Hiroshima and the Nuclear Event

"The most spectacular event of the past half-century," Thomas Schelling announced in his Nobel Lecture of 2005, "is one that did not occur. We have enjoyed sixty years without nuclear weapons exploded in anger." To think of something that has not occurred as an event is slightly counterintuitive; to think of it as a spectacular event is downright bizarre. But Schelling's formulation sits more comfortably than we might expect within the animated and contentious discussion that has surrounded nuclear weapons from their initial explosion "in anger" in 1945 through their persistent "non-use" ever since. 1 The prospect of nuclear combat has regularly pressured the relationship between what Alan Nadel calls "history and event." 2 Jacques Derrida identified nuclear war as a "non-event," a prospect whose very conceptualization raised "the necessity and the impossibility of thinking the event." 3 If Schelling's casting something that did not occur as an event testifies to this necessity, accounts of what Derrida calls "the explosion of American bombs in 1945" (22) often betray the impossibility. "For most people who know something about the United States' intervention in the Second World War," Rey Chow announces at the opening of "The Age of World Target," "one image seems to predominate and preempt the rest: the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, pictorialized in the now familiar image of the mushroom cloud, with effects of radiation and devastation of human life on a scale never before imaginable." 4 (See figures 1-2.) Given that Chow will go on to anatomize and to critique the "fuzzing of the line between war and representation" first, or at least definitively, enacted in the United States' detonation of atomic bombs over Japanese cities, we can only wonder at her casual and seamless movement from the "one image" that dominates all other images of the Second World War to "the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki" (32). That image, Chow tells us, is the "now familiar image of the mushroom cloud," but the order of her phrases presents the bombing itself as if it were the famous image, as if the bombing were in fact itself nothing more than the mushroom cloud that is also said to "pictorialize" it. Once the 1945 atomic attacks are rendered "representation" the world--"us, the spectators"--becomes their "target" (26). But the imperative to disentangle the historical event of the bomb's deployment from its terrorizing pictorialization receives expression here only as the two are further interarticulated. Schelling's event of non-occurrence has become Chow's non-event of occurrence.

Although it is tempting to read these equivocations in Chow's opening lines as a betrayal of her larger challenge to "a global culture in which everything has become (or is mediated by) visual representation and virtual reality" (26-27), my inclination is instead to see in them Chow's most powerful registration of the tenacious centrality of the virtual to the peculiar nature of nuclear warfare. In what follows I will suggest that the emergence of a specifically nuclear branch of strategic military thinking over the late 1940s and 1950s depended upon a thoroughgoing reconceptualization of the idea of the weapon and the event of its use. In its relentless reconsideration of these two categories, nuclear theory would largely anticipate the insights of the self-consciously deconstructive nuclear criticism that later arose to confront it. I will not go so far here as to insist that deconstruction itself should be seen as a progeny of postwar nuclear theory, but several its characteristic insights conspicuously percolate in the seemingly alien discourses of atomic strategy, where, if anything, they receive more committed expression than they would later find in nuclear criticism itself: the bomb brings out unexpected antifoundational valences in military analysis and similarly unexpected realist valences in poststructuralist critique.

The nuclear explosives dropped on Japan, according to Schelling, writing in 1966, "represented violence against the country itself." They "were weapons of terror and shock. They hurt, and they promised more hurt, and that was their purpose." "The bomb that hit Hiroshima was a threat aimed at all of Japan. The political target of the bomb was not the dead of Hiroshima or the factories they worked in, but the survivors in Tokyo." 5 It is easy to see why such weapons might lead Derrida to identify a scare-quoted "'reality'" as "the encompassing institution of the nuclear age" (23). These attacks' chief "effects" occur at the level of what Derrida calls "doxa, opinion, 'belief,'" rather than "science" (24). If the bombs insistently function by way of the application of a seemingly concrete "hurt," they are pitched, equally insistently, to the less concrete entity of "the country itself." And because their targets differ from their victims, they work as much by "representing violence" as inflicting it, which is why so much of their power stems from violence they do not impose but instead merely "promise." The "essential feature" of the nuclear warfare, according to Derrida, is "that of being fabulously textual, through and through" (23)--but Derrida's elaboration of this textuality is itself surprisingly literal in light of Schelling's claims. Because "nuclear war has no precedent," Derrida continues, "The terrifying reality of the nuclear conflict can only be the signified referent, never the real referent (present or past) of a discourse or a text" (23). 6 Schelling's nuclear textuality, by contrast, derives from the nuclear event's formal structure rather its relation to other events: what prevents the "reality" of nuclear weapons from emerging simply as a "real referent" in nuclear theory is not the novelty of the weaponry but the variety of domains in which it will be deployed--the bombs' "purpose" is as much "terror" as destruction. Both depending upon and exceeding the detonation of explosives, nuclear warfare will maintain a perpetually ambiguous and complicated relationship to the ordinary categories of action.

It will maintain, indeed, a perpetually ambiguous and complicated relationship even to the very idea of war. Chow is absolutely right, at the end of the day, to suggest that the "mushroom cloud" is also "the image of [the] blurring of the boundary between war and peace" (31-32). 7 But the atomic bomb's collapsing of war into peace must be read in terms of its reconfiguration of the term "war" as well its reconfiguration of "peace." Paul Virilio's category of "acts of war without war" cuts in two directions. 8 "The overwhelming effect of the continual imaging of" (Chow 33) nuclear weapons lies as much, I submit, in what Schelling would call a "tradition" of nuclear non-use as it does in the "disastrous" (Chow 33) extension of war into the modalities of the everyday. 9 We could easily reverse Derrida's proposition: nuclear weapons are not fabulously textual because they have not been frequently used; they have not been frequently used because they are fabulously textual. The "preemptive combat" (32) Chow associates with the nuclear age involves both a new form of military engagement and a thorough contracting of military agency. To stress the former is to overlook how unlikely it seemed in the immediate aftermath of the events of August 1945 that the development of nuclear weaponry would lead to anything remotely resembling the latter. 10 "There are no longer problems of the spirit," William Faulkner announced in his Nobel Acceptance speech in 1950. "There is only the question: When will I be blown up?" (649). 11 More hard-boiled military strategists were hardly more optimistic. In 1946 Bernard Brodie was sufficiently alarmed by the implications of the atomic bomb that he opened the first systematic academic analysis of the function of nuclear weapons as strategic military instruments by expressing hope that careful and patient deliberation would allow the world to "transmute what appears to be an immediate crisis into a long-term problem." 12 If Chow's age of world target amounts to nothing more than this long-term problem, we might consider it an achievement as well as a disaster.

