John Hersey and the horrors of Hiroshima

The New START treaty – enforced since 2011 and the last remaining arms‑control agreement between the United States and Russia – expired in February 2026 with nothing to replace it. The final legal barrier limiting the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals was removed, ushering in what analysts describe as a period of Great Power uncertainty. China, meanwhile, is rapidly expanding and modernising its nuclear forces, with its stockpile more than doubling in just five years and further growth expected throughout the decade.

In the Middle East, the erosion of nuclear restraint has accelerated sharply. Recent US-Israeli attacks have pushed Iran closer than ever to abandoning the Nuclear Non‑Proliferation Treaty (NPT): Tehran still possesses enough enriched uranium to place it within short technical reach of multiple nuclear warheads, while senior political and security figures openly debate withdrawal from the NPT as a defensive necessity rather than a diplomatic taboo. The precedent – of a major regional power crossing the nuclear threshold outside any arms‑control framework – would reverberate far beyond the region.

North Korea, emboldened by global fragmentation, insists that its arsenal is ‘irreversible’. Across Europe and Asia, public opinion in countries such as Poland, Turkey and South Korea is shifting toward domestic nuclear capability as confidence in US security guarantees becomes frayed. The precarious equilibrium of the non‑proliferation era is cracking just when the living memory of the bomb’s human cost has never been more vital.

In such a landscape, the work of remembering what nuclear weapons do – not in theory, but to human bodies and cities – becomes urgent again. Eighty years ago, one American writer succeeded in forcing the world to confront this reality. His name was John Hersey, and the story he told in August 1946 in the New Yorker magazine, about the world’s first nuclear strike against the Japanese port city of Hiroshima the previous year, remains one of the clearest moral documents of the atomic age. To understand why his voice still matters, we must begin where that voice was formed: far from Washington, far from Hiroshima, in a childhood spent on the other side of the world.

The story of John Hersey begins far from the editorial offices and battlefields that later defined him: in the treaty port city of Tientsin, northern China, where he was born in 1914 to American missionary parents. His earliest memories were shaped by that place: the flat light off the River Hai, the clang of rickshaw bells, the way dust swirled in alleyways between European façades and Chinese shopfronts. Before he understood English, he spoke Mandarin; before he encountered the American temperament, he had absorbed something quite different – the stoicism, patience and quiet endurance of Chinese families who lived with hardship without complaint. Decades later, he would recall ‘the patience, the endurance… their calmness as they talked’, as if those voices still rose from the streets of his childhood. It was, in its way, the first training of an observer who would spend his life listening to those the world overlooked.

In 1924, after his father contracted encephalitis, the family returned to America. Hersey, 10 years old, was suddenly transplanted into Westchester County, New York – a world of clipped lawns, autumn football games and social certainties, utterly unlike China. Yet even at that age he had a capacity for adaptation that would serve him throughout his career. He excelled at the Hotchkiss School, not as a prodigy or a showman, but as a diligent student whose work ethic and calm temperament earned respect. He played football, played the violin, absorbed English literature, and learned – perhaps most importantly – how to live inside a culture without ever wholly belonging to it.

Progressing academically to Yale, he entered Trumbull College, joined the Yale Daily News, rowed, sailed, played varsity football and moved among the rituals of college life with a mixture of reserve and curiosity. The newsroom gave him a sense of purpose: here was the craft that joined his disciplined temperament with his instinct for human detail. He developed a writing style of clarity and restraint and doing his utmost to avoid inflated rhetoric. He even found himself reporting on events in Asia, drawing on memories few of his classmates could fathom.

Even as he thrived, a certain restlessness grew in Hersey. It carried him first to Clare College, Cambridge, on a Mellon Fellowship. His letters home, which I researched from his personal papers now stored at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, reveal a young man discovering a quieter version of himself. Hersey cycled through the Cambridge Fens, noting the ‘deep, deep blue’ of the English sky and the thatched cottages that struck him as almost theatrical in their simplicity. Yet there, too, he felt the limit of academic life. Europe was descending into the long grip of fascism. The world was shifting, and he felt the pull to be closer to its movement.

