The Light of Many Suns: The Meaning of the Bomb by Leonard Cheshire (Methuen, £7.95)

Faces of Hiroshima, A. report by Anne Chisholm (Jonathan Cape, £9.95, Paperback £4.95)
Hiroshima Maidens by Rodney Barker (Viking, £9.95)
COMPARED WITH the other two far younger authors of these three hooks, Geoffrey Leonard Cheshire, VC, can at least be described as an authentic witness of the awesome beginning of the atomic age. He was there on the spot, as one of the two British observers of the dropping of the second bomb on Nagasaki.
By contrast, Rodney Barker and Anne Chisholm, both children at the time, follow up the subsequent fate of a very small group of survivors from the first bomb, the 25 "Hiroshima Maidens" who were transported to the United States for plastic surgery on gross facial disfigurements. Here Barker has the edge over Chisholm, in that one of the "maidens" lived with his family (he was nine years old at the time) in Long Island, when not undergoing operation after operation in New York's Mount Sinai Hospital.
Yet both authors tracked down many of the recipients of this act of charity (or assuagement of guilt?); and, reluctant though some of them were, extracted the stories of their experiences in America and their lives after their return to Japan. Inevitably, these were to some extent second hand since, in most cases, communication was through interpreters.
They make sad reading, and it seems as if the two writers were trying to outdo each other in gruesomeness, thoughtful as they otherwise are. Should there be anyone who has not yet learned the consequences of the single, small nuclear blow which devastated Hiroshima in August 1945, it will not he the lault of these two journalists.
Leonard Cheshire's new and very slim Volume, while equally concerned, stands in a totally different category. Forty years on, with memory unimpaired and still vivid, as if it were only yesterday, he tells again, how with William Penny, the outstanding physicist who helped create the bomb, he watched the plutonium device used in action on the doomed port and city of Nagasaki.
Group Captain Cheshire had, ironically enough, won his Victoria Cross over Germany and Europe through his brilliant, daring low-level marking methods as a master bomber.
Because Cheshire's latest version of the story is somewhat truncated, perhaps I may declare an interest. It was more than 30 years ago that he, by a then close friend of mine, asked me to write his life-story. He had packed an enormous amount into his young life and was an accomplished survivor. But, I asked "why not leave it for 30 years?" "Funny you should say that", he replied, "my father said the same thing this very morning."
Nevertheless, I had a formal letter from a publisher by the next post. I fear that the subsequent book, No Passing Glory (still selling, apparently), did not entirely please him, either for its "architecture” or for its disposal of some unnecessary myths.
Yet I stand by what I then wrote: "A few chosen souls have been favoured . . with providential visions which instantly opened their minds to the truth about history or themselves . . It was a pity that nothing comparable overtook Cheshire over Japan; his reason remained sound as a bell, his values untouched. The route to Nagasaki was neither the road to Damascus nor a short cut to bedlam for him."
Indeed it was not for him a simple matter of a blinding and searing flash, as though the whole world had turned over. Between his conversion to Catholicism in 1948 and his gradual acceptance of the nuclear deterrent, he had slowly reached a plateau of thought, a kind of compromise, if you wish.
In The Light of Many Suns, after the 30 years which I at first thought should elapse before a biography should be written, Cheshire sums up his carefully digested arguments for the huge arsenals of hydrogen and other weapons held by the superpowers: "Nuclear knowledge cannot be disinvented", he writes, "it will remain with us to the end of time, to be put to the service of mankind in more ways than we can at present foresee . . To have to live with the horror which that single bomb caused is a harrowing experience and a source of great personal regret; but I find that the very fact of thinking about it immediately recalls the infinitely greater horror that the totality of the war, until that moment, had constituted 55 million killed, and nobody knows how many maimed in one war or another for the rest of their lives."
Whether the Bruce Kents of .this world would believe it, or not, remains a different matter.