Robert

As he walks towards his office, thousands of miles away, the girl still doesn’t know the sky is about to disappear.

Robert walks alone – languid, uneasy.

Behind him, Dorothy follows at a distance of barely two metres. She has worked with him for some time, but she has never seen him like this.

She hears him mumbling, but she doesn't understand the nicotine-stained words escaping his mouth. He wears a lightweight wool suit — straight cut, structured shoulders, only faintly tailored at the waist. The subdued uniform of a civil servant. Grey. Greyish. Greyed out. As though the desert dust had settled into the fabric. As though the fabric itself had chosen to anticipate ash.

And a hat. That hat...

A dark felt fedora, medium brim, tilted just so. A minimal gesture that still holds on to a trace of style. Everyone recognised that hat.

His shoulders hang loose, yet his body leans forward, as if the weight of the air itself were too much. The ground is dry, earthen, lifeless. There is nothing epic about it — only dust, wind, and silence.

Robert murmurs again. Dorothy quickens her pace.

— Robert, what is it?
— Those poor people… those poor people…
— What?

Can’t stop tormenting himself. And yet, that very same week, he had met with the generals to determine the exact altitude from which it should be dropped to inflict maximum damage. Not the most spectacular result — the most efficient one. The one that would produce a perfect shockwave.

In this real episode, recounted by Dorothy McKibbin — Robert Oppenheimer’s secretary —lies a duality that has defined modern history for over a century: compassion and technique sharing the same office. Moral conscience and ballistic calculation seated at the same table.

Was it necessary? Can violence ever be the inevitable price of peace?
Was the bomb meant to destroy the world — or to end an endless war?

The official narrative was clear: Hiroshima hastened the end and prevented a land invasion that would have cost hundreds of thousands of lives. It saved more than it took. Officially.

But history is not written solely in the arithmetic of bodies.

Oppenheimer often wore a brown porkpie hat. In May 1948, his hat appeared on the cover of Physics Today.
Property of Triad National Security, LLC, operator of Los Alamos National Laboratory for the U.S. Department of Energy.

After World War II ended, and her boss and friend Oppenheimer left the Lab, Dorothy remained. She worked there for 20 years, retiring in 1963 when the Santa Fe office closed. She lived in Santa Fe until her death in 1985.
(Source: Los Alamos National Laboratory)

Miyoko and the seven rivers

Miyoko** remembers that, when she was a child, her city was crossed by seven rivers whose waters mirrored the sky like glass. She remembers running through the streets in search of insects and wildflowers. Birds sang without pause.

And then the sound of war drowned everything.

I remember every second. I had never felt so helpless.
I was buried under the rubble. I didn’t know if I was alive — or if it even mattered anymore. The air burned. I had to get out. I had to find my mother. When you see so many people dying, you pray not to be one of them. Then you realise… perhaps the worst thing is not dying, but surviving.

She never knew what became of her mother, her cousin, her best friend. Bodies evaporated in a fraction of a second. A life forever unable to reconcile what it witnessed.

Between Oppenheimer and Miyoko lies the abyss of modernity: the rationalisation of harm.

The notion of “collateral damage” is one of the great euphemisms of the twentieth century. It turns victims into secondary variables. It removes them from the moral centre of the act. It reframes them as unintended consequences — though perfectly anticipated.

The Atomic Bomb Dome (Genbaku Domu), located in Hiroshima, Japan, is the ruined skeleton of the former Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall. It has been preserved as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1996. It is an international symbol of peace and the devastation caused by the first atomic bomb on August 6, 1945. Photo by Desmond Tawiah on Unsplash.

How far can we justify it?

That question did not end in Hiroshima. It echoes today — across different geographies, through different technologies.

In Gaza, every offensive is framed as necessary. In Ukraine, each advance or counteroffensive is justified — or condemned. Saudi Arabia bombed Yemen for years in the name of regional stability. There is always a strategic framework. Always a rational explanation. Always a calculation.

And yet, there is always someone beneath the rubble.

Arnhem Oosterbeek War Cemetery holds the graves of most of those killed during the September landings and many who died in subsequent fighting in the area. Today, 1684 Commonwealth servicemen of the Second World War are buried or commemorated there./ Photo by Job Vermeulen on Unsplash.

The ease with which we forget the damage of war is not born of ignorance. We do not forget the facts. We forget the human cost.

War becomes geopolitics. A board game. Maps with red and blue arrows. Televised debates about balance of power. And slowly, suffering is pushed aside.

Years after Hiroshima, Oppenheimer would quote the Bhagavad Gītā: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” The phrase has been repeated until it has almost lost its meaning. But at its origin, it was not grandiose, it was awareness. He said it in tears. Because one can be both victim and executioner, sometimes in the same breath.

Oppenheimer described himself as "Destroyer of worlds" years after his participation in the Manhattan Project / Emilio Segre Archives for Triad National Security, LLC, operator of the Los Alamos National Laboratory with the U.S. Department of Energy.

The question is not whether the bomb shortened the war. The question is what part of us eroded when we accepted it.

What is unsettling is that this erosion does not stop. Each generation faces the same dilemma and wraps itself in the same logic: this time it is necessary. This time it is inevitable. This time, collateral damage is a reasonable price.

Perhaps the real threat is not war itself, but its normalisation.

Because when taking up arms becomes routine, when language softens it, when calculation replaces mourning, memory grows fragile. And what is fragile is easily forgotten.

Between the grey fedora walking through the dust of Los Alamos and the girl emerging from the rubble in Hiroshima, one question remains — still unresolved, still present:

Can peace be built on a wound that never truly closes?

A war may, at times, stop another war. But the damage does not disappear. It transforms. It is inherited. It seeps into generations who signed no declarations and designed no strategies.

And perhaps what is truly dangerous is not that wars exist but how quickly we learn to accept them.

________________________

Out of curiosity:

*"Barefoot Gen" (Hadashi no Gen) is one of the rawest and most humanly devastating testimonies about Hiroshima that exists—and, at the same time, a deeply political work. It is an autobiographical manga created by Keiji Nakazawa, originally published between 1973 and 1987. Nakazawa was six years old when the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima. He survived, but lost a large part of his family. The protagonist, Gen Nakaoka, is his alter ego.

**Miyoko is a fictitious name used to protect the identity of a Hiroshima survivor who told her true story in those words.

***In 1962, Manhattan Project leader General Leslie Groves wrote to Oppenheimer to ask about the origin of the name Trinity. According to a copy of the letter that is part of the collections of the Lab’s National Security Research Center, Oppenheimer said: “Why I chose that name is not clear, but I know what thoughts were in my mind. There is a poem of John Donne, written just before his death, which I know and love.”

Oppenheimer then quoted the sonnet “Hymn to God, My God, in My Sickness,” about a man who was unafraid to die because he believed in resurrection. Oppenheimer continued: “That still does not constitute a Trinity, but in another, better known devotional poem, Donne begins: ‘Batter my heart, three person’d God.’ Beyond this, I have no other clue."

***In 1962, Manhattan Project leader General Leslie Groves wrote to Oppenheimer to ask about the origins of the name Trinity. According to a copy of the letter that is a part of the collections of the Lab’s National Security Research Center, Oppenheimer said, “Why I chose the name is not clear, but I know what thoughts were in my mind. There is a poem of John Donne, written just before his death, which I know and love.” Oppenheimer then quoted the sonnet “Hymn to God, My God, in My Sickness” about a man unafraid to die because he believed in resurrection. Oppenheimer continued, “That still does not make a Trinity, but in another, better known devotional poem Donne opens, ‘Batter my heart, three person’d God.’ Beyond this, I have no clues whatever.” 

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