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• 1 2021-07-11T22:54:32-07:00 Sounds and Silences 61 plain 2021-07-16T10:28:36-07:00 The designers of U.S. nuclear testing programs built their experiments around bodies to absorb and record the bomb's effects. Photographic emulsion absorbed nuclear light to produce countless images and films of the tests; sensors of all kinds absorbed visible and invisible light, as well as force. Test designers forced human beings into life (and death) as test subjects, absorbing radiation to create scientific data still used today. Countless animals suffered the same fate, again as sensors in the production of data.
  
  Sound, on the other hand, which arguably penetrated all within reach of these tests with greater consistency and efficiency, left almost no record behind. In our search for understanding the role of sound in life with the bomb, we must turn to another form of aural record - that of eyewitness accounts. Here are a few examples, excerpted from longer oral histories:
  
  
  There is no scarcity of such audio testimonies by American nuclear test workers. Largely from men, and often scientists, these add much to our understanding of sound at the Trinity test. There are so many of these stories, and so often told, that a younger figure who had not witnessed the tests but spent years at other military sites around those who had could recount much the same story:
  It is much harder to find an audio record of such testimony by one of those displaced by these tests and forced into lives as test subjects. Here is the only one I could find, in this case of a Marshallese elder relating his experience of the disastrous Castle Bravo test of 1954:
  
  
  There is nothing new about a historical record dominated by the voices of victors. But in this case, another factor may be in play. For one of the most common documented effects of test radiation on Marshall Islanders is thyroid cancer, leading to loss of voice, as recounted in an extensive report for the Los Angeles Times. Here's an excerpt of an interview with the reporter behind that story:
  
  
  Musicologist Jessica Schwartz has worked with women on the islands of Rongelap and Utrik for many years learning how they have navigated these challenges with their art, and worked them into activist performances. Here is a clip from Schwartz's work with the Rongelap women's collective Iju in Ean (the Northern Star) singing their song "DOE," named for the acronym of the organization that managed the radiation experiments, the U.S. Department of Energy. Here their leader uses the occasion of a voice failure to point to her throat and remind people about the thyroid cancer that prevents full singing:
  
  We must not close this brief overview of orality in reports of nuclear tests and sound without asking - What of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Though I could find no oral recordings of first-hand accounts, we do get a sobering view from writer John Hershey's portraits of four residents of Hiroshima who lived through the blast. Here's a BBC recording of a key passage in his book Hiroshima, in which we learn that at the center of the bomb's blast, there was no sound. Here again, the bomb only has sound for the one watching from far away: