As one review noted, Christopher Nolan’s remarkable new film about the creation of the Atom Bomb avoided one rather significant dimension: it did not directly depict the suffering of the people on whom the bombs were dropped. The closest it gets is the imagined terror in Oppenheimer’s mind’s eye when he finds himself having to utter words of congratulation and praise for the ‘success’ of the bombs to a group of his colleagues. There, we see a few brief images of the kind of horror unleashed on human flesh by these monstrous weapons.

There is, I think, a kind of power in refraining from showing the horrors of destruction caused by the bombs in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. That power is nowhere more expertly wielded than in the hands of Thomas Merton, whose stunningly ironic prose poem, Original Child Bomb, recounts the events shown in Oppenheimer with the use of deliberately flat, understated language.

Here are two of its 41 sections to give a flavour:

32: The bomb exploded within 100 feet of the
aiming point. The fireball was 18.000 feet
across. The temperature at the center of
the fireball was 100,000,000 degrees. The
people who were near the center became
nothing. The whole city was blown to bits and
the ruins all caught fire instantly
everywhere, burning briskly. 70,000 people
were killed right away or died within a
few hours. Those who did not die at once
suffered great pain. Few of them were soldiers.

33: The men in the plane perceived that the
raid had been successful, but they thought of
the people in the city and they were not
perfectly happy. Some felt they had
done wrong. But in any case they had obeyed
orders. “It was war.”

Merton makes reference to the many religious terms used by those in the project, again noted flatly to emphasise the idolatrous sense of awe generated by such a demonstration of human prowess. He was all too aware that language laced with superlatives could never touch the real depth of horror faced by the residents of those two cities. Equally, the dry understatement heightens the sense of pathological dissociation that must exist for human beings to be involved in the deliberate annihilation of fellow humans. It generates a language field in which all compassion has been deliberately excised.

I think Oppenheimer did succeed in presenting the very real moral turbulence created for many of those involved in the Manhattan project, not least Oppenheimer himself. And it skillfully shows how real human suffering can be consigned to a footnote in geo-political narratives.

Another deeply affecting work by a Catholic author does, however, give us an unflinching depiction of the suffering of the bombs’ victims. Takashi Nagai’s, The Bells of Nagasaki, recounts the author’s first-hand experiences in the wake of the bomb.

The authority of his prose comes from his direct involvement in the events he describes rather than from any kind of literary manipulation – he also employs a simple, factual style of description and that is what makes it so devastatingly powerful. Nagai dedicated himself to peacemaking for the remainder of his life, a life shortened by the effects of radiation, not from the bomb, but from its therapeutic use in his medical work.

These two Christian voices add much to the narrative so effectively brought to the wider public’s notice again by Nolan’s film. Together, might they shake us out of our collective complacency about the appalling, inhuman weapons on which we continue to rely?

Bibliographical note: Merton’s poem was published as a limited edition of 8000 copies, which are reasonably affordable if you look around. It is more easily accessed in a number of other collections, including his Collected Poems and the collection, Thomas Merton on Peace.