Atomic Bomb Literature

Claude Eatherly, pilota e metereologo,
era un ragazzo texano di
27 anni quando ordinò lo sgancio
della prima bomba atomica della
storia, Little Boy, che colpì Hiroshima
il 6 agosto 1945.
Nonostante la giovane età, non
era certo un dilettante: per quella
missione vennero scelti i migliori
piloti della US Army, e Eatherly
aveva già dato prova del suo valore
militare, abbattendo, nel corso
della sua fulminante carriera,
più di trenta aerei nemici. Dopo
lo sgancio della bomba, tuttavia,
lasciò l’esercito e rifi utò qualsiasi
riconoscimento al valore da parte
degli Stati Uniti. Compì anche
maldestre rapine e altri piccoli
crimini, con la speranza di trovare
sollievo nel biasimo collettivo. Ma
ciò non bastò a placare i suoi dilanianti
sensi di colpa e Eatherly
venne internato in un ospedale
psichiatrico. Fu in questo momento,
quattordici anni dopo Hiroshima,
che iniziò un carteggio con
Günther Anders, il fi losofo tedesco
autore del capolavoro L’uomo
è antiquato. Il risultato è questo
libro: un commovente scambio
epistolare tra Anders e un’anima
persa, in cerca di un’espiazione
tanto impossibile quanto necessaria.
Dopo anni di assenza dalle
librerie, torna disponibile una delle
testimonianze più toccanti sul
disastro che cambiò per sempre
la coscienza collettiva.

In the 1950s, the situation in the USA was not so easy and the feeling of always being in danger was constant, because of the “containment policy”, contrasts, tensions, the promulgation of the Marshall Plan and the birth of NATO. People lived with the fear of an imminent outbreak of an atomic war. That’s why Norbert Wiener, Karl Deutsh and Giorgio de Santillana wrote a project to prepare American cities in the event of an atomic war.
The project, published in the magazine «Life» (December 18, 1950), was titled “How U.S. cities can prepare for atomic war - M.I.T. professors suggest a bold plan to prevent panic and limit destruction”. In that project the professors outlined their idea of “life belts” around the main cities. The idea was to create circular highways about ten miles from the city centre, with roads leading into the city like spokes on a wheel. The three men designated the perimeter of the life belts as evacuation points for city dwellers, also designing essential facilities and places. The paper aims to analyse the project, contextualizing it in the visions of the three professors of MIT attentive to the role of the scientist in political and social life.

From the very first days after the destruction of Hiroshima the coexistence of science and myth, rationality and mysticism, has gone hand in hand with the elaboration of a public debate over the atomic bomb (1). President Harry Truman's words over the radio when announcing the new weapon to the American people on the sixth of August 1945 describe it as «the basic power of the Universe», granted to the United States by God himself. He reiterated this a point three days later on his return from the Potsdam Conference (2). Truman presented the Bomb to the world using a religious type of rhetoric with tones of almost Messianic deliverance. Technological developments made by scientists from all over the world were embraced and united beneath the stars and stripes. The almost divine nature of the new form of energy may well have been capable of mass destruction, but if well managed it was also able to guarantee prosperity and progress for mankind (3). The capacity to create or annihilate lay in the hands of a man who, like some apprentice alchemist, had become the sole artisan of his own fortune. His was the power to shape the normal course of events, burning bridges with the past and throwing open the (1) The allusive and metaphoric power of the Bomb meant that two spheres, apparently worlds apart, such as science and religion, could be indistinguishably merged within a highly evocative plot.

At the beginning of the 20th century the collective imagination was fascinated and terrified by the discovery of radium. A scientific imagery sprang up around radioactivity and was disseminated by public lectures and newspaper articles discussing the ambiguous power of this strange substance. It was claimed that radium could be used to treat cholera, typhus and tuberculosis, but at the same time there were warnings that it could be used for military purposes. The media and the scientists themselves employed a rich vocabulary influenced by religion, alchemy and magic. The ambivalent power of radioactive elements exerted a great influence on science fiction novelists. This paper will examine some significant works published in Europe, America and Russia during the first decades of the 20th century and their role in the creation of the complex imagery of radioactivity that seized the public imagination long before the invention of the atomic bomb.

Contents
- Introduction: The Historical Context
- The Utopias of Emilio Salgari and H.G. Wells, Suspended between Progress and Catastrophe
- The Ambiguous Nature of Radioactivity and Anxieties Regarding Technology in Early 20th-Century Novels and Feuilletons
- Radioactivity and Nuclear Energy in Slavic Literature in the 1920s and 1930s
- Conclusions

Desde a década de 1970 o debate sobre o revisionismo assola os historiadores, principalmente sobre temas que envolvem a Segunda Guerra Mundial, mais especificamente sobre o Holocausto. Um tema, não menos importante, tem gerado diversas complicações teóricas e historiográficas, sobre outra questão que envolve a Segunda Guerra Mundial: as bombas atômicas jogadas em Hiroshima e Nagasaki em 1945. Diversos intelectuais se dedicaram a estudar tal fenômeno, muitos destes tiveram sua atenção voltada para discutir os motivos pelos quais as bombas foram lançadas, incipientes estudos se preocuparam de como as vítimas, a radiação e reconstrução do Japão (aliada a invasão estadunidense no país de 1945-1952) impactaram o imaginário social do século XX e XXI. Nesta perspectiva, este trabalho busca discutir e problematizar as formas como o pensamento histórico se organiza para legitimar um discurso que carrega um viés político muito forte. Pretendendo compreender como o uso de artifícios da “ciência histórica” são possíveis de serem usados para pretextos variados, como denunciar autores ditos “revisionistas”, porém, muitas vezes aderido um discurso completamente antiético e ofensivo aos Direitos Humanos. Para isso, trataremos do debate (e suas repercussões) travado, desde a década de 1970, entre o historiador estadunidense Robert Maddox e o economista político Gar Alperovitz. Maddox aponta severas críticas ao que chamou de “revisionismo de esquerda” sobre as bombas atômicas. Direcionado a desconstruir a obra de Alperovitz, acusa-o de falsário por ignorar fontes que seriam contraditórios a sua tese: de que a bomba foi lançada para intimidar a URSS. Maddox é veemente em afirmar que a bomba cumpre a função de obrigar um Japão, que ainda colocava muitas pessoas em risco, a se render. O autor recorre a dados estimativos de baixas que o exército estadunidense teria no caso de uma invasão ao Japão. Na tentativa de estreitar este debate, temos como objetivo entender como os autores se utilizam das fontes e do discurso historiográfico para legitimar a sua versão da história, que necessariamente envolve questões políticas e identitárias envolvendo a construção de um inimigo e a justificação para o uso de armas de destruição em massa. Com o intuito de compreender as formas como o discurso histórico acadêmico cria, através de uma crítica “cientificista” da história, elementos capazes de denunciarem uma obra acusando-a de revisionismo (num sentido pejorativo), porém nem sempre comprometidos com a “verdade” e/ou a ética, mas enfatizando apenas a denúncia. Utilizando como referenciais teóricos autores como:  Armitage (2014), Certeau (2010), Cezar (2012), Dower (2000), Ferro (1986), Friedlander (2007), Rousso (1994), Vidal-Naquet (1993) entre outros.

Four years into the Second World War, the citizens of Trail, British Columbia, a small city with a large smelter in the mountainous West Kootenay region near the United States border, were, like most of the world, totally unaware of the possibility of creating an atomic bomb. Trail’s industrial workforce, employees of the Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company of Canada (CM&S Company), were home-front producers of war materials destined for Allied forces on the battlefields of Europe. They, along with the rest of humanity, would have seen the creation of such a bomb as pure science fiction fantasy invented by the likes of British novelist H.G. Wells. They were understandably preoccupied with the life-and-death necessity of ensuring an Allied victory against the Nazis, Italian fascists, and the Japanese. It was no secret that, as it had done in the previous world conflict, their employer was supplying much of the lead, zinc, and now fertilizer that Britain needed to prosecute the war. What Trailites did not know was that they were for a short time indispensable in the creation of the world’s first weapon of mass destruction.

