Meditations on the Bomb From a Small-Town Cul-de-Sac

Is Technocracy our God in the modern world? Today, the unthinkable becomes doable, and the doable is unquestioned. Apart from the decision to manufacture the atomic bombs, what about the decision to actually use them on Japan? The struggle to understand why anyone would want to use power to create nothing began for me with a suicide in a small-town cul-de-sac.

The nightmare came the same night as an early evening suicide. A sharp “pop” was heard. It was early June, still a month too early for Fourth of July fireworks. I and two others spread into the field. The first on the scene, at the age of ten, I am alone in a paved and vacant parking lot cul-de-sac where a man’s body is thrown violently on his back, arms and legs outstretched. Mid-twenties. In his open right hand and across his right ankle is a shotgun, both barrels now empty. Red crew cut and jeans and a blue denim shirt splattered red, his torso convulsing forward repeatedly into the sitting position, then crashing back down to the pavement which can be seen through his dislocated jaws. The man’s father arrives from the nearest house.

Above, the evening cumulus clouds pick up the low red sun against the blue sky. Unforgettably, the entire universe has turned red colliding with blue—a catastrophe has torn asunder the beauty of a more uniform sunset sky. I notice that the entire cul-de-sac is speckled with red brain clusters. I watch where I put my feet. Like the troubled writer, Ernest Hemingway only a few years later, this man had found the technical “ultimate solution” to life’s moments of desolation. “Just pull the trigger.”

The cul-de-sac, itself, was but a solitary speck on the expansive desert of Eastern Washington. Over a decade before, an Indian tribal member had considered his own desolate fate in a final episode of our westward Manifest Destiny. “When I die, the tribe dies.” These were the words of Tomalwash, the last medicine men of the Wanapum tribe, in the mold of James Fenimore Cooper’s chief Chingachgook in The Last of the Mohicans (1826). In 1942, part of the atomic-bomb Manhattan Project had discovered on the banks of the Columbia River an encampment of indigenous Indians. The tribe, possibly dating back 11,000 years, had never signed any agreement with the federal government. The Stone Age meets the Atomic Age on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Campfires from time immemorial now in the shadow of nuclear reactors conjured to tap the inexhaustible energy of a universe 13.6 billion years old.

The Columbia site was selected partly because of the abundant availability of cooling water for nuclear reactors, scaled up from Enricho Fermi’s small prototype under the grandstands at the University of Chicago. Their purpose—to split one type of uranium (unstable U-238) into plutonium (stable Pu-239). When controlled in reactors the uranium atoms each capture an extra neutron, emitting enormous amounts of energy until again stabilized, resulting plutonium. Weapons grade plutonium will fission under special conditions, as when imploded inside of a package of high explosives. After only two years, a test atomic bomb was detonated July 16, 1945 in the Alamogordo desert, New Mexico. The first wartime bomb with a uranium core (from Oak Ridge, Tennessee) was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6. Hanford’s plutonium bomb was detonated three days later over Nagasaki.

Half the size of Rhode Island, the Hanford site rests atop volcanic basalt flows, some up to 10,000 feet thick. And all of this channeled by later pre-historic flood waters nearly a thousand feet deep, rushing to the Pacific from the collapse of late Ice Age glacial dams in Montana. In the 1960s the reality of such biblical-scale floods was finally recognized by more conventional natural and geological sciences. The cyclops vision of slow geologic processes—“uniformitarianism”—made room for the more bifocal evidence including catastrophic events, and the abrupt reshaping of the landscape—“catastrophism,” the juxtaposition of the unexpected.

Manifest Destiny and now Technocracy, and the “social sciences” in general, are these still trapped in an implicit bias of their own? A cul-de-sac mindset rather than a similar bifocal vision? Are we stuck with the convention of periodized and Darwinist history, all evolving toward the modern world (uniformitarianism)? Why are the Dark Ages never in the present, but always in the past somewhere below and behind us? Is Technocracy our God? The unthinkable becomes doable, and the doable is unquestioned.

