive at the end of the battle.

On Saipan in July 1944, the Japanese again put up fanatical resistance, even though a decisive U.S. Navy victory over the Japanese fleet had ended any hope of their resupply.  U.S. forces had to burnthen out of holes, caves, and bunkers with flamethrowers. Japanese forces staged multiple banzai attacks. At the end of the battle the Japanese staged a final banzai that included wounded men, some of them on crutches.  Marines were forced to mow them down.  Meanwhile, on the north end of the island a thousand civilians threw committed suicide by jumping from the cliff to the rocks below after being promised an honorable afterlife by Emperor Hirohito, and after being threatened with death by the Japanese army. In the fall of 1944, Marines landed on the small island of Peleliu, just east of the Philippines, for what was supposed to be a four-day mission. The battle lasted two months. At Peleliu, the Japanese unveiled a new defense strategy. Colonel Kunio Nakagawa, the Japanese commander, constructed a system of heavily fortified bunkers, caves, and underground positions, and waited for the Marines to attack them, and they replaced the fruitless banzai attacks with coordinated counterattacks. Much of the island was solid volcanic rock, making the digging of foxholes with the standard-issue entrenching tool impossible. When the Marines sought cover and concealment, the terrain’s jagged, sharp edges cut up their uniforms, bodies, and equipment. The plan was to make Peleliu a bloody war of attrition, and it worked well. The fight for Umurbrogol Mountain is considered by many to be the most difficult fight that the U.S. military encountered in the entire Second World War. At Peleliu, U.S. forces suffered 50% casualties, including 1,794 killed. Japanese losses were 10,695 killed and only 202 captured. After securing the Philippines and delivering yet another shattering blow to the Japanese navy, the Americans landed next on Iwo Jima in February 1945, where the main mission was to secure three Japanese airfields. U.S. Marines again faced an enemy well entrenched in a vast network of bunkers, hidden artillery, and miles of underground tunnels. American casualties on Iwo Jima were 6,822 killed or missing and 19,217 wounded. Japanese casualties were about 18,000 killed or missing, and only 216 captured.  Meanwhile, another method of Japanese resistance was emerging.  With the Japanese navy neutralized, the Japanese resorted to suicide missions designed to turn piloted aircraft into guided bombs. A kamikaze air attack on ships anchored at sea on February 21 sunk an escort carrier and did severe damage to the fleet carrier Saratoga. It was a harbinger of things to come.

After Iwo Jima, only the island of Okinawa stood between U.S. forces and Japan. Once secured, Okinawa would be used as a staging area for Operation Torch. Situated less than 400 miles from Kyushu, the island had been Japanese territory since 1868, and it was home to several hundred thousand Japanese civilians. The Battle of Okinawa was fought from April 1 – June 22, 1945. Five U.S. Army divisions, three Marine divisions, and dozens of Navy vessels participated in the 82-day battle. The Japanese stepped up their use of kamikaze attacks, this time sending them at U.S. ships in waves. Seven major kamikaze attacks took place involving 1,500 planes. They took a devastating toll—both physically and psychologically. The U.S. Navy’s dead, at 4,907, exceeded its wounded, primarily because of the kamikaze.

On land, U.S. forces again faced heavily fortified and well-constructed defenses. The Japanese extracted heavy American casualties at one line of defense, and then as the Americans began to gain the upper hand, fell back to another series of fortifications. Japanese defenders and civilians fought to the death (even women with spears) or committed suicide rather than be captured. The civilians had been told the Americans would go on a rampage of killing and raping. About 95,000 Japanese soldiers were killed, and possibly as many as 150,000 civilians died, or 25% of the civilian population. And the fierce resistance took a heavy toll on the Americans; 12,513 were killed on Okinawa, and another 38,916 were wounded.

The increased level of Japanese resistance on Okinawa was of particular significance to military planners, especially the resistance of civilians. This was a concern for the American troops as well. In the Ken Burns documentary The War (2007), a veteran Marine pilot of the Okinawa campaign relates his thoughts at the time about invading the home islands:

By then, our sense of the strangeness of the Japanese opposition had become stronger. And I could imagine every farmer with his pitchfork coming at my guts; every pretty girl with a hand grenade strapped to her bottom, or something; that everyone would be an enemy.

Although the estimates of American casualties in Operation Downfall vary widely, no one doubts that they would have been significant.  A sobering indicator of the government’s expectations is that 500,000 Purple Heart medals (awarded for combat-related wounds) were manufactured in preparation for Operation Downfall.

Argument #1.1: The Atomic Bomb Saved Japanese Lives

A concurrent, though ironic argument supporting the use of the Atomic bomb is that because of the expected Japanese resistance to an invasion of the home island, its use actually saved Japanese lives. Military planners included Japanese casualties in their estimates.  The study done for Secretary of War Stimson predicted five to ten million Japanese fatalities.  There is support for the bomb even among some Japanese.  In 1983, at the annual observance of Hiroshima’s destruction, an aging Japanese professor recalled that at war’s end, due to the extreme food rationing, he had weighed less than 90 pounds and could scarcely climb a flight of stairs. “I couldn’t have survived another month,” he said.  “If the military had its way, we would have fought until all 80 million Japanese were dead.  Only the atomic bomb saved me.  Not me alone, but many Japanese, ironically speaking, were saved by the atomic bomb.”

Argument #1.2: It Was Necessary to Shorten the War

Another concurrent argument supporting the use of the Atomic bomb is that it achieved its primary objective of shortening the war. The bombs were dropped on August 6 and 9. The next day, the Japanese requested a halting of the war.  On August 14 Emperor Hirohito announced to the Japanese people that they would surrender, and the United States celebrated V-J Day (Victory over Japan).  Military planners had wanted the Pacific war finished no later than a year after the fall of Nazi Germany. The rationale was the belief that in a democracy, there is only so much that can reasonably be asked of its citizen soldiers (and of the voting public).

As Army Chief of Staff George Marshall later put it, “a democracy cannot fight a Seven Years’ war.” By the summer of 1945 the American military was exhausted, and the sheer number of troops needed for Operation Downfall meant that not only would the troops in the Pacific have to make one more landing, but even many of those troops whose valor and sacrifice had brought an end to the Nazi Third Reich were to be sent Pacific.  In his 2006 memoir, former 101st Airborne battalion commander Richard Winters reflected on the state of his men as they played baseball in the summer of 1945 in occupied Austria (Winters became something of a celebrity after his portrayal in the extremely popular 2001 HBO series Band of Brothers):

During the baseball games when the men were stripped to their waists, or wearing only shorts, the sight of all those battle scars made me conscious of the fact that other than a handful of men in the battalion who had survived all four campaigns, only a few were lucky enough to be without at least one scar.  Some men had two, three, even four scars on their chests, backs, arms, or legs. Keep in mind that…I was looking only at the men who were not seriously wounded.

Supporters of the bomb wonder if it was reasonable to ask even more sacrifice of these men. Since these veterans are the men whose lives (or wholeness) were, by this argument, saved by the bomb, it is relevant to survey their thoughts on the matter, as written in various war memoirs going back to the 1950s.  The record is mixed. For example, despite Winters’ observation above, he seemed to have reservations about the bomb: “Three days later, on August 14, Japan surrendered.  Apparently the atomic bomb carried as much punch as a regiment of paratroopers.  It seemed inhumane for our national leaders to employ either weapon on the human race.”

His opinion is not shared by other members of Easy Company, some of whom published their own memoirs after the interest generated by Band of Brothers.  William “Wild Bill” Guarnere expressed a very blunt opinion about the bomb in 2007:

We were on garrison duty in France for about a month, and in August, we got great news: we weren’t going to the Pacific.  The U.S. dropped a bomb on Hiroshima, the Japanese surrendered, and the war was over.  We were so relieved.  It was the greatest thing that could have happened. Somebody once said to me that the bomb was the worst thing that ever happened, that the U.S. could have found other ways.  I said, “Yeah, like what? Me and all my buddies jumping in Tokyo, and the Allied forces going in, and all of us getting killed?  Millions more Allied soldiers getting killed?”  When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor were they concerned about how many lives they took?  We should have dropped eighteen bombs as far as I’m concerned.  The Japanese should have stayed out of it if they didn’t want bombs dropped. The end of the war was good news to us.  We knew we were going home soon.

