Life and Death in an Age of Infamy
Preface
Preface
“We have been living through years of great evil, and of great terror.”
Remarks by J. Robert Oppenheimer, Los Alamos, April 15, 1945, on
the occasion of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death
This book tells how and when the 20th century quickly turned from unrestrained optimism to cautious pessimism. That trajectory began with the Parisian Universal Exhibition of 1900. The marvels of science and technology were glamorized as transforming the drudgery of daily life into a carefree world of ease and comfort.
World War I suddenly changed all of that promise. Its sheer destructive force in human and material costs gave rise to despair and the desperate hope for quick solutions to misery. Communism and Fascism resulted. They promised future utopias. Instead, both created dystopias in an Age of Infamy. Their fictional counterparts, like George Orwell’s 1984, were nightmares. Fascism brought World War II’s even more significant destruction and the possibility of an atomic Armageddon. It turned an Age of Infamy into a nuclear age, one we might call the Age of Oppenheimer, after the name of the father of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer.
I have tried within this big picture to draw several selective illustrations of the broader movement from despair after World War I to our nuclear madness after World War II. I started by looking at literature’s reflections on humanity’s growing pessimism in the post-World War I’s “lost generation.” Then, I gave some samples of infamy in Nanking’s rape (1937), Auschwitz’s genocide (1941-45), and Tiananmen Square’s massacres (1989). Hitler’s fascism and Stalin’s communism provided specific examples of cruelty, such as the Nazi holocaust and communist collectivization. However, the Allies in World War II were not exempt from infamy in their firebombings of German and Japanese cities and nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Faced with real dystopias, writers turned to fictional ones to depict what could be worse than the infamies of Hitler, Stalin, or Mao. Finally, my story of an Age of Infamy detailed the evolution of nuclear policy and efforts to tame the atomic Frankenstein and its relentless march to Armageddon from 1945 to now.
After all, on some sunny day, you may wake up in a bunker after a nuclear attack and decide to step out, only to discover that you are the last person on Earth. Oppenheimer put it this way immediately after the first atomic bomb explosion on Earth, July 16, 1945, at 5:30 a.m.:
We waited until the blast had passed, walked out of the shelter, and then it was extremely solemn. We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita: Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him he takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.
Today, we stand on a “dangerous precipice,” as Richard Rhodes put it. He quoted President Barack Obama, “if we believe that the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable, then in some way we are admitting to ourselves that the use of nuclear weapons is inevitable.”
D.E. Davis
Bloomington, Illinois, 2024
Newinfamy 