Atombomb Essay, Research Paper

The Atomic Bomb and its Effectss on Post-World War II American LiteratureRob GioielliMrs. McFarlanSenior English6 Dec. 1994Gioielli 1Rob GioielliMrs. McFarlanSenior English 6 Dec. 1994Then a enormous flash of light cut across the sky. Mr. Tanimoto has a distinctrecollection that it traveled from E to west, from the metropolis toward the hills. It seemedlike a sheet of Sun. John Hersey, from Hiroshima, pp.8 On August 6, 1945, the worldchanged everlastingly. On that twenty-four hours the United States of America detonated an atomic bomb over thecity of Hiroshima. Never before had world seen anything like. Here was something thatwas somewhat bigger than an ordinary bomb, yet could do boundlessly more devastation. Itcould rake through walls and rupture down houses like the Satans bust uping ball. In Hiroshima itkilled 100,000 people, most non-military civilians. Three yearss subsequently in Nagasaki it killedroughly 40,000. The immediate effects of these bombardments were simple. The Japanesegovernment surrendered, unconditionally, to the United States. The remainder of the worldrejoiced as the most destructive war in the history of world came to an terminal. All whilethe subsisters of Hiroshima and Nagasaki tried to patch together what was left of theirlives, households and places. Over the class of the following 40 old ages, these two bombardments, and the atomic weaponries race that followed them, would come to hold a direct or indirecteffect on about every adult male, adult female and kid on this Earth, including people in the UnitedStates. The atomic bomb would perforate every cloth of American being. From ourpolitics to our educational system. Our industry and our art. Historians have gone sofar as to name this period in our history the +atomic age+ for the manner it has shaped andguided universe political relations, dealingss and civilization. The full history behind the bomb itself is rooted in Twentieth Century natural philosophies. At the clip of the bombing the scientific discipline of natural philosophies had been undergoing a revolution for the past thirty-odd old ages. Scientists now had a clearpicture of what the atomic universe was like. They new the construction and atom make-up ofatoms, every bit good as how they behaved. During the 1930+s it became evident that there was aimmense sum of energy that would be released atoms of Gioielli 2certain elements weresplit, or taken apart. Scientists began to recognize that if harnessed, this energy could besomething of a magnitude non earlier seen to human eyes. They besides saw that this energycould perchance be harnessed into a arm of astonishing power. And with the coming of WorldWar Two, this became an of all time increasing concern. In the early autumn of 1939, the same timethat the Germans invaded Poland, President Roosevelt received a missive from Albert Einstein, informing him about the certain possibilities of making a controlled atomic chainreaction, and that tackling such a reaction could bring forth a bomb of formidable strength.He wrote: This new phenomena would take besides lead to the building of bombs, and it isconceivable, though much less certain-that highly powerful bombs of a new type may thusbe constructed ( Clark 556-557 ) .The missive goes on to promote the president to increasegovernment and military engagement in such experiments, and to promote the experimentalwork of the scientists with the allotment of financess, installations and equipment that might benecessary. This missive finally led to the Manhattan Project, the attempt that involvedbillions of dollars and 10s of 1000s of people to bring forth the atomic bomb. During the clip after the war, until merely late the American mind has been branded with the threatof a atomic holocaust. Here was something so powerful, yet so bantam. A bomb thatcould kill our states capital, and that was every bit large as persons backyard grill. Forthe first clip in the history of human being here was something capable of pass overing us offthe face of the Earth. And most people had no control over that fate. It seemed likepeoples lives, the life of everything on this planet, was resting in the custodies of a couplemen in Northern Virginia and some cats over in Russia. The atomic bomb and the amazingpower it held over us had a enormous influence on American Culture, including a profoundeffect on American Literature. After the war, the first existent piece of literature about thebombings came in 1946. The work