War & Peace Quote by Wilfred Burchett

Burchett writes like someone trying to puncture a myth before it hardens into policy. Calling Hiroshima a "first testing ground" is a deliberate reframing: not a climactic act of war, but an experiment carried out on a city, with human beings as the data. The phrase pulls the reader away from victory narratives and toward a colder, procedural logic - the kind that makes atrocity easier to administer.

The comparison to "a blitzed Pacific island" is a journalist's brutal calibration device. He reaches for the most familiar image of modern destruction his audience might already accept as normal wartime spectacle, then declares it inadequate. "An Eden" is the barb: Eden isn't just a pretty place, it's innocence, a world before the fall. By making conventional bombing look pastoral next to atomic ruin, he signals a threshold has been crossed, and the moral accounting that applied to previous weapons won't cover this one.

"The damage is far greater than photographs can show" reads like both warning and accusation. Photos were already the currency of credibility, yet he insists the lens will fail. Subtext: officials can manage images, but they can't manage the reality of radiation sickness, invisible injury, and long-term terror. Burchett's intent is to force recognition that this isn't only a bigger bomb; it's a new category of violence that resists easy representation - and therefore invites denial. In 1945, that was an inconvenient truth. He makes it impossible to romanticize, and hard to forget.