"The doctors realized in retrospect that even though most of these dead had also suffered from burns and blast effects, they had absorbed enough radiation to kill them. The rays simply destroyed body cells - caused their nuclei to degenerate and broke their walls"
About this Quote
Hersey delivers horror with a reporter's restraint, and that restraint is the point. By anchoring the sentence in "realized in retrospect", he recreates the sickening lag between event and understanding that defined Hiroshima: people didn’t just die, they died while the living and the supposed experts misread the script. Burns and blast fit the familiar grammar of war. Radiation doesn’t. Hersey turns that epistemic failure into a moral indictment without ever preaching it.
The phrasing "even though most of these dead had also suffered" refuses the reader the comfort of a single, legible cause. It’s not enough to picture scorched streets and shattered buildings; the real weapon is the one that hides inside the body. "Absorbed enough" sounds almost clinical, like dosage or nutrition, a chillingly ordinary verb for an extraordinary violation. The subtext is modernity’s signature cruelty: death as intake, as an invisible accounting.
Then the prose tightens into a brutal simplicity: "The rays simply destroyed body cells". "Simply" is doing quiet violence here. It flattens apocalypse into mechanism, the kind of sentence you might find in a textbook, except it’s describing civilians. By moving to nuclei and cell walls, Hersey zooms past heroics, politics, even battlefield imagery, into biology. The bomb doesn’t just level a city; it rewrites what "wound" means. In Hiroshima’s aftermath, even medicine becomes a witness to something it can name only after the fact.
The phrasing "even though most of these dead had also suffered" refuses the reader the comfort of a single, legible cause. It’s not enough to picture scorched streets and shattered buildings; the real weapon is the one that hides inside the body. "Absorbed enough" sounds almost clinical, like dosage or nutrition, a chillingly ordinary verb for an extraordinary violation. The subtext is modernity’s signature cruelty: death as intake, as an invisible accounting.
Then the prose tightens into a brutal simplicity: "The rays simply destroyed body cells". "Simply" is doing quiet violence here. It flattens apocalypse into mechanism, the kind of sentence you might find in a textbook, except it’s describing civilians. By moving to nuclei and cell walls, Hersey zooms past heroics, politics, even battlefield imagery, into biology. The bomb doesn’t just level a city; it rewrites what "wound" means. In Hiroshima’s aftermath, even medicine becomes a witness to something it can name only after the fact.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
|---|---|
| Source | Hersey, John. Hiroshima. Originally published as a long article in The New Yorker, Aug 31, 1946; book edition 1946. (Passage describes acute radiation effects on victims.) |
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