HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR
A New Film Coincides with the Rebirth of the Nuclear Age
by Carey Monserrate
August 6th of next year will mark a date of tragic
distinction: the 60th anniversary of the bombing of
Hiroshima. Along with the incineration of Nagasaki, the United
States’ decision to develop and deploy history’s most efficient
“weapons of mass destruction”—effectively ending World War II
and inaugurating the nuclear age—resulted in over 200,000 deaths
upon impact, and an estimated 125,000 subsequent fatalities from
radiation exposure and related ailments, almost all of them civilian
casualties.
Attempts to grapple with the frightening legacy of the bomb in
this country have produced a number of memorable works in print,
television, and film, most notably John Hersey’s Hiroshima
(1946), Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964), the
Oscar-nominated documentary The Day After Trinity (1980), The
Atomic Café (1982), War Games (1983) and ABC’s
chilling prime time post-nuclear dramatization, The Day After
(1983).
Taken together, their release dates read like an
electrocardiogram of Cold War anxiety, with spikes roughly
corresponding to the milestone events of the post-nuclear era: the
end of the World War II; the Cuban missile crisis; and the election
of Ronald Reagan, whose pro-military and defense policies, centered
on an exponential build-up of our nuclear arsenal, are popularly
credited with the collapse of the Soviet Union (a development which—in
accordance with the law of unintended consequences—resulted in the
potential exposure of enormous stockpiles of nuclear weapons and
fissile material to criminal and terrorist access at non-secured
sites throughout the former Soviet Union).
The anniversary of Hiroshima may produce yet another spike in
collective anxiety and cultural reflection upon the nuclear threat:
after an interval of relative complacency following the end of the
Cold War, the issues of nuclear warfare and proliferation have
returned to center stage in international affairs, prompted by the
twin specters of global terrorism and the uncontrolled dissemination
of nuclear technologies and fissile material to formerly non-nuclear
states with anti-Western political ideologies (see below). If so,
South African director Carey Schonegevel’s Original Child Bomb,
produced by Holly Becker and premiering at this year’s Tribeca
Film Festival (May 1-9), serves as an eloquent harbinger of works to
come.
Crafted in the style of montage, Schonegevel’s visually
engaging, rhetorically forceful hour-long documentary unleashes a
battery of cinematic modes and techniques—from dramatization,
straight narrative, and interviews to animation and archival footage—to
recount and interrogate in evocative terms the events surrounding
the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the current landscape of
nuclear proliferation, and their implications for our collective
future.
In certain respects, Original Child Bomb operates squarely
within the tradition of American “anti-nuke” protest documents,
presenting a kaleidoscopic synthesis of many of its predecessors’
approaches to the subject: Hersey’s accounts of the infernal
suffering visited upon Hiroshima’s citizen-targets, told from the
perspective of surviving witnesses, or hibakusha, find echoes
here, along with Atomic Café’s canny use of stock footage
to cast American officialdom’s triumphalist attitude towards
nuclear arms in a darkly sardonic light.
But this film is articulated in a thoroughly contemporary visual
idiom, its aesthetic elegantly poised between
experimental/avant-garde cinema on the one hand and
educational/activist documentary on the other. Editor Mako Kamitsuna—a
Hiroshima native—displays a keen sense of rhythm and pacing,
apportioning the flow of imagery and information in carefully
calibrated segments that occasionally challenge but never overwhelm
the viewer (unless so intended). The result is a visual
orchestration integrating quick-edit intensity and contemplative,
elegiac tranquility—a threnody in the key of vexed moral
reflection.
The film’s moral pedigree derives from an authoritative source:
Thomas Merton (1915-1968), the influential American Trappist monk,
mystic, author, and poet. Original Child Bomb borrows its
title and various narrative and thematic elements from Merton’s
1962 prose poem of the same name—a synoptic evocation of the
events leading up to the bombings, which he termed “points for
meditation to be scratched on a cave wall.” Becker and Schonegevel
successfully reprise the dominant notes of ironic indictment in his
spare poetic diction.
