The Atomic Age, Politics, and Morality Theme Analysis

In the very first sentence of Hiroshima, John Hersey conveys the shock and disorientation of the Hiroshima bombing on August 6, 1945. Early in the morning, Hiroshimans were going about their business, utterly unaware that the American military, fighting in World War Two against Japan, was about to drop an atomic bomb on their city. The next day, American forces dropped a second bomb on the city of Nagasaki—altogether, these bombs claimed more than 200,000 lives.

Since 1945, nuclear missiles haven’t been used in a war, making the United States the only country in history to use atomic bombs on an enemy population. This is a controversial designation. Some believe that the United States was justified in killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, including children, for the “greater good” of pressuring the Japanese government to surrender right away. Had President Harry Truman not decided to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, they argue, World War Two would have continued for months or even years, leading to the deaths of many more people. On the other hand, some have argued that bombing Hiroshima was a human rights atrocity; furthermore, historians have suggested that the Truman administration chose to bomb Hiroshima not simply to end the war, but to assert its new superpower status. Since 1945, the world’s most powerful countries have stockpiled nuclear weapons, while other countries have pursued nuclear programs. Since understanding the legacy and the historical background of the bombing of Hiroshima is very important, one of the most surprising things about John Hersey’s book is that it doesn’t spend that much time exploring the political or ethical implications of Harry Truman’s decision to bomb Japan. Instead, Hiroshima revolves around the lives of six people who survived the explosion, while making very few references to politics or ethics.

Readers continue to debate what Hiroshima ultimately suggests about the morality of the bombing, and whether its lack of explicit political or moral information about the bombing is itself a political and moral position. One could argue that the book implies that the bombing was utterly unjustifiable. Hersey’s chilling descriptions of melted concrete and vaporized human bodies emphasize the human misery caused by the bombing—so much misery that there could be no justification for it. By this logic, Hiroshima would imply that the bombing of Hiroshima was a horrific crime, and that President Harry Truman was a war criminal. Hersey, writing for The New Yorker at a time when the vast majority of Americans believed that the bombing was morally justifiable, could never have said this explicitly. One could argue, though, that his focus on the egregious human toll of the bombing implicitly argues that it was unjustified.

However, others have argued that, by omitting any discussion of the decision to bomb Hiroshima, Hersey implicitly argues that America was morally justified in bombing Japan. Particularly in the second half of the book, characters express their outrage with the Japanese government (rather than the American government) for failing to provide for them after the bombing of Hiroshima. Other characters compare the bombing to a natural disaster—a horrible event that simply couldn’t have been avoided. In other words, the characters in Hiroshima express their anger with Japan’s government, or with the universe itself, but not, for the most part, with America, the country that was literally responsible for the bombing. (It’s likely that, had Hersey included any strong criticisms of the U.S., his editor, William Shawn, would have removed them to avoid controversy.) Thus, one could argue, Hiroshima reinforces the standard, mainstream interpretation of the bombing in 1940s America: that it was a horrible—though unavoidable and justifiable—tragedy that the Japanese had brought upon themselves. In all, there are persuasive arguments for both interpretations of Hiroshima’s take on nuclear war. Perhaps Hersey left his book open-ended not simply to avoid censorship or controversy, but so that readers could make up their own minds about a topic that’s too big and complicated for easy answers.