Hiroshima

"Well, I’m a journalist and for me this is one of the great works of journalism. I’m not alone in saying this; many others have called it the best piece of journalism in the twentieth century. It describes the stories of six people who were in Hiroshima on the day that the Americans dropped the first atomic bomb, what happened to them, what they remember about those hours, and the repercussions on their lives in subsequent months. It happened in August 1945, and the book came out in 1946, so it’s pretty immediate reporting. Nobody else has done anything like that. I’ve read it again and again. My father gave it to me when I was eleven, but I never read it. I don’t know why. It might have changed my politics in my teenage years quite a lot if I had. But finally I caught up with it many years later, and it’s a stunning piece of work. Forty years later, he went back and visited the people again, so I have two editions—the original edition and a later edition, when he added a long afterword, nearly as long as the original book, in which he described how those six people’s lives had unfolded since then, which gives it a whole new dimension. I’ve spent a bit of time looking at the repercussions of nuclear accidents and nuclear events of one sort or another, including the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, and visited both those cities while writing my own book , to get my head around the long-term consequences. It turns out that the radiation sickness business is not as bad as people thought it was. In other words, that people who survived the first year tended to survive, though not entirely. Which tells us, I think, a story about how lethal radiation is at high levels, but also how we are more tolerant than we think of the lower levels. That leads me to be a little bit sanguine about nuclear power more generally, in its peaceful form. So, as a journalist as much as an environmentalist, I find this book extraordinary. Yes. I mean, the book doesn’t explore that so much. It’s personal stories, personal reflections from individuals who were interviewed at great length. But I do think that Hiroshima was the first time we were aware that we could literally destroy the world, or at least a city and its population in one fell swoop. I suppose one has to remember that some other acts of war during the Second World War actually killed more people; the firebombing of Tokyo and, I think, Berlin killed more than the blast over Hiroshima. But that was one bomb at one moment. Nothing has ever done so much damage in one go as that. So it changed our perspective on the damage humans could do to the planet and indeed to ourselves. I’m a child of the Cold War . I remember being told by my father, at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, that if I were to see a mushroom cloud to dive under the desk at school. It felt that there really could be nuclear war that day, that there might be nuclear bombs coming out of the sky from Moscow towards us. I was too young to understand exactly what a scary moment that was. But perhaps that sense of doom, or potential doom, has coloured a lot of environmental thinking since then, whether we are talking about climate change or species loss or whatever—the possibility of literal oblivion."