I will outline out the terms of the disaster, or achievement, by juxtaposing John Hersey's Hiroshima (1946) to the nuclear theory of Brodie, Schelling, and other intellectuals associated with the RAND Corporation in the late 1940s and 1950s. On the surface at least, Hiroshima and the texts I will examine along with it could not be less similar, either in their basic conception of the threat posed by the advent of nuclear weapons or in their sense of the ethical obligations that threat places on those who try to write about it. The differences between an intensely focused account of the bomb's devastating effects on specific persons and abstract theoretical speculations about its strategic military implications are so obvious that they hardly need be noted. All the same, I hope to show that the bomb is already implicitly assuming in Hiroshima the form it would later take explicitly in the nuclear theory produced within the broad umbrella of RAND in the 1950s. For all of Hersey's publicly declared reportorial pride in his work's neutral realism, Hiroshima systematically elaborates the abstract nature of atomic military power even as it depicts that power's awful material implications for the inhabitants of Hiroshima. Hersey's contribution to Schelling's tradition of nuclear non-use stems as much from his recognition that nuclear power is not simply an effect of nuclear destructiveness as from his demonstration of how frightening that destruction could be. 13

1. The Noise of the Bomb

If the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been relentlessly pictorialized, as Chow insists, the image of a mushroom cloud has not always served as their chief visual emblem. "The atomic bomb came and changed everything," Brodie declared in 1959. "[P]hotographs of the destruction wrought at Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been spread across the land, and few persons were unaffected by the thought that the damage had in each case been done by a single aircraft" (50). Brodie's images of rubble are closer to "mimetic representations" of "destruction" (Chow 26) than Chow's cloud, of course, but they are not especially good representations of nuclear destruction. Compare a conventional image of firebombed Tokyo (fig. 3) to an equally conventional shot of Hiroshima (fig. 4), and it is easy to recognize that the distinctive power of the image of Hiroshima lies not in the destruction we see but in the "thought" that accompanies it, namely that a single bomb could have generated such carnage.

In this sense, Chow's and Brodie's images should probably be understood as complements of one another rather than as competitors for the status of the hegemonic or definitive image of nuclear power in military action. As Brodie had already explained in The Absolute Weapon (1946), "the essential change introduced by the atomic bomb is not primarily that it will make war more violent—a city can be as effectively destroyed with TNT and incendiaries—but that it will concentrate the violence in terms of time" (71). Pictures of the rubble in Hiroshima show us an effectively destroyed city. Pictures of mushroom clouds show us something about how such devastation might be concentrated in time. That the clouds would gradually overshadow the rubble only intimates that over time the "thought" of nuclear force might gradually displace its physical application in the nuclear imagination.

Obviously, neither picture exactly presents the bomb's devastation in specifically human terms. The inhabitants of Hiroshima, living and dead alike, are usually as absent from images of the bombed city as they are from the images of the cloud that accompanied its devastation (fig. 5). 14

Such an absence might only seem appropriate in the case of a weapon designed to unleash violence on a "country itself" as well as, or instead of, the people and physical environments it destroys. In the spirit of Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain (1985) we might find ourselves going so far as to entertain the thought that the bombing of Hiroshima has readily lent itself to "pictorialized" forms precisely because the images implicitly raise the questions about the relationship between war and violence which seem to lie at the heart of any understanding of nuclear combat. Photographs "may place the injured body several inches in front of our eyes," Scarry explains, but they "may not" "specify whether such an injury was the intent or accidental effect of the bombing, whether it was within or wholly outside the view" of the weapons' makers and designers, or, "most important, whether the populations who consented to war consented to this or to something else." 15 These latter questions have remained pressing with respect to Hiroshima in large part because the bodies attacked in early August 1945 have so frequently been detached in commentary from the "view" of the bomb's designers and from the intentions behind its use. It has often seemed that the bombings were conceived, from the very beginning, as what Brodie labeled "the initial demonstration" (AW 41) of nuclear power. "Japan was already defeated," he explained. "It was necessary only to make her government develop a clear consensus on that fact, and then openly concede it.... The awful terror of the great fire raids on the cities, culminating in the two atomic attacks, copiously provided the pressure" (SMA 131). As this communicative project sits very uneasily with the material results of two destroyed cities and hundreds of thousands of casualties, critics of the decision to drop the bombs on Japanese cities have frequently suggested that the United States should have instead given the demonstration a purer form. "The dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki clearly constituted war crimes in the sense of the Hague Convention," Hannah Arendt would maintain in the early 1960s; the United States' "entirely new and overwhelmingly powerful weapon" could "have been announced and demonstrated in many other ways." 16 But insofar as the impulse here is to start out with the mushroom cloud that the bombing of Hiroshima has become, it encounters interference from terms like "pressure" in Brodie's argument. In dropping the bombs the United States demonstrated more than that the bombs existed and that they were powerful; it also demonstrated that at least one nation was willing to use them in combat.

It would seem at first glance that that use is Hiroshima's principal subject, and that the work's overarching ambition is to show us that the events of August 6, 1945 were emphatically not the relatively empty demonstration Arendt would have preferred. It is certainly hard not to read Hiroshima as a reminder of the human stakes at issue in the deployment of atomic weaponry. The work often seems little more than an insistent commentary on the ease with which the bomb, spectacular in its power, impressive in its design, can be detached from its material impact. Hersey's opening paragraph is a veritable allegory of Chow's critique. The atomic bomb "flashe[s] over Hiroshima" (781) in the opening sentence, almost as if to illuminate the sky for a photograph of a beautiful mushroom cloud. Several sentences later the weapon's presence is considerably less ethereal: "One hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb..." (782). Hiroshima's famously impassive tone gives way to judgment almost exclusively on the question of how thoroughly its characters persist in engaging the devastation around them. "It was difficult for the children in the park to sustain a sense of the tragedy" (824). Hersey himself has no such problems. He fairly glories in his tragic stamina by relentlessly scolding those of his characters who lack it:

The rector of the Novitiate, who had been a doctor before he entered the religious order, cleaned the wounds of the two priests and put them to bed between clean sheets, and they thanked God for the care they had received.

