Disquiets: „You Saw Nothing in Hiroshima“

Author: Leonida Kovač

On July 20th 1962, an image of an explosion of a thermonuclear bomb was featured on the cover of Life magazine, with the title: “Space Bomb in Color: Eerie Spectacle in Pacific Sky”. In the same issue was also published an expansive obituary dedicated to William Faulkner, and a cover story of how Earle Stanley Garder, author of detective bestsellers, discovered cave paintings of “a long-lost Indian tribe” in the Mexican state of Baja California. 

The article on the long-awaited hydrogen bomb test “hundreds of miles in space above the Pacific” starts with a sequence of five colour images, each printed across full pages, while underneath, like graphic poetry, in bold letters stretches the text: “As, far away, the huge bomb exploded in space/first a light/ man had never seen/ then, in awesome brilliance, the sky/ over Hawaii goes wild with color/ it was as if someone had poured blood on the sky.

The Life magazine article asserts that the rocket carrying the hydrogen bomb named Thor, for the thunder-god of Nordic myth, had been launched from the Johnston Atoll, and describes how thousands of people on Hawaii, 800 miles away, anxiously awaited the announcement of the launch, then, in awe and silence, devoid of any “go-team-go” enthusiasm, watched the spectacle in the sky. Among them, claims the article, were schoolgirls in muumuu dresses and schoolboys in swimming trunks, tourists in new beachwear, sleepy children. Some spectators had turned on their transistor radios and followed the radio broadcast of the countdown. The article’s unsigned writer thought it necessary to report that young men brought their girlfriends on Waikiki beach, while there were also those who watched the scene from the graveyard, and that sailors in Pearl Harbor lined the submarine dock. The article further stated that correspondent Thomas Thompson, who had watched the explosion from his hotel’s courtyard, described it thus: “The blue-black tropical night suddenly turned into a hot lime green. It was brighter than noon. The green changed into a lemonade pink and finally, terribly, blood red. It was as if someone had poured a bucket of blood on the sky.” The article also mentions Life photographer Carl Mydans, who was 2000 miles away, on the island of Samoa, and described what he saw as the greatest rainbow in history.

It's impossible to determine whether Mydans was the author of the spectacular footage published on the pages of the magazine whose title, in the context of the published content, sound sarcastic, because neither the photograph, much like the text they illuminate, are unsigned.

The text emphasises that there was no noise because “because what we gaped at was happening 800 miles away. We stood there, with only the gentle sounds of sea and civilization murmuring around us”. The author of the article concluded that the testing proved that “the man-made inferno was supremely successful. It was a crucial part of our effort to deter a nuclear war by keeping our nuclear superiority”.
Our effort? Our superiority? Who or, to be more precise, what signifies this first-person plural? Who are these “we”? Back then, in 1962, and today, in the age of algorithmic capitalism when the lived reality surpasses any form of dystopian imagination, and the political consensus normalizes the paradigmatic situation whereby the richest and the most powerful man in the world extatically waves a chain saw on a podium in front of an elated crowd, while his satellites roam the endlessness of space?

I find on the internet the factoid that Johnston Atoll, from which the Thor rocket was launched, is an unincorporated territory of the United States of America; in 1926, it was declared a national nature reserve with the goal of preserving its coral reefs, rare bird species and marine animals. However, only eight years later, this protected landscape would come under the administration of the US Air Force, with access to the atoll and its waters becoming restricted. Since then, the Johnston Atoll was used as a military base, airstrip, biological and nuclear weapons testing facility and landfill for biological weapons such as sarin and “Agent Orange”, the herbicide and defoliant used for deforestation during the Vietnam War.

On the pages which directly follow this pictorial and textual report on the testing of the hydrogen bomb, this July 20th 1962 issue of Life magazine published a text entitled: “A Scientific Revelation above Samoa: Another Wonder Sears the Sky”, which is also accompanied by images, albeit coloristically somewhat less impressive than the previous ones. I want to turn your attention to the indicative choice of the word “revelation”, a term used to translate the Greek word apokálypsis, that is, to the plethora of its cultural connotations. The article begins with the words: “Another Thor rocket put another remarkable object into space last week – a satellite called the Telstar which sent a crisp TV picture across the Atlantic. (…) Telstar had been launched by the government for the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, whose shareholders got a nice piece of sky in their pie”.