Those soldiers with extensive combat experience in the Pacific theater and with first-hand knowledge of Japanese resistance also express conflicting thoughts about the bomb. All of them write of the relief and joy they felt upon first hearing the news. William Manchester, in Goodbye, Darkness: a Memoir of the Pacific War, wrote, “You think of the lives which would have been lost in an invasion of Japan’s home islands—a staggering number of American lives but millions more of Japanese—and you thank God for the atomic bomb.”

But in preparation for writing his 1980 memoir, when Manchester visited Tinian, the small Pacific island from which the Hiroshima mission was launched, he reflected on the “global angst” that Tinian represents.  He writes that while the battle to take Tinian itself was relatively easy, “the aftermath was ominous.” It was also from Tinian that napalm was dropped on Japanese cities, which Manchester describes as “one of thecruelest instruments of war.”  Manchester continues:

This is where the nuclear shadow first appeared.  I feel forlorn, alienated, wholly without empathy for the men who did what they did.  This was not my war…Standing there, notebook in hand; you are shrouded in absolute, inexpressible loneliness.

Two other Pacific memoirs, both published decades ago, resurged in popularity in 2010, owing to their authors’ portrayal in another HBO mini-series, The Pacific (2010).  Eugene Sledge published his combat memoir in 1981.  He describes the moment when they first heard about the atom bomb, having just survived the Okinawa campaign:

We received the news with quiet disbelief coupled with an indescribable sense of relief.  We thought the Japanese would never surrender.  Many refused to believe it.  Sitting around in stunned silence, we remembered our dead.  So many dead.  So many maimed.  So many bright futures consigned to the ashes of the past.  So many dreams lost in the madness that had engulfed us.  Except for a few widely scattered shouts of joy, the survivors sat hollow-eyed and silent, trying to comprehend a world without war.

Robert Leckie, like Manchester, seems to have had conflicting feelings about the bomb in his 1957 memoir Helmet for my Pillow.  When the bomb was dropped, Leckie was recovering from wounds suffered on Peleliu:

Suddenly, secretly, covertly–I rejoiced. For as I lay there in that hospital, I had faced the bleak prospect of returning to the Pacific and the war and the law of averages. But now, I knew the Japanese would have to lay down their arms. The war was over. I had survived. Like a man wielding a submachine gun to defend himself against an unarmed boy, I had survived. So I rejoiced.

But just a paragraph later, Leckie reflects writes:

The suffering of those who lived, the immolation [death by burning] of those who died–that must now be placed in the scales of God’s justice that began to tip so awkwardly against us when the mushroom rose over the world…Dear Father, forgive us for that awful cloud.

 Argument #1.3: Only the Bomb Convinced the Emperor to Intervene

A third concurrent argument defending the bomb is the observation that even after the first two bombs were dropped, and the Russians had declared war, the Japanese still almost did not surrender. The Japanese cabinet convened in emergency session on August 7. Military authorities refused to concede that the Hiroshima bomb was atomic in nature and refused to consider surrender. The following day, Emperor Hirohito privately expressed to Prime Minister Togo his determination that the war should end and the cabinet was convened again on August 9. At this point Prime Minister Suzuki was in agreement, but a unanimous decision was required and three of the military chiefs still refused to admit defeat.

Some in the leadership argued that there was no way the Americans could have refined enough fissionable material to produce more than one bomb.  But then the bombing of Nagasaki had demonstrated otherwise, and a lie told by a downed American pilot convinced War Minister Korechika Anami that the Americans had as many as a hundred bombs. (The official scientific report confirming the bomb was atomic arrived at Imperial Headquarters on the 10th). Even so, hours of meetings and debates lasting well into the early morning hours of the 10th still resulted in a 3-3 deadlock.  Prime Minister Suzuki then took the unprecedented step of asking Emperor Hirohito, who never spoke at cabinet meetings, to break the deadlock. Hirohito responded:

I have given serious thought to the situation prevailing at home and abroad and have concluded that continuing the war can only mean destruction for the nation and prolongation of bloodshed and cruelty in the world. I cannot bear to see my innocent people suffer any longer.

In his 1947 article published in Harper’s, former Secretary of War Stimson expressed his opinion that only the atomic bomb convinced the emperor to step in: “All the evidence I have seen indicates that the controlling factor in the final Japanese decision to accept our terms of surrender was the atomic bomb.”

Emperor Hirohito agreed that Japan should accept the Potsdam Declaration (the terms of surrender proposed by the Americans, discussed below), and then recorded a message on phonograph to the Japanese people.

Japanese hard-liners attempted to suppress this recording, and late on the evening of the 14th, attempted a coup against the Emperor, presumably to save him from himself. The coup failed, but the fanaticism required to make such an attempt is further evidence to bomb supporters that, without the bomb, Japan would never have surrendered. In the end, the military leaders accepted surrender partly because of the Emperor’s intervention, and partly because the atomic bomb helped them “save face” by rationalizing that they had not been defeated by because of a lack of spiritual power or strategic decisions, but by science. In other words, the Japanese military hadn’t lost the war, Japanese science did.

Atomic Bomb Argument 2: The Decision was made by a Committee of Shared Responsibility

Supporters of President Truman’s decision to use atomic weapons point out that the President did not act unilaterally, but rather was supported by a committee of shared responsibility.  The Interim Committee, created in May 1945, was primarily tasked with providing advice to the President on all matters pertaining to nuclear energy.  Most of its work focused on the role of the bomb after the war.  But the committee did consider the question of its use against Japan.

Secretary of War Henry Stimson chaired the committee.  Truman’s personal representative was James F. Byrnes, former U.S. Senator and Truman’s pick to be Secretary of State.  The committee sought the advice of four physicists from the Manhattan Project, including Enrico Fermi and J. Robert Oppenheimer.  The scientific panel wrote, “We see no acceptable alternative to direct military use.” The final recommendation to the President was arrived at on June 1 and is described in the committee meeting log:

Mr. Byrnes recommended, and the Committee agreed, that the Secretary of War should be advised that, while recognizing that the final selection of the target was essentially a military decision, the present view of the Committee was that the bomb should be used against Japan as soon as possible; that it be used on a war plant surrounded by workers’ homes; and that it be used without prior warning.

On June 21, the committee reaffirmed its recommendation with the following wording:

…that the weapon be used against Japan at the earliest opportunity, that it be used without warning, and that it be used on a dual target, namely, a military installation or war plant surrounded by or adjacent to homes or other buildings most susceptible to damage.

Supporters of Truman’s decision thus argue that the President, in dropping the bomb, was simply following the recommendation of the most experienced military, political, and scientific minds in the nation, and to do otherwise would have been grossly negligent.

Atomic Bomb Argument #3: The Japanese Were Given Fair Warning (Potsdam Declaration & Leaflets)

Supporters of Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb point out that Japan had been given ample opportunity to surrender. On July 26, with the knowledge that the Los Alamos test had been successful, President Truman and the Allies issued a final ultimatum to Japan, known as the Potsdam Declaration (Truman was in Potsdam, Germany at the time).  Although it had been decided by Prime Minster Churchill and President Roosevelt back at the Casablanca Conference that the Allies would accept only unconditional surrender from the Axis, the Potsdam Declaration does lay out some terms of surrender.  The government responsible for the war would be dismantled, there would be a military occupation of Japan, and the nation would be reduced in size to pre-war borders. The military, after being disarmed, would be permitted to return home to lead peaceful lives.  Assurance was given that the allies had no desire to enslave or destroy the Japanese people, but there would be war crimes trials.  Peaceful industries would be allowed to produce goods, and basic freedoms of speech, religion, and thought would be introduced.  The document concluded with an ultimatum: “We call upon the Government of Japan to proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all the Japanese armed forces…the alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction.”  To bomb supporters, the Potsdam Declaration was m5ore than fair in its surrender terms and in its warning of what would happen should those terms be rejected.  The Japanese did not respond to the declaration. Additionally, bomb supporters argue that Japanese civilians were warned in advance through millions of leaflets dropped on Japanese cities by U.S. warplanes. In the months preceding the atomic bombings, some 63 million leaflets were dropped on 35 cities target for destruction by U.S. air forces. The Japanese people generally regarded the information on these leaflets as truthful, but anyone caught in possession of one was subject to arrest by the government. Some of the leaflets mentioned the terms of surrender offered in the Potsdam Declaration and urged the civilians to convince Japanese government to accept them—an unrealistic expectation to say the least.