***

Thousands of people had nobody to help them. (820)

Injured bodies are never more than "several inches" from our eyes in Hiroshima, and Hersey's clever use of readerly surrogates imaginatively projects his readers into scenes from which they might otherwise think themselves aloof:

He reached down and took a woman by the hands, but her skin slipped off in huge, glove-like pieces. He was so sickened by this that he had to sit down for a moment.... Mr. Tanimoto, ashamed of hurting wounded people, embarrassed at being able to walk upright, suddenly thought of the naval hospital ship, which had not come (it never did), and he had for a moment a feeling of blind, murderous rage at the crew of the ship, and then at all doctors. Why didn't they come to help these people? (818)

If we are not so sickened by these images that we have to sit down, it is because we are likely already sitting down, unembarrassed, at least until this moment, that we will walk upright to our next appointment once we finish The New Yorker. And if we need not join Mr. Tanimoto in his feelings shame for hurting injured people, we are also denied the consolation Mr. Tanimoto can feel in complaining that help is not arriving. We have done little enough to help these people; our representatives made them need this help in the first instance.

It is nonetheless easy to overstate the significance of these sequences. Their force lies almost entirely in their subtlety. We get a delicious form of liberal guilt: the work's most powerful effects come bundled with an implicit compliment to the reader for his sensitivity. The process generates as much self-congratulation for one's ability to see through the images of Hiroshima to the horror of war as self-flagellation for one's complicity in bringing about this particular catastrophe: hard-earned tears of sorrow simply wash away responsibility. Whatever the moral stakes of the decision to drop the bomb, they are not so profound as to need announcing. They will surface only ambivalently in Hiroshima, and only in the mouths of characters ("When will our moralists give us a clear answer to this question?" [855]). In their place we find a curiously aggressive evasiveness about exactly what happened "At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time" (781). The bomb itself regularly disappears into Hersey's accounts of its effects. The flashing above Hiroshima occurs in a subordinate clause in Hiroshima's opening sentence, which is primarily focused on what Miss Toshiko Sasaki is doing when it happens. Most of "the survivors in Hiroshima," Hersey notes, "were too busy or too weary or too badly hurt to care that they were objects of the first great experiment in the use of atomic power" (821). His focus on their efforts, their exhaustion, and their injuries crowds out judgment about this experiment; indeed, it allows for the transformation of the bombing into an experiment without the reader's so much as pausing to wonder whether military actions and the scientific method should so seamlessly blur together. If Hersey is quick to attribute the idea that "no country except the United States, with its industrial knowhow ... could possibly have developed" the bomb to "voices on the shortwave" (821), he certainly does not meet such triumphalism with explicit questions about the moral implications of the United States' decision to use the weapon.

Indeed, there is a sense in which Hiroshima is no less devoted to obscuring that decision, and even that use, than it is to revealing the wounds and hardship they occasioned. Following Scarry, we might even say that attention to the wounds and the hardship they occasion is the very means by which Hersey will steer our attention away from the broader ethical implications of August 6^th. Hersey comes remarkably close to saying so himself. "A surprising number of people remained more or less indifferent about the ethics of using the bomb," he writes. "Possibly they were too terrified by it to want to think about it at all. Not many of them even bothered to find out much about what it was like" (854). The phrase "what it was like" jumps off of the page here. The whole premise of Hiroshima, after all, is that while these survivors may not have known what the bomb was, they are the only ones who know what it was like: it is because they know what the bomb was like in an experiential sense that they need not pursue the question of what it was like in an ethical or military sense. But here the experience of the bomb comes at the expense not only of the consideration of the bomb as, to use Brodie's term, "an instrument of war" (24), but also of the consideration of the bomb as a bomb. The impact of atomic warfare is no longer irreducibly connected to the physical scenes of atomic deployment.

The point is not simply that Hersey sometimes detaches the grisly scenes on offer in Hiroshima from the strategic military decisions that produced them--in casting, for instance, the tasks facing the survivors as a "dreadful ordeal" (853), as if the victims of the bombing had simply run into a string of bad luck. It is rather that he will show how easily the bomb's very material effects can conceal its status as a weapon. His focus on survivors, on those whose lives persisted at least some considerable time beyond the moment of the bomb's flash, gently obscures the bomb's most obvious and immediate casualties: those killed by the explosion itself and those who died in "direct reaction to the bombardment of the body, at the moment when the bomb went off, by neutrons, beta particles, and gamma rays" (844). And the bomb's less direct effects frequently appear reconfigured in Hiroshima as the more direct effects of some intervening contingency. When we read something like, "The lot of Drs. Fujii, Kanda, and Machii right after the explosion...explained why so many who might have lived died. Of a hundred and fifty doctors in the city, sixty-five were already dead and most of the rest were wounded" (800-801), we are likely to forget that everyone who perished in Hiroshima might have lived. This kind of teasing displacement springs up throughout the work, perhaps most pointedly in Hersey's accounts of the effects of radiation sickness. "Since the blood disorders were, in the long run, the predominant factor in the disease," Hersey explains in a mesmerizing sequence, "some of the Japanese doctors evolved a theory as to the seat of the delayed sickness. They thought that perhaps gamma rays, entering the body at the time of the explosion, made the phosphorous in the victims' bones radioactive, and that they in turn emitted beta particles, which, though they could not penetrate for through flesh, could enter the bone marrow, where blood is manufactured, and gradually tear it down" (845). By the end of this description, the victim's body has itself become a source of the radioactive particles that kill him: the emission that tears down his bone marrow comes from his own bones. It is almost as if the bomb's power has become more replicative than explosive. Its force lies more in its ability to make its victims themselves redouble its operations than in its immediate detonative energy.