Or, is St. Augustine more fitting to our moment in “history”? He witnessed the sacking of Rome in A.D. 410 and the crumbling of Pax Romana and the entire cosmos. Augustine’s City of God looks beyond the polis and is open ended toward the skies and the divine, and toward the Incarnation as a singular fact in history, elevating human nature itself and much more than a passing construct on a rising trendline toward today’s C.E. (current era). The trenches of World War I gave pause. The atomic bomb also gives pause. As does a single suicide.

As another short-term cul-de-sac, Hanford’s supporting boomtown of Richland survived the war, and in 1947 began to supply plutonium for the new Cold War. Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD)—to date, the greatest cul-de-sac or box canyon in human history. The case is made that the nuclear arms race, and Hanford (and Savannah River, Georgia), served as a geopolitical deterrent and forestalled Armageddon for forty years, until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. But, history is as much a disjointed, layered and tangled web of self-deceptions as it is linear (catastrophism as well as uniformitarianism?). Apart from the manufacture of the bombs, on the bigger screen did the decision to actually use them on Japan also trigger the post-World War II nuclear arms race?

If only Francis Bacon had settled for the scientific experimental method and not also lusted to put feminine nature “on the rack” to reveal her secrets for our total control. Does it take the catastrophic Scandal of the Cross—in history, but not of history—to sever the tangled Gordian Knot which is history? What does it mean that locally and by Christmas of 1944 that one of the earliest churches erected in Richland was Christ the King Catholic parish? Named to recall a Catholic feast day, “Jesus Christ as King of the Universe,”by Pope Pius XI in 1925. Pius resisted the linear flow of events in Europe by proclaiming a higher reality above the triad of idolatries spawned in a post-Christian world, each with pre-Christian roots: Socialism, Communism—and Fascism to which the Manhattan Project and Hanford were a technological response.

On the decision to actually use the bomb on Japan, historian Gar Alperovitz is one who rejects the “momentum” explanation. With a wealth of documentation declassified fifty years after the event, in his Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (1995) he pins the catastrophic burden exclusively on President Truman. But the more entangled momentum lingers. And the role of General Leslie R. Groves, the managing engineer for the entire Manhattan Project. At a critical moment in Truman’s decision, he slow-walked the July 1945 Leo Szilard Letter of dissent from the scientific community. A letter warning that a bomb drop would deflect human history into a bipolar nuclear arms race, eventually leading to nuclear stockpiles with destructive power a million times that of Hiroshima. In the Dark Ages, the long bow and the trebuchet technologies were outlawed (by the Church), but again to little effect. The Truce of God of A.D. 975 was actually observed during religious holidays and seasons, but today even such holidays and seasons have been deflected and discounted into a shopping spree trajectory.

President Truman never saw the Szilard letter. And, in his biography, the popular historian David McCullough (Truman, 1992) remarks that Truman did not even know of the closely-spaced second bomb (Nagasaki) until after it had already been dropped. Was there in play the embedded inevitability that Hanford’s plutonium option had equal rights with the uranium bomb from Oak Ridge used on Hiroshima? “Just pull the trigger”—both barrels. At the time those opposing the bomb “decision” included Admirals Leahy, King, and Nimitz, and Generals Eisenhower, Mac Arthur and even Spaatz who refused to authorize the bomb drops until ordered in signed writing to do so.

Alperovitz explores what did they know and when did they know it? Controversy over actual use of the bomb sweeps together a patchwork of factors: the Japanese “rape of Nanking” and Pearl Harbor; the American naval blockade; conventional carpet and incendiary bombings; the Yalta concession for a Russian role in the Far East (with a second Iron Curtain, across Japan); known peace feelers through Moscow and the Vatican; the slogan of “Unconditional Surrender;” and the casualty figure for a full-scale American land invasion…

The casualty figure—“five hundred thousand to maybe one million American lives”—came only from former President Hoover. This undocumented guess first surfaced to the public six months after the War’s end in a March 1946 Harper’s Magazine article by Henry Stimson, Secretary of War—near the same time as John Hersey’s eye-opening report from ground zero (Hiroshima). This figure is not supported in war planning documents of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Calculated estimates are for a staged invasion are a small fraction (e.g, Stoff et al, The Manhattan Project documents, 1991; Alperovitz citing Rufus Miles, Jr., International Security, Fall 1985, and Barton Bernstein, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, June 1986). This from the Strategic Bombing Survey (1946): “certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”