Generally, the leaflets warned that the city was considered a target and urged the civilian populations to evacuate. However, no leaflets specifically warning about a new destructive weapon were dropped until after Hiroshima, and it’s also not clear where U.S. officials thought the entire urban population of 35 Japanese cities could viably relocate to even if they did read and heed the warnings.

Argument 4: The atom bomb was in retaliation for Japanese barbarism

Although it is perhaps not the most civilized of arguments, Americans with an “eye for an eye” philosophy of justice argue that the atomic bomb was payback for the undeniably brutal, barbaric, criminal conduct of the Japanese Army.  Pumped up with their own version of master race theories, the Japanese military committed atrocities throughout Asia and the Pacific. They raped women, forced others to become sexual slaves, murdered civilians, and tortured and executed prisoners. Most famously, in a six-week period following the Japanese capture of the Chinese city of Nanjing, Japanese soldiers (and some civilians) went on a rampage.  They murdered several hundred thousand unarmed civilians, and raped between 20,000-80,000 men, women and children.

With regards to Japanese conduct specific to Americans, there is the obvious “back-stabbing” aspect of the “surprise” attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. That the Japanese government was still engaged in good faith diplomatic negotiations with the State Department at the very moment the attack was underway is a singular instance of barbaric behavior that bomb supporters point to as just cause for using the atom bomb. President Truman said as much when he made his August 6 radio broadcast to the nation about Hiroshima: “The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid many fold.”

The infamous “Bataan Death March” provides further rationale for supporters of this argument. Despite having a presence in the Philippines since 1898 and a long-standingstrategic plan for a theoretical war with Japan, the Americans were caught unprepared for the Japanese invasion of the main island of Luzon. After retreating to the rugged Bataan peninsula and holding out for months, it became evident that America had no recourse but to abandon them to their fate.   After General MacArthur removed his command to Australia under the cover of darkness, 78,000 American and Filipino troops surrendered to the Japanese, the largest surrender in American history.

Despite promises from Japanese commanders, the American prisoners were treated inhumanely.  They were force-marched back up the peninsula toward trains and a POW camp beyond.  Along the way they were beaten, deprived of food & water, tortured, buried alive, and executed.  The episode became known at The Bataan Death March. Thousands perished along the way.  And when the survivors reached their destination, Camp O’Donnell, many thousands more died from disease, starvation, and forced labor.  Perhaps fueled by humiliation and a sense of helplessness, few events of WWII aroused such fury in Americans as did the Bataan Death March.  To what extent it may have been a factor in President Truman’s decision is unknown, but it is frequently cited, along with Pearl Harbor, as justification for the payback given out at Hiroshima and Nagasaki to those who started the war. The remaining two arguments in support of the bomb are based on consideration of the unfortunate predicament facing President Truman as the man who inherited both the White House and years of war policy from the late President Roosevelt.

Argument 5: The Manhattan Project Expense Required Use of the Bomb

The Manhattan Project had been initiated by Roosevelt back in 1939, five years before Truman was asked to be on the Democratic ticket.  By the time Roosevelt died in April 1945, almost 2 billion dollars of taxpayer money had been spent on the project.  The Manhattan Project was the most expensive government project in history at that time.  The President’s Chief of Staff, Admiral Leahy, said, “I know FDR would have used it in a minute to prove that he had not wasted $2 billion.” Bomb supporters argue that the pressure to honor the legacy of FDR, who had been in office for so long that many Americans could hardly remember anyone else ever being president, was surely enormous. The political consequences of such a waste of expenditures, once the public found out, would have been disastrous for the Democrats for decades to come. (The counter-argument, of course, is that fear of losing an election is no justification for using such a weapon).

Argument 6: Truman Inherited the War Policy of Bombing Cities

Likewise, the decision to intentionally target civilians, however morally questionable and distasteful, had begun under President Roosevelt, and it was not something that President Truman could realistically be expected to roll back. Precedents for bombing civilians began as early as 1932, when Japanese planes bombed Chapei, the Chinese sector of Shanghai.  Italian forces bombed civilians as part of their conquest of Ethiopia in 1935-1936.  Germany had first bombed civilians as part of an incursion into the Spanish Civil War. At the outbreak of WWII in September 1939, President Roosevelt was troubled by the prospect of what seemed likely to be Axis strategy, and on the day of the German invasion of Poland, he wrote to the governments of France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Great Britain.  Roosevelt said that these precedents for attacking civilians from the air, “has sickened the hearts of every civilized man and woman, and has profoundly shocked the conscience of humanity.” He went on to describe such actions as “inhuman barbarism,” and appealed to the war-makers not to target civilian populations. But Germany bombed cities in Poland in 1939, destroyed the Dutch city of Rotterdam in 1940, and infamously “blitzed” London, Coventry, and other British cities in the summer and fall of the 1940. The British retaliated by bombing German cities.  Allied war leaders rationalized that to win the war, it was necessary to cripple the enemy’s capacity to make war. Since cities contained factories that produced war materials, and since civilians worked in factories, the population of cities (including the “workers’ dwellings” surrounding those factories) were legitimate military targets.

Despite Roosevelt’s “appeal” in 1939, he and the nation had long crossed that moral line by war’s end.  This fact perhaps reveals the psychological effects of killing on all of the war’s participants, and says something about the moral atmosphere in which President Truman found himself upon the President’s death. On February 13, 1945, 1,300 U.S. and British heavy bombers firebombed the German city of Dresden, the center of German art and culture, creating a firestorm that destroyed 15 square miles and killed 25,000 civilians.  Meanwhile, still five weeks before Truman took office; American bombers dropped 2,000 tons of napalm on Tokyo, creating a firestorm with hurricane-force winds.  Flight crews flying high over the 16 square miles of devastation reported smelling burning fleshbelow.  Approximately 125,000 Japanese civilians died in that raid.  By the time the atomic bomb was ready, similar attacks had been launched on the Japanese cities of Nagoya, Osaka, and Kobe.  Quickly running out of targets, the B-29 bombers went back over Tokyo and killed another 80,000 civilians.  Atomic Bomb supporters argue that, although this destruction is distasteful by post-war sensibilities, it had become the norm long before President Truman took office, and the atomic bomb was just one more weapon in the arsenal to be employed under this policy.  To expect the new president, who had to make decisions under enormous pressure, to roll back this policy—to roll back the social norm—was simply not realistic.

 Sources Used and Recommended

This article is part of our larger educational resource on World War Two. For a comprehensive list of World War 2 facts, including the primary actors in the war, causes, a comprehensive timeline, and bibliography, click here.

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George Orwell

You and the atomic bomb.

Considering how likely we all are to be blown to pieces by it within the next five years, the atomic bomb has not roused so much discussion as might have been expected. The newspapers have published numerous diagrams, not very helpful to the average man, of protons and neutrons doing their stuff, and there has been much reiteration of the useless statement that the bomb ‘ought to be put under international control.’ But curiously little has been said, at any rate in print, about the question that is of most urgent interest to all of us, namely: ‘How difficult are these things to manufacture?’

Such information as we—that is, the big public—possess on this subject has come to us in a rather indirect way, apropos of President Truman’s decision not to hand over certain secrets to the USSR. Some months ago, when the bomb was still only a rumour, there was a widespread belief that splitting the atom was merely a problem for the physicists, and that when they had solved it a new and devastating weapon would be within reach of almost everybody. (At any moment, so the rumour went, some lonely lunatic in a laboratory might blow civilisation to smithereens, as easily as touching off a firework.)

