“Bomb Journal, an atomic life, on France Culture: an explosive summer series written in the first person

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After repeatedly showing us "Surprised by the Night" (the name of Alain Veinstein's show) and taking us through the summer of 2024 with Christopher Columbus, Stéphane Bonnefoi is producing a podcast on the atomic bomb as part of France Culture's "Grandes Traversées." A subject that might at first seem unlikely to be suited to the summer heat, but a series of remarkable interest.

Chronologically, it is also highly metaphysical. Albert Camus was one of the first to tell it like it is: on August 8, 1945, two days after the bombing of Hiroshima, he wrote in the newspaper Combat : "Mechanical civilization has just reached its final degree of savagery." For his part, Günther Anders (1902-1992) poses a moral question: how did we accept this? For the German philosopher, whose reflections inform this entire podcast, one of the "virtues" of the nuclear age is "the courage to be afraid," as he records in Hiroshima is Everywhere (1956).

On August 6, 1945, at 8:15:17 a.m., after forty-three seconds of falling, the atomic bomb Little Boy caused the death of nearly 200,000 people. Three days later, Fat Man exploded in the sky over Nagasaki, as recalled in episode 2, while the next one focuses on the arms race, and the last one questions the future of this weapon which, in the dust and radiation, sees nothing of its victims.

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