Stephen Walker doesn't really take sides in Shockwave either. Instead, he tabulates the countdown. You have a nuclear physicist, Philip Morrison, carrying the core of the world's first atomic bomb through New Mexico on the back seat of his car. You have what is known of the conversations on board the Enola Gay. And the author has interviewed such survivors of those crucial decision-making days as remain, though some of them died between the interviews and the publication of the book.
And for the Japanese side, Walker (a UK writer) identifies a pair of lovers who met the night before the disaster, and has the couple parting, and then the scene in the reconstituted park in 2005, as his opening and closing sections, framing, as it were, the momentous central action. He interviewed the young man concerned, in 1945 a Hiroshima engineering student, last year along in preparation for writing this book.
As for the photographs, it's hard to know which is the more thought-provoking -- the before and after pictures of the street-system of central Hiroshima as seen from the air, or the photo of grinning Enola Gay tail-gunner Bob Caron in a Brooklyn Dodgers cap holding a copy of the Oakland Tribune. Its headlines read "Atom Bomb Destroys Entire City, Say Japs", "Nip Cabinet Called in Crisis" and "Tokyo Wails Blast Illegal."
Did the crew experience remorse? Some did, after their own fashion. Caron himself, who died in 1995, once commented "When I think about the fission and fusion bombs of today, I wonder whether we're not getting into God's territory."
This is an extremely vivid piece of historical recreation, seeing events always in the concrete, never in the abstract. It's hard to put down, and reminiscent in style of, say, Truman Capote's 1964 blockbuster In Cold Blood. It's true it doesn't always blench at making events immediate in a quasi-journalistic manner, but the sources for statements made and scenes depicted are nevertheless cited throughout. It is also admirably even-handed, seeking neither to make heroes or villains of the bomb's creators, nor condemning anything or anyone out of hand. All in all, if you must read about Hiroshima yet again, this book would probably be as good a one to settle down to as any.
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