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I hold the slim grey Penguin book from 1946 in my hands. Is this my future, and the future of my world?
John Hersey (1914-1993), an American journalist, tells the stories of six survivors of the atomic bomb dropped by the US at 08:15 on 6th August 1945. Seventy-seven years ago: not a tidy anniversary, not a round number, a diamond, or a gold. But it could be the last.
The six were ordinary people: a factory clerk, a doctor, a tailor’s widow, a Jesuit, a trainee surgeon, a Methodist pastor. Unlike my generation, brought up in the cold war years with the nuclear fear always there at a low level, these people did not know about nuclear weapons. They knew that the B-52s had bombed other cities but spared Kyoto and Hiroshima. They feared that something special was reserved for their city of 245,000.
Hersey describes what each of the six was doing at the instant of the silent, powerful flash, and how they had tried in vain to make their loved ones and their community safer. He describes how the blast picked them up and threw them, how buildings disintegrated around them and over them. In the aftermath, with the day turned as dark as night, he tells of the appalling scale of death and suffering. People cried out from collapsed or burning wreckage but couldn’t be rescued. Everywhere people lay inert on the ground among the bodies of the dead, vomiting, and covered with blood and burns. Some hospitals were destroyed; others were overwhelmed by thousands of casualties.
The bomb had created a heat on the ground of 6000 degrees C. Over a hundred thousand people died, a quarter from burns, half from other injuries, and the rest from radiation. Some people died from radiation in the first few hours or days with no visible injuries. Others developed radiation sickness from ten days after the bomb, with weeks of hair loss, diarrhoea, fever, bleeding, ulcerated mouths and infections, of wounds re-opening that would not heal. The survivors were lucky to be alive, yet their lives were utterly broken.
The International Non-Proliferation Treaty came into force in 1970 to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. Yet now almost 13,000 nuclear weapons exist around the world, each one immensely more powerful than the bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
At the Non-Proliferation Treaty conference in New York on 2nd August 2022 the UN Secretary General, António Guterres, warned that with Russia’s war with Ukraine and tensions on the Korean peninsula and in the Middle East, we face ‘a nuclear danger not seen since the height of the cold war’. ‘Humanity,’ he said, ‘is just one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation.’
So what am I to do, trapped on this dying planet, as power and wealth accumulate in the hands of sociopaths?
Writing immortalises the simple precious things, the everyday textures of our lives: sunlight on roses; the laughter of children; the heartbeat of a lover. Even if it’s only in fiction that good triumphs over evil, the book is proof that words can outlast the writer.
What else can I do, but be kind to others, and write?
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