This insistent doubling of the bomb's effects—so that they that are done both to and by the characters in Hiroshima—allows Hersey to isolate the events of August 6^th from the arena of the national military conflict in which they might seem to have taken place and relocate them in a broader sweep of a generally global human time. The paragraph beginning with the Japanese doctors' "theory" of "the delayed sickness" ends with a curious invocation of man's "own ingenuity": "And, as if nature were protecting man from his own ingenuity, the reproductive processes were affected for a time; men became sterile, women had miscarriages, menstruation stopped" (845). "Man" here is at least doubly distortive. That previously specifically American military knowhow has now somehow become the survivors' responsibility: their reproductive difficulties stand as nature's general solution to the bomb's and their enemies' horrific violence against them. And once the bomb has been removed from the scene of national conflict it can also be easily removed from the domain of human agency itself. 17

As the men and women of Japan and the United States are united as "man," ingenuity becomes a natural category, not a social or political one. Man is its victim in the general sense that it is a part of his nature, not in the specific sense that it leads particular groups of men to make unfortunate choices. It thus comes as no shock that the flashing of August 6^th will seamlessly merge with the general patterns of the weather before Hiroshima has run its course: "Down in Hiroshima, the flood took up where the bomb had left off—swept away bridges that had survived the blast, washed out streets, undermined foundations of buildings that still stood" (839). This is how policy becomes an ordeal, how Brodie's "instrument of policy" can effect "visitations from a wrathful deity" (24).

The process lends credence to Mary McCarthy's insistence that Hiroshima refuses to confront "the question of intention and guilt--which is what made Hiroshima more horrifying, to say the least, than the Chicago Fire..." 18 But where McCarthy sees this reticence as evasive, I would suggest that it is at least partially strategic. Hiroshima does not so much fail to register moral considerations as reveal the terms under which such considerations would likely recede from our attention. McCarthy thought that in order to avoid "an insipid falsification of the truth of atomic warfare" Hersey "would have had to interview the dead." But Hersey's point is that the particular "horror" of Hiroshima may well disappear if we attend so carefully to its victims: can the chief moral difference between the Chicago Fire and the atomic bombings be found in the experiences of those who perished in the events? How exactly would their comments address the relevant "question of intention and guilt"? McCarthy's "horrifying" carries weight precisely because the event "Hiroshima" extends beyond the range of the bomb's material impact.

The point is on spectacular display in Hersey's account of the most significant consequence of the bomb's horror: the Japanese surrender. He sets the scene by invoking the tension between what he explicitly labels "a kind of symbolism" and the tragic sense he so often valorizes:

In Kabe, on the morning of August 15^th, ten-year-old Toshio Nakamura heard an airplane overhead. He ran outdoors and identified it with a professional eye as a B-29. "There goes Mr. B." he shouted.

One of his relatives called out to him, "Haven't you had enough of Mr. B.?"

The question had a kind of symbolism. At almost that very moment, the dull, dispirited voice of Hirohito, the Emperor Tenno was speaking for the first time over the radio: "After pondering deeply the general trends of the world and the actual conditions obtaining in Our Empire today, We have decided to effect a settlement of the present situation by resorting to an extraordinary measure. . . ."

... "Have you heard the news?"

"What news?"

"The war is over."

"Don't say such a foolish thing, sister."

"But I heard it over the radio myself." And then, in a whisper, "It was the Emperor's voice." (834)

What exactly is the "symbolism" that Hersey has in mind here? Symbols so suffuse the sequence that it is hard to isolate any single one of them from the cluster as a whole. The first order of symbolism, of course, is the simple transformation of the bomber (and bombing) into Mr. B., a transformation that makes it possible, at least in part, for Toshio to feel wonder at the military systems that attacked him. The relative's question adds a new layer: the bombing of August 6^th itself is reduced to the symbol of the flying plane, as if a photograph of a B-29, rather than a mushroom cloud, could stand in for what happened in Hiroshima that morning (fig. 6).

These layers of symbolism, of course, are superseded as Hersey's attention swings to the larger issue of the war as a whole—has Japan itself had enough of Mr. B.? The question has apparently received an answer in the affirmative, judging from Hirohito's statement. But to conceive of the end of the war in these terms is to make the final days of Japanese bombing every bit as symbolic as they become in Brodie's later explication. Morale in Hirsoshima is not driving the Emperor's decision; nor is any military incapacity stemming from the devastation. Whether actual survivors such as Toshio are tired of Mr. B. is beside the point. "[I]nsofar as the low morale of the Japanese people influenced the governmental decision to surrender, it did so in a quite passive way" (143), Brodie archly noted. The event "Hiroshima" leads to the surrender here entirely in terms of what it says about "general trends of the world" in relation to "actual conditions obtaining in Our Empire today." It matters as a sign. Toshio's childish symbolism is less an evasion of the bomb's status as a weapon than an acknowledgement of the importance of symbolism to the kind of weapon it is.

It is no accident, then, that Hiroshima's first chapter concludes with what Derrida might call a fabulously textual death: "There, in the tin factory, in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books" (794). The moment clearly presents itself as a sly acknowledgement of the ambivalent effects of Western knowledge, 19 but the remainder of Hiroshima makes such allegorical suggestions feel less urgent than what amounts, almost, to the sentence's literal point: the bomb whose explosion inaugurates this nuclear age functions as much as a book as an explosive device. And this in turn explains the role of such a clearly allegorical moment in the midst of a text otherwise so committed to its evenhanded realism: reality in nuclear Hiroshima is at least partially allegorical. 20 The upshot is an intense scrutiny of the complicated relationship between the experience of the bomb's physical effects and the appreciation of its meaning. People being crushed by books are not exactly plumbing those texts for messages:

