Word: hiroshimas
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...necessity, has been treated by those in charge of it as a secret ever since. What are secrets to governments are mysteries to the public; no one outside of a very few people in power has ever understood how nuclear weapons are developed, or why. Suddenly there was Hiroshima, suddenly the hydrogen bomb, suddenly the MIR Vs. Yet while the machinations of the experts and professionals have remained hidden from the public, the effects of the weapons have been continually described and displayed. In the space between secret processes and demonstrated effects, the public imagination has produced works in which...
...Lehrer was singing We Will All Go Together When We Go ("universal bereavement,/ an inspiring achievement"). Robert Lowell, ahead of his time in such things, wrote Fall 1961: "All autumn the chafe and jar/ of nuclear war;/ we have talked our extinction to death." Marguerite Duras's Hiroshima, Mon Amour might also be judged an exception to the indirectness of the period. In some respects, Hiroshima, Mon Amour is not about Hiroshima at all, only using the occasion as a locus for showing how people learn to deal with a tragic past--in the case of the woman...
...what appears to be antinuclear anger or trepidation in the country may simply be part of the perpetual up and-down attitude toward technology in general. Drs. Frankenstein and Strangelove are monsters to the Luddite sensibility quite apart from thoughts of a nuclear winter. It may be that after Hiroshima, Americans were no longer so keen on their seemingly infinite capacity to make things work, that the technological success of Hiroshima took the heart out of American can-do self-esteem. (At Los Alamos, a code name for the Bomb was the "gadget.") On this basis, one might work...
...boil the planet and create a death-in-life; they saw yet one more proof of their impotence. We live in a world of "virile weapons and impotent men," wrote the French historian, Raymond Aron, shortly before his death in 1983. We saw a vision of the future in Hiroshima, but we also saw ourselves, and (again) we did not like what...
...brought, the fear of our murderous capacities is deeper. However monstrous our visions of the Bomb's future, they were only mirrors of what we did, and would probably do again, if we could get away alive. Captain Robert Lewis, co-pilot of the Enola Gay, looked down on Hiroshima and asked, "My God, what have we done?" We did what we always...