Contact Sheet #35 Bern Porter : SEe(MAN)TIC

Growing Up in the Nuclear Age

Leaving the dining room of the Faculty Club, University of California, after a more than pleasant lunch, I entered the Club's lounge, picked up that morning's edition of the New York Times to read not only that a bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima but also exactly what I had been doing with my life and talents the past four years at Princeton, Oak Ridge, and Berkeley.

One physicist reader started crying, screaming in wild destructive frenzy and had to be carried out strapped tightly to a stretcher. Another, dazed, voluntarily stumbled into asylum for relief. A third took off for Minnesota to become a dairy farmer.

Myself, I am still numb after thirty-seven years, yet strong enough to have lived since in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Norway, and Russia in a futile attempt to understand what took place that August day of '45.

I am very sorry that Madame Currie and Lise Meitner did not keep their findings to themselves, that their facts ever got into the textbooks, that war makers pulled their ideas out and ran wild with them to destruction in the interests of nationalism and money.

I am even more sad about my part in it all, even ashamed, and do here now apologize to all and sundry, as if such as that could conceivably aid, even assuage my conscience now that time is too late, and of course my confessing does not help in any way, it is too late, the monster is permanently out.

War is a mental disorder of the highest order, a public manifestation that all who arrange, direct, participate are madly deranged. The insanity touches us all and we have nowhere to go.

Bern Porter, Belfast, ME 1978