On August 5, 1945—the day before the world ended—Frank Sinatra was at a yacht club in San Pedro, California. There, he is reported to have rescued a 3-year-old boy from drowning.
On the other side of the country, Albert Einstein—the father of relativity—was staying in Cabin No. 6 at the Knollwood Club on Lower Saranac Lake, in the Adirondacks. Einstein couldn’t swim a stroke, and (in a reverse Sinatra) was once saved from drowning by a 10-year-old boy.
What neither of them realized when they woke up on the morning of August 6 was that at 8:15 a.m. Japan Standard Time, the first atomic bomb, nicknamed “Little Boy,” had been dropped on the city of Hiroshima, obliterating standing structures and killing close to 80,000 people.
“The day the world ended” is how Kurt Vonnegut described it in his novel Cat’s Cradle, published in 1963. Vonnegut had served in the U.S. Army during World War II, and was one of a handful of survivors of a different American attack: the firebombing of the German city of Dresden, which killed as many as 35,000 people and leveled the town once described as “Florence on the Elbe.”
“The sky was black with smoke,” Vonnegut later wrote in Slaughterhouse-Five, the novel that fictionalized his experience. “The sun was an angry little pinhead. Dresden was like the moon now, nothing but minerals. The stones were hot. Everybody else in the neighborhood was dead.”
The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima is believed, by some estimates, to have killed as many as 146,000 people, once injuries, burns, and long-term radiation poisoning were factored in—approximately the population of Gainesville, Florida, today.
Here is a photograph of the children who dropped it:
I say “children” because the mission commander, Colonel Paul Tibbets, was 30. Robert A. Lewis, the co-pilot, was 27. Thomas Ferebee, the bombardier, was 26. The navigator, Theodore “Dutch” Van Kirk, was 24. Here is a picture of what happened to the children down below:
President Harry Truman was on the USS Augusta at the time, returning from a conference in Potsdam, Germany, following that country’s surrender. The ship’s captain interrupted Truman’s lunch to give him a message announcing the attack.
That afternoon, Truman attended a program of entertainment and boxing held on the well deck. The ship’s orchestra played. The boxing ended abruptly when the ring posts collapsed, slightly injuring a spectator. Such was the nature of human suffering that day.
Cat’s Cradle was Vonnegut’s fourth novel. He had started it nearly a decade earlier, in 1954, when he was just 31 years old. It is the story of Jonah, a journalist who has set out to write a book about what famous people were doing the day of the Hiroshima bombing. In the book, Jonah tracks down the three living descendants of Dr. Felix Hoenikker, one of the so-called fathers of the atomic bomb. Hoenikker is an eccentric scientist who once left a tip for his wife by his coffee cup and would go on to create a substance called Ice 9, which could freeze all water on Earth at room temperature—thus ending the world.
Cat’s Cradle made about as much impact on popular culture when it came out as Vonnegut’s previous books had, which is to say not much. His first novel, Player Piano, had been published more than 10 years prior, to little acclaim, and Vonnegut was scrambling to make ends meet for his growing family. After the war he had made a pretty good living writing short stories, until that market softened. Since then he had worked as an English teacher at a school for wayward boys and as a publicist for General Electric; in a fit of optimism, he had even started a doomed Saab dealership on Cape Cod. An apt word to describe Vonnegut’s state of mind in those years would be desperate. Little did he know that Slaughterhouse-Five, published in 1969, would make him one of the most famous writers in the world.
Vonnegut was similarly unaware that World War II would be the last war of what historians call the Industrial Age. In the 19th century, steam-powered machines had revolutionized human enterprise. Then, following the development of electricity, came a wave of innovation never before seen—the telegraph, telephone, automobile, airplane—as physicists such as Einstein and his successors illuminated the very fabric of the universe. Many of those same physicists would later join the Manhattan Project, harnessing the power of the atom and creating the first atomic weapon.
In some ways, Little Boy was the ultimate invention of the Industrial Age, which ended a few years later. What replaced it? The Atomic Age, of course, followed in the 1970s by the Information Age. Were Vonnegut alive today, he might say that whatever they call the age you live in is actually the name of the weapon they’re using to try to kill you.
In 1943, two years before the bombing of Hiroshima, Kurt Vonnegut dropped out of Cornell University and enlisted in the Army. He was 20 years old. Here is a photo of him:
The Army taught him to fire howitzers, then sent him to Europe as a scout. Before he left, Vonnegut surprised his mother, Edith, by going home for Mother’s Day 1944. In return, Edith surprised Vonnegut by killing herself. That Saturday night, she took sleeping pills while he lay unaware in another room. Seven months later, Private First Class Vonnegut was crossing the beach at Le Havre with the 423rd Infantry Regiment of the 106th Infantry Division.
They marched to Belgium, taking up position in the Ardennes Forest near the town of St. Vith. It was one of the coldest winters on record, and death was all around them. On December 16, the Germans attacked. Inexperienced American troops holding the front buckled, creating a bulge in the line, thus giving the ensuing battle its name. When it was over, about 80,000 American soldiers had been killed or wounded. But Vonnegut didn’t make it to the end. He barely made it three days. Cut off and outnumbered, his regiment was forced to surrender; Vonnegut and more than 6,000 other soldiers were captured. As the Germans advanced, his buddy Bernard O’Hare shouted, “Nein scheissen! ” to the advancing German troops. This did not mean “Don’t shoot!,” as he thought. What he yelled instead was “Don’t shit!”
After a long forced march, Vonnegut and thousands of other American POWs were packed into boxcars. The dark cars smelled of cow shit, and the soldiers were crammed so tightly, they were forced to stand. It took two days to load them. Vonnegut later recounted how, 18 hours after their departure, the unmarked German train was attacked by the Royal Air Force. It was Christmas Eve. Strafed by RAF fighters, bombs dropping all around them, dozens of American prisoners were killed by Allied planes. Against all odds, Vonnegut was still alive.
The name Little Boy was chosen by Robert Serber, a Los Alamos physicist who worked on the bomb’s design. It seems only fitting for a weapon dropped by children from a plane named after the pilot’s mother, Enola Gay. Ten feet long and weighing close to 10,000 pounds, “the gadget”—as the scientists called it—was a plug-ugly sumbitch, made of riveted steel and wires. Nothing like the sleek, gleaming technology of today. See for yourself:
Little Boy was a gun-type bomb, its explosive power triggered by firing a “bullet” of uranium into a target of uranium. When the projectile and target combined, they formed a supercritical mass capable of sustaining a rapid nuclear chain reaction. That’s a fancy scientist way of saying “massive explosion,” and boy howdy, was it.
Fission reactions occur so fast that it’s hard to describe them using our human sense of time. Within one-millionth of a second of the uranium bullet hitting its target, a fireball of several million degrees was formed, spawning a shock wave with a blast equivalent to 15 kilotons of TNT that pushed the atmosphere at supersonic speeds, and that traveled outward at two miles per second from the hypocenter. The fiery shock wave flattened everything in its path, igniting birds in midair. About a third of the bomb’s energy was released as thermal radiation: gamma and infrared rays that flashed through clothing, burning textile patterns into victims’ skin and causing severe burns up to a mile away. In the time it takes to say “boom,” roughly 80,000 people were reduced to ash, and 4.4 square miles of city were obliterated.
Wilfred Burchett was the first Western reporter to reach Hiroshima after the bombing. On September 2, sitting on a piece of rubble, he wrote, “Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence.”
For clarity, a steamroller was an Industrial Age machine used for compacting dirt and gravel in order to create smooth surfaces upon which vehicles could drive.
And so the world ended, if not in fact then in theory.
When he arrived in Dresden, Vonnegut and his fellow POWs were put to work in a malted-syrup factory, making food for Germans that the POWs were not themselves allowed to eat. The guards were cruel, the work exhausting. Vonnegut was singled out and badly beaten. One night, as air-raid sirens roared, Vonnegut and the other POWs were herded into the basement of a slaughterhouse, huddling among the sides of beef as the city above them was bombed.
All told, British and American bombers dropped more than 3,900 tons of highly explosive and incendiary bombs on Dresden that night.
Vonnegut described it this way in a letter to his family: “On about February 14th the Americans came over, followed by the R.A.F.” The combined forces “destroyed all of Dresden—possibly the world’s most beautiful city. But not me.”
Here is a photo of the city before the bombing:
And here is what it looked like when the Allies were done with it:
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.
In his 1967 collection of essays about the Atomic Age, The Ghost in the Machine, Arthur Koestler, a Hungarian British author and journalist, wrote, “The crisis of our time can be summed up in a single sentence. From the dawn of consciousness until the middle of our century man had to live with the prospect of his death as an individual; since Hiroshima, mankind as a whole has to live with the prospect of its extinction as a biological species.”
Throughout human history, children have adopted a rule of engagement called “not in the face.” Think of it as the first Geneva Convention. Violating the not-in-the-face rule opens the offender up to serious retribution. It is an act of war. Now I get to hit you in the face, or worse. In fact, maybe I should kick you in the balls to teach you a lesson and restore the balance of power. Maybe I need to make the cost of hitting me in the face so high, you never take another swing. If Pearl Harbor was an unprovoked face punch, then Hiroshima was the kick in the balls to end all future wars. Scientists of the Industrial Age made that kick possible.
