Richard Overy’s chilling new book Rain of Ruin charts the lead-up to Japan’s surrender in the second World War and is published to mark the 80th anniversary of the terrible events of that time.
Those events include the firebombing of Tokyo and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. All told, more than 300,000 civilians were killed in those bombings.
In his introduction, Overy cautions us not to view these horrendous events simply as history. Rather, in our age of renewed crisis, in which civilian populations are once again subjected to indiscriminate bombing in Gaza and Ukraine, Overy asks us instead to understand how and why such mass killings can occur.
Rain of Ruin uses a range of sub-narratives to paint the broader history. Among these is the story of how the development of new technologies enabled new levels of barbarism – the atomic bomb of course, but also the development of the B-29 long-range heavy bomber which allowed for the devastating firebombing of Tokyo. A second sub-narrative recounts the bastardisation of language to conceal atrocity, such as the reassurances given by senior US military figures that the pinpoint accuracy of nuclear bombing should allay any anxiety that it involved “wanton, indiscriminate bombing”, and that, in any case, death in an atomic explosion is “a very pleasant way to die”.
One cannot read Rain of Ruin without the feeling that we are once again living through the descent into barbarism that Overy is recounting. As every physics student knows, nuclear power stations work on the same basic physics as nuclear bombs. The crucial difference is that while atomic bombs are constructed to ensure runaway nuclear reactions with explosive consequences, power stations are designed with control rods to limit the number of reactions and ensure that only heat, and not explosion, results.
The real danger the world is now facing is that the control rods which allow for morality and moral behaviour – democracy, the rule of law, respect for human rights, and norms of international behaviour – are being rapidly withdrawn. The end point of this descent is what Rain of Ruin is really about: a world in which morality no longer has any place amid the battles of all-against-all to make every nation great again.
- Ian Hughes is author of Disordered Minds: How Dangerous Personalities are Destroying Democracy and a Senior Research Fellow at the MaREI Centre at UCC.