Hiroshima, by Jon Hersey, from which the gap quotation mark istaken, foremost appeared as a long article in the New Yorker, so shortly after in book signifier. The book is a non-fiction history of the bombardment of Hiroshima and the immediate aftermath.It is told from the point-of-view of six hibakusha, or +survivors+ of the atomic blast. Infour chapters Hersey traces how the these people survived the blast, and what they did infollowing hebdomads and months to draw their lives together Gioielli 3and save their families.The book takes on a tone of understanding and of marvelous endurance +that these people werelucky adequate to last the blast. He focuses non on the agony of the victims but ontheir bravery ( Stone, 7 ) . The undermentioned transition from the first chapter shows this: A hundredthousand people were killed by the bomb, and these six were among the subsisters. They stillwonder why they lived when so many others died. Each of the counts many little points ofchance or volition+a measure taken in clip, a determination to travel indoors, catching one streetcarinstead of the next+that spared him. And each that in the act of endurance he lived a dozenlives and saw more decease than he of all time thought he would see. At the clip, none of them knewanything ( 4 ) . Hersey was trying to chronicle what had happened at Hiroshima, and todo so reasonably. And in stressing the survival alternatively of the agony he does non do hisbook anti-American or something that condemns the dropping of the bomb. He merely givesthese peoples histories of how they survived in a tone that is more journalistic thansensationalistic. The book empathizes with their predicament while it besides gives an Americanexplanation for the bombardment ( Stone, 7 ) . That it was an act of war to stop the war every bit quicklyand as easy as possible, and to salvage more lives in the long tally. Hersey did all this toprovide what he considered an evenhanded portraiture of the event, but he besides did non desire tocause much contention. Although it could be criticized for non giving a more detailedaccount of the agony that occurred, and that it reads more like a history book than apiece of literature, Hersey+s book was the first of its sort when it was published. Upuntil so all histories of the Hiroshima bombardment Hagiographas about it took the slant thatJapanese had +deserved what we had given them+ , and that we were good people for making so.These histories were highly damaging and racialist. ( Stone, 4 ) Hersey was the first totake the point of position of those who had really experienced the event. And his work wasthe passage between plants that glorified the dropping of the atomic bomb, to those thatfocused on its astonishing destructive powers, and what they could make to our world.During theperiod instantly after the war, non much information was available to general publicconcerning what sort of devastation the atomic bombs had really caused in Japan. Butstarting with Hersey+s book and go oning with other non-fiction plants, such as DavidBradley & # 8217 ; s No Topographic point To Hide, which concerned the Bikini Island atomic trials, Americansreally began to acquire a image of the amazing power and destructiveness of atomic weapons.They saw that these truly Gioielli 4were Judgment Day devices. Weapons that could changeeverything in an blink of an eye, and turn things into nil in a minute. It was this realizationthat had a startling consequence on American civilization and literature. Some Americans began to say+At any clip we could wholly be shadows in the blast moving ridge, so what+s the point? + . Thisviewpoint manifested itself in literature in something called the +apocalyptic temper+ ; anattitude or a tone covering with a extroverted terminal to the universe. Besides, many people, because of this realisation of our impending decease, were get downing to state that possibly theirwas something inherently incorrect with all of this. That atomic arms are unsafe toeveryone, no affair what your political positions or where you live, and that we should make awaywith all of them. They have no value to society and should be destroyed.This apocalyptictemper and societal activism was effected greatly in the early Sixtiess by the Cuban MissileCrisis. When Americans saw, on telecasting, that they could be under atomic onslaught in undertwenty proceedingss, a new anxiousness about the cold war surfaced that had non been present sincethe yearss of McCarthy. And this new anxiousness