Hiroshima (1946) by John Hersey and Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World (2020) by @lesleymmblume

Hiroshima (1946) by John Hersey and Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World (2020) by Lesley M.M. Blume

August 2020 marks the 75th anniversary of the Atomic Bombings of Japan. It is also the 74th anniversary of the publication (on August 31) of John Hersey’s revealing issue-long article, Hiroshima, in The New Yorker Magazine. Below are some thoughts on Hiroshima as well as the just published Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World (2020) by Lesley M.M. Blume.

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Those of us born in the 1960s had a much different relationship with nuclear war. Too young to have been part of the “Fallout Shelter/Duck and Cover” era, the Nuclear Age of Anxiety for us was reborn in the 1980s with the election of Ronald Reagan that renewed the fear of a global nuclear holocaust that was “popularized” by such mainstream media events as The Day After (1983) television film. Thankfully, no generation has yet seen a nuclear explosion used in war since the two uses, 75 years ago this month, by the United States that served to end the Second World War.

Growing up on the California/Nevada border in Lake Tahoe, we’d often take the nearly 500 mile drive on US route 95 to visit family in Las Vegas. Those late night 100 mph drives down ruler-straight roads that took you through Gardnerville, Yerrington, Hawthorne, Mina, Coaldale, Tonopah, Beatty, and then finally Vegas were light on traffic unless you ran into a military convoy. You slowed behind the heavily secured, tarp-covered slow moving multi-wheeled vehicles that would suddenly turn off onto restricted roads into the heart of the Nevada desert, and then hit the gas to make it to Vegas before breakfast.

What, you wondered, were in those trucks? This was still the era (1951-1992) when the United States conducted, first above ground, and then later, underground, nuclear tests. Roughly a 100 km north of Las Vegas, the Nevada National Security Site was the primary U.S. nuclear testing area with nearly 1,000 tests in the forty year period. Visiting and for a while living in Las Vegas, for me, the occasional nuclear induced rumble, the chandelier sway of Oppenheimer’s deadly toy, was the much removed experience of the nuclear era.

Not so for those with direct experience of a nuclear explosion at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Or the too many exposed in fallout downwind from the Nevada tests; the Marshall islanders who lost their lives and homes; or countless others exposed to radiation from the nuclear tests in service of creating the perfect Bomb. A well-reviewed account of the Pacific testing can be found in Day of Two Suns: U.S. Nuclear Testing and the Pacific Islanders (1998) by Jane Dibblin.

At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk. (Hiroshima, p. 1)

John Hersey, with the publication of Hiroshima (1946) provided a clarion call to the dangers of nuclear war when the horrifying results of such a war were still hidden. First appearing as a report in The New Yorker Magazine, Hiroshima was actually less a clarion call than a quiet exposition of the lives of six survivors of the blast. The intertwined stories of Kiyoshi Tanimoto, Hatsuyo Nakamura, Dr. Masakazu Fujii, Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, and Toshiko Sasaki. Hersey tells their stories in four compelling sections, “A Noiseless Flash”, “The Fire”, “Details are Being Investigated”, and “Panic Grass and Feverfew.” 

With an economy of style, Hersey lays out the horrific aftermath of the explosion without sensationalism, but a clarity of description that lets the reader picture unfolding catastrophe. 

Miss Sasaki went back to her office and sat down at her desk. She was quite far from the windows, which were off to her left, and behind her were a couple of tall bookcases containing all the books of the factory library ... Just as she turned her head away from the windows, the room was filled with a blinding light. ... but principally and first of all, the bookcases right behind her swooped forward and the contents threw her down, with her left leg horribly twisted and breaking underneath her. There, in the tin factory, in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books. (Hiroshima, p. 16).

Hersey mostly refrains from casting the bombing in moral or ethical terms. The six stories he tells are allowed to speak for themselves and the reader is left to frame them in a larger global context. Ultimately, what we see is that, as Hersey puts it, “The lives of these six people, who were among the luckiest in Hiroshima, would never be the same” (p. 87). Why they would never be the same is made clear in the book; at the same time, the reader is compelled to also understand that it is not just these six lives that were forever changed, but all humanity.

Hersey carefully closes the book not with his own words, but those of Toshio Nakamura, son of Hatsuyo Nakamura and 10 at the time of the bombing. Heresy quotes from a school essay Toshio wrote that year: 

“The neighbors were walking around burned and bleeding. Hataya-san told me to run away with her. I said I wanted to wait for my mother. We went to the park. A whirlwind came. At night a gas tank burned and I saw the reflection in the river. We stayed in the park one night. Next day I went to Taiko Bridge and met my girl friends Kikuki and Murakami. They were looking for their mothers. But Kikuki’s mother was wounded and Murakami’s mother, alas was dead.” (Hiroshima, p. 90).

