On August 5, 1945—the day before the world ended—Frank Sinatra was at a yacht club in San Pedro, California. There, he is reported to have rescued a 3-year-old boy from drowning.
1945年8月5日（世界结束的前一天）弗兰克·辛纳屈（Frank Sinatra）在加利福尼亚州圣佩德罗的一家游艇俱乐部。据报道，在那里，他从溺水中救出了一个3岁男孩。
On the other side of the country, Albert Einstein—the father of relativity—was staying in Cabin No. 6 at the Knollwood Club on Lower Saranac Lake, in the Adirondacks. Einstein couldn’t swim a stroke, and (in a reverse Sinatra) was once saved from drowning by a 10-year-old boy.
在该国的另一侧，相对性的父亲阿尔伯特·爱因斯坦（Albert Einstein）住在阿迪朗达克斯（Adirondacks）下萨拉纳克湖（Saranac Lake）的Knollwood俱乐部的6号小屋中。爱因斯坦无法游泳中风，（在反向辛纳屈（Sinatra）中）曾经被一个10岁男孩淹死。
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What neither of them realized when they woke up on the morning of August 6 was that at 8:15 a.m. Japan Standard Time, the first atomic bomb, nicknamed “Little Boy,” had been dropped on the city of Hiroshima, obliterating standing structures and killing close to 80,000 people.
他们俩在8月6日上午醒来时都没有意识到的是，凌晨8:15，日本标准时间，第一个被昵称为“小男孩”的原子弹被丢弃在广岛市，毁灭了站立式结构并杀死了近80,000人。
“The day the world ended” is how Kurt Vonnegut described it in his novel Cat’s Cradle, published in 1963. Vonnegut had served in the U.S. Army during World War II, and was one of a handful of survivors of a different American attack: the firebombing of the German city of Dresden, which killed as many as 35,000 people and leveled the town once described as “Florence on the Elbe.”
“世界结束的日子”是库尔特·冯内古特（Kurt vonnegut）在1963年出版的小说《猫的摇篮》中描述的。沃尼古特（Vonnegut）在第二次世界大战期间在美国陆军中服役，并且是少数美国袭击的幸存者之一：德国城市的炸弹炸弹，德斯顿（Dresden）的遭受了造成的人，杀死了35,000人，造成了35,000人的遗嘱，曾经在埃尔（Eith）上被描述为埃尔德（Elbe），曾经是埃尔德（Elbe），曾经是埃尔德（Eith）的遗迹。
“The sky was black with smoke,” Vonnegut later wrote in Slaughterhouse-Five, the novel that fictionalized his experience. “The sun was an angry little pinhead. Dresden was like the moon now, nothing but minerals. The stones were hot. Everybody else in the neighborhood was dead.”
“天空是黑色的，烟雾。”冯内古特后来在《屠宰场五》中写道，这本小说虚构的经历。“太阳是个愤怒的小脚架。德累斯顿现在就像月亮一样，只有矿物质。石头很热。附近的其他人都死了。”
The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima is believed, by some estimates, to have killed as many as 146,000 people, once injuries, burns, and long-term radiation poisoning were factored in—approximately the population of Gainesville, Florida, today.
据某些据估计，据信，原子弹在广岛上掉落，杀死了多达146,000人，一旦受伤，烧伤和长期的辐射中毒被考虑到今天的佛罗里达州盖恩斯维尔的人口。
Here is a photograph of the children who dropped it:
这是丢下它的孩子的照片：
U.S. Department of Defense
美国国防部
I say “children” because the mission commander, Colonel Paul Tibbets, was 30. Robert A. Lewis, the co-pilot, was 27. Thomas Ferebee, the bombardier, was 26. The navigator, Theodore “Dutch” Van Kirk, was 24. Here is a picture of what happened to the children down below:
我之所以说“儿童”，是因为任务指挥官保罗·蒂贝茨上校是30岁。副驾驶罗伯特·A·刘易斯（Robert A.
Keystone / Getty
Keystone / Getty
President Harry Truman was on the USS Augusta at the time, returning from a conference in Potsdam, Germany, following that country’s surrender. The ship’s captain interrupted Truman’s lunch to give him a message announcing the attack.
当时，哈里·杜鲁门（Harry Truman）总统在奥古斯塔（Uss Augusta）上，在该国投降后从德国波茨坦的一次会议返回。该船的队长打断了杜鲁门的午餐，给他发了一条消息，宣布了这次袭击。
That afternoon, Truman attended a program of entertainment and boxing held on the well deck. The ship’s orchestra played. The boxing ended abruptly when the ring posts collapsed, slightly injuring a spectator. Such was the nature of human suffering that day.
那天下午，杜鲁门参加了在井甲板上举行的娱乐和拳击计划。该船的管弦乐队演奏。当环柱倒塌时，拳击突然结束，略微伤害了观众。那天就是人类苦难的本质。
Cat’s Cradle was Vonnegut’s fourth novel. He had started it nearly a decade earlier, in 1954, when he was just 31 years old. It is the story of Jonah, a journalist who has set out to write a book about what famous people were doing the day of the Hiroshima bombing. In the book, Jonah tracks down the three living descendants of Dr. Felix Hoenikker, one of the so-called fathers of the atomic bomb. Hoenikker is an eccentric scientist who once left a tip for his wife by his coffee cup and would go on to create a substance called Ice 9, which could freeze all water on Earth at room temperature—thus ending the world.