Against this Big Picture, in Richland in 1955, there began for me a series of five identical and truncated dreams. What could this mean? In these early dreams I hurry down a neighborhood street of my childhood toward a simple one-story house. Forward motion always stops short of the front door. I cannot enter my home. This dream finally advances decades later when I am fifty-five and I and my own family are visiting France. In this dream I am an adult, and an unidentified couple tends a garden near the house. There is a conversation: “Who are you?” “I used to live here.” “Oh, you’re the one who keeps coming back and cannot get inside. Come let me show you.” And I am admitted for the first time into my home—to see that the furniture and wall decorations have changed. Time has passed. I awake, and the following day I and my family enter my namesake village on my father’s side, the storybook Beaulieu sur-Dordogne. Centered on an ancient Gothic abbey with part of the sacristy dating back to A.D. 855, to Christendom and almost to Charlemagne. A profound family experience of intergenerational belonging reaching back through the so-called Dark Ages.

In the following two decades the dream returns with further amendments. I finally decipher the dream house…. In the first dreams I am retracing hurried homebound steps on the evening of witnessing the suicide. The first and earliest dream—the nightmare of the suicide—found me still inside the house, but late at night when I am lifted away from my helpless family by an irresistible evil, and through the closed front door. And I float up the neighborhood street in the reverse direction away from the house and then into the enclosed field near the cul-de-sac. Caged in the bottom of a small pit is a hideous deformity gripped in seizure and tracing out spastic motions with clawed hands—a monstrosity with a dehumanized insect-like face. There’s a shotgun. In bed, at the age of ten, I scream and my startled father arrives to rescue me from this hell.

The sticking point behind all of the following dreams had not been my trauma, but our deepest questioning: “why would anyone choose: ‘nothing?’” To this inquiry, my parents had explained how depressing isolation sometimes takes over, but they had no answer sufficient to my own deeper and innermost perplexity, the irreducible gap posed by the mathematician Leibniz: “Why should there be something rather than nothing (?).” Man does not live by Quantum Mechanics alone.

I wondered, “where is his soul?” Facing me was the specter that at the center of everything there might be only a meaningless abyss of subatomic non-existence. Nothing. Are we floating on a veneer of social mores sewn laid down by mere convention—like the paved cul-de-sac camouflaging the indifferent basalt below? Or, instead, is the soul at least Descartes’ “ghost in the machine?” Or, is each soul more like the Romantic, John Ruskin: “larger than the material creation”? Larger even than the nearly infinite cosmos billions of light years across? Is each human soul incommensurate, the sixteenth-century mystic, St. Teresa of Avila’s indwelling “presence of immensity?” I was not capable of such thoughts, but I felt the hollowness in the marrow of my bones.

The self-understanding of Judeo-Christian revelation develops from the Law received on Mount Sinai and through the Prophets, all prefiguring and unfolding toward a messiah—not as simply another existent but as enveloping Being (“I AM who AM,” Gen. 3:14). More than any historicist idea or narrative, but the incarnate Jesus Christ, “the same yesterday, today, and forever” (Hebrews 13:8). Psalm 147: “He makes his word known to Jacob, to Israel his laws and decrees. He has not dealt thus with other nations; He has not taught them his decrees.” Of the laws of other nations, Dostoevsky summarizes: “Indeed, there is no ‘compelling argument’ not to slit anybody’s throat except for the Commandments given on Mount Sinai.”

Of the dream house…some fifteen dreams spread over six decades. In a final episode—all in technicolor—again I am inside and now join my parents, wife, grown children and the several young grandchildren. An intergenerational family. In real time I then visit my home town and actually drive past the house as it is today. I drive past the nearby cul-de-sac and the site of the “pop.”…Where there had been pavement, now grass. I catch a glimpse of a simple swing set.

Verdant grass factors into the final dreams as in Carl Sandburg’s poem, Grass: “Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. I am the Grass: I cover all. And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun. Shovel them under and let me work.” I meditate now Flanders Fields, Auschwitz, and the Gulag. A Gulag prisoner protested to prison guard: “If the whole world were to be covered with asphalt, one day a crack would appear in the asphalt, and in that crack grass would grow.”

