The Podcast for Social Research · The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

Podcast for Social Research, Episode 91: The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 80 Years Later

·1 hr 28 min·5 clips

Women Against the Pentagon blocked the Pentagon entrances and wrote from jail about rape, reproduction, and racism.

1. The Podcast for Social Research marks the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with a panel led by Jude Weber, Alfred Lee, Hannah, and Susie Schneider. 2. Jude Weber introduces the evening, teaches American history and literature, and frames the panel with Shirley Hazard's Transit of Venus and its Hiroshima passage. 3. The episode asks what Hiroshima and Nagasaki mean 80 years later, and how physics, anti-nuclear politics, and literary memory can answer that question. 4. Alfred Lee, a Brooklyn Institute associate faculty member with a physics background, explains fissile material, neutron strikes, and nuclear chain reactions. 5. He uses uranium-235, 92 protons and 143 neutrons, as the example that makes the bomb mechanism concrete. 6. Lee defines half-life with an eight-gram example and explains why short-lived byproducts are intensely radioactive. 7. He distinguishes gamma rays, thermal flash, blast wave, firestorm, and black rain in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki detonations. 8. Lee says Little Boy and Fat Man were detonated about half a kilometer above ground to maximize damage. 9. He notes that only about half of the deaths happened on the first day, with the rest occurring over days, weeks, months, and years. 10. Hannah connects the bombs to postwar peace politics through Judith Butler's distinction between the grievable and the ungrievable. 11. She cites Dorothy Detzer of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, who said the atomic bomb fell 'in a psychological sense on all of us.' 12. Hannah tracks Claudia Jones, the Communist Party of the USA, and the link between anti-nuclear politics, Black freedom struggles, and anti-imperial solidarity. 13. She names the Voice of Women, Women's Strike for Peace, and Coretta Scott King as part of the 1961 anti-nuclear wave. 14. Hannah details the Women's Pentagon Action in September 1980, with mourning, rage, empowerment, and defiance as four ritual stages. 15. She describes Arlington National Cemetery drumming, the circle of 2,000 women around the Pentagon, and the collective jail statement about rape, reproduction, and racism. 16. She then turns to Greenham Common and the Seneca women's encampment for peace, which opened on July 4, 1983, near the Seneca Army Depot. 17. Hannah emphasizes the August 6 and August 9, 1983 rituals at Seneca, including Buddhist drums, Christian hymns, Native American prayers, and the reading from the Japanese confederation of atomic and hydrogen bomb sufferers. 18. Susie Schneider shifts to nuclear proliferation, American empire, and Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed as a meditation on Oppenheimer, secrecy, and open publication. 19. The panel is scholarly and lecture-like, with quoted texts, dates, movement histories, and a prologue that blends literary reading with historical analysis. 20. Listeners interested in nuclear history, feminist peace movements, and Cold War politics will find this useful, while listeners wanting a light, conversational recap may skip it.

As heard by us

A wide-ranging panel on the bomb and the hard questions around anti-nuclear politics.

More than 80 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the panel treats the bomb as more than a closed chapter. It moves through physics, history, queer and feminist theory, and political analysis without trying to flatten any of them, so the discussion feels broad and alive rather…

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Why you'd press play

You want a serious panel on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 80 years later, without the usual simplifications.

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