In the wreckage that adults created, the child sees it, but does not quite comprehend it. For the world who didn’t experience first hand the explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hersey provided a glimpse of what a quick apocalypse humans could now unleash on the world. 

Hersey wisely didn’t revisit the story of Hiroshima for many years. At last, in the July 15, 1985 issue of The New Yorker, he published “The Aftermath” which is now included in most book editions, tells us what happened to the six survivors in the intervening 40 years. 

Hiroshima was a world-wide phenomenon when published in the August 31, 1946 issue of The New Yorker and later in book form.  How Hersey, Pulitzer Prize winner for A Bell for Adano (1944) and noted war correspondent came to write the story of Hiroshima and how the publishing team of Harold Ross and William Shawn at The New Yorker came to publish it, is the story of Lesley M.M. Blume’s Fallout (2020). Blume’s summary of Hersey’s work provides a good refresher for the original, but is no substitute. 

Blume has extensively documented the how and why Hiroshima came into existence. The underlying motives of Hersey and Ross/Shawn in revealing the cover-up by the U.S. government of the aftermath of the two atomic bombs are explained. Blume does a good job of balancing the tremendous moral ambiguities around the use of the atomic bombs. She also reinforces the fact that once the Manhattan Project was underway, there would be compelling reasons to unleash it. Blume provides us with background on the U.S. military staff who gave Hersey permission to enter both Japan and Hiroshima and who ultimately gave permission for the story to be published. Most interesting are the contemporary accounts of the reception of Hiroshima, much of which reflect the still unresolved debate on the “ethics” of the use of the bomb to end a war against an enemy that itself had unleashed inhuman atrocities. 

Concluding the story of Hiroshima, Blume notes: 

Today, Hiroshima Prefecture has nearly 3 million inhabitants. It maintains a world-class museum documenting the atomic bombing and its aftermath, as well as a park and many monuments. The Atomic Bomb Dome—a building whose structure partially survived despite being located near the bomb’s hypocenter—is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. 

Located today at the site of the bomb’s exact hypocenter: a low-rise medical building and a 7-Eleven convenience store. (Fallout, p. 181)

The ultimate message of Hiroshima, however, is best summed up in the quote from Hersey with serves as Blume’s epigraph for Fallout: “What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has been the memory of what happened at Hiroshima” (John Hersey, in Fallout).

It seems, however, that memories fade. Seventy-five years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, thirty-five years after the re-awakening to the dangers of nuclear war, the world mostly yawns at the rise of new nuclear powers or casts these new bomb makers as regional threats or mere flaunters of American hegemony. In the midst of the current COVID-19 pandemic, nuclear holocaust is hard to fathom. In the on-going and existential threat of global climate change where does the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons find headspace?

From the Trinity Test site near Los Alamos, NM, where J. Robert Oppenheimer was moved to quote “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” (Bhagavad Gita), to the death and destruction wrought in Japan, to the shimmering roads in the Nevada desert where nuclear genie was released while I sped by in ignorance and oblivion, the quick destroyer of worlds continues to grow around us and the lived memory fades.

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Also of note, “How John Hersey Revealed the Horrors of the Atomic Bomb to the US: Remembering Hiroshima, the Story That Changed Everything” (April 23, 2019) by Jeremy Treglown in Literary Hub. An extract from Mr. Straight Arrow: The Career of John Hersey, Author of Hiroshima (2019) by Jeremy Treglown.

• Hiroshima (1946) by John Hersey: Read: August 16, 2020 | Buy on Kindle

• Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World (2020) by Lesley M.M. Blume: Read: August 28, 2020 | Buy on Kindle

• See my complete 2020 Reading list on Goodreads.

Prelinger Library: Yearbook 2019 (2020) by Prelinger Library. COVID-19 Recreational Reading / @MeganPrelinger & @footage

Prelinger Library: Yearbook 2019 (2020) by Prelinger Library. COVID-19 Recreational Reading.

