What the People Saw: A Vision of Ourselves

The potential significance of Hiroshima was never lost on Americans. Even bathed in the kissing and weeping at the end of the war, people realized that the remarkable Bomb that felled an empire and brought the world to rapt attention was not going to be a gift without a price. In the Aug. 20, 1945, issue of TIME, James Agee looked ahead: "With the controlled splitting of the atom, humanity, already profoundly perplexed and disunified, was brought inescapably into a new age in which all thoughts and things were split--and far from controlled." Agee was anticipating an opposition between people and their invention that would widen rapidly as the century continued, until eventually Americans would almost come to believe that the Bomb had invented itself. The new age would be seen not as a time of what people did, but of what was done to them.

Forty years now we have been living in that age, no longer new, yet nothing has replaced it. Those born in the atomic age most likely will die in the atomic age, if they do not die because of it. What people saw in Hiroshima was not only the suffering of people; the devastation of a city; the conclusion of a long and deadly war; the development of a scientific-military partnership; a new set of rules for U.S. Presidents and for international politics. It was a vision of the future, a forecast of the world's destruction. We did not like what we saw.

We therefore went about the business of accommodating that unhappy vision, and avoiding it at the same time. Both ends were achieved in the culture, where the collective consciousness could make its fears decorative. Ever since Hiroshima the Bomb has been at the center of films, books, plays, paintings, songs, intellectual life. It has not always played the same part. In the years immediately after Hiroshima, the public seemed not to want to confront the Bomb directly, and so created a culture in which the end of the world was given a sidelong glance. Lately, we cannot seem to get enough of the Bomb, and stare with a hypnotic fixation.

In a way, the world of politics brought about both extreme reactions because the Bomb, of necessity, was kept secret from the public before it was first used and, perhaps of necessity, has been treated by those in charge of it as a secret ever since. What are secrets to governments are mysteries to the public; no one outside of a very few people in power has ever understood how nuclear weapons are developed, or why. Suddenly there was Hiroshima, suddenly the hydrogen bomb, suddenly the MIR Vs. Yet while the machinations of the experts and professionals have remained hidden from the public, the effects of the weapons have been continually described and displayed. In the space between secret processes and demonstrated effects, the public imagination has produced works in which the ends were always clear, and thus focused upon, and the means obscure, and thus ignored.