Cat的摇篮是Vonnegut的第四部小说。他已经在1954年31岁的时候就开始了将近十年的近十年。这是乔纳（Jonah）的故事，他是一位记者，他着手写一本书，讲述了广岛轰炸当天在做什么。在这本书中，乔纳（Jonah）追踪了菲利克斯·霍尼克（Felix Hoenikker）博士的三个活人后代，这是原子弹的所谓父亲之一。霍尼克（Hoenikker）是一位古怪的科学家，他曾经用咖啡杯为妻子留下小费，并继续创建一种称为冰9的物质，可以在室温下冻结地球上的所有水，从而结束世界。
From the July 1955 issue: Kurt Vonnegut’s short story ‘Der Arme Dolmetscher’
从1955年7月的问题开始：库尔特·冯内古特（Kurt Vonnegut）的短篇小说“ der arme dolmetscher”
Cat’s Cradle made about as much impact on popular culture when it came out as Vonnegut’s previous books had, which is to say not much. His first novel, Player Piano, had been published more than 10 years prior, to little acclaim, and Vonnegut was scrambling to make ends meet for his growing family. After the war he had made a pretty good living writing short stories, until that market softened. Since then he had worked as an English teacher at a school for wayward boys and as a publicist for General Electric; in a fit of optimism, he had even started a doomed Saab dealership on Cape Cod. An apt word to describe Vonnegut’s state of mind in those years would be desperate. Little did he know that Slaughterhouse-Five, published in 1969, would make him one of the most famous writers in the world.
猫的摇篮对流行文化的影响与冯内古特（Vonnegut）以前的书相同，这并不是说什么。他的第一本小说《玩家钢琴》（Player Piano）在十多年前出版了，几乎没有好评，冯内古特（Vonnegut）争先恐后地为他的成长中的家庭维持生计。战争结束后，他做了一个很好的生活，写了短篇小说，直到那个市场变软。从那以后，他曾在一所学校的男孩和通用电气的公关人员担任英语老师。在乐观的态度下，他甚至在科德角上开始了注定要失败的萨博经销商。一个恰当的词来形容冯内古特那几年的心态，这是绝望的。他几乎不知道1969年出版的《屠宰场五》将使他成为世界上最著名的作家之一。
Vonnegut was similarly unaware that World War II would be the last war of what historians call the Industrial Age. In the 19th century, steam-powered machines had revolutionized human enterprise. Then, following the development of electricity, came a wave of innovation never before seen—the telegraph, telephone, automobile, airplane—as physicists such as Einstein and his successors illuminated the very fabric of the universe. Many of those same physicists would later join the Manhattan Project, harnessing the power of the atom and creating the first atomic weapon.
冯内古特同样并不意识到第二次世界大战将是历史学家所谓的工业时代的最后一场战争。在19世纪，蒸汽动力的机器彻底改变了人类企业。然后，随着电力的发展，作为物理学家，像爱因斯坦和他的继任者这样的物理学家，从未见过的一波创新浪潮（电报，电话，汽车，飞机）阐明了宇宙的结构。许多同样的物理学家后来将加入曼哈顿项目，利用原子的力量并创建第一种原子武器。
In some ways, Little Boy was the ultimate invention of the Industrial Age, which ended a few years later. What replaced it? The Atomic Age, of course, followed in the 1970s by the Information Age. Were Vonnegut alive today, he might say that whatever they call the age you live in is actually the name of the weapon they’re using to try to kill you.
在某些方面，小男孩是工业时代的最终发明，几年后结束。是什么取代了？当然，在1970年代随后是信息时代。如果今天还活着冯内古特（Vonnegut），他可能会说，无论您所说的年龄如何，实际上都是他们试图杀死您的武器的名称。
In 1943, two years before the bombing of Hiroshima, Kurt Vonnegut dropped out of Cornell University and enlisted in the Army. He was 20 years old. Here is a photo of him:
1943年，即广岛轰炸前两年，库尔特·冯内古特（Kurt Vonnegut）退出了康奈尔大学（Cornell University）并入伍。他今年20岁。这是他的照片：
PJF Military Collection / Alamy
PJF军事收藏 /阿拉米
The Army taught him to fire howitzers, then sent him to Europe as a scout. Before he left, Vonnegut surprised his mother, Edith, by going home for Mother’s Day 1944. In return, Edith surprised Vonnegut by killing herself. That Saturday night, she took sleeping pills while he lay unaware in another room. Seven months later, Private First Class Vonnegut was crossing the beach at Le Havre with the 423rd Infantry Regiment of the 106th Infantry Division.
军队教他解雇榴弹炮，然后将他送往欧洲，作为侦察员。在他离开之前，冯内古特（Vonnegut）回家为1944年的母亲节让他的母亲伊迪丝（Edith）感到惊讶。作为回报，伊迪丝（Edith）杀死了自己，使冯内古特（Vonnegut）感到惊讶。那个星期六晚上，她吃了安眠药，而他不知道另一个房间。七个月后，私人头等舱冯内古特（Vonnegut）与第106步兵师第423步兵团越过勒阿弗尔（Le Havre）的海滩。
They marched to Belgium, taking up position in the Ardennes Forest near the town of St. Vith. It was one of the coldest winters on record, and death was all around them. On December 16, the Germans attacked. Inexperienced American troops holding the front buckled, creating a bulge in the line, thus giving the ensuing battle its name. When it was over, about 80,000 American soldiers had been killed or wounded. But Vonnegut didn’t make it to the end. He barely made it three days. Cut off and outnumbered, his regiment was forced to surrender; Vonnegut and more than 6,000 other soldiers were captured. As the Germans advanced, his buddy Bernard O’Hare shouted, “Nein scheissen! ” to the advancing German troops. This did not mean “Don’t shoot!,” as he thought. What he yelled instead was “Don’t shit!”