In 1937 he returned to the United States and briefly worked as Sinclair Lewis’ secretary – a peculiar apprenticeship that plunged him into literary life but also pushed him towards journalism. Lewis, for all his eccentricities, recognised that Hersey carried not only discipline but an unusually humane perspective. He nudged him towards Time magazine, where Henry Luce – who, fortuitously for Hersey, a generation before had been shaped by childhood in China – saw in the young man a familiar sensibility: worldly, analytical and morally earnest.

As Hersey’s papers tell us, Luce sent him back to Asia almost immediately. By 1939 he was Time’s correspondent in Chungking, and from there he reported on a China at war. His fluency in Mandarin opened doors other western correspondents never approached. He moved through bombed neighbourhoods, government ministries, refugee camps, Japanese blockades and the offices of men who claimed power while barely controlling the ground beneath their feet. His dispatches were stripped of excess and rich in observation. Even then, he wrote with the restraint that would become his hallmark: a refusal to dramatise suffering, trusting that clarity alone would land far more accurately.

After the devastating Japanese air attack on the US Pacific Fleet based at Pearl Harbor, he tried to enlist but was persuaded instead to put his reporting skills to better use. Hersey attached himself to American forces as a war correspondent covering the crucial first year of the fightback against the Imperial Japanese forces – an arrangement that placed him in the thick of the fighting without the protections soldiers enjoyed. I admired the fearlessness in him that drove Hersey to insist he would go where they went, sleep where they slept and eat what they ate. Covering the bitter fighting on Guadalcanal in 1942 he lived in a foxhole that was once a hut; he later wrote that ‘my bedroom was the hollow empty sky, and every once in a while, a 105mm shell would scream in one window and out the other’. It is a line at once factual and haunting, spoken by a writer who understood that a scene’s power lies in its simplest truths.

He joined patrols, carried stretchers, walked with Marines on blistered feet, and watched many of them fall out with malaria. He heard what the men whispered to him in the long, fearful watches of the night – not about ideology or patriotism, but about meals, mothers, and places that represented safety. He asked them: ‘Today here in this valley, what are you fighting for?’ He recorded their answers: roast beef, pies, kitchens back home. ‘Home is what they talk about on Guadal’, he wrote – a line that cut straight through the mythologising of war.

His notebooks were sacrosanct, to be protected at all costs. In the tropical rains he sealed them in condoms; when he nearly drowned in a plane crash at sea, the notebooks survived with him. Those journals became Into the Valley, published in 1943, a work that brought American readers as close to the Pacific front as print could manage. It was followed by dispatches from Sicily, where he survived yet another crash landing of a C‑47, and from Italy, where he witnessed the first bombing of Rome in the cockpit of a B-24 Liberator. These experiences became the bones of A Bell for Adano, the novel of occupation and civic fragility that won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1944.

He was, by 1945, more than a journalist. He had become a witness – not to strategy or weaponry, but to what war did to bodies, to minds, to the fragile coherence of ordinary life. He had by this point survived four air crashes, seen men die in jungles and on beaches, and walked among ruins in Europe and Asia. But he had not yet seen what an atomic bomb could do. That would come next, and it would change not only him, but the world.

When the war finally ended and the world staggered into the uneasy light of 1946, John Hersey was exhausted in ways he could barely articulate. He had reported from crumbling cities, frontlines and bombed ruins. He had watched soldiers die with dirt in their teeth, civilians sift through rubble for the remains of homes, and generals rationalise carnage as necessity. But there was one place he had not yet been, one scene of devastation that existed for him only in second-hand cables and official statements: Hiroshima. And in January 1946, the New Yorker’s William Shawn – renowned for his gentle, soft‑spoken character, one that belied an unyielding moral purpose – began quietly imagining a way to get Hersey there.

By the spring, the plan had hardened. Shawn believed the world needed a different kind of account of the atomic bomb, something free of euphemism, abstraction or triumph, unlike that of the Truman administration and the heroes of the now well-known Manhattan Project led by General Leslie Groves and its scientific director Professor J. Robert Oppenheimer. Reports were filtering through of survivors of the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki dying mysteriously from a myriad of cancer-related illnesses. Shawn wanted Hersey to get there and form his own opinion, believing that he would be the perfect person to cover the story. In a Manhattan café, Hersey accepted without fanfare. He understood what the assignment implied: to bear witness to an event that America, in its relief at victory, was already mythologising.

