Word: hiroshima
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...mind. And the mind has had a very odd relationship with the bomb from the moment it conceived it. Seeing what man had wrought, the people involved in the Manhattan Project almost immediately began to use language in order to deny what they saw, calling the Hiroshima bomb Little Boy, and sending a coded message to report the first successful test at Alamogordo that read, "Babies satisfactorily born"-as if to urge innocence on evil. After Hiroshima, the historical fact could not be expunged; still one could avoid looking at the weapon directly. Only its inventors never seemed to shrink...
...face the bomb squarely might help explain why the attempts to control nuclear proliferation have been so ineffectual. On the one hand, the world has seen more than 30 major good-faith efforts at containing proliferation-a dogged series of pacts, treaties and conferences, extending from three months after Hiroshima through the establishment of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 1957, the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) in 1968, and the International Fuel Cycle Evaluation, the barely pronounceable INFCE, in 1977, that undertook the apparently futile task of dispersing the power without the danger. There...
...makes sense not to face them head on. There are those who never wish to hear about the Holocaust again, contending that it was too horrible even for language. Then there is the matter of avoiding guilt-Why suffer it?-the guilt of not being among the victims in Hiroshima, and the guilt of identifying with the victors as well, the knowledge that the destroyers of the world never came from any planet but our own. Better to hold all that destructiveness at one remove. The U.S. keeps a plane in the air with the capacity to trigger the missile...
...time to see the bomb as a real weapon again, and not an amorphous threat or a political lever. It is time to look straight at its drab snout and recall quite clearly what it once did and still can do. A new book of drawings by Hiroshima's survivors is called Unforgettable Fire. It is time to remember the fire. Whatever considerable use the bomb once served as a diplomatic instrument is passing very quickly now, at a speed directly proportional to the hope of stemming proliferation. But there is still the hope of stemming madness by invoking...
...their stupidity has not neutralized. The mind made the bomb, the mind denied it, and the mind can stop it cold. If that should sound impossible, consider how impossible nuclear fission must have seemed at the start, or how impossible the Holocaust, or how impossible to the children of Hiroshima that Aug. 6, 1945, would turn out to be anything but another summer...