Vonnegut and the Bomb

How the novelist turned the violence and randomness of war into a cosmic joke

- Noah Hawley

On August 5, 1945—the day before the world ended—Frank Sinatra was at a yacht club in San Pedro, California. There, he is reported to have rescued a 3-year-old boy from drowning.

On the other side of the country, Albert Einstein—the father of relativity—was staying in Cabin No. 6 at the Knollwood Club on Lower Saranac Lake, in the Adirondacks. Einstein couldn't swim a stroke, and (in a reverse Sinatra) was once saved from drowning by a 10-year-old boy.

What neither of them realized when they woke up on the morning of August 6 was that at 8:15 a.m. Japan Standard Time, the first atomic bomb, nicknamed “Little Boy,” had been dropped on the city of Hiroshima, obliterating standing structures and killing close to 80,000 people.

“The day the world ended” is how Kurt Vonnegut described it in his novel Cat's Cradle, published in 1963.

Vonnegut had served in the U.S. Army during World War II, and was one of a handful of survivors of a different American attack: the firebombing of the German city of Dresden, which killed as many as 35,000 people and leveled the town once described as “Florence on the Elbe.”

“The sky was black with smoke,” Vonnegut later wrote in Slaughterhouse-Five, the novel that fictionalized his experience. “The sun was an angry little pinhead. Dresden was like the moon now, nothing but minerals. The stones were hot. Everybody else in the neighborhood was dead.”

The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima is believed, by some estimates, to have killed as many as 146,000 people, once injuries, burns, and long-term radiation poisoning were factored in—approximately the population of Gainesville, Florida, today.

Here is a photograph of the children who dropped it: