{"id":54151,"date":"2025-07-07T11:19:26","date_gmt":"2025-07-07T19:19:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=54151"},"modified":"2025-07-07T11:29:22","modified_gmt":"2025-07-07T19:29:22","slug":"vonnegut-and-the-bomb","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/07\/vonnegut-and-the-bomb\/","title":{"rendered":"Vonnegut and The Bomb"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reprinted with permission from Greg Mitchell\u2019s newsletter Oppenheimer and the Legacy of His Bomb<\/a>.<\/i><\/strong><\/p>\n

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Last week, in exploring two major new pieces<\/a><\/strong> at <\/a>The Atlantic<\/a><\/em> (by Tom Nichols and Jeffrey Goldberg), I was not aware that they came from a kind of \u201cspecial issue\u201d marking the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Japan. In other words, there were other \u201cnuclear\u201d pieces to consider, which were not online at the time. So let me get to another one today<\/a>, revolving around one of my old favorites, Kurt Vonnegut, and his end-of-the-world-with-new-substance novel \u201cCat\u2019s Cradle.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now, as it happens, that book was the first from Vonnegut that I read, back in the mid-\u201960s, and it made me a huge fan, for awhile (this was fairly common for males in my generation). I later got to interview him and write a much-anthologized profile (as Kilgore Trout) \u2013 <\/em>you can read it and another major piece about him in this little \u201cVonnegut and Me\u201d<\/a> e-book if you wish. But bringing this up to date, I draw on a quote from him about the Nagasaki bombing in my new film and book, which I will get to in a moment.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve mentioned previously that my new award-winning film<\/a> will start streaming, and screening on TV, from PBS on July 12. The companion e-book with the same title has now been published: \u201cThe Atomic Bowl: Football at Ground Zero \u2013 and Nuclear Peril Today<\/a>.\u201d If you wish to contact me about this, try gregmitch34@gmail.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Now, here is that full Vonnegut quote from my \u201cAtomic Bowl\u201d:<\/p>\n

The novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., who had survived the firebombing of Dresden during World War II as a prisoner of war, and then wrote a bestseller about it, Slaughterhouse-Five, told an interviewer, \u201cThe most racist, nastiest act by this country, after human slavery, was the bombing of Nagasaki. Not of Hiroshima, which might have had some military significance. But Nagasaki was purely blowing away yellow men, women, and children. I\u2019m glad I\u2019m not a scientist because I\u2019d feel so guilty now.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

He did not, in this case, add, \u201cSo it goes.\u201d<\/p>\n

The film and book for \u201cAtomic Bowl\u201d also include a favorite quote from Don DeLillo in \u201cEnd Zone,\u201d an early novel: \u201cNagasaki was an embarrassment to the art of war.\u201d<\/p>\n

Time does not allow a full review of the new Vonnegut piece<\/a> in The Atlantic<\/em>, by Noah Hawley, on \u201cHow the novelist turned the violence and randomness of war into a cosmic joke,\u201d but here are three brief excerpts:<\/p>\n

To destroy the city of Dresden took hundreds of bombs dropped over multiple hours. To destroy the city of Hiroshima, all it took was one. This, a cynical man might say, is what progress looks like\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

After the war, Vonnegut wrestled with what he saw as hereditary depression, made worse by his mother\u2019s suicide, his sister\u2019s death, and the trauma of war. Unable to justify why he had survived when so many around him had died, and unwilling to ascribe his good fortune to God, Vonnegut settled instead on the absurd. I live, you die. So it goes.<\/em><\/p>\n

If it had been cloudy in Hiroshima that morning, the bomb would have fallen somewhere else. If POW Vonnegut had been shoved into a different train car, if he had picked a different foxhole, if the Germans hadn\u2019t herded him into the slaughterhouse basement when the sirens sounded \u2013 so many ifs that would have ended in death. Instead, somehow, he danced between the raindrops. Because of this, for Vonnegut, survival became a kind of cosmic joke, with death being the setup and life being the punch line\u2026.<\/em><\/p>\n

Later, thinking back on Cat\u2019s Cradle\u2019s amoral physicist, Dr. Felix Hoenikker, Vonnegut said, \u201cWhat I feel about him now is that he was allowed to concentrate on one part of life more than any human being should be. He was overspecialized and became amoral on that account \u2026 If a scientist does this, he can inadvertently become a very destructive person.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

This overspecialization is a feature, not a bug, of our Information Age.<\/em><\/p>\n

What are our phones and tablets, our social-media platforms, if not technically sweet? They are so sleek and sophisticated technologically, with their invisible code and awesome computing power, that they have become, as Arthur C. Clarke once wrote, indistinguishable from magic. And this may, in the end, prove to be the biggest danger.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Thanks for reading Oppenheimer and the Legacy of His Bomb! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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