他们前往比利时，在圣维斯镇附近的阿登斯森林中担任地位。这是有记录以来最冷的冬天之一，死亡在他们周围。12月16日，德国人袭击了。没有经验的美军拿着前弯头，在线上产生了隆起，从而使随后的战斗名称。结束后，约有80,000名美国士兵被杀或受伤。但是Vonnegut并没有结束。他几乎没有三天。切断并超过人数，他的团被迫投降。Vonnegut和其他6,000多名士兵被捕。随着德国人的前进，他的好友伯纳德·奥黑尔（Bernard O’Hare）向前进的德国军队大喊“ Nein Scheissen！”。正如他想的那样，这并不意味着“不要射击！”。他大喊的是“不要屎！”
After a long forced march, Vonnegut and thousands of other American POWs were packed into boxcars. The dark cars smelled of cow shit, and the soldiers were crammed so tightly, they were forced to stand. It took two days to load them. Vonnegut later recounted how, 18 hours after their departure, the unmarked German train was attacked by the Royal Air Force. It was Christmas Eve. Strafed by RAF fighters, bombs dropping all around them, dozens of American prisoners were killed by Allied planes. Against all odds, Vonnegut was still alive.
经过漫长的行军，冯内古特（Vonnegut）和其他成千上万的美国战俘被包装到棚车中。黑暗的汽车闻到了牛屎，士兵们被塞得如此紧密，被迫站立。加载它们花了两天时间。冯内古特（Vonnegut）后来叙述，出发后18小时，这架未标记的德国火车遭到皇家空军的袭击。那是圣诞节前夕。炸弹在皇家空军战斗机上挥舞着，炸弹在周围掉下来，数十名美国囚犯被盟军杀死。在各个方面，Vonnegut还活着。
The name Little Boy was chosen by Robert Serber, a Los Alamos physicist who worked on the bomb’s design. It seems only fitting for a weapon dropped by children from a plane named after the pilot’s mother, Enola Gay. Ten feet long and weighing close to 10,000 pounds, “the gadget”—as the scientists called it—was a plug-ugly sumbitch, made of riveted steel and wires. Nothing like the sleek, gleaming technology of today. See for yourself:
小男孩这个名字是由洛斯·阿拉莫斯物理学家罗伯特·塞尔伯（Robert Serber）选择的，他从事炸弹设计。似乎只适合以飞行员母亲埃诺拉·盖伊（Enola Gay）命名的飞机掉落的武器。十英尺长，重量接近10,000磅，“小工具”（科学家称之为它）是由铆接的钢和电线制成的插件。没有什么比当今时尚，闪闪发光的技术更像了。为自己看：
Keystone-France / Gamma-Keystone / Getty
Keystone-France / Gamma-keystone / Getty
Little Boy was a gun-type bomb, its explosive power triggered by firing a “bullet” of uranium into a target of uranium. When the projectile and target combined, they formed a supercritical mass capable of sustaining a rapid nuclear chain reaction. That’s a fancy scientist way of saying “massive explosion,” and boy howdy, was it.
小男孩是枪式炸弹，它的爆炸能力是通过向铀目标发射“子弹”触发的。当弹丸和目标合并时，它们形成了能够维持快速核链反应的超临界质量。这是一种奇特的科学家说“大规模爆炸”的方式，而男孩Howdy是。
Fission reactions occur so fast that it’s hard to describe them using our human sense of time. Within one-millionth of a second of the uranium bullet hitting its target, a fireball of several million degrees was formed, spawning a shock wave with a blast equivalent to 15 kilotons of TNT that pushed the atmosphere at supersonic speeds, and that traveled outward at two miles per second from the hypocenter. The fiery shock wave flattened everything in its path, igniting birds in midair. About a third of the bomb’s energy was released as thermal radiation: gamma and infrared rays that flashed through clothing, burning textile patterns into victims’ skin and causing severe burns up to a mile away. In the time it takes to say “boom,” roughly 80,000 people were reduced to ash, and 4.4 square miles of city were obliterated.
裂变反应发生得如此之快，以至于很难使用我们的人类时间意识来描述它们。在铀子弹击中其目标的一千万秒之内，形成了数百万度的火球，产生了冲击波，爆炸率相当于15千吨TNT，以超音速速度推动大气，并以每秒两英里的速度向外行驶。火热的冲击波使路径上的一切都扁平，在空中点燃了鸟。炸弹的大约三分之一的能量是作为热辐射释放的：伽玛和红外线闪烁，穿过衣服闪烁，将纺织图案燃烧成受害者的皮肤，并导致严重的燃烧到一英里处。在说“繁荣”的时间里，大约80,000人被沦为灰烬，而4.4平方英里的城市被消灭了。
Wilfred Burchett was the first Western reporter to reach Hiroshima after the bombing. On September 2, sitting on a piece of rubble, he wrote, “Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence.”