Martin Cruz Smith (Gorky Park, 1981) is rarely acknowledged as a native American author concerned with the global implications of colonialism, race, and native sovereignty.  His virtually unknown first novel, however, The Indians Won (1970), imagines an alternate America in which an Indian Nation established in the 1870s stretches from Canada to Mexico.  The novel explores how nation-building occurs and what a native nation peopled by modern native citizens might look like.  It maps colonization and forms of native resistance, factual and imagined, through a process of trickster memsis-- subversive and deliberate self-reflexivity that anticipates the playful irony of Viznor’s trickster hermeneutics, in which native peoples continuously engage in cultural play as a means of resistance, reinvention, and affirmation of presence over absence. The Indians Won transforms Western notions of nationhood, citizenship, and sovereignty into a distinctively native form of nationalism.

What happened, in the years leading up to Valentine's Day 2014, that made a canister of nuclear waste burst open and spew out fire underground at a US facility for the long-term disposal of radioactive military waste? According to one widely publicized scenario, a simple run-of-the-mill typo led to organic kitty litter mistakenly being used to soak up liquid in the drum instead of another kind of absorbent material. This ultimately led to a reaction that made heat and pressure build up in the drum, causing it to erupt. But was that "simple" clerical error symptomatic of a much deeper, system-wide problem-- involving a US Energy Department plan to rush the pace of nuclear waste disposal? What were the political, social, and financial elements involved in making Los Alamos' waste drum #68660 erupt that February night? What can be done to prevent similar accidents – which can have price tags of hundreds of millions of dollars or more – from happening again in the future? A cultural anthropologist spent 10 weeks onsite after the event, logging 43 interviews and trying to answer these questions. Here is what he found.

This essay specifically takes issue with the bikini swimsuit with regard to its birth in the latter 1940s and the power the suit garnered in the ’50s and early ’60s. This time period was rife with fears of female sexuality as well as the atomic bomb. Thus, I correlate a relationship between the swimsuit, the sexuality it implicates, and the bomb: how the bikini lends real sexual, some would say, “atomic,” largess to its wearer vis-à-vis the swimsuit’s cultural environment—its name, bikini, and the cultural practices associated with it, I argue, relate to the invention of the atomic bomb. Because the bikini swimsuit is such a visual text, the treatment of the bikini, in its initial film appearances, are incredibly important to this study because they ultimately reveal the linkage between bombs, bodies and the swimsuit. Incorporating an analysis of early filmic debuts of the swimsuit, I show that this swimsuit, more than any other piece of 20th century clothing, imitates a metaphorical cultural marking of the body similar to the atomic bomb.

January 27, 1945: the Red Army set Auschwitz concentration camp free, making this date the “liberation day” for thousands of inmates, victims of Nazi’s idea of the “master race”. August 15, 1945: Emperor Hirohito announced the surrender on Japanese radio after experienced the atomic bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. XX century witnessed two of the most abominable atrocities of human history whose repercussions still affect not only German and Japanese societies, involved at first place, but also individual consciousness too.
Over the past decades different studies have been investigating these indelible marks on History on many levels: historical, political, sociological, psychological and even artistic approaches were called into question in the search for the truth about Shoah and atomic bombing catastrophes.
This study offers a different perspective on the topic by comparing the poetical responses of two representatives of the so-called Shoah Literature and Atomic Bombing Literature: Primo Levi and Hara Tamiki. Both authors, although the space-related distance and the different nature of the traumatic experiences they witnessed, gave birth to similar poetical responses under the title of Se questo è un uomo (“If this is a man”) and Kore ga ningen na no desu (“This is a human being”).
This research sets itself the ambitious goal to demonstrate how, regardless of territorial, cultural and stylistic boundaries, a similar human response toward catastrophe can be detached in the literary productions of Levi and Hara: a comparison on stylistic, figurative and expressive level reveals the  analogous literary solutions adopted by the authors to depict human’s frailty in front of trauma.
Both authors answer the literary imperative of writing: their commitment unveils the aim to bear witness and to convey memory to the future generations. Words, enriched by authors of allusive and critical meanings, represent an effective and necessary means to keep alive and to preserve the traumatic memory. The literature of the catastrophe, then, becomes a language that unites, rather than divides, different societies. It serves as universal mouthpiece for victim’s experience to prevent Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Nagasaki to happen again.