One of my annual pleasures is receiving the annual Prelinger Library Yearbook in the mail. For those who don’t know about the Prelinger Library, it:

is an independent research library located in San Francisco’s South-of-Market neighborhood. It is open to anyone for research, reading, inspiration, and reuse ... The library is primarily a collection of 19th and 20th century historical ephemera, periodicals, maps, and books, most published in the United States. Much of the collection is image-rich, and in the public domain. The library specializes in material that is not commonly found in other public libraries. (From the website)

Founded in 2004 by Megan Prelinger and Rick Prelinger, the collection is described as follows:

The library is primarily a collection of 19th and 20th century historical ephemera, periodicals, maps, and books, most published in the United States. Much of the collection is image-rich, and in the public domain. The library specializes in material that is not commonly found in other public libraries. (From the website)

Past Years

and organized "according to the library’s unique geospatial taxonomy" (From the website). All of that, however, does not encompass the serious fun and research that the library facilitates. The annual Yearbooks documents the many activities that showcase the Library’s role as a center for arts and education. Among the activities this year were:

• Jeremy Ferris: Comics

• Kendell Harbin and Asa Wilder Research Residency

• Klooj

• And a list of institutions that used the library as a resource

You can see the library's online catalog here. I would also recommend that you look for Megan Prelinger’s two books when you have a chance: Another Science Fiction: Advertising the Space Race (2010) and Inside the Machine: Art and Invention in the Electronic Age (2015) and Rick Prelinger’s amazing collage documentary films, from 2004’s Panorama Ephemera to his Lost Landscapes series (2008 - current). You can find all the films here.

• Read: August 23, 2020 | Learn More Online

• See my complete 2020 Reading list on Goodreads.

Some photos from my 2006 visit to the Prelinger Library are below.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th anniversary edition (1962, 2012) by Thomas S. Kuhn. COVID-19 Professional Reading

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th anniversary edition  (1962, 2012) by Thomas S. Kuhn. COVID-19 Professional Reading 

“Paradigm Shift”. We could stop the discussion of Kuhn’s 1962 work with those two words which, literally, created a paradigm shift in the conversation around systemic change, not just in science, but nearly all fields and disciplines. Paradigm shift, it’s safe to say, covers the spectrum of human endeavor, scholarly and not.  

This edition features both Kuhn’s own 1969 (somewhat defensive) postscript as well as a brilliant essay (2012) by Ian Hacking that contextualizes Structure with 50 years of hindsight:

Although Structure had an immense immediate impact on the community of historians of science, its more enduring effects have probably been upon philosophy of science and, indeed, on public culture. -- Ian Hacking (Introductory essay)

As noted above, over the past 20 year, “paradigm shift” has become a bit shopworn, but still remains a convenient shorthand for many industries. The term saw a rebirth with the rise of the internet and as new paradigms were developed for publishing (both popular and scholarly, and especially journalism), education, commerce (including the rise of the “gig economy”), entertainment (particularly music and “television”), and many more. 

At the end of Structure, Kuhn prophetically notes: 

Since this view is also compatible with close observation of scientific life, there are strong arguments for employing it in attempts to solve the host of problems that still remain. (p. 173)

In reading Structure, I found a curious congruence between Kuhn’s concept of “Crisis and the Emergence of Scientific Theories” (p. 66) and “The Response to Crisis” (p. 77), Sections VII and VIII of Structure, and the depiction of the “Seldon Crisis” in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation (1951-53 for the original trilogy) series where a critical event leads to a rethinking and reorientation of the world. 

For Asimov, a technological priesthood, or equivalent, was responsible for observing and mediating the paradigm shifts brought on by a Seldon Crisis. For science (and, more broadly if we are to apply the concepts outlined in Structure to other areas, acceptance of the shift and its implications are not so easy. Kuhn notes: 

Just because it is a transition between incommensurables, the transition between competing paradigms cannot be made a step at a time, forced by logic and neutral experience. Like the gestalt switch, it must occur all at once (though not necessarily in an instant) or not at all. (p. 150)

To put it more bluntly, Kuhn quotes the remark by Max Planck:

And Max Planck, surveying his own career in his Scientific Autobiography (1949), sadly remarked that “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” (p. 151)

In Section XI: The Invisibility of Revolutions, Kuhn gives a number of examples of how the revolutionary nature of certain shifts become lost in the smoothing of the curve in writing of history: 

Those misconstructions render revolutions invisible; the arrangement of the still visible material in science texts implies a process that, if it existed, would deny revolutions a function. (p. 140)

Science, and, by the extension of Kuhn’s concept of paradigm shift to a multitude of areas, is much more punctuated that the linear accounts we often see, and that there is a different and more complex relationship between theories and facts:

And that means that theories too do not evolve piecemeal to fit facts that were there all the time. Rather, they emerge together with the facts they fit from a revolutionary reformulation of the preceding scientific tradition, a tradition within which the knowledge-mediated relationship between the scientist and nature was not quite the same. (p. 141)

If paradigm shifts to occur (which seems obvious), how do scientists move between the old and the new paradigms? In Section XII: The Resolution of Revolutions, Kuhn provides an answer. 