威尔弗雷德·伯切特（Wilfred Burchett）是爆炸案后第一位到达广岛的西方记者。9月2日，他坐在一块瓦砾上，写道：“广岛看起来不像被轰炸的城市。看起来好像是一个怪物蒸汽机已经越过了它，并将其挤出了现有。”
For clarity, a steamroller was an Industrial Age machine used for compacting dirt and gravel in order to create smooth surfaces upon which vehicles could drive.
为了清楚起见，Steamroller是一种工业时代的机器，用于压实污垢和砾石，以创建光滑的表面，可以在该表面上行驶。
And so the world ended, if not in fact then in theory.
因此，世界结束了，如果不是实际上，那么理论上就结束了。
When he arrived in Dresden, Vonnegut and his fellow POWs were put to work in a malted-syrup factory, making food for Germans that the POWs were not themselves allowed to eat. The guards were cruel, the work exhausting. Vonnegut was singled out and badly beaten. One night, as air-raid sirens roared, Vonnegut and the other POWs were herded into the basement of a slaughterhouse, huddling among the sides of beef as the city above them was bombed.
当他到达德累斯顿时，冯内古特（Vonnegut）和他的同伴战俘被放在一家麦芽糖厂工厂工作，为德国人做食物，而那些自己不允许他们吃饭。警卫很残酷，工作疲惫。Vonnegut被挑出来，殴打。一天晚上，随着空袭的警笛声咆哮，冯内古特（Vonnegut）和其他战俘被放到屠宰场的地下室，随着上方的城市被轰炸，牛肉侧面挤在牛肉的侧面。
All told, British and American bombers dropped more than 3,900 tons of highly explosive and incendiary bombs on Dresden that night.
总而言之，那天晚上，英美轰炸机在德累斯顿投下了3,900吨高度爆炸性和燃烧炸弹。
Vonnegut described it this way in a letter to his family: “On about February 14th the Americans came over, followed by the R.A.F.” The combined forces “destroyed all of Dresden—possibly the world’s most beautiful city. But not me.”
冯内古特（Vonnegut）在给家人的一封信中以这种方式描述了这一点：“大约在2月14日，美国人来了，随后是R.A.F.。”联合部队“摧毁了德累斯顿，可能是世界上最美丽的城市。但不是我。”
Here is a photo of the city before the bombing:
这是爆炸前的城市照片：
Ullstein Bild / Getty
乌尔斯坦图片 /盖蒂
And here is what it looked like when the Allies were done with it:
这就是盟友完成时的样子：
Ullstein Bild / Getty
乌尔斯坦图片 /盖蒂
To destroy the city of Dresden took hundreds of bombs dropped over multiple hours. To destroy the city of Hiroshima, all it took was one. This, a cynical man might say, is what progress looks like.
为了摧毁德累斯顿市，数百枚炸弹在多个小时内掉落了。为了摧毁广岛市，只花了一个。一个愤世嫉俗的人可能会说，这是进步的样子。
In his 1967 collection of essays about the Atomic Age, The Ghost in the Machine, Arthur Koestler, a Hungarian British author and journalist, wrote, “The crisis of our time can be summed up in a single sentence. From the dawn of consciousness until the middle of our century man had to live with the prospect of his death as an individual; since Hiroshima, mankind as a whole has to live with the prospect of its extinction as a biological species.”
匈牙利英国作家兼记者亚瑟·科斯特勒（Arthur Koestler）在1967年的关于原子时代的论文中，鬼魂的鬼魂在一句话中写道：“我们这个时代的危机可以总结在一个句子中。从意识的黎明到我们这个世纪的中期，直到我们的世纪中的一个人都必须以自己的身份去世。
Throughout human history, children have adopted a rule of engagement called “not in the face.” Think of it as the first Geneva Convention. Violating the not-in-the-face rule opens the offender up to serious retribution. It is an act of war. Now I get to hit you in the face, or worse. In fact, maybe I should kick you in the balls to teach you a lesson and restore the balance of power. Maybe I need to make the cost of hitting me in the face so high, you never take another swing. If Pearl Harbor was an unprovoked face punch, then Hiroshima was the kick in the balls to end all future wars. Scientists of the Industrial Age made that kick possible.
在整个人类历史上，孩子们都采用了一种称为“不面对面的”的参与规则。将其视为第一个日内瓦公约。违反不面对面的规则为罪犯打开了严重的报应。这是一种战争。现在我要打你的脸，或者更糟。实际上，也许我应该把你踢到球上，教你一堂课并恢复力量平衡。也许我需要使我的脸如此高，您永远不会再挥杆。如果珍珠港是无端的脸，那么广岛就是结束所有未来战争的球。工业时代的科学家使这一切成为可能。
Vonnegut’s relationship with his own children after the war was mixed at best. There would be seven in total, three biological and four of his sister’s boys, who had come to live with him and his wife, Jane, in 1958, when Vonnegut’s brother-in-law, Jim, died in a train derailment, his commuter train launching itself from the Newark Bay Bridge into Newark Bay. Two days later, Vonnegut’s sister, Alice, died of breast cancer. So it goes. It was Alice who had shaken Vonnegut awake on Mother’s Day 1944 to tell him their mother was dead. Vonnegut considered Alice his muse, and later wrote in Slapstick : “I had never told her so, but she was the person I had always written for. She was the secret of whatever artistic unity I had ever achieved.”
