Question 7, page 13
4
Thirty years earlier, H. G. Wells had been given a personally guided tour by the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Irving Langmuir around General Electric’s famed research facilities at Schenectady in New York State, where Edison had perfected the light bulb. Langmuir pitched Wells a story idea about a form of ice, the smallest piece of which could freeze whole oceans. Wells turned the idea down.
But Langmuir’s assistant at the time, Bernard Vonnegut, a scientist working with Langmuir on attempts to control the weather, never forgot it. After the war, Bernard got his brother, a former POW who had survived the fire-bombing of Dresden, a job as a publicist at General Electric. One day Bernard told him Langmuir’s idea.
During 1962, in the wake of Tsar Bomba, as the world came perilously close to global nuclear war with the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kurt Vonnegut transformed Langmuir’s rejected idea into one of his most celebrated novels, Cat’s Cradle, in which this new idea of scientists not as moral leaders but as amoral monsters was given its most potent literary expression. A tale about a world destroyed by human stupidity made manifest by a scientist, he also made use of Langmuir himself as the model for the fictional Dr Felix Hoenikker, a scientist who, in Vonnegut’s words, ‘isn’t interested in people’. The fictional Hoenikker is the discoverer of ice nine, a form of ice that can instantly freeze anything it touches, from people to oceans, in a form of chain reaction. Hoenikker was previously one of the ‘fathers’ of the atom bomb.
‘After the thing went off, after it was a sure thing that America could wipe out a city with just one bomb,’ Vonnegut wrote, ‘a scientist turned to Father and said, “Science has now known sin.” And do you know what Father said? He said, “What is sin?”’
Vonnegut begins with his narrator planning to write a book called The Day the World Ended about what ‘important Americans’ had done the day Thomas Ferebee pulled his lever and the bomb fell on Hiroshima, and finishes six months after the world has more or less ended for all living things save a few ants and a handful of humans.
Perhaps, inevitably, when anyone faces the apocalypse, the example of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people comes up. In Vonnegut’s telling in Cat’s Cradle, they were ‘hunted for sport’ by the first English settlers ‘who were convicts’. The Tasmanian example is the ur-story of the end of the world, much imitated and never rivalled.
5
Cat’s Cradle was rapturously reviewed in the New York Times by Terry Southern, who was at the time co-writing a film with Stanley Kubrick called Dr Strangelove, in which Peter Sellers’ titular character is the apotheosis of the mad scientist. Dr Strangelove took inspiration from Szilard’s close friends and fellow Hungarians Edward Teller and John von Neumann, as well as the Nazi-cum-American rocket scientist Wernher von Braun. In the movie, Dr Strangelove is responsible for the Doomsday Machine, which was inspired by another idea of Leo Szilard’s. Originating as an illustration of where the arms race might lead, Szilard in a 1950 radio broadcast had come up with the idea of the terrifying—and technically possible—notion of the Doomsday Bomb: a cobalt bomb, which could kill all life on the planet.
In an inspired improvisation, Sellers borrowed a glove Kubrick wore when handling hot studio lights. He has Strangelove present as though afflicted by his own gloved hand, giving Nazi salutes and constantly seeking to strangle his own neck. Strangelove has to battle with his uncontrollable hand as the human and irrational comically, continually, assert themselves over the controlled and rational.
Dr Strangelove was released in January 1964. Four months later Szilard died knowing not dolphins saving the world but rather a madman seeking to strangle himself with his own gloved hand. The last of his paradoxical legacies was that he—an exemplar of the Wellsian ideal of scientists as noble saviours—had unintentionally helped create the opposite image of scientists: that of dehumanised, crippled minds without a conscience, creatures of the darkly irrational.
In their gallows humour and fatal despair, both Cat’s Cradle and Dr Strangelove are as distant from Wells’s optimism as Earth is from Mars, with Vonnegut’s Hoenikker and Sellers’ Strangelove as removed from Wells’s enlightened scientists as the Tsar Bomba is from a firecracker.
Thus do love stories that begin with a kiss in front of a bookcase and continue in baths and traffic lights end: with Tsar Bomba’s explosion spreading into a sixty-seven-kilometre-high mushroom cloud looking, according to one witness, as ‘if the earth was killed’.
6
Not long after Andrei Sakharov’s greatest triumph, which saw him embraced by Khrushchev in front of the USSR’s Politburo, the principal Russian physicist behind the Tsar Bomba, often hailed as the father of the Russian hydrogen bomb, read one of Szilard’s stories published in The Voice of the Dolphins. It was called ‘My Trial as a War Criminal’.
Szilard had written it in 1947. In the story, Russia had conquered the US. Szilard finds himself arrested and tried as a war criminal, charged with inducing the US to develop nuclear weapons in 1939 and ‘having contributed to the war crime of dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima’. The evidence is irrefutable, his defence—that he sought to prevent the bomb being used—rejected.
Szilard’s story spoke to Sakharov’s own growing doubts. Deeply affected by it, Sakharov showed the story to fellow physicist Viktor Adamsky.
‘A number of us discussed it,’ Adamsky later wrote. Although Szilard and his fellow physicists who are similarly charged are innocent, neither ‘they nor their lawyers could make up a cogent proof of their innocence,’ Adamsky continued. ‘We were amazed by this paradox. You can’t get away from the fact that we were developing weapons of mass destruction. We thought it was necessary . . . But still the moral aspect of it would not let Andrei Dmitrievich [Sakharov] and some of us live in peace.’
At its beginning the atom bomb was far more a continuation of the grotesquery of modern war than a departure from it. When asked about his decision to drop the bomb, Truman, a former artillery officer, once answered, ‘It was just the same as getting a bigger gun than the other fellow had to win a war, and that’s what it was used for. Nothing else but an artillery weapon.’
Sakharov, following Szilard, understood that no gun, no matter how big, threatened the future of humanity. Nuclear weapons did. And in creating them and understanding what they meant he had a moral responsibility to speak out against them. Along the way he became the USSR’s most famous dissident.
‘His message was unequivocal: there is only one way to avoid a life of lies,’ his friend and fellow dissident Natan Sharansky wrote of Sakharov. ‘In order to be truly free, you must speak your mind.’
And so, once more, a disappointing reality was reinvented as a fiction that metamorphosed into an unexpected new reality.
7
Szilard’s dolphins, brilliant creatures, come to understand maths and science completely and grow bored. Only US politics piques their interest because it defies understanding. And what was US politics or any politics for that matter but the irrational expressed as a system? Perhaps only Szilard’s dolphins could finally answer the question that Leo Szilard’s life raises: if despair is rational why was hope the very essence of Leo Szilard?
When he was dying Szilard simply said he did his best. He never stopped trying. He never ceased looking for what he termed the narrow margin of hope, no matter how often it proved elusive. That he failed makes his struggle no less poignant. The example of his life remains: a man who always thought science existed within a web of morality. Science’s achievements had to be constantly tested against the reality of human beings and yield to what we are, or we would be consumed and possibly even destroyed by them.
8
Thomas Ferebee felt justified in his part in the destruction of Hiroshima and its people: after all, how many more would have died if the bomb had not been dropped? In July 1945, the American Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, commissioned a study on the human cost of an invasion of Japan. It estimated between 1.7 million and four million Allied casualties with 400,000 to 800,000 dead and between five and ten million Japanese dead. So many Purple Hearts (awarded to US soldiers wounded or killed in combat) were manufactured in preparation for the invasion and its expected feats of death—some half a million—that the stockpile has not been exhausted to this day, many wars and nearly eighty years later.
Japanese estimates were higher, with the vice-chief of the Imperial Japanese Navy, Vice Admiral Takijirō Ōnishi, predicting up to twenty million Japanese deaths. The grand slaughter was being prepared for on every side: biological weapons were also under active consideration and General Douglas MacArthur readied stockpiles of phosgene, mustard gas, and cyanogen chloride close to the frontline in the Mariana Islands and ensured the US Chemical Warfare Service units were trained in their use. When it came to which weapon of mass destruction, the atom bomb was simply the final choice.