Early that day, August 7^th, the Japanese radio broadcast for the first time a succinct announcement that few, if any, of the people most concerned with its content, the survivors in Hiroshima, happened to hear.... Nor is it probable that any of the survivors happened to be tuned in on a short-wave rebroadcast of an extraordinary announcement by the President of the United States, which identified the new bomb as atomic.... [B]ut, even if they had known the truth, most of them were too busy or too weary or too badly hurt to care that they were objects of the first great experiment in the use of atomic power.... (821)

"So far as the populace was concerned," Brodie would explain, "few people outside the target areas had any real comprehension of what the [atomic] bombs meant ..."  (140). But this "meaning" of the bomb, the converse of Hersey's "what it was like," has relatively little to do with the bomb's significance; the relevant messages will be "communicated" (AI 3) on another frequency: "Japan was already defeated. It was necessary only to make her government develop a clear consensus on that fact." Although the citizens of Hiroshima may have been the "objects" of the first nuclear bomb, to return to Hersey's terms, they were emphatically not the objects of "the first experiment in the use of nuclear power." Paradoxically, Schelling would note, if the goal is what Brodie called "the maximum of direct military pressure upon the population and the government" (131), then "What happens on the battlefield may be of only moderate interest" compared with its significance in the eyes of noncombatant observers (183). No wonder Hersey balances his complaint that these messages have been somehow diverted from the ears of "those most concerned with" their "content" with a persistent questioning of exactly why this content would much matter to the survivors in Hiroshima.

Hiroshima indeed sometimes so absorbs Schelling's notion that the "targets" of the Hiroshima bombing were not "the dead of Hiroshima" "but the survivors in Tokyo" that it places even some of the bomb's most immediate physical military effects beyond the purview of its victims in Hiroshima. If the messages surrounding the bomb go unheard in Hiroshima, so too does the bomb itself: "He heard no roar. (Almost no one in Hiroshima recalls hearing any noise of the bomb...)" (785). It is almost as if the roar itself has been routed through the airwaves, and Hersey drives the point home by suggesting that Hirohito will have to tell the survivors what the bomb should have made clear ("she needed nothing more to make her give up thinking, in spite of the atomic bomb, that Japan still had a chance to win the war" [834]). Hirohito's statement looms large in Hiroshima precisely because it marks the way in which military conflict itself has become an essentially mediated experience in 1945 Hiroshima. 21 Hersey's vigilant attention to war's violence has ultimately led to a powerful recognition of the ways in which war, at least in its nuclear form, always involves more than that violence.

 

2. Nuclear Promises

Bernard Brodie's insistence that we consider the "atomic bomb as instrument of war--and thus international politics--rather than a visitation from a wrathful deity" (24) coincided with a complicated, not to say downright bizarre, account of what kind of instrument it would be. The first step in conceptualizing the weapon, he thought, lay in recognizing what he called its "limitations." These limitations would prove surprisingly formidable, especially given the ease with which we might join Scarry in imagining that in the event of a nuclear monopoly a country's very "possession" of nuclear weapons might "require[] its opponents to capitulate to all of its wishes" (80). This scenario lies behind the Arendt-style fantasies of Japanese surrender by way of atomic demonstration, and indeed it goes further than Arendt in stressing the weapon's implicit power. In Scarry's scheme even a demonstration of the weapon is unnecessary; power would seem to follow, in Herman Kahn's terms, "as almost a simple philosophical consequence of the existence of thermonuclear bombs" (8). We could make do with a picture of Little Boy without even detonating it into a mushroom cloud (fig. 7).

In light of the bomb's future tradition of non-use there is obviously something plausibly intuitive about thinking that its power might proceed from its very existence, but almost the first move in nuclear theory would be to insist that, as Schelling put it, "The mere existence of nuclear weapons does not itself determine" military outcomes (24). For one thing, Henry Kissinger noted, one would need to show a given opponent that her "military strength [was] coupled with the willingness to employ it." 22 And though the problem of how to cultivate and express this willingness seemed pressing throughout the early years of the Cold War, even a combination of military strength and martial will could fail to induce the capitulation Scarry imagines. "On August 6 and 9, 1945 the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan," writes Nina Tannenwald, "ending World War II and inaugurating the nuclear age." 23 Tannenwald implies that the bombs themselves ended the war, but Hiroshima reminds us that the war stopped when Hirohito spoke, not when the bombs roared. If it seems obvious that the bombs played some role in getting him to speak, that they "copiously provided pressure," the relations between physical destruction and enemy acquiescence were by no means transparent during World War II and would indeed become less and less transparent the more military strategists thought about how to derive political power from nuclear military strength.

The "object of victory has traditionally been described as 'imposing one's will on the enemy,'" Schelling explained in the mid-1960s; "how to do that has typically received less attention than the conduct of campaigns and wars" (vi). "The difficulty" with early schemes for integrating nuclear weapons into military strategy, according to John Lewis Gaddis, "was their vagueness on just how the bomb could be made to produce the desired results." 24 The concern was only magnified by the bomb's association with the strategic bombing operations of World War II, which had been documented carefully enough so that a consensus could emerge after the war among military strategists that they had been largely ineffectual. By 1959 Brodie would confidently declare general bombing "the worst possible way to coerce states of relatively low military power, for it combines the maximum of indiscriminate destruction with the minimum of direct control" (98).

Indeed, so far as Brodie was concerned, the atomic bomb's very destructive power was itself the weapon's greatest limitation. "There is no doubt that there are extremely grave and far-reaching limitations" governing the use of atomic weapons, he explained in the mid-1950s. "But they lie not in the costliness of the weapons, in the difficulty of delivering them or in the finite boundaries of their destructive power. They stem, on the contrary, from their excessive destructive power. Excessive in terms of what? Their power is likely to be excessive in terms of any reasonable war objectives we might have." 25 Versions of this conundrum were sufficiently widespread in the 1950s that Kissinger could call it "the dilemma of the nuclear period" (7). Nuclear strategists would almost ritually note, to quote Herman Kahn, that as "force becomes increasingly more available, and increasingly more dangerous to use" it also becomes "in practice increasingly unusable" (3). Many commentators traced the problem to essentially moral sources--the "horror" (Kahn 126) of nuclear destructive power would make civilian leaders "reluctant" (Kissinger 3) to employ it. But Brodie's nuclear limitations derived from strategic considerations. "'No war is begun,'" Brodie quoted Clausewitz, "'or at least no war should be begun if people have acted wisely, without first finding an answer to the question: what is to be attained by and in war?'" (53). What ends could nuclear destruction advance? While "Warfare should be a means to an end other than warfare," George Kennan wrote in 1950, the use of nuclear weapons "cannot really be reconciled with a political purpose directed to shaping, rather than destroying, the lives of the adversary." 26