Therefore, paradigm-testing occurs only after persistent failure to solve a noteworthy puzzle has given rise to crisis. And even then it occurs only after the sense of crisis has evoked an alternate candidate for paradigm. (p. 145)

He continues:

More is involved, however, than the incommensurability of standards. Since new paradigms are born from old ones, they ordinarily incorporate much of the vocabulary and apparatus, both conceptual and manipulative, that the traditional paradigm had previously employed. (p. 149)

With the concluding Section XIII: Progress Through Revolutions, Kuhn argues that the only progress in science is through revolutions: 

When they [crisis] arise, the scientist is not, of course, equally well prepared. Even though prolonged crises are probably reflected in less rigid educational practice, scientific training is not well designed to produce the man who will easily discover a fresh approach.(p. 166). 

And: 

When it repudiates a past paradigm, a scientific community simultaneously renounces, as a fit subject for professional scrutiny, most of the books and articles in which that paradigm had been embodied. Scientific education makes use of no equivalent for the art museum or the library of classics, and the result is a sometimes drastic distortion in the scientist’s perception of his discipline’s past. (p. 167).

For the revolution to be complete, the for the paradigm to shift, the new paradigm must possess two traits:

First, the new candidate must seem to resolve some outstanding and generally recognized problem that can be met in no other way. Second, the new paradigm must promise to preserve a relatively large part of the concrete problem-solving ability that has accrued to science through its predecessors. (p. 169). 

The successful revolution, the transition to a new paradigm, contains a curious conundrum, scientific progress (and in many of the fields where the concept of paradigm shift is applied) lacks a teleological end; as Kuhn notes: 

The developmental process described in this essay has been a process of evolution from primitive beginnings—a process whose successive stages are characterized by an increasingly detailed and refined understanding of nature. But nothing that has been or will be said makes it a process of evolution toward anything. (pp. 170-171).

The successful paradigm shift will change one’s perception of the past and understanding of the present, but, frustratingly, does not provide a path to the future or even a window to glimpse that future. And, just as Heraclitus said, “you cannot step twice into the same stream” (as quoted in Plato, Cratylus, 402a) the past perception of the world is annihilated with the new paradigm and “you can’t go home again.”

Concluding Thoughts 

In the nearly 60 years since it was first published, Structure does show include artifacts of its time. As Hacking notes, “science” almost exclusively means physical science (still true today when it comes to funding of non-medical research). Though it should be noted, in the final section of Structure, Kuhn draws heavily on natural sciences for his concluding analogy. More jarring to the 2020 ear is the exclusive use of he/him/his. In 1962 gender inclusivity was rarely used (even by female writers such as Susan Sontag in her 1966 essay collection, Against Interpretation and Other Essays).

Likewise, Kuhn mostly embraces the moral neutrality of science, a stance already severely tried since the start of the Atomic Age. As Matthew C. Rees noted in “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions at Fifty” (The New Atlantis, Fall 2012). 

One persisting trouble with Kuhn’s classic work is that its narrow focus left too many questions unanswered — including the question not just of what science is but of what science should be … Kuhn’s work is largely silent on the value of science and the wellbeing of society, and entirely silent on the wrongheadedness of blindly accepting scientific authority and discarding the philosophical questions that must always come first, even when we pretend otherwise.-- Rees (2012).

As a result, though new paradigms seldom or never possess all the capabilities of their predecessors, they usually preserve a great deal of the most concrete parts of past achievement and they always permit additional concrete problem-solutions besides. (p. 169)

I’ll close with one final and, at this time of the COVID-19 pandemic and ongoing crisis of global climate change: 

One of the strongest, if still unwritten, rules of scientific life is the prohibition of appeals to heads of state or to the populace at large in matters scientific. (p. 168)

Indeed.

• Read: July 20, 2020 | Buy on Kindle

• See my complete 2020 Reading list on Goodreads.

Station Eleven (2014) by @EmilyMandel. COVID-19 Recreational Reading

 

Station Eleven (2014) by Emily St. John Mandel. COVID-19 Recreational Reading 

August said that given an infinite number of parallel universes, there had to be one where there had been no pandemic and he’d grown up to be a physicist as planned, or one where there had been a pandemic but the virus had had a subtly different genetic structure, some minuscule variance that rendered it survivable, in any case a universe in which civilization hadn’t been so brutally interrupted. -- Station Eleven

What better book to read in the midst of a global pandemic that has, at the time of this writing, infected millions and killed hundreds of thousands? Mandel, in her post-global pandemic world has written a work that stands at the top tier of literary end-times along with two of my personal favorites from recent years, Margaret Atwood (Oryx and Crake, 2003) and Cormac McCarthy (The Road, 2006) as well as classic, less apocalyptic books, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) by Daniel Defoe (see review) and The Plague by Albert Camus (1947). As a side note, Station Eleven is also an upcoming timely Netflix series.

