Buscador avanzado

Acto de recuerdo en memoria de las víctimas de Hiroshima el pasado 6 de agosto, en el 78º aniversario del lanzamiento de la bomba atómica.Kyodo News (AP / LAPRESSE)

Oppenheimer, la película de Christopher Nolan, se ha convertido en uno de los grandes éxitos cinematográficos del momento, una buena opción para las tardes de verano. La película es larga y exhaustiva si vamos con la expectativa de conocer una historia más, sin mayores pretensiones que evadirnos de la rutina cotidiana. En cambio, nos parecerá que no sobra ni el más mínimo detalle, e incluso se nos hará corta, si nos interesa en detalle la vida de este físico, considerado el padre de la bomba atómica; el contexto y circunstancias históricas y las consecuencias y repercusiones de su trabajo. A través del proceso de descrédito mediante juicio sumarísimo, amañado y sin pruebas, al que se vio sometido Oppenheimer, y que desembocó en su exilio académico, por su libertad de expresión contra el poder establecido y sus simpatías con el partido comunista, se puede constatar una vez más cómo se comportan incluso los colegas más próximos ante este tipo de situaciones: reminiscencias del experimento de Milgram.…  Seguir leyendo »

Living in the shadow of the Bomb

A traveler heading northward from El Paso eventually enters a stretch of New Mexico desert so remote and hostile that the Spanish conquistadors dubbed it Jornada del Muerto — a phrase not easily translated. A jornada is a day of hard labor. Muerto means dead man. The dead man’s toil, perhaps. Or maybe: a long day’s journey toward death.

In the depths of that empty land, in the early darkness of a midsummer Monday in 1945, some 425 people, including some of the world’s most brilliant scientists and engineers, prepared to detonate the first nuclear explosive device. They called it “the Gadget.”…  Seguir leyendo »

Japanese military close up on Nanking Castle.

There have been countless articles, protests and commemorations in recent days on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But why is there so much focus on these events?

This may seem an odd question to ask, especially at the time of their 70th anniversaries, but it is not as flippant as it sounds. True, at least 200,000 people died – an appalling waste of human life and the source of countless personal and family tragedies. But such horrors were anything but unique at that time – the bombing of Hiroshima took place in the context of a war in which, on a reasonable estimate, some 60m people were killed.…  Seguir leyendo »

On Aug. 9, 1945, the United States dropped a nuclear bomb on Nagasaki, situated on a long, narrow bay on Japan’s southernmost main island, Kyushu.

From the beginning, this attack was different than the atomic bombing of Hiroshima three days earlier, yet the experiences of the two cities have been fused in memory, to the point that we use the term “the bomb” to refer to both events. The result has been to consign Nagasaki to the edge of oblivion.

Many Americans believe their government’s official narrative: that the two bombs, dropped in close succession, led to Japan’s surrender. But it is now well known that the surrender was prompted at least as much by the Soviet Union’s decision to join the Allies in the war against Japan.…  Seguir leyendo »

The cockpit of the Enola Gay. Credit National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution

In the 1980s, the Smithsonian began restoring the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. By then it was a complete mess. Over the years it had been disassembled, spread across multiple buildings, birds had nested in its engines, a turret had been smashed, its wheels had decayed, and its parts were corroded from being left out in the wind, sun and rain.

Workers invested an estimated 300,000 hours on the task, sorting through countless parts and polishing its aluminum skin until the iconic B-29 Superfortress — one of the most famous planes in the world — once more took shape.…  Seguir leyendo »

When I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was still there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at ease: legs splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting for a bank to open. At a quarter past eight on the morning of August 6, 1945, she and her silhouette were burned into the granite. I stared at the shadow for an hour or more, then walked down to the river and met a man called Yukio, whose chest was still etched with the pattern of the shirt he was wearing when the atomic bomb was dropped.…  Seguir leyendo »

Today is Hiroshima day, the anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb. As the wartime generation passes on, our sense of gratitude is increasingly mixed with unease regarding one theatre of the second world war. There is a widespread conviction that, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, America committed acts that were not only terrible but also wrong.Disarmament campaigners are not slow to advance further charges. Greenpeace maintains that a different American approach might have prevented the cold war, and argues that new research on the Hiroshima decision "should give us pause for thought about the wisdom of current US and UK nuclear weapons developments, strategies, operational policies and deployments".…  Seguir leyendo »

Por Antonio Tabucchi, escritor italiano. La presente evocación de la explosión atómica sobre Hiroshima ha sido escrita por el autor a petición de la revista japonesa Subaru. © En Europa: EL PAÍS / L'Unità. Traducción de Carlos Gumpert (EL PAÍS, 09/03/03):

Los siervos. ¿Qué será de los siervos? De nosotros, ya lo sabemos. Somos hombres inciertos, seguros durante algunos instantes, pero normalmente perplejos, mejor dicho, indecisos, listos para contradecirnos, para enredarnos miserablemente en ese mismo pensamiento que apenas ayer parecía darnos seguridad. Una duda nos persigue: ¿será de verdad así? No, no, ha sido una confusión. E inmediatamente después: ¿y si en cambio fuera verdad?…  Seguir leyendo »