Their selection of this particular work as a source text for the
film is inspired, resonating with several enigmatic parallels in the
trajectory of Merton’s life and thought and Japan’s involvement
in the war. Merton entered the order at the Abbey of Gesthemani
outside Louisville, Kentucky a few days after the bombing of Pearl
Harbor. Although a Catholic by affiliation, he was powerfully drawn
at the end of his life to the religions of the East, and especially
to Zen, writing extensively on the subject (see his Mystics and
Zen Masters [Noonday Press: November 1999] and Zen and the
Birds of Appetite [New Directions: 1998]). He died in a tragic
accident during a pilgrimage through Asia, a final journey movingly
recorded in The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (New
Directions: 1998). Finally—and most strangely—one of the airmen
aboard the plane that dropped the bomb on Japan would enter Merton’s
Abbey several years after the war’s end.
[Original Child Bomb was made with the endorsement and
fiscal management of the Thomas Merton Foundation in Louisville,
Kentucky; additional support was provided by the Becker Family
Foundation].
A note on the film’s title: “original child bomb” is a
coinage derived from the Japanese term for the atom bomb, genshi
badukan. Genshi, which literally means “atom,”
consists of root characters in Japanese which, if rendered
individually, could be taken to mean “original” and “child.”
Merton’s poem opens with the claim (reiterated at the beginning of
the film) that the Japanese called the weapon dropped on Hiroshima
“original child bomb” because it was the first of its kind the
world had ever seen. This rather arresting interpretation turns out
to be an instance of extravagant poetic license. A native Japanese
speaker would regard the translation of genshi into “original
child” as an unnatural semantic contortion, and it is unlikely
that any Japanese person ever embraced this construal—one which
appears to have originated with John Hersey, who rendered genshi
badukan thus in Hiroshima.
Nevertheless, “original child” serves as an effective
conceit, and in Schonegevel’s skilled hands, provides one of the
film’s central motifs: the strange, unmistakable, morally exigent
relationship between children and the dawn of the nuclear age. From
the very beginning, themes of birth, childhood, parentage, and
domestic tranquility surrounded the bomb’s development. President
Truman’s coded message relaying the news of the first successful
atomic test to Winston Churchill in July of 1945 read, “Babies
satisfactorily born.” The flight crew assigned to carry out the
run over Hiroshima gave the weapon that would ultimately kill
130,000 people the soubriquet “Little Boy” (perhaps because it
was a lesser device of simpler design than “Fat Man,” the bomb
dropped on Nagasaki three days later). The colonel in command of the
fateful B-29 bomber that would deploy “Little Boy” quaintly
christened his aircraft the Enola Gay after his mother back
home in Iowa.
Schonegevel takes full advantage of this peculiar contrast,
selectively disclosing these and other details in successive visual
and narrative iterations to highlight the merciless,
omni-directional destructive intensity of nuclear warfare—and its
cruelly efficient, deadly assault on human innocence. A voice-over
of Merton’s incantatory opening lines (“In the year 1945 an
Original Child was born. . . .”) accompanies period footage of
everyday life in Japan as it appeared in
1945—children at play, men boarding the trains to work. Shots of
army technicians preparing “Little Boy” for the strike and
footage of the actual bombing runs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, both
drawn from US military archives, are followed by an animated
portrayal of the impact on the ground (executed in anime, the at
once sophisticated and juvenile cartoon style popular both in Japan
and among cult aficionados here).
Images of children recur throughout Original Child Bomb:
period footage of smiling Japanese children, taken from the McGovern
Collection in Washington, DC, interspersed with filmed portraits of
Hiroshima youth today; American schoolchildren in conversation; a
child rehearsing her ABCs in terms related to nuclear warfare (“‘A’
is for atom; ‘B’ is for bomb; ‘C’ is for Cold War”). One
sequence follows a contemporary Japanese boy dressed in American
hip-hop attire and wearing head phones as he wanders through the
streets of present- day Hiroshima and, in a proleptic interlude,
steps into the past, meandering through the wreckage in the
immediate aftermath of August 6th, 1945. (The spectral outline of a
little girl trailing a white horse—the symbolic messenger of the
gods in Shinto iconography—accompanies him).