was evidenced in plants that took on a much moresatirical tone. And one of the plants that shows this satiric revelatory pique andcynicism is Kurt Vonnegut & # 8217 ; s Cats Cradle. Vonnegut, considered by many to be one of Americasforemost life writers, was himself a veteran of World War Two. He, as a captive of war, was one of the few subsisters of the fire-bombing of Dresden. In Dresden he saw what manybelieve was a more atrocious calamity than Hiroshima. The allied bombs destroyed the entirecity and killed as many people, if non more, than were killed in Hiroshima. He wouldeventually compose about this experience in the semi-autobiographical Slaughterhouse-Five.This novel, like Cats Cradle, takes a really strong anti-war stance. But along with being anAnti-war book, Cats Cradle is an first-class sarcasm of the Atomic Age. It is basically thestory of one adult male, an writer by the name of John ( or Jonah ) and the research he is making fora book on the twenty-four hours the bomb exploded in Hiroshima. This involves him with members of the Dr. Felix Hoenikker family+the mastermind who helped construct the bomb+and their escapades. In thebook Vonnegut paints an fanciful universe where things might non look to do any Gioielli5sense. But there is in fact an astonishing sum of symbolism, every bit good as sarcasm. Dr. Hoenikker is an highly bizarre scientist who spends most of his clip in the lab at hiscompany. He is interested in really few things, his kids non among them. His childrenare about afraid of him. One of the few times he does seek to play with his kids iswhen he tries to learn the game of cats cradle to his youngest boy, Newt. When he is tryingto show newt the game Newt gets really baffled. In the book, this is what Newt remembered ofthe incident: +And so he sang, +Rockabye catsy, in the tree top+ ; he sang, + when the windblows, the cray-dull will fall. Down will come cray-dull, catsy and all.++I explosion intotears. I jumped up and ran out of the house as fast as I could.+ ( 18 ) What Newt doesn+tremember is what he said to his Father. Subsequently in the book we find this out from Newtssister, Angela that triton jumped of his father+s lap shouting + No cat! No cradle! No cat! No cradle! + ( 53 ) With this scene, Vonnegut is seeking to demo a twosome of things. Dr. Hoenikker symbolizes all the scientists who created the atomic bomb. And the cats cradle isthe universe and all of world combined. Dr. Hoenikker is merely playing, like he has allhis life, that game merely happens to affect the destiny of the remainder of the universe. And littleNewt, holding a childs un-blinded perceptual experience, doesn+t understand the game. He doesn+t see acat or a cradle. Like all the games Dr. Hoenikker dramas, including the 1s with nuclearweapons, this one is mislabeled.This is merely one of the many episodes in the book thatcharacterizes Dr. Hoenikker as a participant of games. He recognizes this in himself when hegives his Nobel Prize address: I stand before you now because I ne’er stopped lingering like aneight twelvemonth on a spring forenoon on his manner to school. Anything can do me halt and inquire, and sometimes larn ( 17 ) . And the Doctors farewell to the universe is a game he has played, with himself. One twenty-four hours a Marine General asked him if he could do something that wouldeliminate claies, so that Mariness wouldn+t have to cover with clay any longer. So Dr. Hoenikkerthinks up ice-nine, an fanciful substance that when it comes in contact with any other kindof H2O, it crystallizes it. And this crystallisation spreads to all the H2O moleculesthis piece of H2O is in contact with. So to crystallise the clay in an full armeddivision of Mariness, it would merely take a small letter sum of ice-nine. Dr. Gioielli6Hoenikker & # 8217 ; s co-workers see this every bit merely another illustration of his imaginativeness at work. But heactually does make a little Chinaman of ice-nine, and when he dies, each of his kids get asmall piece of it. They carry it around with themselves in thermos containers the remainder oftheir lives. At the terminal of book one little piece of ice-nine gets out, by mere accident, and ends up crystallising the whole universe. The game Dr. Hoenikker was playing with himselfdestroyed the whole universe. The accident that caused the ice-nine to acquire out could be muchlike the accident that could do World War III. One little thing that sets off an amazing

