Hello Alex, This is awesome (in the original sense of inspiring awe (and/or horror)) - Mitsushige's accounts and photos are sobering and shocking.
Not sure if this is the right place to suggest a minor correction, and apologies if it isn't since this is an amazing piece. The footnote to Wargowski's article has the date as 1945 (i.e. the actual date of the event(s), so I think it should be 2025 (the article date)? It is also an amazing article, and like this Doomsday Machines piece does justice to the (uncensored) moment in time and Mitsushige's photographs.
Videos of the wounded survivors were finally showed on PBS in 1969 when I was 17. I have a vivid memory of watching the 17-minute film with my father, who had been at Oak Ridge during the war and by that era, was working as an engineer on a big project with Toshiba. He was spending weeks at a time in Japan and loved it. I asked him how he felt about his involvement in the Manhattan Project. He felt we had to beat the Nazis to getting the bomb but he also had signed the Oak Ridge version of the Szilard petition asking Truman to demonstrate the bomb before using it on people.
The quote from Hershey's book about rescuing neighbours and relatives is echoed in a news story I was reading about the devastation in Venezuela, and the news article mentioned that people mostly are digging for their family members. When a government is overwhelmed I guess it is human nature to look out for those closest to us. It makes post-apocalyptic fiction about fragmentation of government more plausible
Good post, thank you.
Hello Alex, This is awesome (in the original sense of inspiring awe (and/or horror)) - Mitsushige's accounts and photos are sobering and shocking.
Not sure if this is the right place to suggest a minor correction, and apologies if it isn't since this is an amazing piece. The footnote to Wargowski's article has the date as 1945 (i.e. the actual date of the event(s), so I think it should be 2025 (the article date)? It is also an amazing article, and like this Doomsday Machines piece does justice to the (uncensored) moment in time and Mitsushige's photographs.
Videos of the wounded survivors were finally showed on PBS in 1969 when I was 17. I have a vivid memory of watching the 17-minute film with my father, who had been at Oak Ridge during the war and by that era, was working as an engineer on a big project with Toshiba. He was spending weeks at a time in Japan and loved it. I asked him how he felt about his involvement in the Manhattan Project. He felt we had to beat the Nazis to getting the bomb but he also had signed the Oak Ridge version of the Szilard petition asking Truman to demonstrate the bomb before using it on people.
The quote from Hershey's book about rescuing neighbours and relatives is echoed in a news story I was reading about the devastation in Venezuela, and the news article mentioned that people mostly are digging for their family members. When a government is overwhelmed I guess it is human nature to look out for those closest to us. It makes post-apocalyptic fiction about fragmentation of government more plausible