The literary world has been busy at this time compiling and curating list of plague works, many of which include Mandel’s Station Eleven; here are a few of those lists:

• Pandemics: An Essential Reading List by Tobias Carroll (10 March 2020)

• 12 Books About Pandemics by Electric Lit (10 March 2020)

• The 16 Best Pandemic Books, Fiction and Non-Fiction by Sarah S. Davis (30 July 2020)

• Epidemic! Fictional Plagues and Pandemics by ChiPubLib_Adults

• Pandemic Books by Goodreads

Turning back to Station Eleven, the pandemic that serves as the basis for the plot is eerily like the current COVID-19 pandemic. In the novel, the pandemic arrives in Toronto via a passenger plane coming from the Republic of Georgia. The resulting “Georgia Flu” quickly infects the entire world, quickly killing billions of people and leaving small bands of humans. Station Eleven is the story of some of those survivors (and their descendants) spread across the Great Lakes region of North America. 

Mandel’s story is told across time, moving between pre-pandemic times, the Year 0 of the start of the pandemic, and the current time. Mandel builds her work around the life (and death) of Arthur Leander, an actor in perhaps the end time of his career, now a successful Shakespearean actor playing the role of King Lear. Key to the story is Kirsten Raymonde, a minor player in Leander’s Lear, but the center around which the novel turns. 

All three caravans of the Traveling Symphony are labeled as such, THE TRAVELING SYMPHONY lettered in white on both sides, but the lead caravan carries an additional line of text: Because survival is insufficient. -- Station Eleven

Raymonde’s life as a young woman and a member of The Travelling Symphony (a troupe of players and musicians who traverse the Great Lakes region performing Shakespeare’s plays and playing music) is the center of the novel’s present. 

Much more description of the plot or characters would reveal too much of the complex and intertwined nature of Mandel’s work. Station Eleven builds on the tropes of the genre. Mandel’s development of character is excellent and she writes compelling dialog. She juggles a complex plot well and true to the genre, riffs on the exchange between two of her characters: 

“It just doesn’t make sense,” Elizabeth insisted. “Are we supposed to believe that civilization has just come to an end?” 

“Well,” Clark offered, “it was always a little fragile, wouldn’t you say?” -- Station Eleven

Mandel recently released her latest novel, The Glass Hotel (2020) that has received excellent reviews. 

• Read: July 19, 2020 | Buy on Kindle

• See my complete 2020 Reading list on Goodreads.

Game Theory 101: The Basics (2011) by @gametheory101. COVID-19 Recreational Reading

Game Theory 101: The Basics (2011) by William Spaniel. COVID-19 Recreational Reading 

The growth of the use of game theory in various fields and increasing references in popular culture makes it important for a larger audience to become aware of the basic tenets and precepts of game theory. Many people have heard of the most basic element of game theory, the prisoner’s dilemma, but how many have a more than rudimentary understanding of how it works?

Spaniel’s aptly titled Game Theory 101 is a fine primer into understanding the core components of game theory. As noted in the introduction: 

Game theory is the study of mathematical models of strategic interaction among rational decision-makers. It has applications in all fields of social science, as well as in logic, systems science and computer science. Originally, it addressed zero-sum games, in which each participant's gains or losses are exactly balanced by those of the other participants. Today, game theory applies to a wide range of behavioral relations, and is now an umbrella term for the science of logical decision making in humans, animals, and computers.

Neumann (1903-1957) was a key figure in the development of game theory. It grew as a distinct field when von Neumann published the paper “On the Theory of Games of Strategy” in 1928. Soon after the nuclear test by the Soviet Union, game theory took off as a method to understand the outcomes of nuclear war. Von Neumann is often paired with John Nash (1928–2015) as the other key figure in game theory. Nash (subject of the book (1998) and movie (2001), A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar) is the creator of the set of strategies termed the “Nash equilibrium”. This, along with the “prisoner’s dilemma” -- likely the most well-known element of game theory -- are well covered in Spaniel’s book. 

Final Thought: This book has quickly explained all of the tools you will need to solve introductory level questions about matrix form games. Good luck in applying them. And always remember: weak dominance will be the bane of your existence.

NOTE: this is a newer and expanded version of the book; you should look for the expanded, Game Theory 101: The Complete Textbook.

• Read: June 16, 2010 | Buy on Kindle

• See my complete 2020 Reading list on Goodreads.