Had that been true, the whole trend of history would have been abruptly altered. The distinction between great states and small states would have been wiped out, and the power of the State over the individual would have been greatly weakened. However, it appears from President Truman’s remarks, and various comments that have been made on them, that the bomb is fantastically expensive and that its manufacture demands an enormous industrial effort, such as only three or four countries in the world are capable of making. This point is of cardinal importance, because it may mean that the discovery of the atomic bomb, so far from reversing history, will simply intensify the trends which have been apparent for a dozen years past.

It is a commonplace that the history of civilisation is largely the history of weapons. In particular, the connection between the discovery of gunpowder and the overthrow of feudalism by the bourgeoisie has been pointed out over and over again. And though I have no doubt exceptions can be brought forward, I think the following rule would be found generally true: that ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance. Thus, for example, tanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon—so long as there is no answer to it—gives claws to the weak.

The great age of democracy and of national self-determination was the age of the musket and the rifle. After the invention of the flintlock, and before the invention of the percussion cap, the musket was a fairly efficient weapon, and at the same time so simple that it could be produced almost anywhere. Its combination of qualities made possible the success of the American and French revolutions, and made a popular insurrection a more serious business than it could be in our own day. After the musket came the breech-loading rifle. This was a comparatively complex thing, but it could still be produced in scores of countries, and it was cheap, easily smuggled and economical of ammunition. Even the most backward nation could always get hold of rifles from one source or another, so that Boers, Bulgars, Abyssinians, Moroccans—even Tibetans—could put up a fight for their independence, sometimes with success. But thereafter every development in military technique has favoured the State as against the individual, and the industrialised country as against the backward one. There are fewer and fewer foci of power. Already, in 1939, there were only five states capable of waging war on the grand scale, and now there are only three—ultimately, perhaps, only two. This trend has been obvious for years, and was pointed out by a few observers even before 1914. The one thing that might reverse it is the discovery of a weapon—or, to put it more broadly, of a method of fighting—not dependent on huge concentrations of industrial plant.

From various symptoms one can infer that the Russians do not yet possess the secret of making the atomic bomb; on the other hand, the consensus of opinion seems to be that they will possess it within a few years. So we have before us the prospect of two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds, dividing the world between them. It has been rather hastily assumed that this means bigger and bloodier wars, and perhaps an actual end to the machine civilisation. But suppose—and really this the likeliest development—that the surviving great nations make a tacit agreement never to use the atomic bomb against one another? Suppose they only use it, or the threat of it, against people who are unable to retaliate? In that case we are back where we were before, the only difference being that power is concentrated in still fewer hands and that the outlook for subject peoples and oppressed classes is still more hopeless.

When James Burnham wrote The Managerial Revolution it seemed probable to many Americans that the Germans would win the European end of the war, and it was therefore natural to assume that Germany and not Russia would dominate the Eurasian land mass, while Japan would remain master of East Asia. This was a miscalculation, but it does not affect the main argument. For Burnham’s geographical picture of the new world has turned out to be correct. More and more obviously the surface of the earth is being parceled off into three great empires, each self-contained and cut off from contact with the outer world, and each ruled, under one disguise or another, by a self-elected oligarchy. The haggling as to where the frontiers are to be drawn is still going on, and will continue for some years, and the third of the three super-states—East Asia, dominated by China—is still potential rather than actual. But the general drift is unmistakable, and every scientific discovery of recent years has accelerated it.

We were once told that the aeroplane had ‘abolished frontiers’; actually it is only since the aeroplane became a serious weapon that frontiers have become definitely impassable. The radio was once expected to promote international understanding and co-operation; it has turned out to be a means of insulating one nation from another. The atomic bomb may complete the process by robbing the exploited classes and peoples of all power to revolt, and at the same time putting the possessors of the bomb on a basis of military equality. Unable to conquer one another, they are likely to continue ruling the world between them, and it is difficult to see how the balance can be upset except by slow and unpredictable demographic changes.

For forty or fifty years past, Mr. H. G. Wells and others have been warning us that man is in danger of destroying himself with his own weapons, leaving the ants or some other gregarious species to take over. Anyone who has seen the ruined cities of Germany will find this notion at least thinkable. Nevertheless, looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity. James Burnham’s theory has been much discussed, but few people have yet considered its ideological implications—that is, the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of ‘cold war’ with its neighbors.

Had the atomic bomb turned out to be something as cheap and easily manufactured as a bicycle or an alarm clock, it might well have plunged us back into barbarism, but it might, on the other hand, have meant the end of national sovereignty and of the highly-centralised police state. If, as seems to be the case, it is a rare and costly object as difficult to produce as a battleship, it is likelier to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a ‘peace that is no peace’.

This George Orwell piece was originally published by the Tribune on October 19, 1945 within two months after atomic bombs were dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan by the only country ever to have used them to kill people and destroy cities, viz., the U.S.A. Orwell had written enough about the same (re: A. Bomb) but this particular piece was exceptional for the insights it shared about the world dispensation that lay ahead in the age of atomic weaponry. In addition, it was clear that the groundwork for his novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four had been completed by this writing.

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Sharply the menacing wind sweeps o… The bending poplars, newly bare, And the dark ribbons of the chimne… Veer downward; flicked by whips of… Torn posters flutter; coldly sound

No stone is set to mark his nation… No stately tomb enshrines his nobl… Not e’en the tribute of a wooden c… Can mark this hero’s rest. He needs them not, his name untarn…

Syme had vanished. A morning came, and he was missing from work: a few thoughtless people commented on his absence. On the next day nobody mentioned him. On the third day Winston went i...

A few days later, when the terror caused by the executions had died down, some of the animals remembered—or thought they remembered—that the Sixth Commandment decreed ‘No animal shall k...

It had happened at last. The expected message had come. All his life, it seemed to him, he had been waiting for this to happen. He was walking down the long corridor at the Ministry and...

Winston had woken up with his eyes full of tears. Julia rolled sleepily against him, murmuring something that might have been ‘What’s the matter?’ ‘I dreamt—’ he began, and stopped shor...

OH! give me the strength of the L… The wisdom of reynard the Fox And then I’ll hurl troops at the… And give them the hardest of knock… Oh! think of the War Lord’s maile…

THE rue du Coq d’Or, Paris, seven in the morning. A succession of furious, choking yells from the street. Madame Monce, who kept the little hotel opposite mine, had come out on to the p...

In the low-ceilinged canteen, deep underground, the lunch queue jerked slowly forward. The room was already very full and deafeningly noisy. From the grille at the counter the steam of ...

As he put his hand to the door-knob Winston saw that he had left the diary open on the table. DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER was written all over it, in letters almost big enough to be legible a...

As winter drew on, Mollie became more and more troublesome. She was late for work every morning and excused herself by saying that she had overslept, and she complained of mysterious pa...

‘We can come here once again,’ said Julia. ‘It’s generally safe to use any hide-out twice. But not for another month or two, of course.’ As soon as she woke up her demeanour had changed...

The chestnut tree was almost empty. A ray of sunlight slanting through a window fell on dusty table-tops. It was the lonely hour of fifteen. A tinny music trickled from the telescreens....

It was a bitter winter. The stormy weather was followed by sleet and snow, and then by a hard frost which did not break till well into February. The animals carried on as best they coul...

As I stand at the lichened gate With warring worlds on either hand… To left the black and budless tree… The empty sties, the barns that st… Like tumbling skeletons– and to ri…

Home — Essay Samples — War — Atomic Bomb — The Atomic Bomb

The Atomic Bomb

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Albert Einstein’s Role in the Development of the Atomic Bomb

This essay about Albert Einstein explores his monumental impact on physics, particularly his theory of relativity and the famous equation E=mc². It also addresses the moral dilemmas he faced regarding the development of the atomic bomb, despite being a pacifist. Einstein’s indirect role in the Manhattan Project and his subsequent advocacy for nuclear disarmament are highlighted, emphasizing the complex interplay between scientific advancement and ethical responsibility.

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In the grand narrative of scientific progress, few figures shine as brightly as Albert Einstein. Born in the unassuming town of Ulm, Germany, in 1879, Einstein’s genius ignited a revolution in physics that forever changed our understanding of the universe. Yet, his legacy is intertwined with a controversial chapter: his inadvertent role in the creation of the atomic bomb.

