this is what it is like.

from the inner eye, by nicholas humphrey -

when an atom bomb goes off on a pacific island, this is what it is like:

albatrosses will fly for days, skimming a few inches above the surface of the water… beautiful creatures. watching them is a wonder… we were standing around waiting for this bomb to go off, which we had been told was a very small one… and the countdown comes in over the radio… and suddenly i could see all these birds… and they were smoking. their feathers were on fire. and they were doing cartwheels… they were being consumed by the heat. their feathers were on fire. they were blinded. and so far there had been no shock, none of blast damage we talk about when we discuss the effects of nuclear weapons. instead there were just these smoking, twisting, hideously contorted birds crashing into things. (interview with an observer of a test at christmas island.)

and when an atom bomb goes off over a city, this is what it is like:

the appearance of the people was … well, they all had skin blackened by burns. they had no hair because their hair was burned, and at a glance you couldn’t tell whether you were looking at them front or back. they held their arms bent like this .. and their skin – not only heir hands, but on their faces and bodies, too – hung down ... wherever i walked i met these people. many of them died along the road – i can still picture them in my mind – like walking ghosts. they didn’t look like people of this world. they had a special way of walking – very slowly … i myself was one of them. (interview with a survivor of hiroshima.)

and this is how men talk about atomic weapons, a speech by senator mcmahon in 1952:

some people used to claim that a-bombs, numbered in the thousands or tens of thousands, were beyond our reach. i am here to report to the senate and the american people that the atomic bottlenecks are being broken. there is virtually no limit and no limiting factor upon the number of a-bombs which the united states can manufacture, given time and given a decision to proceed all out… we must have atomic weapons to use in the heights of the sky and the depth of the sea; we must have them to use above the ground, on the ground, and below the ground.

in terms of the story i have been telling about the evolution of human social intelligence and the capacity for insight, something has gone very badly wrong. alone in the animal world we are capable of knowing what we are doing, and the effect our own actions may be having upon other human beings. such insight and imagination ought to provide the greatest restraint possible on human acts of cruelty, or blindness or indifference to the suffering of others. yet again and again, human relationships go up in smoke. after six million years of human evolution, there are just, it sometimes seems, these smoking, twisting, hideously contorted human bodies crashing into one another.

..that's the first pages of the book’s closing chapter. at 177 pages, it’s a slender volume: a science book at the start, and at the end, too, but by that time it’s revealed itself as something more--an investigation, a philosophy of us. it is supremely elegant.