Hiroshima: The World's Bomb (review)

Given the number of tomes on the atomic bomb, one might be forgiven for asking whether we need another one. In the case of Andrew J. Rotter's Hiroshima: The World's Bomb, the answer is definitely "yes." His central argument is that the atomic destruction of Hiroshima was "an episode in international history" (p. 5). To this end, Rotter emphasizes global flows: of scientists moving from one country to the other, of knowledge crossing borders, and of weapons transforming international relations. "Americans alone could not, and would not, have built the bomb," he notes (p. 95). The international dimension was not simply advantageous; it was indispensable. The Hiroshima story has stubbornly resisted this kind of transnational framing, and the presentation here may strike some readers as counterintuitive and a little jarring, which is all to the good.

For example, Rotter stresses that all major belligerents in World War II, including Germany and Japan, also had nuclear projects. But, unlike most histories, he treats the Axis projects before discussing the Anglo-American Manhattan Project. In this way, he throws into relief the massive organizational problems that attend any effort to weaponize fission. We see the failure of the Japanese and German programs not as defective Manhattan Projects, but instead as alternative attempts to resolve a rather new engineering problem —a problem that no one was sure would be solvable at all until the Manhattan Project succeeded.

The novelty of the atomic bomb is also something Rotter's elegant and clear presentation calls into question. The bombs were new, true, but the militarization of science, and the devaluation of civilian lives into legitimate targets for massive destruction goes back, in his telling, at least to World War I with poison-gas warfare and aerial bombardment. Chemical weapons were, like nuclear weapons, "understood by those who made them as things unprecedented and possibly decisive in war" (p. 21). For the most part, Rotter's pass over this material stresses the continuities of the international features of the race for atomic bombs —continuities characterized by international cooperation as well as competition —and this perspective makes the history of these weapons both more understandable and more troubling.

This persuasive underscoring of continuity, however, seems to vanish once the city of Hiroshima was destroyed on August 6, 1945. From that point on, Rotter resorts to a standard presentation of radical rupture, and the innovative clarity of his narrative loses some of its power. That said, he does not close the story with the war, or even with the Soviet detonation of their first nuclear device in August 1949, but continues more or less up to the present with brief histories of the British, French, Israeli, South African, Chinese, and Indian atomic bombs.

This is not an archive-heavy scholarly sifting of the various debates about casualty estimates, morality, and the decision to use the bombs —although the bibliographic essay at the end provides ample and well-informed orientation to a large literature. Rotter's volume is intended to be an accessible and balanced presentation geared to a more general readership. The author is to be commended not only for having succeeded at that task, but also for providing a valuable teaching volume and a creative reflection of interest to the specialist.