If there is no precise statistic to measure Hiroshima, nor can it be pretended that there is some moral calculus to death. There is no equation of horrors. Everyone knows of the victims of the first atomic bomb; few know of the Death Railway, whose dead number (in the typically imprecise way of evil) between 100,000 and 250,000 human beings. While the world still grieves for the dead of Hiroshima, outside Japan who grieves for the firebombing of Tokyo, which saw perhaps even more die from conventional bombs than the first atomic bomb—an estimated 100,000 victims? Which is the greater war crime? Who do we remember and who do we forget? Thomas Ferebee or Leo Szilard? A failed actress who makes a stolen stage name her destiny as a writer, or a successful actor with a gloved hand whose screen name becomes a synonym for mad evil while his own name fades from memory? If Thomas Ferebee releases a lever at 8.15 am, says, ‘Bomb away!’, and a bomb falls six miles before exploding, how many people need to die in order that you might read this book?
9
Forever after, Thomas Ferebee was asked how he felt about bombing Hiroshima. No one ever asked Thomas Ferebee how he felt about taking part in the first USAAF daylight raid on German-occupied Europe three years earlier. Tasked with destroying the Rouen railyards, half the bombs dropped by the raiding aircraft missed their target, killing fifty-two civilians and wounding 120 more. One Frenchman returned to his home to find it destroyed. At the morgue he discovered among many others the corpses of his parents and his son, naked, still bleeding, with only their socks left on their bodies. Of his daughter no trace was ever found.8
The raid was deemed a success that ‘far exceeded in accuracy any previous high-altitude bombing’. Though a demonstrable nonsense, it was used to justify an intensification of aerial bombing. Precision aerial bombing was always a misnomer in search of a justification. Subsequent Allied bombing of France killed, according to one historian, 57,000 French civilians. Estimates of German civilian dead from Allied bombing vary between 300,000 and 600,000.
Nor did anyone ever ask Thomas Ferebee how he felt about taking part in the carpet bombing of Vietnam twenty years later, which he did as a USAAF observer. During that war the Americans and their allies dropped on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia more than double the entirety of bombs it dropped in the Second World War—some 7.5 million tons of ordnance. It remains the largest aerial bombardment in history. Outside the countries that suffered it is largely forgotten.
Little Boy is generally accepted to have exploded with a force equivalent to 15,000 tons of TNT. However, a major post-war US government report, the Strategic Bombing Survey, analysing the effect of aerial bombing in the Second World War, estimated that the same blast and fire effect to the Little Boy explosion could have been achieved with 2100 tons of conventional bombs. In other words, the bombing of Vietnam can be calculated as the equivalent of either 500 Hiroshima bombs (at 15,000 tons) or, using the Strategic Bombing Survey figures, the equivalent of 3571 Hiroshima bombs (at 2100 tons). It is impossible to accurately quantify in a war that saw over three million die, of whom two million were civilians, how many died from aerial bombing. We remember Hiroshima. Who, other than the Vietnamese, remembers the Vietnamese dead? Other than the Cambodians, the Cambodian dead? The Laotians, the Laotian dead?
But then, who remembers a vanished daughter?
10
After Sanyo-Onada City and the night of the hostess bar I returned to Tokyo. There I met a man who had been a Japanese Army medical orderly at Hintok, the POW camp on the Death Railway where my father had also been. He described arriving there at night and walking past the funeral pyres on which were burning the cholera dead. Around the fires of flesh and bamboo were pitiful naked skeletons crawling in the mud. These, he told me, were the Australian POWS.
We met at a tearoom, a small space up a stairwell of an anonymous office block. There was a large window at one end of its narrow room. It was a place without charm, whose function was its function and no more.
It looked, he said of the camp, like a Buddhist hell.
I asked if he helped them.
He said he didn’t.
I asked if as a medical man he did not feel it was his duty to help the sick and the suffering.
‘You have to understand,’ he said, and he said it as though commenting on the quality or otherwise of his green tea, ‘we did not see them as human beings.’