Se describe el proyecto de nuclearización militar de España al final de la Dictadura franquista y en los primeros años de la Transición, así como el megalómano programa de construcción de centrales nucleares en esa época. Se evidencian la vinculación del ciclo energético del átomo con sus posibles usos armamentísticos, así como las implicaciones e intereses económicos y políticos de todo ello.

This article explores the poetry written by survivors of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki to elucidate the history of atomic memory in the city. Looking closely at works by three poets, the article discusses how poetry served as a medium for the survivors to grapple with traumatic memory and convey the atomic experience in meaningful ways that both provided catharsis and challenged a landscape of memory that ignored their personal trauma and suffering. An analysis of their verse also informs our understanding of the historical nature of war trauma more generally.

The article discusses how the emerging genre of American and British science fiction symbolised and expressed Cold War anxieties after 1949. 
It begins by briefly showing how a popular Western symbolised the Berlin Airlift, then considers how several new Sci Fi novels, including "The Martian Chronicles," "The Day of the Triffids," "I am Legend," and "The Bodysnatchers" each respond more precisely to changing Soviet aggression. 
The chief writers explored are Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, John Wyndham, Richard Matheson, Jack Finney, and the television writer Terry Nation.  Connections are drawn between key science fiction novels and public concerns about possible atomic war, espionage fears, future Soviet invasion, and the Cuban Missile Crisis.
It then suggests a shift in meaning affecting British science fiction from the mid-1950s, with rising fears about the demise of empire, and concerns that European civilisation is waning.  The chief writers discussed in this regard are John Christopher, whose work is linked with the Suez Crisis, & J.G. Ballard's "The Drowned World."  Strong links are also established between several British science fiction novels and William Golding's "Lord of the Flies."
9pp.

The challenge of Barefoot Gen (Hadashi no Gen, 1973-1987) lies in its use of a
conventional manga style to depict an event that is often deemed to be unrepresentable
in its violence and trauma—the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 8, 1945.
Barefoot Gen invites us to address not only the experience of survivors of Hiroshima
but also to consider what manga expression brings to our understanding of the atomic
bomb, war, and trauma. I propose to pay particular attention to the dynamics of the
line, as the key to an analysis of the composition of forces in manga. I also propose
to show how Barefoot Gen works through the dynamics of the “plastic line”, which
contributes to its articulation of a politics in which vitality and resilience do not appear
to reside outside historical violence but seem to emerge with it.

This paper examines the political-ontoepistemological-ethical implications of temporal dis/junction by reading insights from Quantum Field Theory and Kyoko Hayashi's account of the destruction wrought by the Nagasaki bombing through one another. The diffraction [indeterminacy] of time at the core of quantum field theory, troubles the scalar distinction between the world of subatomic particles and that of colonialism, war, nuclear physics research, and environmental destruction; all of which entangle the effects of nuclear warfare throughout the present time, troubling the binaries between micro and macro, nature and culture, nonhuman and human. Barad thus attempts to think through what possibilities remain open for an embodied remembering of the past which, against the colonialist practices of erasure and avoidance and the related desire to set time aright, calls for thinking a certain undoing of time; a work of mourning more accountable to, and doing justice to, the victims of ecological destruction and of racist, colonialist, and nationalist violence, human and otherwise-those victims who are no longer there, and those yet to come. This task is related to rethinking the notion of the void. Against its Newtonian interpretation as the absence of matter and energy, as that which does not matter and thus works to justify colonial occupation, Barad understands the void in terms of Derrida's hauntology; a spectral domain where life and death are originarily entangled, and inanimate matter itself gives itself to be thought in its mortal finitude. The void is rather the yearning and the imagining of what might yet have been, and thus also the infinitely rich ground of imagining possibilities for living and dying otherwise.

Book flyer and discount code for book and translation of Anders...

Günther Anders’s prolific philosophy of technology is undergoing a major revival but has never been translated into English. Prometheanism mobilises Anders’s pragmatic thought and current trends in critical theory to rethink the constellations of power that are configuring themselves around our increasingly “smart” machines.

