[Announce] We Go on Record: the Catholic Worker Response to Hiroshima

[Robert Waldrop]

> The Catholic Worker, September 1945, page 1
> We Go on Record: the Catholic Worker Response to 
> Hiroshima
> By Dorothy Day
>
>
>
> Mr, Truman was jubilant. President Truman. True 
> man; what a strange
> name, come to think of it. We refer to Jesus 
> Christ as true God and
> true Man. Truman is a true man of his time in 
> that he was jubilant. He
> was not a son of God, brother of Christ, brother 
> of the Japanese,
> jubilating as he did. He went from table to 
> table on the cruiser which
> was bringing him home from the Big Three 
> conference, telling the great
> news; "jubilant" the newspapers said. Jubilate 
> Deo. We have killed
> 318,000 Japanese.
>
> That is, we hope we have killed them, the 
> Associated Press, on page
> one, column one of the Herald Tribune, says. The 
> effect is hoped for,
> not known. It is to be hoped they are vaporized, 
> our Japanese brothers
> -- scattered, men, women and babies, to the four 
> winds, over the seven
> seas. Perhaps we will breathe their dust into 
> our nostrils, feel them
> in the fog of New York on our faces, feel them 
> in the rain on the
> hills of Easton.
>
> Jubilate Deo. President Truman was jubilant. We 
> have created. We have
> created destruction. We have created a new 
> element, called Pluto.
> Nature had nothing to do with it.
>
> Created to Destroy
> "A cavern below Columbia was the bomb's cradle," 
> born not that men
> might live, but that men might be killed. 
> Brought into being in a
> cavern, and then tried in a desert place, in the 
> midst of tempest and
> lightning, tried out, and then again on the eve 
> of the Feast of the
> Transfiguration of our Lord Jesus Christ, on a 
> far off island in the
> eastern hemisphere, tried out again, this "new 
> weapon which
> conceivably might wipe out mankind, and perhaps 
> the planet itself."
>
> "Dropped on a town, one bomb would be equivalent 
> to a severe
> earthquake and would utterly destroy the place. 
> A scientific brain
> trust has solved the problem of how to confine 
> and release almost
> unlimited energy. It is impossible yet to 
> measure its effects."
>
> "We have spent two billion on the greatest 
> scientific gamble in
> history and won," said President Truman 
> jubilantly.
>
> The papers list the scientists (the murderers) 
> who are credited with
> perfecting this new weapon. One outstanding 
> authority "who earlier had
> developed a powerful electrical bombardment 
> machine called the
> cyclotron, was Professor O. E. Lawrence, a Nobel 
> prize winner of the
> University of California. In the heat of the 
> race to unlock the atom,
> he built the world's most powerful atom smashing 
> gun, a machine whose
> electrical projectiles carried charges 
> equivalent to 25,000,000 volts.
> But such machines were found in the end to be 
> unnecessary. The atom of
> Uranium-235 was smashed with surprising ease. 
> Science discovered
> that not sledgehammer blows, but subtle taps 
> from slow traveling
> neutrons managed more on a tuning technique were 
> all that wereneeded
> to disintegrate the Uranium-235 atom."
>
> (Remember the tales we used to hear, that one 
> note of a violin, if
> that note could be discovered, could collapse 
> the Empire State
> Building. Remember too, that God's voice was 
> heard not in the great
> and strong wind, not in the earthquake, not in 
> the fire, but "in the
> whistling of a gentle air.")
>
> Scientists, army officers, great universities 
> (Notre Dame included),
> and captains of industry -- all are given credit 
> lines in the press
> for their work of preparing the bomb -- and 
> other bombs, the President
> assures us, are in production now.
>
> Great Britain controls the supply of uranium 
> ore, in Canada and
> Rhodesia. We are making the bombs. This new 
> great force will be used
> for good, the scientists assured us. And then 
> they wiped out a city of
> 318,000. This was good. The President was 
> jubilant.
>
> Today's paper with its columns of description of 
> the new era, the
> atomic era, which this colossal slaughter of the 
> innocents has ushered
> in, is filled with stories covering every 
> conceivable phase of the new
> discovery. Pictures of the towns and the 
> industrial plants where the
> parts are made are spread across the pages. In 
> the forefront of the
> town of Oak Ridge, Tennessee is a chapel, a 
> large comfortable-looking
> chapel benignly settled beside the plant. And 
> the scientists making
> the first tests in the desert prayed, one 
> newspaper account said.
>
> God, Our Creator
> Yes, God is still in the picture. God is not 
> mocked. Today, the day of
> this so great news, God made a madman dance and 
> talk, who had not
> spoken for twenty years. God sent a typhoon to 
> damage the carrier
> Hornet. God permitted a fog to obscure vision 
> and a bomber crashed
> into the Empire State Building. God permits 
> these things. We have to
> remember it. We are held in God's hands, all of 
> us, and President
> Truman too, and these scientists who have 
> created death, but will use
> it for good. He, God, holds our life and our 
> happiness, our sanity and
> our health; our lives are in His hands. He is 
> our Creator. Creator.
>
> And as I write, Pigsie, who works in Secaucus, 
> New Jersey, feeding
> hogs, and cleaning out the excrement of the 
> hogs, who comes in once a
> month to find beauty and surcease and glamour 
> and glory in the drink
> of the Bowery, trying to drive the hell and the 
> smell out of his
> nostrils and his life, sleeps on our doorstep, 
> in this best and most
> advanced and progressive of all possible worlds. 
> And as I write, our
> cat, Rainbow, slinks by with a shrill rat in her 
> jaws, out of the
> kitchen closet here at Mott Street. Here in this 
> greatest of cities
> which covered the cavern where this stupendous 
> discovery was made,
> which institutes an era of unbelievable richness 
> and power and glory
> for man ?
>
> Everyone says, "I wonder what the Pope thinks of 
> it?" How everyone
> turns to the Vatican for judgement, even though 
> they do not seem to
> listen to the voice there! But our Lord Himself 
> has already pronounced
> judgment on the atomic bomb. When James and John 
> (John the beloved)
> wished to call down fire from heaven on their 
> enemies, Jesus said:
>
> "You know not of what spirit you are. The Son of 
> Man came not to
> destroy souls but to save." He said also, "What 
> you do unto the least
> of these my brethren, you do unto me."
>
> * * *
> This text is not copyrighted. However, if you 
> use or cite this text
> please indicate the original publication source 
> and this website
> (Dorothy Day Library on the Web at
> http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/).
> Thank you.
> * * *
>