The cited introduction is accompanied by images of domes of American and French transmission stations, along with the image of an elderly shareholder, missus Louise Bucker, gleefully observing the model of the satellite at Cape Canaveral. Telstar was the first active telecommunications satellite. We might also mention that France, with whose cooperation, in 1960, the USA have achieved the first satellite transmission of a television signal, during the Algerian war for independence from French colonial rule, tested its first nuclear bomb in the Algerian area of the Sahara Desert. France has executed 167 nuclear tests on that territory until 1966, thereby irreversibly contaminating Africa and the Mediterranean with radioactive particles.

The Soviet Union tested its first nuclear weapon called Pyérvaya mólniya (“First Lightning”) in August of 1949 in the territory of what is today the Republic of Kazakhstan. In the continuation of the article on the launch of the telecommunication satellite entitled “Man Pursues His Fiery Destiny”, the first sentence mentions how “the spectral light over the Pacific and the glimmer of millions of TV tubes that illuminated and understanding with fate that man made long ago”.

But who is this universalising, discursively produced figure of “man”? The text goes on to mention the discovery of fire and countless burned fingers in the pursuit of technological advancement, finally ending up on TV host Ed Sullivan, and explains that this figure is the white American. Man, of course.

I find on the internet a factoid that the satellite monitoring website “Orbiting Now” has counted 12.149 active satellites as of May 4th 2025 in various Earth orbits, with this number set to exponentially grow by 2030. More than 8000 satellites belong to the Starlink project, run by the SpaceX corporation, which was funded by Elon Musk in 2002.

In their 2000 book “Empire”, political theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri claim that the Empire, as a world order, is created on the basis of the ability to pass off force as working in service of rights and peace, and that imperial control function on the basis of three global and absolute means. Those are the bomb, money and ether.

I did look for precise data on the number of technologically sophisticated “smart” bombs which have been launched from the beginning of the new millennium to this day, say, on the territories of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, and Gaza, nor on the number of children whose slave labour in the Congolese mines supplies the global military, computer and telecommunication industry with critical rare-earth minerals.

Achille Mbembe, who at the start of the 21st century coined the term necropolitics, in his recent text “On Diminishment, I: Architecture and the Shelter-Rubble-Dust Continuum“, calls this present period brutalism. According to Mbembe, the key attribute of brutalism is the unprecedented extent to which force “clears” territories and produces extreme poverty. In so doing, Mbembe emphasizes that the construction of shelter is one of the first conscious activities of human kind, and that the current effective brutalism is precisely based on unhoming, which he precisely defines as a method on waging war against an enemy whose living environment and means of survival are a priori destroyed with the use of restricted weapons such as ammunition made from depleted uranium and whit phosphorus, and long-term terrain and air pollution with cancerogenic and radioactive chemicals. 

This calculated and programmed form of war, being undertaken by new means and resources, is a war against the very idea of habitation. “Bombs do not aim at individual bodies, but certain masses whose every organ must become the object of precise disabling, which is carried down from generation to generation – eyes, nose, mouth, ears, tongue, skin, bones, lungs, bowels, blood, arms, legs. So many maimed individuals, invalids, and those who have survived pulmonary diseases such as pneumoconiosis, traces of uranium in the hair, thousands od cases of cancer, miscarriages, malformations of fetuses, congenital deformations, thoracic damage, nervous system dysfunction – huge fissures”, writes Mbembe, concluding that the era of brutalism is akin to the era of ruins and dust, and that memory is now sheltered in the mud, ruins and dust.

In her text “No Milk No Love” published in May 2022, Ukrainian art historian Asia Bazdyrieva writes about an uninhabitable world, toxic soil, irreparably contaminated areas which, instead of people, will be inhabited by machines impervious to any kind of toxin. Articulating the notion of “Ukraine as territory”, which Bazdyrieva explains using the framework of colonialism, that is, cryptoracism, she concludes that Western Europe has never regarded the inhabitants of Eastern Europe as “human enough”. Bazdyrieva claims that throughout its history, Ukraine was (and still is) a doubly colonized territory: both by Wester Europe and the Russian Empire, and subsequently the Soviet Union, explaining the current “colonial view” by a process of resourcification. Bazdyrieva recognizes the tragedy of it all in the fact that “two colonial powers at play, one actively killing, the other exploiting to the very last and then leaving the people and land to die”.