series of events, like piece of ice-nine merely falling out of the thermos. And Dr. Hoenikker, like the scientists of the universe, was playing game and caused it all. Here is adescription of the universe after the ice-nine has

wreaked its havoc:There were no smells.There was no movement. Every step I took made a gravelly squeak in blue-white frost. Andevery squeak was echoed loudly. The season of locking was over. The Earth was locked uptight (179).This description eerily resembles what many have said the Earth will look likeduring a nuclear winter (Stone, 62). In addition to Dr. Hoenikker and his doomsday games,Vonnegut provides an interesting analysis of atomic age society with the Bokonon religion.This religion, completely made up by Vonnegut and used in this novel, is the religion ofevery single inhabitant of San Lorenzo, the books imaginary banana republic. This is theisland where Jonah eventually ends up, and where the ice-nine holocaust originates. (Italso, being a Caribbean nation, strangely resembles Cuba.) Bokonon is a strange religion.It was created by one of the leaders of San Lorenzo, a long time ago. Essentially, Bokononis the only hope for all inhabitants of San Lorenzo. Their existence on the island is sohorrible that they have to find harmony with something. Bokononism gives them that. It isbased on untruths, to give San Lorenzans a sense of security, since the truth provides none. This concept can be summed up in this Bokononist quotation: +Live by the foma* that makesyou brave and kind and healthy and happy. *Harmless untruths (4)+ The inhabitants of SanLorenzo do not care what is going on in their real lives because they have the foma ofBokonon to keep them secure and happy. And Vonnegut is trying to say that is what ishappening to the rest of us. Americans, and the rest of the world for that matter, havethis false sense of security that we are safe and secure. That in our homes in Indiana withour dogs and Gioielli 7our lawnmowers, we think we are invincible. Everything will be okaybecause we are protected by are government. This is the foma of real life, because we aretrying to deny what is really going on. We+re in imminent danger of being annihilated atany second, but to deny this very real danger we are creating a false world so that we maylive in peace, however false that sense of peace may be.Throughout the entire novelVonnegut gives little snippets of +calypsos+ : Bokonon proverbs written by Bokonon. Verselike:I wanted all things To seem to make some sense,So we could all be happy, yes,Instead oftense.And I made up liesSo that they all fit niceAnd made this sad worldA par-a-dise(90).This calypso expresses the purpose of Bokonon and why it, with its harmless untruths,exists. The following one is about the outlawing of Bokonon. To make the religion moreappealing to the people, the leaders had it banned, with its practice punishable by death.They hoped that a renegade religion with a rebel leader would appeal to the people more.So Isaid good-bye to government,and I gave my reason:That a really good religionIs a form oftreason (118)These calypsos, and the rest of the book, express the points Vonnegut in amore abstract , symbolic manner. They only add to the impact of the books messageexpressing it in a very short, satirical way. The black humor used when talking about theend of the world+the nuclear end+was pioneered by Vonnegut. But what many consider to bethe the climax of this pop culture phenomena is Stanley Kubrick’s movie, Dr. Strangelove(Stone 69). Subtitled Or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb , thismovie was Kubrick’s viewpoint on how mad the entire Cold War and arms race had become.Based a little known book by English science fiction writer Peter George, Red Alert, themovie is about how one maverick Air Force general, who is obviously suffering a severemental illness, concocts a plan to save the world from the Gioielli 8Communists. He managesto order the strategic bombers under his command to proceed to their targets in the SovietUnion. They all believe it is World War Three, and the General, Jack Ripper, is the onlyone that can call the planes back. Kubrick’s characters: Dr. Strangelove, President MertinMuffley, Premier Kissof and others, go through a series a misadventures to try and turn theplanes around. But the one, plane piloted by Major +King+ Kong, does get through, and itdrops its bombload. This is where Kubrick tries to show the futility of everything. Thegovernments of both the worlds superpowers have thousands of safeguards and securityprecautions