Text Fwd: We Go on Record: the Catholic Worker Response to Hiroshima

* Text informed by Frank Cordaro on August 7, 2009

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."


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