Einstein’s journey through the realms of theoretical physics was nothing short of transformative. His famous equation, E=mc², revealed the profound connection between energy and matter, hinting at the enormous potential energy contained within the atom.

Despite laying the theoretical foundations for nuclear fission, Einstein himself was far removed from the practical development of atomic weaponry.

A staunch pacifist, Einstein was deeply troubled by the idea of using atomic energy for destructive purposes. His ethical concerns about scientific advancements were heightened by the looming threat of World War II. In 1939, he co-authored a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt with physicist Leo Szilard, warning of Nazi Germany’s potential to develop atomic bombs. This letter was a catalyst for the Manhattan Project, the secretive American initiative aimed at unlocking atomic secrets.

Under the leadership of the enigmatic J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project brought together some of the brightest minds in science. Their relentless research and innovation led to the unravelling of atomic mysteries, ushering humanity into the nuclear age.

The decision to deploy atomic bombs on Japan during World War II is fraught with ethical complexities. On August 6, 1945, the world was forever changed by the detonation of “Little Boy” over Hiroshima, followed by “Fat Man” over Nagasaki three days later. The unprecedented destruction and loss of life cast a dark shadow over the dawn of the nuclear era.

In the aftermath of these bombings, Einstein was haunted by his indirect contribution to such devastating weapons. He became an outspoken critic of nuclear arms proliferation, advocating for global cooperation and disarmament. His poignant observation, “I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones,” reflects his deep concern over humanity’s propensity for self-destruction.

Einstein’s legacy, a complex tapestry of intellectual brilliance and moral integrity, serves as a powerful reminder of the dual-edged nature of scientific progress. As we navigate the complexities of the modern world, his story urges us to apply our knowledge with wisdom and to strive for a future characterized by understanding and peace rather than conflict and destruction.

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May 16, 2024

Has Quantum Physics Determined Your Future?

Everything in the universe may be preordained, according to physics

By Dan Falk

Does physics allow humans to make their own choices, or does it preordain our future?

Prathan Chorruangsak/Getty Images

On the morning of June 28, 1914, a Bosnian Serb student named Gavrilo Princip stood outside Moritz Schiller’s delicatessen near the Latin Bridge in Sarajevo. Sometime after 10:45 A.M., a motorcade carrying archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, passed within meters of Princip, who drew his 0.38-caliber pistol and fired. One bullet struck the archduke in the neck. He was rushed to the military governor’s residence for medical treatment, but by 11:30 A.M. he was pronounced dead.

The assassination helped spark World War I. Historians view history as a series of interconnected but highly contingent events—built of myriad and mostly unseen chains of cause and effect. If Princip’s gun had jammed, the thinking goes, the archduke would have lived, and Europe’s subsequent history may well have been very different. Fiction writers have long been enthralled with these what-ifs (known to philosophers as “ counterfactual histories ”): What if Hitler hadn’t flunked out of art school? What if the Germans had developed the atomic bomb before the Americans? What if John Lennon had never met Paul McCartney? What if an asteroid hadn’t wiped out the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago and reptiles still ruled the Earth?

Such contingencies presume, of course, that things could have been different—either because a person exercising their free will could have chosen another course of action (Princip could have chosen not to pull the trigger) or because random events (such as the asteroid strike) could have unfolded differently. But is this attitude compatible with physics? Do the natural laws of the universe allow for free will?

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Scientists and philosophers have been arguing over the question for centuries and are often torn between two competing poles. Some think, Yes, you obviously have free will. (Aren’t you already four paragraphs into a story that you freely chose to read?) Others think, No, you can’t possibly have free will because the laws of physics say that whatever happens was determined by what happened immediately before—and the happenings within human minds are no exception. Recently a new argument for why quantum mechanics is even more deterministic than physicists might have thought has sparked the debate anew.

The notion that physics and free will might be incompatible goes back at least to the ancient Greeks, but it was expressed most forcefully by French scholar and polymath Pierre-Simon Laplace. Perhaps, wondered Laplace, everything that happens is strictly determined by what came before. His thought experiment involved an entity, now known as Laplace’s demon , that can discern the position and momentum of every particle in the universe. For such a demon, the future is fixed: there can be only one way for the universe to unfold. The cosmos would be deterministic, meaning that the future is uniquely determined by the present, which in turn was uniquely determined by the past. If Laplace was right, the notion of contingency—the idea that regardless of what’s happening at any moment in time, what happens next is “up in the air”—would seem to evaporate.

Then at the start of the 20th century came the twin upheavals of quantum mechanics and relativity. Quantum mechanics, in particular, seemed to have profound implications for free will and contingency. The theory sees nature as inherently fuzzy: quantities that were clearly defined in classical physics, such as position or momentum, are indeterminate in quantum mechanics—until they’re measured. Upon measuring a system (at least in the so-called Copenhagen interpretation of the theory), its wave function (a mathematical description of the system) is said to “collapse,” leaving one unique outcome, such as a specific observed position or momentum. The theory tells you only the probability of various outcomes of each observation but not which result you’ll actually see. At first glance, this haziness might seem to rescue physics from the clutches of determinism. On the other hand, it’s not clear how quantum indeterminacy would enable free will because we don’t usually think of our decision-making processes as random any more than we think of them as wholly preordained.

But there is another twist in this story—one that crops up when physicists attempt to apply quantum mechanics to the entire universe (a field known as quantum cosmology ). Some quantum approaches to cosmology, such as the one envisioned by theoretical physicists Jim Hartle and Stephen Hawking (and described by Hawking in A Brief History of Time ), appear to dictate not only the rules governing the evolution of the universe but also its initial state. In this way of seeing things—physicist Roger Penrose called it “strong determinism” in his book The Emperor’s New Mind —the universe can have precisely one history. Nothing could have been different from how it actually was and is. Everything from the trajectory of Princip’s bullet to the fact that you’re now reading this sentence was prescribed, so to speak, at the dawn of time.

That’s one way to interpret quantum mechanics—but not the only way. Another popular take is known as the “ many worlds ” view (or the Everettian view, after physicist Hugh Everett III , who first wrote about it in detail). In this view, everything that can happen does in fact happen—but in a different universe. So rather than saying that the universe has precisely one history, proponents of many worlds would say that the “ multiverse ” has just one history. Within this multiverse, there are branches, or universes, in which Princip pulled the trigger and also ones in which he didn’t. There are universes where Schrödinger’s famous cat is alive and universes where it’s dead. But the cosmos as a whole is fully determined.

Eddy Keming Chen, a philosopher of physics at the University of California, San Diego, believes we should take the idea of strong determinism—and its implications—seriously. If we embrace a theory like the one put forward by Hartle and Hawking, in which both the dynamics and the initial conditions of the universe (or multiverse) are specified, then only one unique history is possible. From this perspective, quantum mechanics is even more deterministic than its classical predecessor, Chen argued recently in Nature . (In a related preprint , Chen developed the idea further, describing what he calls the “Everettian Wentaculus,” which he wrote is “the first realistic and simple strongly deterministic theory of the quantum world.”)

But it’s tricky: even if we live in an Everettian multiverse, we only see one branch—our universe—and within that branch, we still tend to imagine that multiple outcomes are possible. In his preprint, Chen admits that “it is an open question how to think about freedom and agency in a multiverse context.” At the very least, though, the way we usually understand decisions, choices and contingency would need a rethink, Chen says. He believes that under strong determinism, it no longer makes sense to speak of counterfactuals. “You can understand the counterfactuals as referring to different physical possibilities compatible to the laws of physics,” Chen says. “But if I tell you there’s only one single possibility, then there are no counterfactuals. All counterfactuals become meaningless or trivial or vacuous.” And if there are no counterfactuals, he says, there’s no freedom. As he wrote in his Nature essay, strong determinism “makes it harder to appeal to quantum theory to defend free will.”

