Doomsday Men

by P. D. Smith

  When their hands hung down, the blood accumulated in the fingertips and caused throbbing pain, so they held their arms up and forward; burned so badly that the skin peeled and hung loosely, their raw hands and arms oozed and dripped blood. They looked just like ghosts. Barely managing not to fall over, they stumbled along in continuous lines to escape from fiery death.72

  Seiko Ikeda was one of the schoolchildren helping to clear firebreaks in the city. Sixty years later, he recalled the horror:

  The skin on my friends’ faces was melting off like wax on a burning candle. I saw people whose eyes had come out, people holding in their internal organs as they walked. From the rubble, people screamed, ‘Help me, please!’ All I could do was save myself. I scrambled up Hijiyama Hill. The city had vanished, it was an ocean of fire.73

  The explosive chain reaction of the uranium– 235 bathed the centre of Hiroshima with deadly radiation: alpha and beta particles, gamma rays and neutrons. There were significant levels of radiation in the environment for at least three days after the explosion, affecting those who came into the city looking for loved ones. Within an hour of the explosion and until mid-afternoon, a black, sooty rain fell on Hiroshima and its unfortunate inhabitants. The rain came from the towering mushroom cloud hanging over the city like some vengeful god and contained dust that was highly radioactive. For those who survived the initial blast and the searing heat, the one word on their lips was Mizu! – water. When it began to rain, they turned their faces skywards looking for relief. But in this radioactive environment, the rain too was poisoned; it brought only temporary relief and at the price of a painful death a few days later.

  More than four square miles of Hiroshima were scorched reddish-brown by the intense heat of ‘Little Boy’, the grotesquely inoffensive name of the first atomic bomb to be dropped on a city. It was as though a giant welder’s torch had been held against the earth. Nine-tenths of the city’s buildings were destroyed. The infrastructure and essential services were wiped out at one blow. Survivors, often with appalling injuries, found few people able to care for them. Those doctors who were still alive had no idea what kind of weapon had been used. Even when it was announced that an atomic bomb had been dropped, they had no idea how it would damage the human body, or what symptoms to expect. It was a revolution in science and in warfare. ‘We were, in effect, the first guinea pigs in such experimentation,’ said Father Arrupe, one of the Jesuits who helped to treat the victims.74

  Of the 350,000 people in the city that day in August, more than 100,000 were killed immediately. Five years later people were still dying. The final death toll is thought to be in excess of 200,000. To this figure must be added the cancers and birth defects caused by the radiation that the survivors of the atomic bomb, the hibakusha, would suffer for the rest of their lives. Even today the atomic bomb is still killing people. From the moment the atomic bomb exploded, it released radiation which began attacking the human body at its most fundamental level – the cell. On the day of the bombing, the symptoms of radiation sickness included bloody vomiting and loss of appetite. In the days that followed, victims would become increasingly ill, suffering diarrhoea, purpura (discoloured patches caused by bleeding in the skin), hair loss, bleeding from the nose and fever.

  Wilfred Burchett, the first independent journalist to describe what had happened on the ground, described their mysterious sickness as ‘an atomic plague’. He arrived in Hiroshima thirty days after the bomb was dropped, having skilfully slipped away from the chaperoned foreign press corps and made his own way to the bombed city. Burchett described how apparently uninjured people were now dying:

  They lost appetite. Their hair fell out. Bluish spots appeared on their bodies. And then bleeding began from the ears, nose and mouth. At first, the doctors told me, they thought these were the symptoms of general debility. They gave their patients Vitamin A injections. The results were horrible. The flesh started rotting away from the hole caused by the injection of the needle. And in every case the victim died.75

  His report for the Daily Express was headlined WARNING TO THE WORLD. It appalled readers around the globe. Officials from the American occupying forces called a specially convened press conference to deny that atomic radiation had caused the symptoms described by Burchett. In Hiroshima, rumours spread that everyone would soon die, poisoned by the unknown forces unleashed by the superbomb. The rumours also said that nothing would ever grow in the city again. It would become a radioactive wasteland like the one in Africa that H. G. Wells had described in Tono-Bungay.