When "the atomic bomb came and changed everything," then, it did not radically expand the military capabilities of those nations fortunate enough to develop it. Its effect actually worked in the opposite direction: rather than making it easier for certain nations to win wars, Brodie concluded, the atomic bomb instead made it impossible for them to wage them, or at least impossible for them to wage them without radically limiting the terms of their military commitment. In what quickly emerged as the most significant sequence in The Absolute Weapon, Brodie announced that a proper nuclear strategy would pay no attention to question of "who will win the next war in which atomic bombs are used." "Thus far," he explained, "the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can have almost no other useful purpose" (76).

This shift had the counterintuitive effect of greatly enhancing the military relevance of nuclear weapons--the new instruments quickly assumed a pivotal role in helping us to avert the wars they could not help us win. They would assume this role, paradoxically, precisely because they would themselves serve as the occasion for any significant future military conflicts. That we would have no need to deploy such weapons in a military theatre did not exactly mean that the weapons were obsolete. Others might not be quite so conscientious in calibrating their weapons' destructive power to their strategic ends. Indeed, according to Brodie at least, they might even, "reasonably," conclude that our destruction would be worth the "very considerable price" a full-on nuclear assault might entail. "We have to remember that the Soviets have a very high incentive for destroying us, or at least our military power, if they can do so—the incentive of eliminating what is to them a great threat..." (SMA 281). To the extent that "the existence of nuclear weapons" serves as the "chief stimulus" to an enemy's attack (356), we might well decide that our safety depends less on the development of nuclear weaponry than the disavowal of it. Why preserve a military capacity, tactically useless to us, whose most likely effect would be to encourage our enemies to target us for destruction? 27 Hence, even in the midst of the American nuclear monopoly, Gaddis has noted, Kennan would speculate that a universal ban on the use of nuclear weapons would be in the nation's interest: "it would perhaps be best for this country, if it were decided that atomic bombs would never be used." 28

But so far as Brodie is concerned, it is not the possession of nuclear weapons but rather the very possibility of such weapons that generates the difficulty. The minute a potential conflict emerges between an advanced industrial state with nuclear weapons and another without them, he maintains, there is every incentive for the nuclear power to deploy its nuclear weapons as rapidly as possible: since the conflict would only give the rival an incentive to develop the weapons, why not strangle that threatening child in its crib? Nor will a universal nuclear ban work any better. Even if neither side possesses nuclear weapons, the conflict itself will stimulate both to develop them; "the race to get the bomb would not be an even one" (AW 84), and with that we will find ourselves back in the scenario in which one side has the weapons and a "very high incentive" to use them as soon as possible. What eliminates this "incentive" (301) to use the weapons will only be "a fear of their reciprocal use," and hence "a war in which atomic bombs are not used is more likely to occur if both sides have bombs in quantity from the beginning than if neither side has it at the outset or if only one side has it" (AW 85). So while nuclear weapons are in some important senses the source of the tense conflict between the US and the USSR, they are also the best, indeed the only, way of managing that conflict: "Known ability to defend our retaliatory force constitutes the only unilaterally attainable situation that provides potentially a perfect defense of our home land" (185). The counterintuitive notion that only the vigorous development and defense of the very weapons that might stimulate attacks against us can serve as a "perfect defense of our home land" lies at the center of Brodie's nuclear strategy. His claim that "our military establishment" "can have almost no other useful purpose" than averting wars comes on the heels of an admonishment that we keep our nuclear weapons well protected: "Thus, the first and most vital step in any American security program for the age of the atomic bomb is to take measures to guarantee to ourselves in case of attack the possibility of retaliation in kind" (76).

If it is hard to see the nuclear weapon as instrument of national policy here, the difficulty stems in no small part from the way in which the weapon has become the goal of that policy. We will not be using nuclear weapons to further our interests; our primary interest will be to protect our weapons. The most "important immediate objective" of any well-designed nuclear defense strategy, according to Schelling, is "the safety of weapons rather than the safety of people." And now that weapons have emerged as the chief object of any sound defense strategy, the way we conceive of their proper targets will undergo a similar modification. So far as Schelling was concerned, "A weapon that can hurt only people, and cannot possibly damage the other side's striking force, is profoundly defensive." Such a weapon "provides its possessor no incentive to strike first." The "weapon that is designed or deployed to destroy 'military' targets," by contrast, "can exploit the advantage of striking first and consequently provide a temptation to do so" (SC 233). 29 The paradox of the defensive weapon of terror is really just a microcosm of the larger paradox of deterrence itself. Schelling's argument that instruments designed only to kill people are paradigmatically defensive weapons depends upon the assumption that they will never have to be deployed. "Deterrence now means something as a strategic policy," Brodie explains, "only when we are fairly confident that the retaliatory instrument upon which it relies will not be called upon to function all" (272). The result is an enormous amount of effort to create and maintain a machine whose very point is its own obsolescence: "we expect the system to be always ready to spring while going permanently unused" (272). "[W]hat national defense is about in the thermonuclear age" is "spending" billions of dollars on possible responses to contingencies that are "utterly improbable," with an understanding, or at least a hope, that these expenditures will "mak[e] such situations still more improbable" (297-298).