While physicists continue to debate the idea of strong determinism, Emily Adlam, a philosopher of physics at Chapman University, agrees with Chen that it appears to present more of a threat to free will than traditional determinism, particularly because of its ties to the Everettian multiverse. “In a standard deterministic picture, sure, everything that happens was determined from the past—but your mind was a key part of the causal process by which future events get realized,” Adlam says. “So in some meaningful sense, future events—even though they were predetermined—were mediated through processes that you identify with yourself.” But in the Everettian picture, she says, it’s harder to see where decision-making would fit in. “If you always make every possible decision, that does seem to severely undermine the sense in which you are exercising any meaningful kind of choice,” she says. “So in that sense, you do seem worse off than in the standard picture, where one outcome occurs and you play a role in bringing it about.”

As troubling as quantum mechanics (or at least certain versions of it) may be for the idea of free will, relativity—the other pillar of modern physics—isn’t off the hook. Many theorists think of relativity as describing a universe in which past, present and future are all equally real: a static cosmos that just sits there like a big block of spacetime (sometimes called the “ block universe ”). It’s not that time disappears in this picture—but it no longer “passes” or “flows.” (As Albert Einstein famously put it, the passage of time is a “ stubbornly persistent illusion .”) Conceptually speaking, the strongly deterministic quantum universe and the block universe of relativity may not be so far apart. The quantum version can be thought of as “a kind of enriched block universe,” says Alastair Wilson, a philosopher of science at the University of Leeds in England. “Imagine taking a block universe and adding an extra dimension to it—the dimension of possibility.”

Still, theories about the fundamental nature of space and time need to be taken with a grain of salt. Physicists have a reasonably good grip on most of the universe’s 13.8-billion-year history. As we rewind the tape, though, we find that our understanding of space and time becomes more tenuous as we get closer to the big bang. In the universe’s first moments, neither relativity nor quantum mechanics on their own can offer an accurate description of what’s happening, and there’s no agreed-upon unified theory of quantum gravity to take their place. In this realm, “notions of space and time themselves start breaking down at the fundamental level in ways we don’t understand,” says David Wallace, a physicist and philosopher at the University of Pittsburgh. “If the notion of time breaks down, then the sharp distinction between laws, which say how things change over time, and initial conditions, which say how things are at the initial time, starts breaking down as well.” Despite how much interest the Hartle-Hawking proposal has garnered, Wallace cautions that it is still “speculative.” And although Wallace is an ardent Everettian (as are the well-known scientists David Deutsch, Max Tegmark and Sean Carroll), the Everettian multiverse remains controversial as well.

Skepticism about free will is hardly new. Long before quantum mechanics and relativity came along, people wondered what sort of freedom, if any, could be found in a universe in which matter merely moves about in response to forces like balls in a never-ending game of cosmic billiards. The latest in a long line of free will skeptics is biologist and neurologist Robert Sapolsky, whose most recent book is entitled Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will . You are who you are, Sapolsky argues, because of everything that came before, both in your own life’s history and long before you were born. After decades of trying to see what wiggle room science might leave for personal freedoms, he has concluded that “we have no free will at all,” he wrote in his book.

The preferred “solution” to reconciling possibly deterministic physics and seemingly free personal choices—the quotation marks are important because not everyone is onboard—is a position known as compatibilism . Whatever the fundamental particles and forces might be doing at the subatomic level, the compatibilist says, human freedom can still exist because we live our lives in the macroscopic world, where very different rules apply. Yes, we’re made of atoms (or fluctuating quantum fields , if you prefer), but it would be absurd to try to describe any feature of human behavior by analyzing our atoms (or our quantum fields). And although a slight majority of philosophers identify as compatibilists (polls put the figure at around 60 percent), others see it as a cop out. Immanuel Kant, for example, dismissed compatibilism as “wretched subterfuge.” More recently, neuroscientist Sam Harris wrote in his book Free Will that “from both a moral and a scientific perspective, [compatibilism] seems deliberately obtuse.”

For compatibilists, it comes down to a matter of perspective. Wilson gives the example of astronomer Arthur Eddington, who, writing a century ago, pointed out that a table loses its tablelike properties when examined at the microscopic level. “He discovered there’s a lot of empty space between the particles in the table,” Wilson says. “Does that mean it’s not solid? Or does that mean that solidity is not what we thought it was?” He suggests looking at the Everettian multiverse in the same light. From one perspective, we might say that the very notion of probability has vanished—or we could say “that there are probabilities—they’re just not what we thought they were.”

For committed compatibilists, the issue of free will doesn’t depend on what physics says about atoms, forces, quantum fields or anything else that applies at the microscopic level, and strong determinism is no more upsetting than regular determinism. As Adlam puts it: “On one level of description, people are the source of their decisions, and on a different, physical level of description, the distant past and the laws of physics are the source of their decisions. And I think if you keep those two levels of description separate, as you should, then you don’t really have a problem with free will.”

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What If Cold War Consumerism Never Ended?

In fallout , the bomb scared americans underground. in reality, nukes sold everything but shelters.

Fallout plays atomic advertising for laughs—but in real life, the bomb sold cocktails, detergent, and more. What it didn’t sell: fallout shelters, writes historian Thomas Bishop. A Vault-Tec commercial features Cooper Howard selling survival. Courtesy of Prime Video.

by Thomas Bishop | May 13, 2024

Amazon’s new series Fallout starts with the end of the world: News reports of an international crisis interrupt a children’s birthday party, mushroom clouds appear outside, and chaos ensues. The year is 2077, but it feels like the 1950s. In this world, the Cold War never ended, and neither did the consumerism that defined mid-century America.

Two centuries after the opening sequence—when the plot of Fallout shifts into gear—cities are devastated, and communities have descended into violence. But brands endure. Advertisements for “Nuka-Cola” and “Super Duper Mart” litter the new American wasteland. Meanwhile, deep underground, a parallel society of Vault Dwellers live in high-tech shelters, cooking with “Atomic Queen” ovens, watching movies on “Radiation King” VHS players, and snacking on “Sugar Bombs.”

Lucy and Hank MacLean enjoy some relaxation in Vault 33, where it feels a lot like 1950s America. Courtesy of Prime Video.

The show, which might easily be dismissed as suburban nostalgia, is rooted in messy historical reality. In mid-century America, conspicuous acts of consumption defined a society facing the end, spurred in large part by the macabre influence of the bomb—evincing fascination and discomfort.

Today, trotting out the bomb to advertise goods might seem misguided at best and exploitative at worst. But in the 1940s and 1950s, the dawn of a new technological age promised an unleashing of scientific potential, and audiences were entranced. Walt Disney produced the 1957 television special for schoolchildren “Our Friend the Atom,” and President Dwight D. Eisenhower launched a very public pro-nuclear campaign called “Atoms for Peace” to reassure the public that the nuclear future was not just about destruction. Meanwhile, atomic advertisers tapped into the excitement of technological modernity while trying to sidestep the true horrors of nuclear war.

Still from a 1950s U.S. Army information film , which appears in the documentary Atomic Café .

So, just as the fictional characters in Fallout sip on Nuka-Cola, real-life Americans of the era sipped a popular cocktail inspired by the atomic bomb. On August 6, 1945, less than an hour after reports of the successful attack on Hiroshima, members of the Washington Press Club mixed gin, Pernod, and vermouth, charging 60 cents a pour for the “Atomic Cocktail.” It was a smash hit with members of the press—and went on to become particularly beloved in Las Vegas, where atomic tests were a 1950s tourist attraction.

Fallout ’s soundtrack features hits such as the Ink Spots’ “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire” (1941) and Five Stars’ “Atom Bomb Baby” (1957), harking back to a time when songs about the end of the world routinely climbed the Billboard charts. And its reimagined advertisements for “atom powered” wind-up robots and washing detergent that’s as “tough on dirt as a nuclear blast” refer to genuine Cold War-era products that stocked shelves at Macy’s and Sears.

But sometimes marketers weren’t successful in striking a balance between sensationalizing their products and terrifying their audience. Such was the case with a product central to both Fallout and the real-life Cold War home front: the fallout shelter.