The book offers a comprehensive introduction to Anders’s philosophy of technology with an annotated translation of his visionary essay ‘Promethean Shame’, part of The Obsolescence of Human Beings 1 published in 1957. The essay analyses feelings of curtailment, obsolescence and solitude that become manifest whilst we interact with machines. When technological solutions begin to make humans look embarrassingly limited and flawed, new emotional vulnerabilities are exposed. These need to be thought, because our wavering confidence leaves us unprotected in an ever more (un)transparent, connected yet fractured world.

IN: Anais de História de Além-Mar, XVIII (2016)

Inaugurated in 1962, the Museum of the Twenty-Six Martyrs of Nagasaki and its accompanying monument are dedicated to the memory of the first saints born from the mission in Japan: the Twenty-six martyrs of 1597 (beatified in 1627, canonized in 1862).
Analyzing both the architecture and the nature of the collections of the museum, this article demonstrates how the entire structure was created, in the context of post-War Nagasaki, as something between a museum and a place of worship, and also as a “lieu de mémoire,” following the models of Jesuit spirituality, such as Louis Richeome’s “La peinture spirituelle,” or the “Spiritual Exercises.”


Palavras-chave: Mártires, Museu, Relíquias, Japão, Jesuítas, Nagasaki

Inaugurado em 1962, o Museu e Monumento dos Vinte e Seis Mártires são dedicados à memória dos primeiros santos nascidos da missão no Japão: os vinte e seis mártires de 1597 (beatificado em 1627, canonizado em 1862) .
Analisando a arquitetura e a natureza das coleções do museu, este artigo demonstra como toda a estrutura foi criada, no contexto do pós-guerra Nagasaki, como algo entre um museu e um local de culto, e também como um “lieu de mémoire”, seguindo os modelos da espiritualidade jesuíta, como a “La peinture spirituelle” de Louis Richeome ou os “Exercícios Espirituais”.

Inspired by the “aesthetic turn” in International Relations (IR), the present dissertation focuses on atomic bomb literature, a genre in Japanese literature that portrays the nuclear attacks of Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the viewpoint of survivors, of hibakusha. The study contrasts stories and poetic depictions, conveyed by literature, with dominant narratives and representations of the events, championed by sovereign authorities. Its aim is to call attention to the fissures between literary accounts and hegemonic discourses, disrupting the latter. The dissertation argues that the contrast between narratives accentuates divergences, exposes inconsistencies, undermines self-evident concepts, and fragments taken- for-granted “truths.” By bringing out differences, this contrast creates a vivid, kaleidoscopic memory of the atomic bombings. Moreover, the study advances that literary texts enable us to grasp aesthetic, cultural, and emotional facets of nuclear weapons that have been often neglected in IR scholarship. The dissertation investigates how atomic bomb literature destabilizes the sovereign frontiers that limit our modern political imagination. By delineating alternative narratives of war and nuclear atrocities, literature challenges the “atomic silence”, the silence of death and destruction imposed by the bomb, and sparks critical thinking about world politics and security.

When reading about nuclear and communist fears in the United States after World War II, a commonly used phrase is “fears, either real or imagined.” Most work concentrated on the perceived real fears. This essay attempts to identify and illuminate the imagined companion narratives of a world in the Nuclear Age. These narratives were created out of fear of what could be rather than a fear of what was, a fear of philosophy rather than historical fact, and became the companion to facts that ultimately became conspiratorial truisms. This paper refers to these instantly recognizable Cold War metaphors, opinions and narrative constructs as atomodoxies. This essay analyses representative textual anecdotes that began circulating shortly after the advent of the atomic bomb including those evident in the science fiction movies Them! and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. How does a good citizen respond to monsters and communists? What is victory? These examples are more than just entertaining stories for the public. Atomodoxies supplemented and provided scaffolding for the prevailing cold war ideology and cast the cold war and communism into mythic realities.

The paper discusses and assesses the ways in which the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki affected anime through the examination of depiction of the atomic bomb and nuclear warfare in anime in the wake of the attacks. The paper focuses on 'Grave of the Fireflies', 'Barefoot Gen', 'Akira', 'Appleseed', and the 'Neon Genesis Evangelion' series, as well as some other anime and some manga.