Any scheme that depends so thoroughly upon what Schelling calls "the threat of force" in order to avoid "the application of force" (9) is bound to seem slightly strange. "Surely there is something almost unreal about this," Brodie sighs (272). 30

But the problem at issue here is even deeper than Brodie lets on, for the very structure of our deterrent system itself partakes of the unreality that characterizes its strategic posture. It is not simply the case that we hope that we will not have to use our weapons, and not even the case that we hope that our guaranteeing the operational functionality of those weapons will itself help make them superfluous. Even in the face of the contingency for which they were created we would still not want to use them in the way that our deterrent threats suggest. According to Brodie, the best way of "achieving the maximum deterrent effect from our retaliatory force before hostilities" would be to "assign the hard-core elements in our retaliatory force to the enemy's major cities, provide for the maximum automaticity as well as certainty of response, and lose no opportunity to let the enemy know that we have done these things...." But "what looks like the most rational deterrence policy involves commitment to a strategy of response which, if we ever had to execute it, might then look very foolish" (291-292). 31What makes such aggressive nuclear retaliation potentially a "foolish" strategy of response? Certainly humanitarian considerations would loom large in this connection. "Given the power of modern weapons," Kissinger insisted, "a nation that relies on all-out war as its chief deterrent imposes a fearful psychological handicap on itself.... [A]ll pressures will make for hesitation, short of a direct attack threatening national existence" (133). But we will have misgivings about nuclear retaliation whether or not we are particularly concerned with the humanitarian implications of our choice. We ended up in the unreal hall of mirrors of our deterrence strategy, after all, precisely because we recognized that "the destructive power" of nuclear weapons is "likely to be excessive in terms of any reasonable war objectives we might have." Kissinger acknowledged that "short of a direct attack threatening national existence" statesmen "will be inhibited by the incommensurability between the cost of the war and the objective in dispute" (144). Why would the incommensurability perish in an attack? If "the President's anger abates long enough for him to consider the situation," Kahn noted, "he will realize that there is no way to undo the damage that is done and that revenge may appear to make less sense than trying to make the best of a bad situation" (170-171). And once a strategic response to the situation reclaims its central role in our nuclear decision making process the bomb's limitations are likely once again to govern its use. So long as we retain any interest and the enemy retains any military capacity, Brodie thought, we will probably find that our over-powerful nuclear weapons will have more coercive authority as threats against future aggression than as destructive agents. Even in the midst of ongoing nuclear combat, the bomb's greatest authority would remain largely virtual: "[I]n a thermonuclear war the mere ability to destroy cities may well confer more military advantage than the destruction of them" (292-293). 32

There is an obviously defensive and self-protective dimension to this extension of deterrence "into war itself" (191), to use Schelling's terms, and it would be easy to see it as little more than a new elaboration of Brodie's previous claim that military strategy in the nuclear age would focus on avoiding wars rather than winning them. But Brodie's emphasis is less on minimizing casualties than maximizing "military advantage": the relevant danger is foolishness, not brutality. Nor would analysts eager to prosecute nuclear war, rather than evade it, see much military advantage in destroying cities. 33 Threats depend upon the existence of the interests at which they are directed: the bomb's power seemed so parasitic of its targets' value that even nuclear aggression would operate most effectively without nuclear deployment. "Cities," Schelling explained, are "not merely targets to be destroyed as quickly as possible to weaken the enemy's war effort, to cause anguish to surviving enemy leaders, or to satisfy a desire for vengeance after all efforts at deterrence had failed." Instead, "live cities" should "be appreciated as assets, as hostages, as a means of influence over the enemy himself." A strategy built around the actual destruction of cities "would abandon the principal threat by which the enemy is to be brought to terms." Once the target becomes as much a "means of influence" as the weapon, the detonation of nuclear warheads in combat becomes almost indistinguishable from the disarming of them (191).

"There is a difference," Schelling maintains, "between taking what you want and making someone give it to you.... It is the difference between defense and deterrence, between brute force and intimidation, between conquest and blackmail, between action and threats" (2). 34 For all of their "excessive destructive force," nuclear weapons do not work on the "brute force" side of these distinctions. "Peculiarly suited to the creation of pain and damage and fright," they will be used, "wittingly or unwittingly, to hurt, to intimidate, to coerce" (177). 35 Their military power is thus crucially dependent upon the collaboration of their putative targets: "Hurting, unlike forcible seizure or self-defense, is not unconcerned with the interest of others" (2). Terms such as "pain" and "hurt" move to the center of Schelling's discussion precisely because they transfer the material effects of nuclear weapons into the psychological realm in which the weapons' real work will be done. Pain "is measured," Schelling explains, both "in the suffering it can cause and the victims' motivations to avoid it." And even this emphasis on pain slightly overstates the significance of nuclear violence in Schelling's scheme of effective nuclear warfare. In invoking the "interests of others," coercion also alters the temporality of combat. "To inflict suffering gains nothing and saves nothing directly; it can only make people behave to avoid it" (2). Nuclear coercive power thus derives not from effective deployment but from the suggestion of future initiative: "It is the threat of damage, or of more damage to come, that can make someone yield or comply. It is latent violence that can influence someone's choice" (3).

This is why Schelling so aggressively ties the "hurt" inflicted by the "bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki" to the "promise" of "more hurt." The conversion of hurt into promise transforms the "brute strength" of the bomb into "terror and shock." It also relocates the agency of the nation's nuclear arsenal from its violence to its "latent violence." So long as our goal is chiefly what Kennan called "shaping the lives" of our adversaries, violence itself, Kennan's "destroying," will be relatively useless, except insofar as it makes a given "threat a lively one" (AI 195). Although "the power to hurt is often communicated by some performance of it" (3), the communication is more important than the performance: "it is not the pain and damage itself but its influence on somebody's behavior that matters. It is the expectation of more violence that gets the wanted behavior, if the power to hurt can get it at all" (3). Nuclear weapons thus "make war less military" (22). "'[V]ictory' inadequately expresses what a nation wants from its military forces," Schelling concluded. "Mostly it wants, in these times, the influence that resides in latent force. It wants the bargaining power that comes from its capacity to hurt, not just the direct consequence of successful military action" (31). 36

