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first moment of the cold war. there's little doubt about that.
but dropping the bomb, reading the documents that recount the processes of development and the decision to use them is an interesting confrontation with open-endedness. once a story is past folk like to fill in detail, re-organize the narrative in order to eliminate or reduce the space(s) of uncertainty and/or contingency, mistakes and gaps in knowledge. when we say, for example that it was pretty clear that the japanese were willing to surrender before hiroshima, what does that mean? to whom was it clear and what did clarity mean? after the fact, that this was the case can be reconstructed, but with the reconstruction comes an evacuation of the importance of limitations of information in shaping the spaces of acting. there's also a tendency to reduce the role of what amounts to anonymous masses of people and replace it with Actors whose Names we Know, as if a reassuring story needs a single definite Hero. but the world isn't like that and human systems aren't like that.
what is the difference between an atomic weapon and a really big conventional weapon? is it the radiation, the gift that keeps on giving? does it lay in the fact that the fire-bombing of a place requires alot of payload and delivery systems, so is a Big Operation that delivers a Big Nightmarish Effect while a nuke is a single, relatively small package? And how fast was information about what happened to hiroshima assembled? who did the assembling? (this i think is pretty well known, i just happen not to remember it)...
frequently it is not obvious on the ground what just happened, yes? it takes some time to assemble a coherent view. for example, a group of french deportees sent germaine tillion, who was an anthropologist and who had been deported to ravensbruck, to the nurmberg trails so she could gather a coherent narrative about what happened to them all and publish it. her book reframed the holocaust as a holocaust for alot of these folk. but before that, what was it that had happened?
i say all this in a kind of agnostic mode. i just find it interesting the extent to which open-endness, partial information, contingency and multiplicity get written out of histories when histories are allegedly about such things. heros and story-lines and an illusion of omniscience provided for a reader. histories as they're written are more about the genre of histories as texts than they are about the world they talk about.
but i digress.
i think nagasaki was wrong.
hiroshima there's a discussion.
but nagasaki, i don't really think so.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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