Vonnegut’s relationship with his own children after the war was mixed at best. There would be seven in total, three biological and four of his sister’s boys, who had come to live with him and his wife, Jane, in 1958, when Vonnegut’s brother-in-law, Jim, died in a train derailment, his commuter train launching itself from the Newark Bay Bridge into Newark Bay. Two days later, Vonnegut’s sister, Alice, died of breast cancer. So it goes. It was Alice who had shaken Vonnegut awake on Mother’s Day 1944 to tell him their mother was dead. Vonnegut considered Alice his muse, and later wrote in Slapstick : “I had never told her so, but she was the person I had always written for. She was the secret of whatever artistic unity I had ever achieved.”
Suddenly the house was overstuffed with children between the ages of 2 and 14. For the next five years, Vonnegut tried (and mostly failed) to write Cat’s Cradle. The stress of supporting that large a family as a writer, while still processing trauma from the war, made him irritable. Never a hands-on dad, he left most of the actual parenting to Jane, and as the chaos of family life filled the house, he would hole up in his study all day, chain-smoking. The slightest noise from the children could propel him from the room, ranting.
Vonnegut himself had been raised in a house of math and science. His father was an architect. As a scientist, his brother would pioneer the field of cloud seeding. But Vonnegut had a complicated relationship with the word progress. His experience in the war had soured him on the idea that science was exclusively a force for good. Too often, he believed, scientists and engineers focused on the question Can we do something? rather than Should we? He saw this when he looked at the Manhattan Project. Though scientists at Los Alamos knew that the bomb they were designing was meant to be dropped on people, they rarely thought about the consequences of dropping it.
After the war, the physicist Victor Weisskopf, who’d worked on the bomb at Los Alamos, admitted that he was “ashamed to say that few of us even thought of quitting. It was the attraction of the task. It was impossible to quit at that time.” The task, he said, was “technically sweet.”
J. Robert Oppenheimer himself used this phrase during testimony at his security-clearance hearing after the war. “It is my judgment in these things that when you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb. I do not think anybody opposed making it.”
“Nice, nice, very nice,” as Bokonon wrote in his “53rd Calypso.” “So many different people in the same device.” Bokonon was the fictional founder of a religion that Vonnegut invented for Cat’s Cradle, a novel as much about the hypocrisy of organized religion as it was about war. Bokonon’s first dictum is this: “All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.”
Here’s another shameless lie: The atomic bomb was dropped to save lives. This is an ancillary thing that war does; it inverts language. See, the lives that mattered to scientists at Los Alamos were American. So they chose to focus on the lives they would spare—the GIs who would theoretically die in a conventional invasion—instead of the Japanese citizens who would actually die when the bomb was dropped. This made the morality of their actions easier to justify. In this way, they kept things sweet.
And yet, to quote a survivor, those scientists who invented the atomic bomb—“what did they think would happen if they dropped it?”
Here are some things that happened. Day turned to night. In a flash, the bomb destroyed 60,000 of the 90,000 structures in a 10-mile radius. Of the 2,370 doctors and nurses in Hiroshima, 2,168 were killed or injured too badly to work.
This is what the atomic bomb did to survivors: “They had no hair because their hair was burned, and at a glance you couldn’t tell whether you were looking at them from in front or in back,” a survivor told The New York Times in 1981. “Their skin—not only on their hands, but on their faces and bodies too—hung down.” In this way they stumbled down the road, going nowhere, “like walking ghosts.”
Only a few of the survivors were children, as most school-age kids near ground zero were killed on impact. This is because at 8:15 a.m. on August 6, they had gathered outside their schools to help create firebreaks to slow the spread of flames in the event of firebomb raids like the ones that had destroyed Tokyo and so many other Japanese cities. Did they hear the distant roar of the B-29, I wonder, flying overhead? An air-raid siren had gone off an hour earlier, but no planes had come, so now, when the Enola Gay approached, many didn’t even look up.
Picture the children of Hiroshima on that sunny morning, thousands of little haircuts, thousands of gap-toothed smiles. Thousands of children trying to be good citizens, wondering what the morning snack would be. This is whom the child pilots flying overhead dropped the bomb on: schoolchildren and their parents. What else are we to think? The city of Hiroshima had no real military or technological value. It was a population center, chosen to send a message to the emperor.
So it goes—or, as the survivors of Hiroshima used to say, “Shikata ga nai,” which loosely translates to “It can’t be helped.” This sentiment was born from the Japanese practice of Zen Buddhism—an even older made-up religion than Bokononism, Vonnegut might say. And yet, what else can one say about a world in which children drop bombs on other children?
In Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut writes of an argument he had with his old Army buddy Bernard’s wife, Mary. Vonnegut has gone to their house to drink and trade war stories, and when he tells them he is writing a novel about the war, Mary erupts:
“You were just babies then!” she said.
“What?” I said.
“You were just babies in the war—like the ones upstairs! … But you’re not going to write it that way, are you … You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them. And they’ll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs.”
Later, thinking back on Cat’s Cradle’s amoral physicist, Dr. Felix Hoenikker, Vonnegut said, “What 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 … If a scientist does this, he can inadvertently become a very destructive person.”
This overspecialization is a feature, not a bug, of our Information Age.
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.
Because so little thought has been given to the Should we? of the Information Age (what will happen if we give human beings an entertainment device they can fit in their pocket, one that connects them instantly to every truth and every lie ever conceived?), we have, as a society, been caught unprepared. If the atomic bomb, riveted from steel plates and visible wires, was irrefutable proof of the power of science, how is it possible that even more sophisticated modern devices have decreased our faith in science and given rise to the wholesale rejection of expertise?
Talk about a shameless lie! And yet how else to explain the fact that misinformation spread through our magic gadgets seems to be undermining people’s belief in the very science that powers them?
To put it simply, if the bomb was a machine through which we looked into the future, our phones have become a looking glass through which we are pulled back into the past.
Shikata ga nai.
After the war, Vonnegut wrestled with what he saw as hereditary depression, made worse by his mother’s suicide, his sister’s 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.
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’t herded him into the slaughterhouse basement when the sirens sounded—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.
On May 11, 1955, the Hiroshima survivor Kiyoshi Tanimoto, a Methodist minister, was featured on the American television program This Is Your Life. He had come to the U.S. to raise money for victims of the atomic bomb known as the Keloid Girls or the Atomic Maidens.
Seated on a sofa beside the host, Ralph Edwards, Tanimoto wears a baggy suit and looks stunned. After an introductory segment, the camera cuts to the silhouette of a man behind a screen. He speaks into a microphone.
“Looking down from thousands of feet over Hiroshima,” he says, “all I could think of was ‘My God, what have we done?’ ”
The camera cuts back to Edwards and Tanimoto. “Now, you’ve never met him,” the host tells the Hiroshima survivor sitting next to him, “never seen him, but he’s here tonight to clasp your hand in friendship. Captain Robert Lewis, United States Air Force, who along with Paul Tibbets piloted the plane from which the first atomic power was dropped over Hiroshima.”
The camera pans across the stage as the screen retracts and Captain Lewis emerges from shadow. Tanimoto steps into frame and shakes his hand. Both men appear as if they want to throw up:
“Captain Lewis,” Edwards says, “come in here close, and would you tell us, sir, of your experience on August 6, 1945?”
There is an uncomfortable beat, in which we wonder if Lewis will be able to continue. The camera cuts to a close-up of Lewis. He is unable to make eye contact with Tanimoto.
“Well, Mr. Edwards, when we left Tinian, in the Mariana Islands, at about eight—at 2:45 in the morning on August the 6th, 1945, our destination was Japan. We had three targets. One was Hiroshima. One was Nagasaki. One was Kurkura.
“About an hour before we hit the coastline of Japan, we were notified that Hiroshima was clear. Therefore, Hiroshima became our target.”
The camera cuts to Tanimoto, listening, horrified. The social contract of human behavior freezes him in place.
“Just before 8:15 a.m. Tokyo time,” Lewis continues, “Tom Ferebee, our very able bombardier, carefully aimed at his target, which was the second Imperial Japanese Army Headquarters. At 8:15 promptly, the bomb was dropped.
“We turned fast to get out of the way of the deadly radiation and bomb effects. First was a thick flash that we got, and then the two concussion waves hit the ship. Shortly after, we turned back to see what had happened, and there in front of our eyes, the city of Hiroshima disappeared.”
“And,” Edwards says, “you entered something in your log at that time?”
Lewis’s voice breaks and he rubs his temples, trying to compose himself.
“As I said before, Mr. Edwards, I wrote down later: ‘My God, what have we done?’ ”
After retiring from the Air Force, Captain Lewis went to work in the candy business, where he patented various improvements to candy-manufacturing machinery. Sweet treats for kids. Picture them. All those happy kids.
Picture them putting quarters in the vending machine. Picture them in store-bought costumes holding out their Halloween sacks. They are no more theoretical than the children of Hiroshima, but unlike them, these children would grow up.
They would come of age practicing duck-and-cover drills, diving under their desks at the shriek of a whistle; come of age hiding in the bomb shelters their parents had built, terrified of the theoretical deaths that the A-bomb had made all but inevitable.
Nice, nice, very nice. So many different people in the same device.
This article appears in the August 2025 print edition with the headline “Vonnegut and the Bomb.”
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