Little Boy
By nicmas
- 274 reads
Preparing for his interview, he walked towards the mirror to take a look at what he imagined he looked like. The image in his mind formed; he was Julius Robert Oppenheimer, a tall, extremely slim professor, teaching theoretical physics at Berkeley University. He had jet black hair, bushy eyebrows, and carried with him an aura of mystique that was associated with his love for the Hindu religion, and eloquence, or rather, scarcity in speech. His image shattered as he approached the mirror; in front of him stood a sick man. His white hair stood awkwardly in odd patches on his scalp. The intelligent twinkle in his blue eyes was replaced by a sad, down stricken look that seemed to be permanently engraved in his face. His cheeks were sucked in, and his eloquence seemed more like a loss for words. He dreaded going up those steps. “Whenever you’re ready, Mr. Oppenheimer.”
6th August, 1945. Shigeaki Mori was forced to sit in front of the mirror while his mother straightened him up for summer school. He saw in front of him a boy with a very tidy haircut he did not like, wearing khaki shorts, a white, short-sleeved shirt, a green tie and a brown hat. His mother liked having him sit in front of the mirror while she brushed his hair and arranged his tie. In this way, he would learn how to do it on his own one day by aptly observing his mother. She kissed his head and told him to walk safely as he opened the door, introducing a hot summer day in busy Hiroshima.
A nucleus, situated within any atom, contains a mix of protons and neutrons. If a free neutron is fired at high speed into a group of closely packed atom with heavy nuclei such as uranium or plutonium isotopes, a nuclear chain reaction starts. The heavy nuclei break apart into lighter nuclei, freeing even more neutrons which are propelled towards other nuclei, elongating the chain reaction. Every time a nucleus breaks apart, a lot of energy is released through a chemical reaction. If one compresses the reaction, letting the nucleus break down into as many lighter nuclei as it can, and then releasing the energy, an explosion of...atomic proportion occurs. Julius explained this simple version of his idea to his colleagues in the Manhattan project. Explaining it in theoretical terms made it sound peaceful, and the atomic bomb was in fact quite peaceful; it left nothing behind.
Shigeaki walked happily towards his school, counting the number of cars passing in front of him until he remembered he had to cross the road. The cars stopped for him, and he crossed the road, feeling like a king, with the cars being his servants, blowing their trumpets as the town hero passed. He reached the bridge and stopped for a second to look at the river. Suddenly he felt a massive shockwave. Looking up, he thought the sky was falling; it glowed white. His vision slowly declined, and he saw a couple walking in front of him being consumed by the white light, just a split second before it threw him over the bridge into the river together with two other men.
He must have been unconscious for quite a while, because it was already dark when he opened his eyes, and he was on the river bank. Only after a minute with his eyes open did he realise that it was still morning, and that the air was black and thick, so much so he could not even see his own fingers. He saw the two men he was thrown with a few paces away. Walking towards them, he saw that one of them was badly burnt and not breathing, while the other one was missing a leg. He glanced down stupidly at his own legs, checking if he had a spare one to lend him, but he only had two. A woman walking towards them in the distance caught his eye. She seemed like an angel dressed in white and holding something red in her hands. As she got closer, Shigeaki realised she was swaying, that her white dress was in tatters revealing body parts his mother always scolded him for looking at, and that her belly was no longer there; she was holding something that was coming out from the hole in it. More confused than frightened, he resolved to find shelter in his school a few blocks away. He waded amongst the corpses.
Oppenheimer scanned the room, seeing approximately 400 people, all ready to see his bomb in action at the testing in New Mexico on July 16th, 1945. Nobody quite looked like they comprehended what was about to happen, not until it actually happened. The room was loud, everyone chatting about how the Japs would get what they deserve, how this bomb would make America the most feared nation on earth. ‘Trinity’, he’d codenamed the operation, reminiscent of his favourite poet; John Donne. The line “Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new” kept repeating in his head. The countdown started and the room went silent. At first, when the bomb exploded, no one could look due to the bright white light that blinded the room. After, however, a huge mushroom cloud rose towards the sky. It looked like the air itself had been replaced by the explosion. The aftermath saw a stifling black fog engulfing the area. There was no cheering, the Japs didn’t deserve this anymore, and America was not sure whether it wanted to be feared. A different line from John Donne now dominated Oppenheimer’s head: “Take me to you, imprison me, for I, Except you enthral me, never shall be free.”
So much pain, so many yells, all the agony. Shigeaki made his way to the school and found some of his school mates and his teacher in a shelter under the school. They spent the night without food or drink. Shigeaki kept waking up to scary screams and yells from the courtyard, what had happened? He asked the teacher and, familiar with his love for kings and kingdoms, she told him: “Another king doesn’t like our king very much, so he tried sending some fire to our kingdom to burn us down; he’s a mean king!” He hated this king so much. If he was king, he would try to make friends with other kings not burn them down; they were both kings after all. He thought about how worried his mother would be, waiting for him to come home, and how much she’d shout at him for staining his white shirt. He laid down on his makeshift bed and looked up at the cracked ceiling. The world’s ceiling has just been destroyed, he thought, and this one just has a crack. They spent several days in the shelter, until, ironically, the kingdom that had bombed them started bringing relief packages, regretting what they had done.
“How did you feel, after you saw the astounding success of the Trinity tests? What was the reaction in the room?” Oppenheimer looked down sadly, sighed, and spoke: “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...Now, I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds. I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.”
We’ve seen hurricane spills overrun the land through gaps we dug that couldn’t be filled with tons of sand, but we still don’t understand. We’ve put nails through the hands and feet of freedom fighters, leaving them to die on crosses, but we still don’t understand. We’ve seen planes reflected through the windows of the crumbled down buildings we drove a plane in, but we still don’t understand. We behead, mutilate, batter and butcher those who are seemingly objects within an enlightened system, but we still don’t understand. But you feel like I feel about the son of man, we will overcome. Stand up.
References:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/12/11/us-peace-hiroshima-idUSKBN0JP06J20141211
http://www.atomicarchive.com/Bios/Oppenheimer.shtml
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