Remembering Hiroshima

On the anniversary of the atomic bomb holocaust, Dr Sunil Kothari talks about a play that brings alive the horror.During a recent visit to ...

August 7, 1997 12:00 AM IST

2 min read

On the anniversary of the atomic bomb holocaust, Dr Sunil Kothari talks about a play that brings alive the horror.

During a recent visit to Imphal, Manipur, I saw the play Hiroshima directed by Ratam Thiyam for the Chorus Repertory Theatre. An adaptation from the Bengali play, it is a sort of docu-drama. Using slides of the devastation, the director brings home the horror of nuclear war.

In a court room sequence, employing the device of a witness box in tandem with accusations, defence and recreation of the horror, Hiroshima had a heart-rending poignancy to it. The characters, who were a part of this devastation, narrate the effects of the bomb, the burns and the shower of ash from the skies that did not cease for four hours. Colonel Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the B-29 bomber Enolagay, had only been told to drop his passenger, The Little Boy8217; over the city of Hiroshima. He did as instructed but was in no way prepared for what he saw. quot;The sky was lit up by a thousand suns,quot; said Tibbets. On August 06, 1945, The Little Boy exploded a mushroom cloud above Hiroshima. Three days later, the Fat Man8217;, the second atom bomb, vapourised Nagasaki. Total number of deaths: around 1,00,000. Injured: more than 60,000. Missing: 15,000. Japan surrendered unconditionally on August 10, 1945. But it was too late. President Truman had decided to use the atomic bomb to defeat Japan, though Germany had already surrendered. But the seeds of the bomb had been sowed much earlier. In 1939, United States wooed Albert Einstein to work on the atomic bomb project. He agreed and the Manhattan Project was born. By early 1945, after an expenditure of 2,000 million, the bomb was ready. On July 16, 1945 the atomic bomb, U-235, was tested on a desert near Alamogordo. For the first time, men witnessed the deadly mushroom cloud rising 40,000 feet in the sky. But what happened in Hiroshima was much worse.