Manhattan Trauma

An Historical Fiction About Our Nuclear Dilemma

Preface: This is a fictional treatment of an urgent problem, written originally for a short story contest run by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “Write Before Midnight.” You can find links to the winning stories here.

And the story begins:

He was a fixture in the graduate student lounge. Wild wisps of white hair, a threadbare suit, shoes with cracked leather – same outfit, day in and day out. No one knew if he was unhoused, or lived in a run down rooming house, because no one ever talked to him. I used to give him a dollar or two for food once in a while, but I rarely looked him in the eye.

It was the mid-1970s in New York, and I had foolishly enrolled in a PhD program in German philosophy at Columbia University – a royal road to unemployment, as my father loved to point out at every opportunity. I had resisted his pressure to train for a “real” job in a traditional profession, like, say, a lawyer. I followed my interests instead. Except now I barely understood what I was reading, so perhaps “interests” was too strong a word.

I was in the midst of an independent study on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, and I was frankly lost. Every once in a while I had a nightmare that I would end up like the gentleman in the lounge, scraping by without friends or family, completely isolated in one of the most heavily populated and socially active cities in the world.

My sense of disorientation was made all the worse by the state of the city, which was dirty, noisy, and bankrupt. There were 2,000 murders in the city that year – more than in most war zones. The worst of the violence was in poorer neighborhoods, but Columbia was not immune. One night I was robbed at knife point on campus no more than 20 feet from a security guard, because my assailant threatened to knife me in the side if I made a noise.

But there was a flip side to the chaos. My share of the rent on our fourth floor walkup, complete with loud, creaky stairs and black linoleum on the floor of our apartment, was $100 a month. A breakfast special was $2, and most days I could wear Army surplus gear or cheap clothes from a local thrift shop to work. Even an unemployed PhD in German philosophy might make a go of it at those prices.

Alongside the possibility of an affordable lifestyle was an outburst of creative activity. The wild days of Andy Warhol and his cohort had died down, but the seeds of a new artistic surge were in the air. Jean Michel Basquiat was still doing graffiti, but in just a few years he would skyrocket to notoriety in the New York art scene. Punk rock and new wave music were firmly established downtown, where you could see the Ramones, the Talking Heads, Patti Smith, Television, or my personal favorites, Richard Hell and the Voidoids (more for the name than the music).

Pulling an all nighter of punk rock, drugs (well, usually just beer) and a 6 a.m. breakfast felt like a real accomplishment, especially compared to my increasingly incoherent days of futile “study.” But my place at the margins of the downtown scene wasn’t enough to change the basic truth of my life during that period – I was deeply depressed, and I didn’t feel like I belonged anywhere, or that I ever would.

It was during this period that I started paying more attention to the people living on the streets of Manhattan, a group that ranged from lost souls crying into the void to people who seemed not that different from me, except that they were broke and could only occasionally afford a bed for the night. I started donating small amounts to people begging for change, and, eventually, I started talking to some of them. To some degree I was guilt tripped into it by my friend Alice, who volunteered in a soup kitchen on the weekends and knew almost every person on the street by first name.

Around that same time I was admiring Alice’s approach, I saw a slightly cheesy TV news piece in which a news anchor was filmed posing as a homeless person. The one thing that stuck with me was that almost every unhoused person they spoke to said the worst thing they experienced was not the lack of money alone, but the fact that people passed them by as if they didn’t exist.

So I decided to start talking to the folks on the margins, and I began on familiar turf, with the piano playing gentleman in the graduate students lounge. His name was Arthur, and to my surprise, he was quite willing to tell me his life’s story. Apparently no one had ever asked, or at least not in a long time. His story was painful, and he delivered it in fits and starts, but it was all the more compelling as a result.

Early in his career Arthur had been a budding physicist, working in a lab at Columbia. He had just barely scraped by as an undergrad, not for lack of interest and aptitude at science, but because he was failing almost everything else. His favorite professor, Wilhelm Strasser, vouched for him with the graduate physics department, and he found his place at the lab, setting up experiments and doing all the other things a good lab tech was asked to do.

One day Strasser came into the lab and told Arthur he would be leaving Columbia to work on a government project. Strasser was hazy about the details, but after determined questioning he finally told Arthur that he would be going to New Mexico to help build some sort of new weapon that could be the key to defeating fascism. Arthur wanted to go along, and despite his relatively thin resume, Strasser managed to get him hired because of his skills in setting up and monitoring complex experiments.

At first Arthur felt a rush of pride. He was going to be on the front lines of fighting fascism, and he would be living in a tight community of scientists – people he would actually have something in common with. He may have finally found a place where he belonged.

But it didn’t work out as Arthur hoped. There were too many arrogant, status conscious colleagues who had no time for a lowly lab assistant. On top of that, the hours were long and information about what the project was actually accomplishing was hard to come by. He began to feel like a cog in a machine he did not understand.

As the project progressed and rumors emerged of just how powerful the new weapon would be – some scientists even feared that testing it might set the atmosphere on fire – Arthur started to have doubts about the whole undertaking. Then some of his colleagues learned that Hitler had abandoned his pursuit of the super bomb. The reason that most of the scientists had agreed to join the project had evaporated.