One of the show’s main characters is Cooper Howard, “star of stage and screen” and “pitchman for the end of the world.” In advertisements for Vault-Tec, he sells shelters “strong enough to keep out the rads and the Reds.” His pitches close with a promise, made directly to the camera: “You can be a hero, too. By purchasing a residence in a Vault-Tec vault today. Because if the worst should happen tomorrow, the world is going to need Americans just like you to build a better day after.”

A 1951 prototype basement fallout shelter sits on a New Jersey boardwalk. Courtesy of the National Archives.

In real life, a similar directive came from an even bigger celebrity. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy delivered a nationwide address encouraging ordinary citizens to build their own fallout shelters. Speaking to around 25 million viewers, Kennedy argued, “We owe that kind of insurance to our families and to our country.” That September, President Kennedy opened an entire issue of Life magazine dedicated to fallout shelters with a letter that made the remarkable claim that “97 out of 100” citizens might survive the next war if they took survival into their own hands. Outsourcing survival to the private sector gave rise to swarms of local businesses. Newsweek estimated that in one week in October 1961, over 31 shelter companies applied for business licenses in Atlanta. In the same month companies like Peace-O-Mind Shelter Corporation in Texas, Survival-All Incorporated in Ohio, Survival Construction Specialist in Denver, and Diamond Blocks in Boston all opened their doors for business.

Driving profit was no afterthought in the development of the Cold War home front; it was central to its social function. Historian Lizabeth Cohen describes America immediately following the end of World War II as a “consumers’ republic” defined by the rise of powerful new political language that equated good citizenship with effective consumerism. Shelter businesses, then, attempted to marry two eminently successful ideological constructs of the era: national security and the self-made, individualistic, suburban consumer family. But there were limits to even the best salesman’s pitch. Fallout depicts a nation duped into life underground. But many real-life American households were not so easily convinced—and shelter salesmen routinely went bust, even as the atomic clock ticked close to midnight.

Take James Byrne, a Detroit-based plywood businessman who described the shelter trade as a “can’t miss proposition,” with every political statement from the Oval Office a “million-dollar free advertisement.” As international tensions rose in the summer and fall of 1962, Byrne went door to door trying to make a buck—and failed miserably. “People listen to the sales pitch, take all the literature,” Byrne’s best salesman, Sal George recalled, “ask questions and then just walk away.”

Getting desperate, during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, Byrne and George loaded up a flatbed truck with their model shelter, drove it around town, dropped the price by $100, and posted a sign reading “FALLOUT SHELTERS—WHILE THEY LAST.”  There was not even a “nibble of a sale.” Eventually, they offered it up free of charge, and a Michigan family hauled the shelter away. “Last I heard from them they were having trouble assembling it. But I’m not asking questions,” said Byrne.

His experience was not unique. Between 1961 and 1963 an estimated 600 shelter companies across the United States filed for bankruptcy. Given the opportunity to purchase their families’ safety, most citizens rejected the salesmen’s pitch.

“The future, my friend, is products,” a fellow actor tells Cooper Howard in Fallout . “You’re a product. I’m a product. The end of the world is a product.” Maybe in their world. But history shows us that when faced with the prospect of total annihilation, Americans never really embraced the idea that survival should be a consumer choice.

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U.S. POWs and the A-Bomb

On August 6, 1945, the world changed forever when the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. Within a year of the bombing, approximately 140,000 people died as a result. It is a little-known fact, however, that 12 American prisoners of war (POWs) were among the casualties, and that the people of Hiroshima buried them with honor. Japanese director Sachiko Kato and Hiroshima Television Corporation tell this story through the documentary film, U.S. POWs and the A-Bomb . The film features Shigeaki Mori, a Japanese atomic bomb survivor from Hiroshima who spent four decades searching for the identities of the 12 American POWs who were killed in the bombing. Through reaching out to their families, Mori helped them put closure on their tragedies. U.S. POWs and the A-Bomb is also a tale of reconciliation between the former enemies of World War II—the United States and Japan—as it follows Mr. Mori accompanying U.S. POW family members visiting Hiroshima, and also Ms. Kato visiting family members of the U.S. POWs in the United States.

Through an exploration of empathy, this film and accompanying teacher’s guide not only educate viewers about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and its enduring legacy, but also help emphasize the dangers of nuclear war and how our shared humanity can transcend borders. This teacher’s guide featuring Mori’s mission of empathy should be used to supplement other materials pertaining to the atomic bombings.

View the film at https://youtu.be/T3fqKCoXb7UI .

Essaying the pop culture that matters since 1999

‘Time of the Heathen’ Mixes Atomic Angst with Racial Woes

Time of the Heathen is a nightmarish, hyper-edited, avant-garde freak-out as atomic angst and racial woes wend their way toward Shakespearean tragedy.

Peter Kass’ Time of the Heathen (1961) is an American indie film so obscure that nobody has seen or heard of it, and that’s only a slight exaggeration. The heathen must be having its time, for an excellent restoration is currently touring art houses and festivals.

The opening legend announces: “The story of this film takes place in a period four years after the BOMB [underlined] fell on Hiroshima.” Then follow images of a white man called Gaunt in the credits (played by John Heffernan) walking or shambling towards the camera, his mouth agape, surrounded by literal darkness. The shots of walking in darkness alternate with shots of a landscape overwhelmed by gray sky. We hear Lejaren Hiller Jr. ‘s score as performed by the University of Illinois Wind Ensemble ; the score will later become electronic.

When the Expressionist credits are over, we open on Gaunt, still walking, but now in a more identifiable rural landscape. Although Time of the Heathen was shot around Oyster Bay, Long Island, I reckon it’s set in the American South for reasons to be explained. For now, the jug-eared, tic-laden Gaunt wears a formal suit with a jacket and button shirt over an undershirt. He stops and gapes in alarm as the camera glides towards him. He looks up.

Military planes in formation fly overhead in a thunderous roar. The camera pans down to a different observer sitting on the bank of a lake, thus spiritually and visually linking the two watchers. Here’s where the black and white camera begins to announce its poetic tendencies. The second watcher is a young African-American boy, who we’ll learn is called Jessie (Barry Collins).

Now, the action cuts to a fraught scene of three people in a kitchen. Seated at the table are the master of the house, Link (Orville Steward), with his shotgun, and his nervous adult son Ted (Stuart Heller). Link and Ted are white, while doing dishes at the sink is Marie (Ethel Ayler in her film debut), a young African-American. Silent compositions emphasize that Ted gives Marie the eye, that the uncomfortable Marie tries to ignore it, and that the annoyed Link is aware. Link grabs his gun and says he’s going into town, and Marie should finish up work and go home. “You hear me, girl?” She turns and says, “Yes, sir.”

Then, the camera follows behind a police car approaching Gaunt. He stops, and a subjective shot from inside the car gives us the sheriff’s voice as he tells his deputy to pull over and question this strange tramp. They’re rousting him. Gaunt says he’s “walking through”, and when asked where he’s from, he replies, “All of it, just seeing the country.” He quotes the Bible, reciting the title’s passage from Ezekiel. This seems to perplex the cowboy-hatted sheriff (Nathaniel White).

Is Gaunt an itinerant preacher? Such figures aren’t unknown in the South. Consider such diverse examples as Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood (1952) and Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry (1926), which have been powerfully filmed. As the sheriff stares at Gaunt, the dynamic shifts when Link drives by and makes unfriendly remarks about “garbage washing up around here lately, stirring up trouble. They’d do us a real service if we wipe them off the land.”

Link’s comments can best be understood by a later exchange in which the sheriff tells neighbor Dan (Dan Goulding), “Never knew Link to be interested in getting justice for colored folk before. Don’t think he’s turning into one of them integrationists, do you?” They both chuckle at the absurdity of their ironic joke, and the sheriff gives Dan some jolly pats on the chest. Their dialogue is loaded with unspoken understanding, which implies they have some notion of what’s really going on with Link’s behavior.

On a level raised above Dan and the sheriff, two impassive women look down silently upon them like two of the three Fates, unless they belong to the weird sisters of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth . Is their third companion out stirring up the plot?

This point in history saw a much-publicized phenomenon of Freedom Riders, civil rights activists who came to the South to challenge Jim Crow laws and register black voters. This program began in May 1961, and the Southern reaction was to complain loudly about “outside agitators”.

