War & Peace Quote by Wilfred Burchett

Burchett’s sentence is engineered to detonate late. He starts with a restraint that reads almost clinical: his anger with the US “was not at first” about the atomic bomb. That delay isn’t a dodge; it’s an accusation with a fuse. By postponing moral outrage over the weapon itself, he frames his initial fury as something even more damning than the obvious: not the act, but the way the act was laundered into acceptable history.

The subtext is journalistic, and pointedly so. Burchett was the reporter who went to Hiroshima soon after the bombing and described radiation sickness at a time when Allied messaging leaned on triumphal necessity and downplayed ongoing human effects. So “although that anger came later” signals two things at once: he’s capable of evolving judgment, and he’s indicting a propaganda ecosystem that forced that evolution. His first anger, implied but unstated, is at denial, euphemism, and the controlled narrative of clean victory.

It also functions as a credibility gambit. Burchett refuses the easy posture of instant sanctimony, the retroactive certainty that often accompanies war commentary. Instead he tells you: I arrived through evidence. That’s a journalist’s ethos, but in the Cold War context his stance carried consequences. Burchett was vilified in the West as sympathetic to communism; this line quietly anticipates that critique by grounding his politics in observation rather than ideology.

The sentence’s power is its reorder of priorities: the bomb is horrifying, yes, but the first scandal is how quickly horror can be managed.