The green tea came in small cups. It was very hard to swallow.
He told me the Australians were bad with their hygiene. The Japanese took hot baths. The Australians did not.
This seemed to explain things. I said nothing in reply.
‘You understand?’ he said.
I said I did.
I paid for his tea and taxi home. Nothing could have prepared me for what was to happen next.
11
I had arranged to meet another ex-guard later that day. I knew nothing about him. He had nothing to do with my father. He had just been one of thousands of guards who had worked on the pharaonic project that was the Death Railway with its hundreds of thousands of slaves. While travelling on a train to the outer suburbs of Tokyo where I was to meet him in the offices of a taxi company owned by his son, I had googled him to discover that he had only reverted to his original Korean name in recent times. His former Japanese name, Kakurai Hiromura, the name he had used during the war, that name I knew. He had been the Ivan the Terrible of my father’s camp, the man the Australians called the Lizard.
He is the only man I have ever heard my father—a gentle, peaceful man—speak of with violent intent. My father told me he had a dream of which he was ashamed—and I cannot tell you how out of character it was—and in that dream they captured the Lizard and bayoneted him and tied him up with his entrails.
Lee Hak-rae was sentenced to death for war crimes after the war. Later, his death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment and in 1956 he was released in a general amnesty.
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Lee Hak-rae was a dignified, gracious and generous old man. He did his best to answer my questions politely and thoughtfully. He had no recollection of violence. Perhaps it happened, he said. But he never saw it. He gave the impression of being sincere. I wondered if perhaps he had forgotten or he had decided to forget or it had receded from his mind, or if perhaps as an old man many things had vanished. Yet when I asked him about other aspects of that period in his life—his life in Korea before becoming a prison guard, his training by the Japanese, he was surprisingly full of precise details.
Violent face slapping—known as binta—was the immediate form of punishment in the camps, doled out frequently and viciously. There was often no discernible reason for the violence. Prisoners could be slapped until they were unconscious. Sometimes POWs were lined up in two rows and made to slap the man opposite them. The slapping would go on until one man fell. Anyone who was thought to be feigning their blows would be beaten by the guards.
Of course, he told me, he knew about binta. But that was just for discipline.
I asked him to slap me. I asked him to slap me as hard as he could.
My request was curious, even perverse. I still don’t understand why I asked. I tried to meet each witness without emotion, so that I would be open to everything they said and were, and not to prosecute, nor to judge. But perhaps I wanted him to know I knew. Perhaps, in spite of myself, I wasn’t without emotion. Perhaps I wanted him to know the past had returned, that, finally, it always returns. Or I wanted him to know I couldn’t be hurt as my father had been hurt. Perhaps I thought I needed to know what it was like waiting for the blow, how it might snap your head around, how you might seek to ride the blow while accepting it. But to be truthful, to this day I still really don’t understand why I asked.
The old man took some persuasion. Finally, we stood up, facing each other. He angled his body so that the force of his torso was behind the blow, slightly crooked his arm to buffer the blow, and cupped his hand to maximise the blow. It was evident that even if he had forgotten his violence his wasted muscles and withered body had not.
He hit me three times.
Of his slaps, I recall only how clean and dry the skin of his aged hand was as it struck me. It smelt of precisely nothing.
On the third blow, the taxi office began to shake and toss violently, like a dinghy in a wild sea. The whole building reeled around me. Folders fell from shelves as cupboards rocked. A long row of wildly swinging car keys began an ethereal jingling. I thought I had finally gone mad, that the whole trip to Japan, the novel I had been writing for over a decade and yet couldn’t write, had finally cracked my mind.
But in one of those coincidences in which reality delights but fiction—for fear of being unrealistic—is never permitted, a 7.3 Richter scale earthquake had hit Tokyo.
I had never experienced an earthquake and was too ignorant to be frightened. But Lee Hak-rae had. For the half a minute that room swayed, I saw that he was very frightened. I saw too that wherever evil is, it wasn’t in that room with me and that terrified old man gripping the table edge as if it were flotsam and he was drowning.