Before he could begin, Hersey had to reach Japan via China, a journey that became, quite unexpectedly, the catalyst for the form of the article itself. While aboard a US Navy destroyer in the early summer of 1946, he came down with a violent flu. Feverish, confined to a narrow bunk, he asked a sailor for something to read. The man handed him Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Hersey opened it and, in the heat of illness, was struck by the elegance of its structure: five lives, intertwined by a single moment of catastrophe. By the time his fever broke, he realised he had found the blueprint for Hiroshima. He would look at a small selection of lives. He would track them through the moment the bomb fell, and what came after.

This clarity was still with him when, weeks later, he disembarked in Japan. The now-defeated country he stepped into was not a sovereign nation but a vast military governorship. General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, ruled with a concentration of authority unmatched in modern American history. Though the occupation was nominally multinational, it was in reality ‘very much an American show, and there was no doubt who was in charge’. His headquarters in the Dai‑Ichi Building faced the Imperial Palace of Hirohito across a moat, as if in symbolic reminder of the transfer of power. By late 1945, some 430,000 American troops were stationed across the Home Islands, many living ‘in almost neocolonial fashion’, supplied plentifully even as Japanese civilians queued for rations and lived in threadbare shelters among ruins.

Under MacArthur’s command, a strict Press Code governed all reportage. Japanese-based newspapers could not mention radiation, long-term burns, acute sickness, starvation or anything that suggested the atomic bomb had inflicted suffering beyond the blast itself. The American public in occupied Japan received a similarly sanitised narrative. The atomic bomb was discussed as an event of physics and strategy, not of bodies or pain. It was into this controlled informational environment that Hersey, quiet and unassuming, arrived.

He spent a few days in Tokyo acclimatising to the rhythms of the occupation and getting local intelligence from sympathetic admirers of his work in the military forces, before making his way south to Hiroshima. As Hersey’s papers tell us, the ensuing journey took him through a landscape still deep in ruin: flattened towns, factories collapsed like punctured cans, railway stations where the air tasted of ash. Hiroshima itself, nine months after the bombing, looked as if the city had been peeled open. Blackened trees stood like stunted pylons. Stone walls remained but roofs had vanished. The A‑bomb dome – once the Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall – was a charred skeleton amid open plains of rubble. People lived in shacks assembled from fractured beams, corrugated tin roofs and whatever materials could be scavenged.

Amid this devastation, as witnessed in countries across Europe, too, life persisted. Children played near ruins. Merchants sold vegetables from carts. Doctors walked with slow steps between makeshift clinics where supplies were almost non‑existent. With the support of local religious dignitaries, who would then feature in his article, Hersey began searching for the eyewitnesses his intended narrative structure required. He spoke to dozens of survivors, sitting with them in small, sparse rooms or in what remained of gardens. Slowly he found the figures who would shape his narrative: the widowed seamstress Hatsuyo Nakamura; the young clerk Toshiko Sasaki; the Jesuit Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge; Dr Terufumi Sasaki of the Red Cross Hospital; the injured physician Dr Masakazu Fujii; and the Methodist pastor Kiyoshi Tanimoto. Their stories – intimate, modest, unvarnished – provided the human detail he needed.

One survivor told him of ‘burned, charcoal‑coloured people littering the ground’, some staggering silently, others calling for water with ‘skin hanging down from severe burns’, a girl whose half‑burned face and ruined clothing were seared into the memory of a child who could not help her. Another described the ‘Black Rain’ that fell in the hours after the detonation, a sticky, irradiated torrent that coated homes, bodies and the broken ribs of surviving structures. These details, spoken without embellishment, carried a kind of moral gravity that required no additional framing.

Hersey worked with a steadiness that his own wartime experience had given him. He traced each subject’s movements through that August morning: where they stood at 8:15 am, what they saw when the light came, how they moved through the wreckage afterwards. He layered these stories not for dramatic effect but to restore proportion – to provide a sense of the bomb’s human cost rather than its megatonnage.