  Three days after Hiroshima was bombed, it was Nagasaki’s turn. Nagasaki was chosen as the target only because cloud obscured the first choice, Kokura. This time a plutonium bomb was used, code-named ‘Fat Man’. The Hiroshima bomb had exploded with a force equivalent to 12.5 kilotons. The Nagasaki bomb was much bigger, equivalent to 22 kilotons.

  The implosion method was far more efficient than the uranium– 235 bomb. Although it only contained 13 lb of plutonium, 20 per cent of its mass was converted to energy. According to Farrell this was ‘a new type of cosmic weapon, more destructive and easier to make than the first one dropped on Hiroshima’.76 But due to the lie of the land, fewer people died at Nagasaki on 9 August – at least 70,000. However, the figures do not include the thousands of Korean slave labourers who worked in Japanese factories. The real figure, including subsequent deaths from cancers and other long-term effects of the bomb, is twice as high.77

  As at Hiroshima, up to 3,000 feet from the hypocentre it was as if the sun had touched the surface of the earth. Every living thing within that radius was instantly carbonized, from people walking on the street to birds in mid-flight. Cast-iron roofs warped and melted into impossible shapes; stone was crushed and shattered by the fantastic forces released as mass was transmuted into energy. Solid granite melted. As far as 6,500 feet from the hypocentre, roof tiles bubbled.

  Farther from the explosion, the radiant heat burned exposed skin, and even 10,000 feet away combustible substances burst into flame. White fabric reflected the energy away, while darker materials absorbed it, burning strange patterns into people’s skin for the rest of their lives. One and a half miles from the hypocentre a piece of Japanese paper had the characters, which were written in black ink, burned out as neatly as if they had been cut by a laser.78 The official US Government report on the bombings noted dispassionately that people suffered flash burns to their skin ‘out to the remarkable distance of 13,800 feet’.79 Trees on the hillsides around Nagasaki were scorched by the flash of heat. Afterwards, their browned leaves made it seem as though autumn had come early to Japan.

  About 4,000 feet from the hypocentre, reinforced concrete smokestacks with eight-inch walls designed to withstand a major earthquake were overturned. The British Mission to Japan estimated that if such a bomb were exploded over a British city it would have seriously damaged every building within two and a half miles of the hypocentre.80 Such a bomb dropped on London’s Trafalgar Square would have devastated an area extending northwards, past Russell Square to Camden Town. To the south, it would have laid waste to Westminster, the Houses of Parliament and beyond. Buckingham Palace to the west and the Bank of England to the East would have been well within the range of its destructive power. In an instant, one bomb would have obliterated the human and historic heart of the city.

  Flying in a B-29 accompanying the Nagasaki bomber, William Laurence had no sympathy for the inhabitants of the Japanese city about to be bombed: ‘Does one feel any pity or compassion for the poor devils about to die? Not when one thinks of Pearl Harbor and of the Death March on Bataan.’81 A correspondent who flew over Nagasaki after the bombing described what he saw:

  Great tongues of red and orange flame leaped toward the sky, reaching up and grabbing at what appeared to be a large white cloud of smoke that hung like a mushroom over the region. We ran along the coast over a ridge of hills. The blaze now seemed to stretch over the whole eastern sky, covering an area of at least 10 square
miles. The effect of the fire reaching over the hills was that of a volcano, the top of which had been blown clear off and which now was seething lava from its base.82

  The White House press release following the Hiroshima bombing was triumphant in hailing the new superweapon that its scientists had created:

  It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East… The battle of the laboratories held fateful risks for us as well as the battles of the air, land, and sea, and we have now won the battle of the laboratories as we have won the other battles… We have spent two billion dollars on the greatest scientific gamble in history – we won.83

  Three months later, the British scientist Jacob Bronowski, who would later work with Leo Szilard, drove through Nagasaki at dusk. It was, he said, a ‘desolate landscape’ in which ‘the skeletons of the Mitsubishi factory buildings, pushed backwards and sideways as if by a giant hand’ stood in a ‘bare waste of ashes’.84 Many people looked at the atomic wastelands of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and saw in their ruins the future of their own cities. The dream of a new world order arising like a phoenix from these radioactive ashes now seemed very hollow indeed.

  The secret US Government report on the bombings, prepared for the Manhattan Project, declared the work of the scientists to be a resounding success:

  In both Hiroshima and Nagasaki the tremendous scale of the disaster largely destroyed the cities as entities. Even the worst of all other previous bombing attacks on Germany and Japan, such as the incendiary raids on Hamburg in 1943 and on Tokyo in 1945, were not comparable to the paralyzing effect of the atomic bombs.

  On 10 August 1945, the day after the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, a mother and her son receive a boiled rice ball from an emergency relief party one mile south-east of Ground Zero.

  The report also noted that, as well as the terrible damage done to the cities, the bombings provoked ‘a panic flight’ of people out of the cities. It continued:

  Aside from the physical injury and damage, the most significant effect of the atom bombs was the sheer terror which it struck into the peoples of the bombed cities. This terror, resulting in immediate hysterical activity and flight from the cities, had one especially pronounced effect: persons who had become accustomed to mass air raids had grown to pay little heed to single planes or small groups of planes, but after the atomic bombings the appearance of a single plane caused more terror and disruption of normal life than the appearance of many hundreds of planes had ever been able to cause before. The effect of this terrible fear of the potential danger from even a single enemy plane on the lives of the peoples of the world in the event of any future war can easily be conjectured.85

  The Manhattan Project scientists had worked their fatal magic, and the war had been won. But the price of peace was that now the inhabitants of every city around the world had to live with.

  V

  The End of Dreams

  From the place of ground zero,

  O Lord, deliver us.

  From the rain of the cobalt,

  O Lord, deliver us.

  Walter M. Miller, Jr, A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)

  17

  The Doomsday Decade

  Doomsday is near; die all, die merrily.

  William Shakespeare, 1 Henry IV

  The American capital is missing in action.

  A single enemy atom bomb has destroyed the heart of the city. The rest is rapidly becoming a fire-washed memory. The flames are raging over 18 square miles.

  Washington is burning to death. Communications are temporarily disrupted. Help of all kinds is urgently needed from the rest of the country – blood, drugs, bandages, doctors, nurses, food, transportation.

  Uncounted thousands are dead. More thousands of injured lie, spread in untended rows, on hospital lawns and parks, or walk unheeded until they fall.

  Civil defense has broken down. The few valiant disaster squads are helpless in this homeless flood of agony and misery. Troops are moving in to restore order among maddened masses trying to flee the city.

  Fright crowds the rubbled streets and wears the blank face of awe. It couldn’t happen here yesterday. It did happen here before dawn today.

  The bomb exploded in southwest Washington, midway between the Capitol building and the Jefferson Memorial. It lighted the city as if it were a Roman candle.

  For a radius of a mile from the center of the blast the devastation is utter – a huge scorched zero, as if a giant, white-hot hammer had pounded the area into the earth. Blast and fire then reached out in widening waves.1

  This was how World War III began in 1951, as reported by Associated Press journalist Hal Boyle. His dramatic ‘eyewitness account of the A-bombing of Washington, D.C.’ was published in October of that year by Collier’s magazine, in a special issue devoted to speculation about the next war. The year before, President Truman had authorized the building of the next generation of nuclear weapons, the hydrogen bomb.

  Aerial view of the smoking ruins of New York City after an atomic attack in a still from the 1952 film Invasion USA.

