shipped to a U.S. airbase for its final Tokyo destination until President
Harry S Truman, citing despair over the enormous number of casualties,
decided to spare the city and its inhabitants.
After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, propagandists did not wait
long to put a happy face on the ghastly new weapon and incorporate
the mushroom cloud into popular iconography. The bomb itself (in its
various unexceptional physical manifestations) was not iconic enough for
widespread use as a modern emblem, but the mushroom cloud was
monumentally omnipotent. Since the United States could smash and
harness the atom (and with it, smash and harness Imperial Japan) the
mushroom cloud initially represented superhuman accomplishment. It
symbolized righteousness rather than wickedness.
But not everyone embraced this view. Only a few months after
the end of war, one early opponent, former U.S. Navy Lieutenant Robert
Osborn, an artist whose wartime assignment was drawing cartoons for
training and safety brochures, published a cautionary manual of a different
kind. This time, rather than teach sailors and pilots survival techniques
under battle conditions, his book, titled War is No Damn Good,tried to save
lives through condemnation of all armed conflict—especially the nuclear
kind. While serving in the Navy, Osborn believed he had seen all the
carnage imaginable, and supported the end result. But after viewing
pictures from Hiroshima and its atomic aftermath, he realized the means
were not beyond reproach, and as an artist he could not remain silent.
Thus he created the first protest image of the nuclear age—a drawing of a
smirking skull face on a mushroom cloud, which transformed this atomic
marvel into a symbol of death. Although it was not the most profound
statement, it was the most poignant of the few antinuclear images produced
in the wake of World War II. For its prescience, it has earned a place in the
pantheon of oppositional graphics.
But even Osborn’s satirical apocalyptic vision pales before actual
photographs and films of A-bomb and H-bomb blasts that were made of
the many tests over land and under sea. One film is remarkable for the
real-time eruption from a gigantic plasma bubble (like an enormous womb)
into a gaseous fireball from which the mushroom cloud emerges. Others
are incredible for the sheer enormity of the cloud compared to nearby
buildings or ships. Detonations at sea routinely produced the best photo
ops because the immense upward thrusting water column, the base of the
mushroom, was so surreal. Seen from the air, the blast produced undulating
surf that radiated for miles, churning up the otherwise calm sea. These
images are horrific andhypnotic, and like cosmic fireworks, they were as
fascinating as they were terrible.
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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