战争后，冯内古特与自己的孩子的关系充其量是混合在一起的。1958年，沃恩格特（Vonnegut）的姐夫吉姆（Jim Jim）在火车脱轨中去世，他的通勤火车从纽瓦克湾桥（Newark Bay Bridge）驶向纽瓦克湾。两天后，冯内古特（Vonnegut）的姐姐爱丽丝（Alice）死于乳腺癌。所以去了。是爱丽丝在1944年母亲节醒来醒来，告诉他他们的母亲死了。冯内古特（Vonnegut）将爱丽丝（Alice）视为他的缪斯女神（Alice），后来在闹剧中写道：“我从未告诉过她，但她是我一直写的人。她是我曾经取得过的任何艺术统一的秘密。”
Suddenly the house was overstuffed with children between the ages of 2 and 14. For the next five years, Vonnegut tried (and mostly failed) to write Cat’s Cradle. The stress of supporting that large a family as a writer, while still processing trauma from the war, made him irritable. Never a hands-on dad, he left most of the actual parenting to Jane, and as the chaos of family life filled the house, he would hole up in his study all day, chain-smoking. The slightest noise from the children could propel him from the room, ranting.
突然，这所房子被2至14岁之间的孩子塞满了。在接下来的五年中，冯内古特（Vonnegut）试图（大多是失败）写猫的摇篮。支持一个大家庭作为作家的压力，同时仍在处理战争中的创伤，这使他变得烦躁。他从来没有一个动手的父亲，他把大部分实际的育儿留给了简，随着家庭生活的混乱充满了房子，他整天都会在书房里闲逛。孩子们的丝毫声音可能会使他从房间里咆哮。
Vonnegut himself had been raised in a house of math and science. His father was an architect. As a scientist, his brother would pioneer the field of cloud seeding. But Vonnegut had a complicated relationship with the word progress. His experience in the war had soured him on the idea that science was exclusively a force for good. Too often, he believed, scientists and engineers focused on the question Can we do something? rather than Should we? He saw this when he looked at the Manhattan Project. Though scientists at Los Alamos knew that the bomb they were designing was meant to be dropped on people, they rarely thought about the consequences of dropping it.
Vonnegut本人是在数学和科学屋里长大的。他的父亲是建筑师。作为一名科学家，他的兄弟会开创云种子领域。但是Vonnegut与“进步”一词有复杂的关系。他在战争中的经历使他认为科学仅是永久的力量。他认为，科学家和工程师经常专注于我们可以做某事的问题吗？而不是我们应该吗？当他看着曼哈顿项目时，他看到了这一点。尽管洛斯阿拉莫斯（Los Alamos）的科学家知道他们正在设计的炸弹被抛在人们身上，但他们很少考虑放弃它的后果。
After the war, the physicist Victor Weisskopf, who’d worked on the bomb at Los Alamos, admitted that he was “ashamed to say that few of us even thought of quitting. It was the attraction of the task. It was impossible to quit at that time.” The task, he said, was “technically sweet.”
战争结束后，曾在洛斯阿拉莫斯（Los Alamos）在炸弹上工作的物理学家维克多·韦斯科普（Victor Weisskopf）承认，他“感到羞耻地说我们很少有人想辞职。这是任务的吸引力。当时不可能辞职。”他说，这项任务“从技术上讲是甜蜜的”。
J. Robert Oppenheimer himself used this phrase during testimony at his security-clearance hearing after the war. “It is my judgment in these things that when you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb. I do not think anybody opposed making it.”
罗伯特·奥本海默（J. Robert Oppenheimer）本人在战后的安全清除听证会上使用了这句话。“我的判断是在这些事情上，当您看到技术上甜美的东西时，您就继续前进，然后您就在您的技术成功之后就对此做了什么。这就是原子弹的方式。我认为没有人反对这样做。”
“Nice, nice, very nice,” as Bokonon wrote in his “53rd Calypso.” “So many different people in the same device.” Bokonon was the fictional founder of a religion that Vonnegut invented for Cat’s Cradle, a novel as much about the hypocrisy of organized religion as it was about war. Bokonon’s first dictum is this: “All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.”
Bokonon在他的“第53 calypso”中写道：“很好，很好，非常好。”“在同一设备中有这么多不同的人。”博科农（Bokonon）是沃尼古特（Vonnegut）为猫摇篮（Cat's Cradle）发明的宗教的虚构创始人，这是一部关于有组织宗教的伪善和战争的小说。博科农的第一个格言是：“我要告诉你的无耻谎言的所有真实事情。”
Here’s another shameless lie: The atomic bomb was dropped to save lives. This is an ancillary thing that war does; it inverts language. See, the lives that mattered to scientists at Los Alamos were American. So they chose to focus on the lives they would spare—the GIs who would theoretically die in a conventional invasion—instead of the Japanese citizens who would actually die when the bomb was dropped. This made the morality of their actions easier to justify. In this way, they kept things sweet.
这是另一个无耻的谎言：原子弹被丢弃以挽救生命。这是战争所做的辅助事件。它会反转语言。看，对洛斯阿拉莫斯科学家至关重要的生活是美国人。因此，他们选择专注于自己将要挽救的生命 - 理论上会死于常规入侵的GI，而不是日本公民在炸弹掉落时实际上会死亡的日本公民。这使他们的行动的道德更容易证明合理性。这样，他们使事情变得甜蜜。
And yet, to quote a survivor, those scientists who invented the atomic bomb—“what did they think would happen if they dropped it?”