Analisi degli omonimi film, (1982) - diretto da Alan Parker, con Bob Geldof  - e disco (1979), entrambi collegati alle tematiche scolastiche del liceo classico.

Analysis of the film (1982) - made by Alan Parker - and the disk (1979) by Pink Floyd, both of them linked to scholastic themes.

This essay traces the trajectory of how memory of Saint Maksymilian Kolbe at Auschwitz and memory of the Catholic A-bomb victims of Nagasaki have been juxtaposed in postwar Japan. A simple juxtaposition of Auschwitz and Nagasaki through the figure of Saint Maksymilian Kolbe may expose a hidden mnemonic nexus capable of bridging East and West in the global memory space. This essay tries to understand the religious sublimation of victimhood nationalism into the transnational memory formation by investigating the role of the Saint Kolbe cult in the promotion of Catholic sanctification of the Nagasaki atomic bomb victims in postwar Japan.

Atollo K è l'unico film della coppia Laurel & Hardy con esplicite pretese politiche - se si eccettuano le altre produzioni degli anni Quaranta realizzate durante il Secondo conflitto mondiale. Amalgama di sentimenti anti-imperialisti e anti-nucleari, rivela un atteggiamento quanto mai pessimista nei confronti della società post-bellica, aspetto che talora fa a pugni con il "materiale comico" di Stanlio e Ollio.

In  what  sense  do  we  speak  of  the planetary university? This  essay  belongs  to  a  more  comprehensive, still  unpublished reflection  that the authors have been developing over  the  past  years  while teaching  and  doing  research in Italy  and  abroad. However,  the essay  delineates  neither  the  situation  of  single  academic institutions, nor  a  general picture obtained by induction starting  from a variety of observational data. Rather,  it  attempts  to clarify,  in  the  specific  situation in which the authors  operate,  the powers  that  act  upon  teaching  and  research  once  they  let  themselves  be  informed  by  the laws  of  the  earth  turned  into  a  planet, that is,  in the words  of  common  language, by the new order of the globalized earth.

Title
The Flight of the Hog Wild / by Bill Streifer and Irek Sabitov

Summary
Webpage providing commentary and background information to the authors' book Flight of the Hog Wild. The Hog Wild was a U.S. B-29 shot down over Japanese-occupied Korea during the closing stages of World War II. Ostensibly on a mission to drop humanitarian relief supplies to prisoners held in the P.O.W. camp at Konan, the authors argue the aircraft was shot down by the Soviet Union in order to prevent the Americans from identifying the production facilities supporting Japan’s World War II atomic bomb program.

Japan’s defeat in the Second World War represented an opportunity for radical reform of the institutions and practices of art and for rethinking the role of art and artist in the public sphere. Calls for change and revolution were couched in terms of “democratization.” Women were some of the earliest and most obvious beneficiaries of the Allied Occupation of Japan’s democratization policies. This article asks how female artists sought to capture the potential of social and political change for women in particular and society in general at this transformative moment in Japanese history. Focusing on Akamatsu Toshiko and Migishi Setsuko, two of early postwar Japan’s most successful female painters, it reveals how women artists across the spectrums of artistic practice and political conviction enacted women’s liberation in the public sphere and engaged in the democratization of art. Keywords: Japan, art, democracy, communism, postwar, occupation, gender, Cold War, women, Women’s Democratic Association, Association of Women Painters, audience, authorship, atomic bomb, peace movement, women’s movement Alicia Volk is Associate Professor of Japanese Art at the University of Maryland. She is the author of In Pursuit of Universalism: Yorozu Tetsugorō and Japanese Modern Art (University of California Press, 2010), which received the Phillips Book Prize of the Center for the Study of Modern Art at The Phillips Collection, and Made in Japan: The Postwar Creative Print Movement (University of Washington Press, 2005), the catalog of an exhibition she curated for the Milwaukee Museum of Art. Her current research examines the rebuilding of the art world during the occupation of Japan. Alicia has been a J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellow, a Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Fellow, and a Fulbright Research Fellow at Waseda University.