SOURCE: "The Most Spectacular Explosion in the Time of Man," in The New York Times Book Review, November 10, 1946, pp. 7, 56.

In the waning days of last August people all over the United States who read The New Yorker suddenly began to discuss the harrowing experiences of a clerk in the personnel department of a tin works, a doctor in a private hospital, a tailor's widow, a priest, a young member of a surgical staff and the pastor of a church. What had happened to them might happen to any or all of us, and there were new inflections and intensities in our discussions of the source and substance of their plight.

The six were, of course, the principals in John Hersey's Hiroshima—the quietest, and the best, of all the stories that have been written about the most spectacular explosion in the time of man.

Others, trying to bring home to us the millennial meaning silhouetted against that enormous flash of light, had bellowed at us, and exhorted us, and thundered. They had numbed us with the statistics of infinity and the hieroglyphics of formulae we could not understand.

Well they might. We needed all the warnings we could get. We needed them particularly after the first Bikini returns were in, when a certain lulling note of familiarity ("It's just another weapon: only a question of time before the counter-weapon is invented") had begun to creep into our contemplation of the bomb that, multiplied, could scrawl finis across lands as placid as The New Yorker's cover that week.

Hiroshima penetrated the tissue of complacency we had built up. It penetrated it all the more inexorably because it told its story not in terms of graphs and charts but in terms of ordinary human beings, Miss Sasaki, Dr. Fujii, Mrs. Nakamura, Father Kleinsorge, Dr. Sasaki, the Reverend Tanimoto, aliens and enemies though they were. Their stories had been taken down directly by Mr. Hersey, who brought to his interrogations and investigations the gifts he had already conspicuously shown as the Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of A Bell for Adano and as an outstanding war correspondent.

He had talked, sometimes in English, sometimes through interpreters (one of these was a true Australian, which added something to the language range), sometimes in bits of German and Chinese which he knew, to many others, as well. And he had done an immense amount of research. Some of this he used; great quantities he brilliantly did not, concentrating always on the lives of six people at the moment of the explosion and in the desperate and revealing hours and days and weeks and months of the year that followed.

Presently their story began to spread to the ends of the earth. The editors of The New Yorker had immeasurably enhanced the dramatic impact of the article by devoting the magazine's entire editorial space to it, convinced that "few of us have as yet comprehended the all but incredible destructive power of this weapon and that everyone might well take time out to consider its terrible implications."

Talking to people in that week, listening to the commentators on the air, reading the editorials and the columnists, you soon realized what a profound impression the story had already made. There was in many cases an urgency about the discussion that you did not remember having noticed since the end of the war.

The magazine could not cope with the cascading requests for reprints. Albert Einstein wanted 1,000 copies; the Army wanted texts for its education service; the Belgian Chamber of Commerce wanted 500 copies; the man in the street and Bernard Baruch on the Atomic Energy Commission wanted many more. Newspapers from Boston to California and from Montreal to Panama asked for the rights to Hiroshima.

They were granted, on two conditions: first, that all profits should go, not to Mr. Hersey and The New Yorker, but to the Red Cross; second, that the article be reprinted in full, without abridgment. And even in that time of acute newsprint shortage they complied, some even printing the entire text in one issue.

The American Broadcasting Company canceled all its regular 8:30 to 9 o'clock broadcasts on four successive evenings to read the story of Hiroshima over the air to millions more. Various stations around the country even had to repeat their broadcasts, so great was the public interest, and many schools and institutions asked for the recordings.

In England the text of Hiroshima was broadcast by the BBC, and the Canadian and Australian networks followed suit. The English papers, reduced as they are to an emaciated size, could not run anything but the regular news release summaries, but Penguin will soon issue a huge pocket book edition. The text has already been pirated in France, Holland, China and Bolivia, according to recent returns.

The house of Knopf, Mr. Hersey's publishers, are now struggling with the intricate problem of establishing authorized translations for France, Sweden, Germany, Denmark, Argentina, Brazil, and just about any of the United Nations you can name offhand. A translation into Braille is already under way. The Book-of-the-Month Club is distributing hundreds of thousands of copies free to its subscribers, because, in the words of Harry Scherman, "we find it hard to conceive of anything being written that could be of more importance at this moment to the human race."