In an especially heart-rending sequence, we are confronted by the
arresting gazes of actual victims of the bombings, women and
children recorded in color by the US Army shortly after the war, the
surfaces of the skin on their faces and bodies disfigured, burned,
and scarred into inhuman topographies of suffering (temperatures at
the epicenter of the blast reached 10 million degrees,
instantaneously vaporizing everything in the immediate vicinity).
These are difficult images to behold, and Schonegevel takes pains to
display the most graphic among them with judicious restraint.
The frame eventually jumps to a classroom discussion among high
school students who have just surveyed these same images. Educators
will be interested to learn that Original Child Bomb is
tailor made for this demographic. Communicating to young people
seems to be one of its driving ethical imperatives, with content
conveyed in terms clearly appealing to younger viewers, and a
soundtrack incorporating contributions from numerous well known (and
cutting-edge) musical artists, from ground-breaking turntablist and
producer DJ Shadow and innovative hip-hop artist Mos Def to master
Japanese composer and film scorer Ryuichi Sakamoto and producer Dan
the Automator.
Watching as these students weigh the meaning of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, earnestly debating the continued threat of a nuclear
attack, is affecting. Their discussion yields one of the film’s
more poignant comments, from a young woman who remarks, “The
possibility of any kind of nuclear war—I don’t think it’s even
remotely any type of reality for this generation. It’s something
that’s in the past. And it seems like it’s something that’s in
the future, but it’s not something that affects us.”
Events of the recent past suggest otherwise.
* * *
In the second week of May 1998, the world learned of India’s
inauguration into the so-called “nuclear club.” Almost exactly
three months after its historic victory in the Indian parliament,
the ruling coalition government, headed by Prime Minister Atal
Behari Vajpayee’s right-wing, Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP), conducted five nuclear tests beneath the arid deserts
of Rajasthan state in the northwest, at a site only 93 miles from
India’s border with Pakistan, its historic Muslim antagonist over
the course of three wars since partition in 1947. To knowledgeable
observers, the detonations (only the second and third to be
conducted by India in 24 years) were simply the BJP’s way of
making good on a decades-old promise: the Party had always
maintained India’s right to “exercise the nuclear option” as
the centerpiece of its national security platform. Its ascent to
power was interpreted by Party leaders as a ratification of that
position, one they wasted no time in executing.
Pakistan promptly responded in kind later that month by carrying
out six underground nuclear detonations of its own at its Chagai
Hills test site. At the conclusion of testing on May 29, 1998,
Pakistan officially declared itself a “nuclear state”—a form
of aggressive and menacing rhetoric the Indian leadership had taken
pains to avoid in the face of international indignation—in an
interview given to the Associated Press by its Foreign Minister,
Goyar Ahub Khan.
Khan is a name that would resurface roughly five years later,
again in connection with Pakistan, as the chief protagonist in an
even more ominous chapter in the history of global nuclear
proliferation. In early October 2003, a US Navy ship—operating on
American intelligence obtained as part of the Bush Administration's
Proliferation Security Initiative—seized the BBC China, a
registered German vessel bound for Libya from a Persian Gulf port.
Upon inspection by US and British agents, the BBC China was
found to contain thousands of concealed parts, later determined to
have been manufactured in Malaysia, for a uranium enrichment
processing machine known as a gas centrifuge—the key component in
thermonuclear weapons production. The discoveries made aboard the BBC
China are believed to have played a significant role in
persuading Libya to abandon its nuclear weapons program, an accord
Tripoli announced the following December after months of secret
negotiations with the US and British governments. Over the course of
those negotiations, Libya furnished officials with a set of
blueprints it had obtained for a nuclear warhead. The designs for
both the BBC China centrifuge and the Libyan warhead bore a
striking resemblance to those attributed by investigators to the
founder and director of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, Dr.
Abdul Qadeer Khan.