But the project went full speed ahead anyway, despite whatever misgivings some of the scientists may have had. It was a supreme technical challenge, and whatever Hitler might or might not do, the atomic bomb would put America in the global driver’s seat once the war was over, or so many scientists and policy makers thought.

Most of the scientists swallowed their doubts and carried on with the project. The only exception was Joseph Rotblat. He resigned from the bomb project and went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in founding the Pugwash movement, a global network of scientists that has spent decades trying to persuade world governments to eliminate nuclear weapons.

Arthur had neither the courage nor the inclination to follow in Rotblat’s footsteps. Instead, he became increasingly isolated from his colleagues, and his work fell far below his normal standards.

Other members of the project failed to follow Rotblat’s example either, but there was an effort to persuade President Truman to do a demonstration shot of the bomb over an unpopulated area to show the leadership of Japan – the new target of the atomic bomb project – what was in store if they did not surrender. But the petitions were dismissed, even by the project’s chief scientist, Robert Oppenheimer, who had the wildly optimistic belief that if the atomic bomb was used the consequences would be so horrific that mankind would put an end to war once and for all. When this didn’t happen, Oppenheimer threw himself into efforts to restrict the bomb, and lobbied vigorously against the development of an even more powerful weapon, the hydrogen bomb. He was vilified and stripped of his security clearance for his troubles, and once the Soviet Union and China developed their own atomic bombs, the nuclear arms race was off and running.

Arthur followed these developments closely, but he felt helpless to do anything about them. When most of his colleagues celebrated the first successful bomb test at Trinity, New Mexico, Arthur found a secluded spot behind one of the lab buildings and puked his guts out.

The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki hit Arthur even harder, as news of the damage done seeped out through testimonies of soldiers who had reviewed the bomb site and journalists like John Hersey, who described the human consequences of a nuclear attack in detail in the New Yorker magazine, in what later became the seminal book Hiroshima.

Arthur felt intensely guilty for his role as a foot soldier in the effort to create the bomb, and he never regained his balance. He did time in a psychiatric hospital after leaving the bomb program, and he never held down a job in scientific research again. He did odd jobs, lived in flop houses and dirty, decrepit group apartments, and eventually started begging for a living in and around his alma mater, Columbia.

Arthur’s reaction to the use of the bomb differed from that of many of his colleagues in the bomb program. Some doubled down on designing weapons, arguing that they were essential to holding back the global threat of communism, or just because it allowed them to do interesting science in secure, well paying jobs.

Other scientists involved in the bomb program founded organizations dedicated to nuclear arms control and disarmament, including the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Federation of American Scientists, the Council for a Livable World, and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

But Arthur was paralyzed. He took no action and voiced no objection to the bomb publicly. Instead he lived a shadow life in and around Columbia, where he had first learned the skills that allowed him to help build the bomb.

I was amazed that the man we routinely ignored as he haunted the graduate student lounge had been part of one of the most consequential efforts in the history of science. It made me wonder about the stories of all the other people who lived on the streets of New York. I wanted to help them and learn from them, but I didn’t have the courage or the temperament to do so. I became a lawyer after all – working at an environmental nonprofit at an adequate wage, with colleagues I could connect with, and goals I could believe in, however hard they might be to achieve. And I volunteered at an anti-hunger program on the weekends.

I lost track of Arthur, but his story stuck with me. I kept being reminded that he was far from the only victim of the bomb program, or the most consequential. I thought of him when I saw the film Oppenheimer, which told the story of one remarkable scientist and the people like Arthur who worked with him, but failed to capture the overwhelming human consequences of the bomb program. And after the film came out I read an article by Tina Cordova, an activist from New Mexico who was working to get compensation for the victims of nuclear testing in her community, who had suffered generations of cancer since the 1945 Trinity test that had made Arthur ill to even witness.

I thought of Arthur again in October of 2024 when the Nobel Peace Prize was given to a movement of Hibakusha – survivors of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who continued to tell the stories of the devastation caused by the bomb and to press for global disarmament. Arthur was a silent witness to the horrors of the weapon he helped build, but I was glad to see that there were people speaking and organizing every day to force us to confront what we had done, and to make sure it never happened again. I don’t know if Arthur would have learned of or appreciated their efforts, but I felt that in some small way they were acting on his behalf. In truth, they are acting for all of us

When I think of Arthur now, I think of him as a sensitive, lost soul who couldn’t bear the harsh realities of the nuclear age. And he paid a steep personal price for his inability to look away. But maybe those of us who go about our business without confronting the threat to our human future are the real lost souls, and Arthur was just able to see and feel the danger and the pain caused by the bomb more clearly. In his own tortured way, Arthur was more in touch with the reality of the world we live in than the rest of us are.

We need to see and feel what Arthur saw and felt. But instead of being paralyzed, we need to work to eliminate the world-ending weapons that Arthur helped to create before they eliminate us — acting in whatever way we can, large or small. The threat is there whether we think about it, or ignore it the way we used to ignore Arthur when he drifted in and out of the student lounge.