然而，为了引用幸存者的话，那些发明了原子弹的科学家：“他们认为如果他们放弃它会发生什么？”
Here are some things that happened. Day turned to night. In a flash, the bomb destroyed 60,000 of the 90,000 structures in a 10-mile radius. Of the 2,370 doctors and nurses in Hiroshima, 2,168 were killed or injured too badly to work.
这是发生的一些事情。白天变成黑夜。炸弹在闪光灯中以10英里的半径摧毁了90,000个结构中的60,000人。在广岛的2,370名医生和护士中，有2,168人被杀害或受伤，无法工作。
This is what the atomic bomb did to survivors: “They had no hair because their hair was burned, and at a glance you couldn’t tell whether you were looking at them from in front or in back,” a survivor told The New York Times in 1981. “Their skin—not only on their hands, but on their faces and bodies too—hung down.” In this way they stumbled down the road, going nowhere, “like walking ghosts.”
这就是原子弹对幸存者所做的事情：“他们没有头发，因为他们的头发被灼伤了，一眼就无法判断出您是从前还是在后面看着它们，”一位幸存者在1981年告诉《纽约时报》。他们的皮肤不仅在他们的脸上，而是在他们的脸和身体上，而且还不得这样，他们跌跌撞撞地走了道路，无处不在，“就像步行的幽灵。”
Only a few of the survivors were children, as most school-age kids near ground zero were killed on impact. This is because at 8:15 a.m. on August 6, they had gathered outside their schools to help create firebreaks to slow the spread of flames in the event of firebomb raids like the ones that had destroyed Tokyo and so many other Japanese cities. Did they hear the distant roar of the B-29, I wonder, flying overhead? An air-raid siren had gone off an hour earlier, but no planes had come, so now, when the Enola Gay approached, many didn’t even look up.
只有少数幸存者是孩子，因为零地面附近的大多数学龄儿童因撞击而被杀。这是因为在8月6日上午8:15，他们聚集在学校外面，以帮助创建防火爆炸，以减慢火焰袭击的情况，例如那些摧毁了东京和许多其他日本城市的突袭者。我想知道，他们听到了B-29的遥远咆哮声吗？一个小时前，空袭的警笛声已经下来，但是没有飞机来了，所以现在，当埃诺拉同性恋接近时，许多人甚至没有抬头。
Picture the children of Hiroshima on that sunny morning, thousands of little haircuts, thousands of gap-toothed smiles. Thousands of children trying to be good citizens, wondering what the morning snack would be. This is whom the child pilots flying overhead dropped the bomb on: schoolchildren and their parents. What else are we to think? The city of Hiroshima had no real military or technological value. It was a population center, chosen to send a message to the emperor.
在那个阳光明媚的早晨，想象广岛的孩子，成千上万的小发型，成千上万的齿状微笑。成千上万的孩子试图成为好公民，想知道早上小吃会是什么。这是飞行飞机飞行的儿童飞行员将炸弹扔掉：学童及其父母。我们还要想什么？广岛市没有真正的军事或技术价值。这是一个人口中心，被选为向皇帝发送信息。
So it goes—or, as the survivors of Hiroshima used to say, “Shikata ga nai,” which loosely translates to “It can’t be helped.” This sentiment was born from the Japanese practice of Zen Buddhism—an even older made-up religion than Bokononism, Vonnegut might say. And yet, what else can one say about a world in which children drop bombs on other children?
因此，正如广岛的幸存者曾经说过的“ shikata ga nai”一样，它散发着“无济于事”。冯内古特（Vonnegut）可能说，这种情绪源于日本的禅宗佛教实践，即使是比科诺主义的宗教，甚至比博科尼斯主义更古老。然而，人们还能说一个关于孩子在其他孩子身上炸弹炸弹的世界呢？
In Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut writes of an argument he had with his old Army buddy Bernard’s wife, Mary. Vonnegut has gone to their house to drink and trade war stories, and when he tells them he is writing a novel about the war, Mary erupts:
冯内古特（Vonnegut）在《屠宰场五》中写道，他与他的旧军队好友伯纳德（Bernard）的妻子玛丽（Mary）提出了争执。冯内古特（Vonnegut）去了他们家喝和贸易战争的故事，当他告诉他们他正在写一部关于战争的小说时，玛丽爆发：
“You were just babies then!” she said.
“那你只是婴儿！”她说。
“What?” I said.
“什么？”我说。
“You were just babies in the war—like the ones upstairs! … But you’re not going to write it that way, are you … You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them. And they’ll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs.”
“你只是战争中的婴儿 - 就像楼上的婴儿！……但是你不会那样写的，是……你是……你假装自己是男人而不是婴儿，弗兰克·辛纳特拉（Frank Sinatra）和约翰·韦恩（John Wayne）和约翰·韦恩（John Wayne）或其他一些迷人的，喜欢战争的老人，战争和战争看起来很棒，所以我们会像他们一样，像他们一样，他们会像他们一样。
Later, thinking back on Cat’s Cradle’s amoral physicist, Dr. Felix Hoenikker, Vonnegut said, “What I feel about him now is that he was allowed to concentrate on one part of life more than any human being should be. He was overspecialized and became amoral on that account … If a scientist does this, he can inadvertently become a very destructive person.”
后来，回想一下猫的摇篮的不道德物理学家费利克斯·霍尼克（Felix Hoenikker）博士，冯内古特（Felix Hoenikker）博士说：“我现在对他的感觉是，他被允许专注于生活的一部分比任何人都应该更加专注。
This overspecialization is a feature, not a bug, of our Information Age.
这种过度专业化是我们信息时代的一个功能，而不是错误。
What are our phones and tablets, our social-media platforms, if not technically sweet? They are so sleek and sophisticated technologically, with their invisible code and awesome computing power, that they have become, as Arthur C. Clarke once wrote, indistinguishable from magic. And this may, in the end, prove to be the biggest danger.
我们的手机和平板电脑是什么，我们的社交媒体平台，即使不是技术上的甜蜜？正如亚瑟·C·克拉克（Arthur C. Clarke）曾经写的那样，它们在技术上是如此时尚和精致的技术，具有无形的代码和令人敬畏的计算能力，以至于与魔术无法区分。最终，这可能是最大的危险。
Because so little thought has been given to the Should we? of the Information Age (what will happen if we give human beings an entertainment device they can fit in their pocket, one that connects them instantly to every truth and every lie ever conceived?), we have, as a society, been caught unprepared. If the atomic bomb, riveted from steel plates and visible wires, was irrefutable proof of the power of science, how is it possible that even more sophisticated modern devices have decreased our faith in science and given rise to the wholesale rejection of expertise?
因为我们应该对我们应该有那么少的想法？在信息时代（如果我们给人类可以放在口袋里的娱乐装置，将会发生什么，将它们立即与每个真理和曾经想到的每个谎言联系起来？），作为一个社会，我们被抓住了。如果从钢板和可见的电线中铆接的原子弹是科学力量的无可辩驳的证明，那么更复杂的现代设备如何减少我们对科学的信仰并引起专业知识的批发拒绝？
Talk about a shameless lie! And yet how else to explain the fact that misinformation spread through our magic gadgets seems to be undermining people’s belief in the very science that powers them?
谈论一个无耻的谎言！然而，如何解释错误信息通过我们的魔术小工具传播的事实似乎在破坏人们对为他们提供动力的科学的信念呢？
To put it simply, if the bomb was a machine through which we looked into the future, our phones have become a looking glass through which we are pulled back into the past.
简而言之，如果炸弹是一台我们探索未来的机器，我们的手机已经成为一个看起来像玻璃的机器，我们可以通过它回到过去。
Shikata ga nai.
我无能为力。
After the war, Vonnegut wrestled with what he saw as hereditary depression, made worse by his mother’s suicide, his sister’s death, and the trauma of war. Unable to justify why he had survived when so many around him had died, and unwilling to ascribe his good fortune to God, Vonnegut settled instead on the absurd. I live, you die. So it goes.
战争结束后，冯内古特（Vonnegut）与他所说的遗传性抑郁症搏斗，因母亲的自杀，姐姐的死和战争创伤而变得更糟。沃尼古特（Vonnegut）无法证明他周围的许多人死亡，而不愿将他的好运归因于上帝时，他无法证明他为何幸存下来，而是定居在荒谬的地方。我活着，你死了。所以去了。
If it had been cloudy in Hiroshima that morning, the bomb would have fallen somewhere else. If POW Vonnegut had been shoved into a different train car, if he had picked a different foxhole, if the Germans hadn’t herded him into the slaughterhouse basement when the sirens sounded—so many ifs that would have ended in death. Instead, somehow, he danced between the raindrops. Because of this, for Vonnegut, survival became a kind of cosmic joke, with death being the setup and life being the punch line.
如果那天早上在广岛的广岛多云，炸弹将会落在其他地方。如果Pow Vonnegut被推入另一辆火车车，如果他选择了另一个狐狸孔，如果德国人没有在警笛声响起时将他放入屠宰场地下室，那么许多IF会在死亡中结束。相反，他以某种方式在雨滴之间跳舞。因此，对于Vonnegut而言，生存成为了一种宇宙的笑话，死亡是设置和生命是打孔线。
On May 11, 1955, the Hiroshima survivor Kiyoshi Tanimoto, a Methodist minister, was featured on the American television program This Is Your Life. He had come to the U.S. to raise money for victims of the atomic bomb known as the Keloid Girls or the Atomic Maidens.
1955年5月11日，卫理公会部长的广岛幸存者Kiyoshi Tanimoto曾在美国电视节目中介绍这是您的生活。他来到美国，为被称为凯洛因女孩或原子少女的原子弹的受害者筹集资金。
Seated on a sofa beside the host, Ralph Edwards, Tanimoto wears a baggy suit and looks stunned. After an introductory segment, the camera cuts to the silhouette of a man behind a screen. He speaks into a microphone.
Tanimoto坐在主持人拉尔夫·爱德华兹（Ralph Edwards）旁边的沙发上，穿着宽松的西装，看上去震惊。介绍性片段后，相机切成屏幕后面的男人的轮廓。他讲了一个麦克风。
“Looking down from thousands of feet over Hiroshima,” he says, “all I could think of was ‘My God, what have we done?’ ”
他说：“从数千英尺处看着数千英尺，我所能想到的是‘我的上帝，我们做了什么？’”
The camera cuts back to Edwards and Tanimoto. “Now, you’ve never met him,” the host tells the Hiroshima survivor sitting next to him, “never seen him, but he’s here tonight to clasp your hand in friendship. Captain Robert Lewis, United States Air Force, who along with Paul Tibbets piloted the plane from which the first atomic power was dropped over Hiroshima.”