All in all, then, these few notes may validate the statement already made elsewhere that Hiroshima seems destined to become about the most widely read—and heard—article and book of our generation. What effect will it have on the thinking of our time, particularly the thinking of our own people?

The overwhelming response to Mr. Hersey's story would seem to provide one overwhelming answer. It is simply that millions of people have wanted to hear what he has to say and to have others hear it, too. Among the stacks of letters that have been written to The New Yorker, perhaps one in ten objected to the magazine's having printed Hiroshima, and the dissenters were generally people who thought the magazine had strayed grievously out of its field. (A few impulsively wrote in to say they would under no circumstances read it, so there!) Most thought the Japs had the bomb coming to them. And the heavy mail at the American Broadcasting Company has similarly run 95 per cent letters of approval to 5 per cent who were in some measure displeased.

A very small minority believes that we should never have used the bomb at all; this is balanced by the lunatic fringe which has already picked targets on which it would like us to use it again. And among minorities there is considerable difference of opinion. When someone who thinks we should never have used the bomb at all encounters people whose brothers were in the Death March on Bataan or whose sons were among the immense forces poised for the final invasion of Japan's home islands that General Marshall outlined in his report, there must be a profound cleavage.

The idea that we should have kept the bomb secret because we really didn't need it, and could then surprise the world with it later on, if necessary, provides one extreme. And the suggestion that we may have acquired a kind of guilt-complex about having used the bomb without a warning demonstration on some uninhabited spot brings forward those who are quick to point out that it took a second—and more powerful bomb—at Nagasaki to bring about the capitulation.

In the subtly contrapuntal text of Hiroshima opinion is divided. "It was war," Mrs. Nakamura says, "and we had to expect it," though Dr. Sasaki has a more violent view, while a priest writes in his report: "It seems logical that he who supports total war in principle cannot complain of a war against civilians." And civilians were not first hurt in this war at Hiroshima, which, Mr. Hersey tells us, was "one of the most important military and command and communications centers in Japan and would have become the Imperial Headquarters had the islands been invaded and Tokyo captured."

There is very little evidence that many believe we should hesitate to use the bomb if anyone ever made aggressive war on us again. Even those who have reservations about the bomb at Hiroshima might have had different sentiments if on the black night of Pearl Harbor news had come that we had started to use it.

As for those who, for various and somewhat disparate reasons, say that we did not need to use the bomb because the Japanese would have collapsed pretty soon anyway, various things are said in rebuttal. One is the example of the fanatic resistance at Okinawa and the knowledge that similar installations had been prepared in the home islands (at Hiroshima, for one place) but on a much vaster scale. Another is the very gruesomeness of arriving at the equation of American lives it would be proposed to offer in the gamble of saving a Japanese city.

There is abundant evidence that most Americans took the bomb as the epitome of all the instruments of war that maim and blast and burn and kill, and that Hiroshima has stirred thousands to a new awareness of the necessity for world action to stop using them all—not excepting the even more lethal instruments that may now be germinating in the strange mind of man.

A criticism sometimes heard is that Hiroshima gives a sympathetic picture of the Japanese people involved. This is understandable when it comes from people who have known at first hand or through bereavement the tortures to which Japs have put Americans. But if you read the text carefully you will see that it expresses neither sympathy nor lack of it, but only the scrupulous notation of what they said, what they thought, what they felt, what they saw, what they did.

In any case, John Hersey would be among the last to favor the Japanese. He happens to have been born in China, which gives him a natural dislike for the Japanese that goes back to childhood days. What is more, he has seen a good deal of the Japanese in wartime action, in the bloody days on Guadalcanal and on the airplane carrier Hornet during some very rugged times.

Now that Hiroshima has been published in book form, it will go out to an ever widening circle of all—and that means all—of us who may well "take time to consider its terrible implications." Nothing that can be said about the book can equal what the book has to say. It speaks for itself, and, in an unforgettable way, for humanity.