Highlighting how in 2018, in cooperation with the Ukrainian government, Germany has started the project of developing solar farms in Chernobyl, claiming that in this way the radioactive soil, which would otherwise remain useless ground, can be given a new purpose because “in Ukraine, the sun is an inexhaustible resource”, Bazdyrieva wonders what kind of life will be possible in Ukraine after the war. She writes: “Our cities are in ruins, our fields are mined, our water is poisoned. Metal falls from the sky and explodes and explodes. Our air is filled with smoke from burning oil depots. After all is said and done, will this territory be conceptualized as Chernobyl—as completely wasted, so that at some point it can be creatively repurposed for a different, greener, nonsensical future?”

Only two weeks after his second presidential inauguration, Donald Trump announced his own conceptualization of the completely destroyed Gaza Strip, where, according to a Reuters report, more than 53.000 Palestinians have been killed from October 7th 2023 till May 17th 2025, a third of which are younger than 18. Trump suggested that the surviving Palestinian citizens by moved to neighbouring countries, making way for the Gaza Strip to be rebuilt and turned into a middle eastern riviera. Soon after followed his attack on the autonomy of American universities, precisely, on the academic freedom of thought and speech. So that memory might forever stay “sheltered in the mud, ruins and dust”?

In his 1936 essay “The Storyteller”, Walter Benjamin writes that the art of storytelling is nearing its end, because “less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly”. Benjamin defines storytelling as the ability to exchange experiences “that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions”, recognizing the cause for this extinction in the fact that “experience has fallen in value, and it looks as if it is continuing to fall into bottomlessness”, while “our picture, not only of the external world but of the moral world as well, overnight has undergone changes which were never thought possible”.

Benjamin recognizes the First World War as the starting point of this process, when people returned from the battlefield mute; not richer, but poorer in communicable experience because “never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power”. Furthermore, Benjamin claims that the press, as one of the most important instruments of governance in the era of high capitalism, is completely alien to storytelling and brings a new form of communication. This new form is the information whose spread plays a key role in the disappearance of the art of storytelling.

Benjamin did not live to see the current information, or rather digital, age in which the press has morphed into internet portals and gave way to social networks, while chatbots even write “poetry” on demand. The information age, which is marked by the rapid transition from traditional industrial production to an economy in the centre of which are information technologies, is primarily based on the opportunity of access and control of information.

Information is, of course, inseparable from spectacle, as evidenced by the Life magazine article cited at the beginning of this essay. In the late 1980s, in the commentary to his seminal book “Society of Spectacle”, published two decades earlier, Guy Debord writes that the first intention of the reign of spectacle was to make general historical cognition disappear, primarily almost all information and all reasonable commentary on recent history, and emphasizes spectacle skilfully organizes ignorance on what is happening, immediately followed by the oblivion of that which could have still been cognised. His claim is echoed by Vilém Flusser’s conclusion in his essay “The Philosophy of Photography” published in 1983. Flusser writes that devices were invented to simulate specific thought processes, emphasizing that the scientific discourse from Descartes onward tends to transliterate thought into numbers, but only with the advent of the camera this tendency is given its material form. Flusser concludes that the ensuing mechanisation of thought will lead to people becoming incapable of thought, entrusting it more and more to devices. Flussers prediction proved correct, because the artificial intelligence system ChatGPT, which was made publicly available by the end of 2022, regularly records 400 million users per week.

In his autofictional novel “Never Any End to Paris”, Enrique Vila-Matas mentions that his Parisian landlady Marguerite Duras once told she writes so as not to kill herself. The truthfulness of Vila-Matas’s claim cannot (nor needs to be) ascertained, but we can read what Marguerite Duras herself said about her work. In her interview with Suzan Husserl-Kapit, published in 1975, Duras defined her pulsating writing as organic, translational writing which translates the blackness, the darkness which is the gloom of the unknown and unspoken.

Marguerite Duras and Jean-Luc Godard spoke in 1979 about the movies they were filming, about the relationship between image and text, about his need for images and her need for text, for the written word, how she defined it. Duras claimed that all images, virtually all images, get in the way of the text, because they prevent the text from being heard, and what she wants is something that lets the text come through, something that doesn’t get in the way of “the amplitudes of speech”. Duras insisted on talking about degraded speech which represents the word in sound films, naming Resnais’s movie “Hiroshima, Mon Amour”, for which Duras wrote the screenplay in 1959, as the first true sound film. Duras told Godard how Alain Resnais asked her not to make and distinction between that what she writes and what he asks of her. Duras here also mentions that the whole world was inundated with images of the greatest calamity on earth, and that is why the film, i.e. her script, starts with the sentence “You saw nothing in Hiroshima”.