In a parallel development, the UN had issued an ultimatum on
September 12, 2003, threatening Iran, long suspected of harboring a
covert nuclear weapons program, with broad sanctions in 45 days’
time if it continued to conceal the extent of its nuclear
weapons-related activities. Along with the Libyan revelations,
Tehran’s subsequent compliance with requests from investigators at
the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency set in motion a chain
of events that would lead in an unexpected and terrifying direction.
Documents and interviews provided by the Iranian government
through the fall of last year shed light on a shadowy nuclear
technology distribution network originating with Pakistan’s
nuclear weapons program and employing middlemen and suppliers
scattered across three continents. At the center of the gathering
international scandal was Dr. Khan, who in early February of this
year, under mounting pressure, was moved to issue an astonishing
public confession broadcast on Pakistani state television in which
he admitted to leaking national nuclear secrets to several states
and begged for an official pardon (days later, Pakistani President
Pervez Musharraf would summarily oblige Khan’s request, presumably
in an effort to avoid any public criminal proceedings, additional
revelations of Pakistan’s involvement in international nuclear
technology sales, and the transformation of an already heralded hero
of the Islamic world into an historic martyr).
These admissions, accompanied by a 12-page written confession
outlining various covert activities, relationships, and
transactions, served as the final confirmation of a chilling
scenario: that Khan, known in some precincts as the “Father of the
Islamic Bomb,” stole blueprints for uranium enrichment technology
while employed by a Western consortium in the seventies and then
distributed these designs—along with other forms of technical
guidance, equipment, and material—for sale or in-kind exchange to
nations with nuclear ambitions and similarly anti-Western
sympathies. Libya, Iran, and North Korea were his acknowledged
customers, but perhaps not the only ones. According to some
accounts, Khan may also have made overtures to the governments of
Iraq and Syria, with inconclusive results.
While no firm timeline has been established, the relationships
and activities detailed over the course of these investigations span
several decades. The New York Times reported on April 13
that, in recent sessions with interrogators, Khan dated the
beginning of his negotiations with the North Koreans on equipment
and design sales to the late eighties, but did not actually ship
anything until the late nineties. (A June 2002 CIA report estimates
that Pongyang first received equipment and technical information for
thermonuclear device manufacture in 1997; North Korea may have
reciprocated by providing Pakistan with missile technology and
material for its nuclear tests in 1998. Although North Korea has
never admitted possessing nuclear weapons, it all but declared
itself a nuclear state in January 2003 when it withdrew from the
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty—the only nation ever to do so).
In the same Times article, Khan is reported to have told
investigators that five years ago, while on a trip to North Korea,
he was shown three nuclear devices at a secret underground site.
The extent of the current availability of Khan’s blueprints and
other stolen nuclear technology to other as yet unnamed states—or
to “stateless” terrorist and criminal organizations—is
unclear.
The Bush Administration, in apparent deference to Pakistan’s
status as a key ally in its “war on terror”—and in order to
avoid embarrassment over its ties to Islamabad—issued a relatively
muted response to these developments, framing the unearthing of Khan’s
nuclear technology distribution network as a coup for the
intelligence community, a victory for international security, and
one of the “key accomplishments in our efforts to prevent and
protect against the proliferation of WMD.” [WMD: “weapons of
mass destruction”]
As of this writing, President Bush has not mentioned Pakistan
publicly for weeks.
* * *
Against the backdrop of these developments, Original Child
Bomb will presumably find an interested audience. Although
completed before revelations about Dr. Khan’s activities surfaced,
the filmmakers take note of other near-current developments in
quick-edit bursts, furnishing news broadcast clips of the Indo-
Pakistani conflict, the military build-up in Iraq, and North Korean
missile test footage, interspersed with on-screen “factoids”
highlighting the staggering irrationality of nuclear armament (there
are more than 22,000 warheads worldwide, most of them orders of
magnitude more powerful than those dropped on Japan; nine countries
have declared nuclear arsenals, and almost 33 countries have the
theoretical capacity to manufacture thermonuclear weapons; the
United States has conducted 1,054 nuclear tests to date, some of
them undertaken within short distances of human populations). Among
the most disturbing clips are those originally broadcast during the
run-up to the invasion of Iraq, when the White House briefly floated
the idea of employing “tactical nuclear weapons,” “mini-nukes,”
or “bunker busters” to uproot Saddam and his forces.