Crucially, MacArthur’s censors did not understand what he was doing. Foreign correspondents were monitored, yes, but they were not always scrutinised with the vigilance applied to Japanese reporters. The US military’s censors believed radiation was a prohibited topic and, because Hersey’s questions were quiet, humane and seemingly apolitical, they did not grasp the implications.

When he returned to New York, Shawn read the manuscript in silence, then again, then a third time. It was unlike anything the magazine had published. Shawn took it to Harold Ross, whose usual reaction to long manuscripts was a barrage of pencil marks and queries. When one analyses Hersey’s draft at the Yale archives, it is peppered with editorial comments and queries, but overall both Shawn and Ross realised they had a major story to publish, not simply an article. Together they decided to devote an entire issue to the piece – the first time in the New Yorker’s history that a single article would occupy all its narrative pages.

It still had to pass official censorship in order to be published and would be given the green light by the very man who arguably had done more than any other to ensure Hiroshima was destroyed: General Leslie Groves. Still very much at the forefront of the Manhattan Project, Groves was now driven by a desire for the Truman administration to embrace nuclear technology for the military. Upon reading the draft article, the politician in the military supremo believed Hersey’s apocalyptic narrative would support his argument that the United States must arm itself in order to defend the nation against anyone else developing a similar weapon. Conversely, he had spent months downplaying radiation as a factor in the thousands of deaths accumulating in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, insisting publicly that reports of long-term sickness were exaggerated.

When ‘A Noiseless Flash’ appeared in the New Yorker on 31 August 1946 the effect was unlike anything in American journalism. Go online and search for the cover. You will see that the colour illustration drawn by Charles E. Martin is quite ordinary – Manhattanites spending a summer’s day relaxing in Central Park, the table of contents deceptively blank. Only when unsuspecting readers turned the page did they realise that the entire issue – all 47 pages – was a single story. There were still adverts, cartoons and the usual sections, but the core of the issue was remarkable. It felt less like a magazine than a memorial printed in black ink. The opening message from Harold Ross prepared the reader of what was to come: ‘The New Yorker this week devotes its entire editorial space to an article on the almost complete obliteration of a city. It does so in the conviction that few of us have yet comprehended the all but incredible destructive power of this weapon and that everyone might well take time to consider the terrible implications of its use.’

The magazine’s current editor, David Remnick, summed it up: ‘The idea that John Hersey, in a popular magazine read by the upper, upper-middle, and middle classes of the United States that’s by now quite accustomed to coverage of the war, but also accustomed to gag cartoons and is a magazine of delight as much as anything else – to encounter the devastation of Hiroshima, was a shock.’

In the first hours of publication, a curious wave of silence seemed to spread across newsrooms, government offices and living rooms. Then the silence cracked. By midday the issue had sold out on newsstands across New York. Harvard students queued outside the university bookstore. Priests read it from pulpits. Newspaper editors interrupted staff meetings to say, simply, ‘You have to read this.’ At NBC, an announcer carried a copy into the studio and began reading live on air, continuing until the station closed at midnight. Across the country, radio stations followed suit, broadcasting the piece in continuous segments, as if it were a kind of secular scripture.

People wrote to the New Yorker in numbers the magazine had never seen. Many admitted they had wept. Others said they had read the entire article aloud to their families, stopping only to steady themselves before continuing. The emotional register of the responses was remarkably similar: shock, sorrow and a dawning recognition that something morally unexamined had been left at the margins of the American victory story. In the days that followed, the impact rippled outwards. The New York Times, in a now‑famous editorial, wrote: ‘One may think [the bombing] sound when he recalls Tarawa, Iwo Jima, or Okinawa. One may think it unsound when he reads Mr Hersey.’

It was as close as the newspaper had come to suggesting that the rationale for the bomb, so recently a unifying article of American faith, had moral dimensions still unreckoned with. Albert Einstein had been long convinced of this new weapon’s dangers, publicly declaring he had purchased a thousand copies of the New Yorker to send to science facilities and physicists. His pronouncement would build the wave of popular opinion that now recognised the dangers Hersey’s article had asked his readers to heed.