摄像机切成爱德华兹和塔尼莫托。主持人告诉坐在他旁边的广岛幸存者说：“现在，您从未见过他，”他今晚在这里抓住您的友谊。
The camera pans across the stage as the screen retracts and Captain Lewis emerges from shadow. Tanimoto steps into frame and shakes his hand. Both men appear as if they want to throw up:
当屏幕缩回时，摄像机盘中跨过舞台，刘易斯上尉从影子出来。Tanimoto走进框架并握手。这两个男人似乎都想扔掉：
Ralph Edwards Productions
拉尔夫·爱德华兹（Ralph Edwards）的生产
“Captain Lewis,” Edwards says, “come in here close, and would you tell us, sir, of your experience on August 6, 1945?”
爱德华兹说：“刘易斯上尉，靠这里进来，先生，您会告诉我们1945年8月6日的经验吗？”
There is an uncomfortable beat, in which we wonder if Lewis will be able to continue. The camera cuts to a close-up of Lewis. He is unable to make eye contact with Tanimoto.
有一个不舒服的节奏，我们想知道刘易斯是否能够继续。相机切成刘易斯的特写镜头。他无法与Tanimoto进行眼神交流。
“Well, Mr. Edwards, when we left Tinian, in the Mariana Islands, at about eight—at 2:45 in the morning on August the 6th, 1945, our destination was Japan. We had three targets. One was Hiroshima. One was Nagasaki. One was Kurkura.
“好吧，爱德华兹先生，当我们在玛丽安娜群岛离开蒂尼安时，大约八点 - 1945年8月6日上午2:45，我们的目的地是日本。我们有三个目标。一个是广岛。一个是纳加西木。一个是库尔库拉。
“About an hour before we hit the coastline of Japan, we were notified that Hiroshima was clear. Therefore, Hiroshima became our target.”
“大约在我们撞到日本海岸线的一个小时之前，我们被通知广岛很清楚。因此，广岛成为我们的目标。”
The camera cuts to Tanimoto, listening, horrified. The social contract of human behavior freezes him in place.
相机切到塔尼莫托，听着，震惊。人类行为的社会契约将他冻结到位。
“Just before 8:15 a.m. Tokyo time,” Lewis continues, “Tom Ferebee, our very able bombardier, carefully aimed at his target, which was the second Imperial Japanese Army Headquarters. At 8:15 promptly, the bomb was dropped.
刘易斯继续说：“就在东京时代的上午8:15之前，我们非常有能力的庞巴迪（Tom Ferebee）小心翼翼地瞄准了他的目标，这是日本帝国军队的第二个总部。炸弹迅速掉落了。
“We turned fast to get out of the way of the deadly radiation and bomb effects. First was a thick flash that we got, and then the two concussion waves hit the ship. Shortly after, we turned back to see what had happened, and there in front of our eyes, the city of Hiroshima disappeared.”
“我们迅速转过身来摆脱致命的辐射和炸弹效果。首先是我们得到的浓密闪光，然后两次脑震荡袭击了船。不久之后，我们转过身去看看发生了什么事，在眼前，Hiroshima市在我们的眼前消失了。”
“And,” Edwards says, “you entered something in your log at that time?”
“而且，”爱德华兹说，“您当时在日志中输入了某些东西吗？”
Lewis’s voice breaks and he rubs his temples, trying to compose himself.
刘易斯的声音破裂，他摩擦了寺庙，试图构成自己。
“As I said before, Mr. Edwards, I wrote down later: ‘My God, what have we done?’ ”
“正如我之前所说的，爱德华兹先生，后来我写下了：‘我的上帝，我们做了什么？’”
After retiring from the Air Force, Captain Lewis went to work in the candy business, where he patented various improvements to candy-manufacturing machinery. Sweet treats for kids. Picture them. All those happy kids.
从空军退休后，刘易斯上尉从事糖果业务，在那里他为糖果制造机械提供了各种改进。儿童甜点。想象他们。所有那些快乐的孩子。
Picture them putting quarters in the vending machine. Picture them in store-bought costumes holding out their Halloween sacks. They are no more theoretical than the children of Hiroshima, but unlike them, these children would grow up.
想象他们将四分之一放在自动售货机中。在商店购买的服装中想象它们，以拿出万圣节麻袋。他们比广岛的孩子更理论上，但是与他们不同，这些孩子会长大。
They would come of age practicing duck-and-cover drills, diving under their desks at the shriek of a whistle; come of age hiding in the bomb shelters their parents had built, terrified of the theoretical deaths that the A-bomb had made all but inevitable.
他们会在练习鸭和斗篷的演习中，在哨子尖叫的桌子下潜水。隐藏在炸弹庇护所中的年龄是他们父母建造的，这对A-Bomb几乎不可避免的理论死亡感到恐惧。
Nice, nice, very nice. So many different people in the same device.
很好，很好，很好。在同一设备中如此多的人。
This article appears in the August 2025 print edition with the headline “Vonnegut and the Bomb.”
本文出现在2025年8月的印刷版中，标题为“ vonnegut和炸弹”。