for their nuclear weapons. But one man manages to get a nuclear warhead to behit its target. And this warhead hits the +Doomsday Device+. The Doomsday device is theultimate deterrent, because if you try to disarm it it will go off. It has the capabilityto destroy every living human and animal on Earth, and it does So it is all pointless. Wehave these weapons, and no matter how hard we try to control them everyone still dies. Andso to make ourselves feel better about all this impending doom, Kubrick, like Vonnegut,satirizes the entire system. By making such moronic characters, like the wimpish PresidentMertin Muffley, Kubrick is saying, similar to Vonnegut with Dr. Hoenikker, that we are evenworse off because these weapons are controlled by people that are almost buffoonish andchildish. General Ripper, the man who causes the end of the world, is a portrait of aMcCarthy era paranoid gone mad. He thinks the communists are infiltrating and trying todestroy are country. And he says the most heinous communist plot against democracy isfluoridation of water:Like I was saying, Group Captain, fluoridation of water is the mostmonstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face . . . Theypollute our precious bodily fluids! (George 97)And General Rippers personal prevention ofthe contamination of his bodily fluids is equally perplexing. He drinks only + . . . distilled water, or rain water, and only grain alcohol . . .+Kubrick uses this kind ofabsurd reasoning in his movie to show the absurd reasoning behind nuclear weapons. Both himand Vonnegut were part of the satirical side of the apocalyptic temper in the earlySixties. They laughed at our governments, our leaders, the Cold War and the arms race, andtried to show how stupid it all really was. But as time moved on, the writers, and theentire country, started to take a less narrow minded view of things. The counterculture ofthe Gioielli 9sixties prompted people to take a closer look at themselves. As thinkers,teachers, lovers, parents, friends and human beings. And people concerned with nuclearweapons started to see things in a broader context as well. Nuclear weapons were somethingthat affected our whole consciousness. The way we grew up, our relationships with othersand what we did with our lives. One of the authors who put this new perspective on thingswas the activist, social thinker and poet Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg first made a name forhimself in the 1950+s as one of the foremost of the Beat writers. The Beats in the Fiftieswere a forerunner of the more widespread counterculture of the late Sixties and earlySeventies. And Ginsberg evolved into this. He became a devoted leader in thecounterculture, who set many precedents for the Hippie generation. He lived in variouscommunes, delved deeply into eastern religions and experimented with numerous hallucinogenicdrugs. In the earlier part of his life Ginsberg had been a rebel against society. He wasstill a rebel but now he was taking the form of activist. By the Seventies he was involvedin many causes that promoted peace and world harmony. What separated Ginsberg from otheractivists is that he was one of the first and original members of many of these movements.Now he was the father figure to many in the non-mainstream world. While teaching at hisschool of poetry in Naropa, Colorado, Ginsberg became involved in protests against thenearby Rock Flats Nuclear Weapons Factory. During the Summer of 1978 he was arrested forpreventing a shipment nuclear waste from reaching its destination and for numerous otherprotests against the facility (Miles 474). From these experiences came two poems +NagasakiDays+ and + Plutonium Ode+.Both these poems exhibit Ginsberg’s more mature style of writing(Miles 475). The poems are more scholarly, containing many mythological and religiousallusions. But both these characteristics show how post war apocalyptic literature hadevolved. By the Seventies many writers, instead of taking the defeatist, satirical viewlike Vonnegut, were beginning to take a make activist standpoint, like Ginsberg.Apocalyptic literature also took on a more mature, scholarly tone, and was more worldly andhad a broader viewpoint. This stanza from +Nagasaki Days+ shows how Ginsberg is puttingnuclear weapons into the context of the universal:2,000,000 killed in Vietnam13,000,000refugees in Indochina200,000,000 years for the Galaxy to revolve on its core 24,000 theBabylonian great year24,000 half life of plutoniumGioielli 102,000 the most I ever got for apoetry reading80,000 dolphins killed in the dragnet4,000,000,000 years earth been born(701)The half life of plutonium is brought together with dolphins and Indochinese refugees.Also, Ginsberg makes a reference to the Babylonian great year, which coincides with the halflife of plutonium. This cosmic link intrigued Ginsberg immensely. That fact alone inspiredhim to right +Plutonium Ode+. The whole poem expands on this connection to plutonium as aliving part of our universe, albeit a very dangerous one. Here he mentions the GreatYear:Before the Year began turning its twelve signs, ere constellationswheeled fortwenty-four thousand sunny yearsslowly round their axis in Sagittarius, one hundredsixty-seven thousandtimes returning to this night. (702) Ginsberg is also relating thegreat year, and the half life of plutonium, to the life of the Earth. The life of the Earthis approximately four billion years, which is 24,000 times 167,000 (Ginsberg 796)In+Plutonium Ode+, Ginsberg talks to plutonium. By establishing a dialogue he gives theplutonium almost human characteristics. It is something, and is near us every day, and isdeadly. In this passage he is asking how long before it kills us all:I enter your secretplaces with my mind, I speak with your presence,I roam your lion roar with mortal mouth.Onemicrogram inspired to one lung, ten pounds of heavy metal dust,adrift slowly motion overgray Alpsthe breadth of the planet, how long before your radiance speeds blight and deathto sentient beings. (703) In putting his nuclear fears and worries on the table, andsaying that these things have pertinence to us because they affect how we live our lives andthe entire the universe, Ginsberg is showing how intrigued he is with plutonium in thispoem.By the time Ginsberg was publishing these poems in late 1978, post war literature hadevolved immensely. At first people had no idea about the bomb and its capabilities. Then,as more information came out about what the bomb could do, they began to began to start tolive in real fear of nuclear weapons. The power of it, a creation by man that could destroythe world, that was terrifying. Then some artists and writers began to see the absurdity ofit all. They saw that we were under control by people we did not, or should not, trust, andwere a constant state of nuclear Gioielli 11fear. So they satirized the systemunmercifully, and were very apocalyptic in their tone. But then things evolved from thesenarrow minded viewpoints, and people began to envision nuclear weapons in the context of ourworld and our lives. The atomic bomb and nuclear proliferation affected all facets of ourlifestyle, including what we read. Literature is a reflection of a country+s culture andfeelings. And literature affected Americans curiosity, horror, anxiety, cynicism and hopeconcerning nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons raised questions that no one had dare everasked before, and had given them answers that they were afraid to hear. They have made usthink about our place in the universe, and what it all means. Gioielli 12WorksCitedBartter, Martha A. The Way to Ground Zero. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988. Dewey,Joseph. In a Dark Time. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1990.Dr. Strangelove. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. With Peter Sellers, George C. Scott and SlimPickens. Highland Films Ltd., 1966.(This is a novelization of the movie. All qoutationsfrom the movie were transribed form this book) Einstein, Albert. +Sir+ (a letter toPresident Franklin D. Roosevelt) Einstein: The Life and Times. Ronald W. Clark. NewYork: World Publishing, 1971. 556-557.George, Peter. Dr. Strangelove. Boston: GreggPress, 1979.Ginsberg, Allen. +Nagasaki Days+ and +Plutonium Ode.+ Collected Poems:1947+1980. Ed. Allen Ginsberg. New York: Harper and Row, 1984. 699-705. Gleick, James. Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman. New York :Vintage Books,1992.Hersey, John. Hiroshima. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985.Miles, Barry. Ginsberg: ABiography. New York: Harper Perennial, 1989.Stone, Albert E. Literary Aftershocks:American Writers, Readers and the Bomb. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994.Vonnegut, Kurt.Cat+s Cradle. New York:Dell, 1963.literary specialist.txtRobGioiellirrgioie@univscvm.csd.scarolina.eduenglishenglishthe atomic bomb and it’s effects onpost wwll american literatureA-Honors High School18 yearsUSAE-mail