General Groves was appalled at the public reaction. Since 1945 he had insisted that radiation sickness was either exaggerated or a temporary effect. Hersey’s calmly precise descriptions of burns, fevers, missing skin, infections, hair loss, maggot‑infested wounds and lingering illness contradicted this official narrative. The general reacted exactly as Hersey would have predicted: with indignation. He complained privately that the New Yorker had endangered national security, misled the public and opened the door to emotionalism. But he could not refute the facts. The six survivors were real. Their stories were documented. And the world believed them.

In Tokyo, the reaction was equally fraught. General MacArthur’s headquarters understood the delicate politics of occupation. America’s image as the benevolent agent of reconstruction could not rest easily atop stories of families whose skin had melted or whose children had died from vomiting blood. The Press Code had forbidden such descriptions. Yet here they were, in an American magazine, beyond his control, circulating in Tokyo through the postal bags that arrived each week for occupation officials. Within days, clandestine translations of ‘Hiroshima’ were circulating in Japan. Copies were passed from hand to hand, especially among survivors, many of whom read them with tears, shock or a quiet, long‑held recognition. For a year they had lived under a system in which their medical suffering could not be named publicly. Hersey’s prose broke the silence.

The international reaction was even more dramatic. In Britain, the BBC produced a full radio dramatisation of the article – unprecedented for a piece of American reportage – and broadcast it nationwide. Knopf would rapidly acquire book rights: it sold 250,000 copies in a single week, a record for its time. Across Europe, where paper shortages were acute, translations still appeared. In France, Italy and the Netherlands, newspapers reprinted entire sections. Critics compared it to Dickens, to Zola, to Tolstoy’s ‘Sevastopol Sketches’. In Scandinavia, schools adopted it as a set text within months.

Hersey watched all this from a distance, bewildered and, in characteristic fashion, faintly embarrassed. He had not written the article to provoke a reckoning. He had written it because he believed the survivors deserved to be heard. Yet the world had taken it as a moral shockwave. His name was suddenly everywhere: on radio programmes, in editorials, in parliamentary debates in London, in student discussions in Chicago, in UN committee meetings on nuclear arms.

Then something unusual happened. As the world debated his article, Hersey disappeared. He declined interviews. He refused to attend celebratory dinners. He did not accept invitations to testify before committees. He did not want to become the story. He believed, stubbornly, that he had merely been a courier – a bearer of voices that belonged not to him but to the six survivors. Rather than chasing fame, he would instead teach English literature at Yale University and work for the Author’s Guild.

Inside the New Yorker, Harold Ross and William Shawn watched the aftermath with a mixture of pride and astonishment. They had taken a risk that no American magazine had ever taken: surrendering an entire issue to a single work of journalism. Ross, normally quick with criticism, simply told Hersey: ‘You’ve done something important.’ Shawn, who had first conceived the idea, said almost nothing; he simply stood beside Hersey at the printer’s office when the first bound copies arrived, and held one as though it were fragile.

Naturally, there was political fallout. Critics on the American right claimed the article undermined the victorious narrative of the war. Some military officials accused Hersey of giving ‘aid and comfort to the enemy’, though the war was already over. Others called him naïve, sentimental, or unpatriotic. Yet none of these critiques endured. The article’s truth was too clear. Its power lay in its restraint. Hersey had not condemned the bombing; he had not defended it. He had merely described what happened to six people on a bright morning in August 1945. That, it turned out, was enough to unsettle a world. Within a year, Hiroshima was being taught in universities across the United States. In Japan, translations finally appeared officially once censorship was relaxed in 1949. For the survivors, the article became a kind of validation – a recognition that their suffering was real, acknowledged, and no longer prohibited from public memory.

Hersey returned to Hiroshima only once more, in 1985, to write ‘Hiroshima: The Aftermath’, revisiting the six lives four decades later. It was, in its way, his closing of a circle. He saw the city rebuilt, the Peace Park established, the survivors aged and marked by time. But he also saw something deeper: the persistence of memory. The persistence of their stories.

‘What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945’, he wrote later, ‘has not been deterrence… so much as it’s been memory – the memory of what happened at Hiroshima.’

His article became part of that collective memory. It remains so. The Manhattan Project ushered in the atomic age, President Truman welcomed it as no different than any conventional weapon the country had. John Hersey’s words instead gave this argument a conscience. As Harold Ross would confess, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever got as much satisfaction out of anything else in my life.’