I meditate on history’s construction of Western “nation states,” and on non-Western multinational states with their mingled “communal” groupings of differing religions, cultures, languages, races and insignia. In my university years the supervisory committee chair for my multidisciplinary doctoral dissertation was an anthropologist, having worked with the Ute Indians in the Southwest and, in the late 1960s with educational reform in Kabul, Afghanistan. During one coffee-shop session he startled our discussion group. He recounted the early days of the British in Hindu and Islamic India, but then after a pause, this from out of nowhere: “I am Episcopalian, and my wife is Catholic, and I do not know if God talks to people…”

The “religious” question…for me a crack in the armor on a secularist (uniformitarian?) university campus. “Does God actually talk to people?” August Comte (1798-1857), the inventor of “sociology” was one who periodized history, as a three-stage trendline from the religious, to the metaphysical, and then to today’s cul-de-sac of secularist “logical positivism.” The mystery of ultimate reality reduced by pragmatic utopianism to what we legislate it to be. The eventual Associate Supreme Court Justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., had set the table in the Harvard Law Review (1895):“… I often doubt whether it would not be a gain if every word of moral significance could be banished from the law altogether….[Earlier, he had written] I think that the sacredness of human life is a purely municipal idea of no validity outside the jurisdiction.” And earlier still, Marx had said: “We Communists teach no ethics.”

What about the irreducible gap between brain chemistry and a fully human mind and heart? And of a hundred billion silenced brain cells scattered across a neighborhood cul-de-sac—all replicated in the hundred billion unseeing galaxies scattered across the cul-de-sac of a mindless cosmology?  What about the sameness of a physical suicide and the metaphysical suicide of Richard Dawkins and his speechless cosmos in The Blind Watchmaker (1996) and The God Delusion (2006)? If only Descartes had never estranged Western Scient-ism by first positioning himself as totally alone, as on the outside looking in (Cogito, ergo sum, instead of the other way around)?

Reasonable thought presupposes companionship. Alongside real science, Cardinal Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI in his Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions (2003), proposes this:

“Christianity’s claim to be true cannot correspond to the standard of certainty posed by modern science, because the form of verification here is of a quite different kind from the realm of testing by experiment—pledging one’s life for this—is of a quite different kind. The saints, who have undergone the experiment, can stand as guarantors of its truth, but the possibility of disregarding this strong evidence remains” (italics added).

String theorist Brian Greene, in The Elegant Universe (1999), proposes that: “[m]aybe we will have to accept that certain features of the universe are the way they are because of happenstance, accident, or divine choice” (italics added). Even if these “features” are nothing more, and nothing less than each divinely-ensouled human person intended for eternity, there to see the Father face to face.

Christians consider history as always both progressive and vulnerable to evil, still redeemable but dislocated, for example by rationalism and the Reign of Terror. Liberty, Equality—and Fraternity replacing paternity? Robespierre was born out-of-wedlock and abandoned by his father. The earlier Rousseau cited his own unhappy childhood as he later abandoned his five illegitimate children to orphanages. Other examples abound, and even the very ideas of marriage and family are undermined and redefined today.

The atheist journalist Ariani Fallaci, in The Force of Reason (2004), curiously identified herself as a “Christian atheist.”

“Christianity truly is an irresistible provocation [….] Life always resurrects, Life is eternal …That most seduces even me. Because in it I see the rejection of Death, the refusal of Death, the apotheosis of Life which can be evil: yes. Which is also evil, which eats itself. But its alternative is Nothingness. And let’s face it: such is the principle which leads and feeds our civilization.”

Today, Christians and others who affirm Life and, for example, and traditional marriage of millennia between one man and one woman, are branded in United States v. Windsor (2013) as motivated by only “homophobia.” Supreme Court cancel-culture “hate speech”? It must be that while all hate speech is equal, some is more equal than others.