Schonegevel goes to some lengths to render her film accessible to
a Japanese audience, incorporating details they will appreciate and
recognize. In one sequence, a series of Japanese characters
intermittently glows and fades from the frame. These are key words
drawn from Merton's poem—“atomic,” “light,” “harmony,”
“revenge,” “burn,” and “power”—intended to amplify the
film’s meditative atmosphere for Japanese viewers, who are
otherwise numbingly familiar with accounts of the bombings. Several
movies by Japanese directors dealing with themes of nuclear
annihilation served as inspirations—Kurosawa’s Dreams
(1990) and Record of a Living Being/I Live In Fear (1955),
and Shohei Imamura’s Black Rain (1988)—of which numerous
visual cues can be discerned over the course of the film. These and
other references to Japanese history, culture, society, and religion
not only furnish a level of meaning for contemporary Japanese
viewers; they communicate a respect for and responsibility towards
the only society in history that has endured the horror of atomic
warfare.
This is not to suggest that Americans did not suffer profoundly
in the aftermath of the bombings. Original Child Bomb
includes interviews with two members of the Atomic Veterans
Association actively involved in anti-nuclear advocacy (and still
seeking acknowledgment and compensation from the US Government)
after suffering from exposure to radiation at the hands of the US
military, both in Japan and during post-war nuclear testing. Neither
was informed of the potential consequences of radiation exposure
(serving instead as involuntary human guinea pigs) and, according to
their accounts, each has met with years of government obstructionism
and denial.
What emerges from their stories, taken together with the hibakusha
testimony that forms the film’s centerpiece (gleaned from the
Peace Memorial Museum in Hiroshima), is an incisive portrait of the
effects of nuclear weapons on ordinary people.
Among the most poignant disclosures in this remarkable
documentary are those regarding the relationship between the bomb
and religion—the nuclear and the mystical. It is almost impossible
to witness the blossoming furnace of a nuclear blast, even from the
remove of celluloid, without drawing an association at some level
with cosmic creation-destruction. (100 Suns, Michael Light’s
astonishing 2003 coffee table collection of US Army photographs
documenting atmospheric and underwater nuclear tests conducted
between July 1945 and November 1962, communicates the divine
celestial quality of nuclear explosions like no other book in print
today). It is equally difficult to grasp that a weapon of such
incomprehensible destructive capacity could ever have been wrought
by human hands.
Accordingly, religious language has surrounded the bomb since its
inception. The code word selected for the first atomic test,
conducted on July 16th, 1945 in Almagordo, New Mexico, was “Trinity.”
The code word for the site where “Little Boy” was to be
assembled, on the North Pacific island of Tinian, was “Papacy.”
Numerous witnesses of the first detonations expressed their awed
reactions in religious terms. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of
the Manhattan Project, famously responded to the Almagordo test with
a quote from the Bhagavad Gita: “If the radiance of a thousand
suns were to burst forth at once in the sky, that would be like the
splendor of the Mighty One . . . I am become Death, the destroyer of
worlds.” A semi-official report on the Almagordo test cited a line
from the New Testament—“Lord, I believe, help Thou my unbelief.”
But the most touching detail regarding religion and the bomb, in
this reviewer’s opinion, comes early in the film. (I could not
find it in Merton’s poem, so its inclusion is a masterstroke). It
seems to sum up everything this votive, compelling, cautionary work
attempts to convey about the suffering nuclear weapons hold in store
for humanity: “U.S. airman Matthew McGunigle photographed the
Hiroshima blast. After the war, he entered a monastery and took a
vow of silence.”
Editor’s Note: Information on Original Child Bomb is
available at www.originalchildbomb.com.