  The American scientific community was divided as to whether the H-bomb, or Hell Bomb as the press soon dubbed it, was ethical or even possible. In spring 1951 the physicist John Wheeler wrote to Richard Feynman asking him to work on the new bomb. In his letter he estimated that there was ‘at least 40 percent chance of war by September’.2 Feynman declined.

  A thousand times more powerful than the bomb that devastated Hiroshima, the H-bomb could literally wipe a city off the map. But its effects were not limited to one city, or even one country. No less a scientist than Albert Einstein had warned the year before that the use of these most appalling of all weapons of mass destruction would result in the ‘radioactive poisoning of the atmosphere, and hence annihilation of any life on earth’.3

  After the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many had struggled to come to terms with the new destructive powers at humankind’s disposal. The first book on the subject, The Atomic Age Opens, was published in August 1945 and described atomic energy as ‘a subject for Superman cartoons and wild-eyed fantasy, or at best a project for the 25th century’.4 After the first use of poison gas as a weapon, in 1915, people found parallels in the scientific romances of Verne and Wells. Now the idea that a lone plane could drop a single bomb and devastate a city seemed straight out of science fiction. The New York Herald Tribune said that it was ‘as if the gruesome fantasies of the “comic” strips were actually coming true’. The paper speculated that ‘selfextinction’ was one of the ‘strange futures’ that humanity now faced.5

  For advice on this new, science-fictional world, people turned to the experts. The uncrowned king of the science fiction pulps, John W. Campbell, Jr, told PM magazine on 7 August 1945: ‘Frankly, I am scared. I’m scared because I fear people won’t fully realize that, from this day on, war is impractical.’ As ever, Campbell was ahead of his fellow commentators. A decade before the dread word ‘fallout’ became familiar to people, he even alluded to the global implications of nuclear explosions: ‘If many of these atomic bombs are used, we can predict magnificent sunsets as the superfine dust drifts all around the world, coloring the sun’s rays. Let’s hope it isn’t sunset for the human race. It could be sunrise – if we’re wise.’6

  For the first time, the people of mainland America felt vulnerable to direct and devastating attack. Having tested their first atomic bomb in autumn 1949, Soviet physicists were well on their way to developing a hydrogen bomb. The British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin had warned back in 1932 that ‘the bomber will always get through’.7 The idea of even one bomber reaching the American mainland with its deadly atomic cargo struck fear into people’s hearts. As a writer in the New York Times put it, in the atomic age ‘no nation will be invulnerable to attack. No Goliath will be safe. Indeed, a small aggressor nation might have ample resources to dest
roy a great nation.’8

  Before the world entered the era of the H-bomb, the civilian body responsible for overseeing atomic energy in America, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), had sought to play down the effect of an A-bomb attack on Washington. America would be better prepared than Hiroshima and Nagasaki, said the AEC, implicitly blaming the Japanese themselves for their high death toll:

  In Japan the number of casualties was enormous because the attacking planes were not heeded and people were caught in the open or with inadequate cover… With adequate warning which was heeded and adequate shelters which were occupied, the casualties could be greatly reduced. Furthermore, doctors with ample medical supplies, hospital facilities, and blood banks would save many of those who were injured by blast or burns.9

  Similarly, public information films such as Atomic Alert (1951) glossed over the true horror of an atomic attack, claiming that ‘the chance of your being hurt by an atomic bomb is slight’.10

  In private, scientists and statesmen were rather more concerned. Within weeks of the first atomic bombs being dropped, the new British prime minister, Clement Atlee, admitted in a personal memorandum that

  It is difficult for people to adjust their minds to an entirely new situation… Even the modern conception of war to which in my lifetime we have become accustomed is now completely out of date… it would appear that the provision of bomb-proof basements in factories and offices and the retention of ARP [Air Raid Precautions] and Fire Services is just futile waste… The answer to an atomic bomb on London is an atomic bomb on another great city.11