The notion that the non-use of nuclear weaponry amounts to the paradigmatic act of nuclear warfare casts Schelling's "tradition" of nuclear restraint in a new light. If nuclear power is "peculiarly suited" to coercive gestures as opposed to combative missions, we may begin to doubt that the nuclear states refrained from using their nuclear weapons during the Cold War in any ordinary sense of the term. 37 Refraining from using nuclear weapons, after all, is the proper way to use them--which is why the sixty-five years after Hiroshima have offered both the terror of Chow's age of world target and the "great good fortune" of Schelling's nuclear hiatus. 38 Obsessively centered on the disalignment of nuclear agency from nuclear combat, the nuclear imagination simultaneously expands and contracts the incidence of nuclear violence. "If the occurrence of violence does not always bespeak a shrewd purpose," Schelling explains, "the absence of pain and destruction is no sign that violence was idle. Violence is most purposive and most successful when it is threatened and not used" (10). We may well wonder how "violence" would be "most purposive and most successful" "when it is not used." Presumably "when it is not used" means something like "when it remains latent." 39 But we are left with a strange scenario in which violence manages not to be "idle" at the same time that it "is not used"--a description that would make sense only if we imagined that atomic weapons, in their hybrid state of non-idle non-use, were in and of themselves a form of violence.

Yet even as violence comes to attend the very existence of nuclear weapons it also remains strangely divorced from their actual deployment. "Nobody quite knows what happens if one country explodes a nuclear weapon in an enemy country" (195), Schelling claimed in 1960. It would probably be going to far to say that Schelling has simply forgotten about the "bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki"; he is almost certainly thinking here about a scenario, unlike the last days of World War II, in which both combatants would have recourse to nuclear weaponry. And while it is nonetheless quite striking that the analyst most concerned with the "tradition" of nuclear warfare would so casually overlook the attacks of 1945, there is a sense in which he never quite identified those bombs with their "explosions" in the first place. Their "pain" having quickly bled into the promise of "more to come," the World War II bombs would engage Schelling at the level of their political targets rather than their tactical victims. And once the relevant consideration is the promise of violence in the future and the attendant question of whether it has been properly communicated, it becomes slightly more understandable that one would lose sight of the fact that "the power to hurt" may well have been "communicated by some performance of it" and that what has been threatened is not violence but "more violence." 40 Nobody quite knows what happens if one country explodes a nuclear weapon in an enemy country because nuclear explosions so easily blur into their effects. This moment is in effect Schelling's version of Hersey's silent nuclear blast.

In the closing lines of Hiroshima Hersey reproduces a brief "matter-of-fact essay" (855) written by Toshio Nakamura recounting his experiences of August 6^th. Toshio details a moment in which, as Hersey had first presented it some thirty pages earlier, "one of the city's gas-storage tanks went up in a tremendous burst of flame" (821) on the evening of the bombing. In Hersey's telling, Toshio's fascination with the explosion had emblematized a general sense of distraction surrounding the rescue efforts at Asano Park. Toshio's attention focused not on the burning tank itself so much as its "reflection in the river," and his excitement in the presence of this image is juxtaposed to Mr. Tanimoto's failure, in his exhaustion, to carry several "festered, limp bodies high enough on the sandpit" so that they would not be swept away by the rising tide. We are hardly shocked, then, that the unfortunate result--drowned "bodies floating in the river" (821)--is absent from Toshio's essay, where the river offers only a burning reflection for our consideration. Toshio effectively stands for the process whereby tragedy is displaced by spectacle. And in giving the final lines of Hiroshima to Toshio Hersey conjures the ease with which his own somber presentation of atomic horror might give way to less responsible forms of remembrance. If Hiromshima's "cognizance of itself as a document, is strikingly marked on the last pages," as Nadel has noted, 41 its recognition of the possibility that documents may evade important historical considerations is no less strikingly marked.

But the status of these evasions is by no means clear-cut. Little Boys are after all not simply little boys in Hiroshima. Hiroshima itself has offered up reflections of burning gas tanks as well as accounts of exploding bombs, and it has often suggested that such shifts from war's material consequences to its spectacular effects reveal the way atomic military power works even as they might seem to evade that power's ethical implications. In this sense we may see the substitution of Toshio's account for Hersey's as a part of a broader process of substitution of throughout the text, one in which events regularly morph into documents. Hiroshima begins and ends with Little Boys, and if it betrays misgivings about replacing the bomb's record of devastation and destruction with Toshio's story of exhilaration, it nonetheless underscores how difficult it would be to disentangle either of the two from the other, how difficult, that is, it would be either to reduce nuclear warfare simply to the event of nuclear deployment (Derrida's impossibility) or to abstract it entirely from such events (Derrida's necessity). 42 Hersey's narrative has translated the seemingly empirical fact of a nuclear explosion into the precedent that nuclear weaponry had an irreducibly virtual application. This is the sense in which Hiroshima offers the definitive record of the ways in which atomic weapons are too destructive ever to be used. "The pattern of the use of atomic weapons was set at Hiroshima," Robert Oppenheimer maintained. 43 Hiroshima helped perform the unlikely service of making that pattern a pattern of non-use.

Deak Nabers is Associate Professor of English at Brown University. He adds in acknowledgment:

I presented a preliminary version of this argument at the Post•45 Conference at the University of Missouri in the fall of 2009, where it met with helpfully spirited resistance. Although I doubt that my subsequent revisions will have met all of their objections, I am grateful to the conference participants for their engagement with the project. Challenges and suggestions from Amy Hungerford (on Hersey and trauma), Deborah Nelson (on Hersey and Mary McCarthy), Sean McCann (on the ethical stakes of Schelling's celebration of the nuclear stalemate), and Dan Grausam (on the intense nuclear activity that accompanied the Cold War's mode of nuclear non-use) significantly refined my thinking about several of the topics under discussion here; and rejoinders from Michael Szalay and Oren Isenberg led me to reshape parts of the argument from the ground up. I am also indebted to Oren, Abigail Cheever and Florence Dore for insightful comments on a later draft of the piece, to the members of the Brown English summer workshop program (Angela Allan, Austin Gorman, David Liao, Jeff Neilson, Sara Osment, and Jennifer Schnepf, in particular) for their vigorous responses to that draft, and to Joseph Stadolnik for helping me prepare the manuscript for the Post•45 webpage.

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References