Under today’s positivistic judicial devolution, the cosmic tragedy of suicide in a small town cul-de-sac is reduced to a middle case between two bookends: routinized abortion and physician assisted suicide (euthanasia: rationalized statutorily only as an “exemption” from homicide laws). Today, in bellwether Washington state (site of the first public vote in human history approving abortion, 1970; and the first state to redefine/dismantle marriage, 2013), we now find legalization of human “composting” as an alternative to burial or cremation (2019). And soon, front-end genetic engineering, and a post-COVID “One World” with its superimposed and flat-earth “global ethic.”

Imperial Japan grafts itself into democracy, but “democracy” in crisis devolves into a One World-ism suffocating rooted locality—globalized foot binding. The solvent myth of Secular Humanism is already the “established” national religion by United States Supreme Court fatwas. Even the validation of fictive worldviews. In addition to Windsor (above), also Roe v. Wade (1973), and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) mandating history-erasing gay “marriage.” While the First Amendment restrains Congress from establishing a national religion, the Founding Fathers never guessed at the need to restrain the other two branches of government—the Supreme Court and the Administrative State, including flaccid public schools and academia.

The question of a personal God who is Other than ourselves, and therefore the question of our contingency is the one question the prophet Karl Marx would not permit. From the Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society (1967): “This question is forbidden to socialist man.” Forbidden? In Roman times Christians were thrown to the lions when they refused to toss a pinch of ash to images of the divinized emperor. Today, thrown to the media and state attorneys general. Litigious cannibalism. Instead of ash, the litmus test of compliance with the new Procrustean regime is flower arrangements, wedding cake frosting, and woke “bias response teams” on campus.

The inventor of the problematic atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, offered this alternative and more capacious meditation in his Science and the Common Understanding (1953):

“These two ways of thinking, the way of time and history and the way of eternity and of timelessness, are both part of man’s effort to comprehend the world in which he lives. Neither is comprehended in the other nor reducible to it. They are, as we have learned to say in physics, complementary views, each supplementing the other, neither telling the whole story.”

And then, on solitude and inborn freedom of religion toward a personal God, this from theologian Don Luigi Giussani in The Religious Sense (1990):

“…religion is that which man does in his solitude, but it is also that in which the human person discovers his essential companionship. Such companionship is, then more original to us than our solitude […] Therefore, before [!] solitude there is companionship…”

Such companionship as the alternative to both individual and societal suicide. We ask, “why would God NOT choose nothing?” For us to begin to exist apart from non-existence—ex nihilo from nothing—is binary and irreversible.

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s orphan child in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)? Topsy, is asked “who made you?” He responds: “Nobody as I knows … I ‘spect I (just) grow’d.” The Dawkins cosmology in bare feet. Einstein believed sincerely in a God of scientific intelligibility, but not a personal God. But, the namesake for Social Darwinism paused: “I feel most deeply that this whole question of Creation is too profound for human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton! Let each man hope and believe what he can.”

Of believing what we can, Hans Urs von Balthasar, the theologian of transcendental “beauty,” meditated in My Work in Retrospect (1993):

“The responses of the Old Testament and a fortiori of Islam (which remains essentially in the enclosure of the religion of Israel) are incapable of giving a satisfactory answer to the question of why Yahweh, why Allah, created a world of which he did not have need in order to be God. Only the fact is affirmed in the two religions, not the why. The Christian response is contained in these two fundamental dogmas: that of the Trinity and that of the Incarnation.”

The historian Charles Norris Cochrane then adds this in his Christianity and Classical Culture (1974):

“Trinitarian Christianity presents itself, not as a dogma [read Arianism, Deism, Consciousness and its legion ideologies], but as the rejection of dogma, not as the assertion but rather as the denial of anthropomorphism and myth, and it calls for a final and conclusive expulsion of these elements from the description of ultimate reality as the preliminary to a starkly realistic account of the nature of man.”

The nature of man together with the nature of an inexhaustible Giver! A Triune God who cannot change or suffer, but who can freely take up our suffering. With St. Bernard, God does talk to people, and in one word of unconditional self-donation: “His is a single, uninterrupted utterance, because it is continuous and unending.” Ours is a fallen and yet sacramental universe—from the beginning we belong, rather than not.

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The featured image is a picture of a plume at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. It is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.