All these implications would have been clear to audiences in 1961 and made them forget the purported 1949 setting (four years after Hiroshima), and that’s why dialogues in Time of the Heathen suggest a Southern setting. Returning to the plot, the intercutting among these characters embarks on the melodrama driving the action as Ted makes unwelcome advances to Marie. The film indulges that reliable trope of the struggle where someone hits her head against something and is accidentally killed.

On opposite sides of the road, Gaunt and Jessie curiously spot each other, almost as recognition. Gaunt makes a strange hieratic gesture of bringing his right hand to his right eye as though to open it further. Then Jessie walks away, as nervous as he has every right to be, and for some reason, Gaunt starts to follow him. Why is he doing this? It seals Gaunt’s fate, for Jessie walks straight to the scene of his mother lying dead on the ground, followed a few seconds later by Gaunt. The dominated and gutless Ted burbles that it was an accident. His father adds to the bad timing by showing up and deciding to resolve the problem by shooting the two witnesses.

Gaunt and the seemingly shell-shocked Jessie hide in the loft of neighbor Dan’s barn, and it hardly looks great when the stranger is found lying there with his arms around the kid. Dan’s just been told by Link that “my housekeeper’s just got herself raped and killed” and the villain is a “tall scrawny stranger ugly as sin”. That’s when Gaunt learns Jessie is mute, although not deaf. This time, when Gaunt flees in terror and abandons his mute witness, Jessie chooses to chase after Gaunt and attach himself to him as the camera dollies before and behind them.

This Gaunt/Jessie dynamic exemplifies how Time of the Heathen is both openly symbolic and subtly literary. Jessie’s muteness isn’t just muteness. As a black child in a racist society, his muteness represents being disregarded and disbelieved, being powerless, and also a chosen defensiveness. More mystically, it turns Jessie into a silent god-figure who listens impassively to Gaunt’s semi-coherent confessions while lost in the wilderness or, rather, hiding in the woods, as Gaunt repeats, “I didn’t know. I didn’t know. I didn’t know.” Later, a doctor (Moses Smith) will say, “I must say for a mute boy he can make himself abundantly clear when he wants to.”

On the literary level, the fact that a white man and a black child are fleeing pursuit inverts the relationship between Huck and Jim in Mark Twain’s 1884 novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . Twain’s story was part of contemporary cinema via Michael Curtiz ‘s 1960 MGM production starring Eddie Hodges and Archie Moore.

In Twain’s novel, the travelers find an abandoned house floating on a raft. In Time of the Heathen , the travelers find the wreckage of a house in the woods, and Gaunt launches into childhood memories and monologues about his father. “His hands were strong, I remember, but always unclenched. I broke a window, and the air was filled with bits of glass… He died in fierce silence. When he struck me with unclenched hands, he wept.”

He goes on like this, reliving disconnected traumas and hearing voices as the score turns more electronic and the house becomes a heavy metaphor for America. In a later scene, he’ll say. “There’s blood in my throat. I’m choked by the blood in my throat.” Is he a traveling killer? Perhaps Time of the Heathen previews a rather brilliant indie that seems to have vanished from sight, Servando Gonzalez’s The Fool Killer (1965), based on Helen Eustis ‘ 1954 novel. That’s about a shell-shocked war vet traveling in post-Civil War America with a child.

At this point, there are about 30 minutes left in the 75-minute Time of the Heathen , and we haven’t gotten to the stylistic selling point comparable to the hallucinatory climax of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1967). Here, we must explain the many hats worn by Ed Emshwiller, who’s not only the photographer for Time of the Heathen but also one of its producers and editors. Emshwiller is credited with “Cinematography and Art Work”.

Emshwiller is famous for two careers that lightly overlap. In one career, he’s a fine arts painter who became one of the most celebrated illustrators of science fiction magazines and paperbacks. His second career, which began concurrently with Time of the Heathen , was his interest in avant-garde film. His first entirely self-signed production was Thanatopsis in 1962, one of several experimental dance films. He pioneered experiments with video and computer animation. He founded the CalArts Computer Animation Lab and served as dean of CalArts’ film and video department from 1979 to 1990.

In Time of the Heathen , one year before he began making his own films, Emshwiller seems to have been given free reign to mix black and white with color and found footage into one of his characteristic plays with sound and image, including superimposition and bits of color animation. The lengthy experimental section includes images of an ancient white-bearded black man who laughs at Gaunt amid ruins.

Gaunt’s legacy of being “choked with blood” is finally explained allusively, complete with photos of damaged children, and we learn why the BOMB ties in to Time of Heathen ‘s story. Gaunt, who vaguely resembles a clean-shaven Uncle Sam, embodies America and civilization’s collective guilt, as well as personal guilt, toward war, violence, racism, and inhumanity at large. This section of the film becomes a nightmarish, hyper-edited, avant-garde freak-out as the melodrama wends its way toward Shakespearean tragedy.

Time of the Heathen is Kass’ only feature film, who’s more famous as an acting teacher and Broadway director. For example, he directed the original 1964 production of Lorraine Hansberry’s The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window .

Calvin Floyd is listed as producer. He then produced something called Faust (1964), a modern update from writer-director Michael Suman, which played the Berlin Film Festival. My goodness, where’s that movie? He also directed the 1974 documentary In Search of Dracula starring Christopher Lee, and later the horror films Terror of Frankenstein (1977) and Sleep of Death (1980), both starring Per Oscarsson. The fact that he produced Al Adamson’s Black Heat (1976) shows the connection between arty indie cinema, horror, and blaxploitation. Floyd collaborated often with his wife, Yvonne Floyd.

Time of the Heathen can be associated with a trickle of postwar indies that address racial angles in the shadow of “the Bomb”. The earliest was probably Leo Hurwitz’s Strange Victory (1948). Then came Arch Oboler’s Five (1951), set after a nuclear apocalypse and anticipating by several years the more mainstream release of Ranald MacDougall’s The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959). John Cassavetes’ Shadows (1959) and Shirley Clarke’s The Connection (1961) are also important in this regard.

Some indies, bless their hearts, took a more “exploitive” (that is, commercial) approach to films about race. Prominent is Roger Corman ‘s The Intruder (1962, aka I Hate Your Guts ), from Charles Beaumont ‘s 1959 novel. Also prominent but less available is I Passed for White (1960), written and directed by Fred M. Wilcox a few years after he made, so help us Zeus, the big-budget science fiction festival of Freudian repression known as Forbidden Planet (1956).

Several early ’60s indies with Something To Say have found a revival in the spotlight of restoration and re-evaluation this century. Indeed, 1961 was a banner year, yielding such examples as Alexander Singer’s A Cold Wind in August , Jack Garfein’s Something Wild and Allen Baron’s Blast of Silence . Nor should we forget Leslie Stevens’ Private Property (1960). These films concern themes of sex and/or violence without the racial element, but they all are connected to the same zeitgeist.

The beautiful print of Time of the Heathen is restored in 4K resolution by UCLA Film & Television Archive and Philadelphia’s Lightbox Film Center. They used 35mm negatives owned by the British Film Institute, so the film comes with a British rating certificate and the British Lion logo. For reference, the restoration team compared with a 35 print by the Swedish Film Institute. The restored edition provides the stereo mix of Hiller’s electronic score from the Sousa Archives at the University of Illinois.

The print sources indicate how invisible the film has been in the US. Some write-ups have claimed it was never released in the US, but IMDB indicates otherwise without getting too specific. Not only was Time of the Heathen released in England but in several European countries, and it won the grand prize at Italy’s Bergamo International Film Festival in 1962.

Time of the Heathen plays at Chicago’s Gene Siskel Film Center and New York’s Film at Lincoln Center through 23 May. Later dates are scheduled for 18-21 June at Guild Cinema in Albuquerque, New Mexico; 25 June at Hollywood Theatre in Portland, Oregon; 14 July at The Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque ; 16-18 August at Trylon Cinema in Minneapolis, Minnesota; and 10 November at Regal Rivera in Knoxville, Tennessee. More info can be found at the distributor’s website, Arbelos Films .

• Time of the Heathen: Arbelos Films