 Okay, I think I've conquered the technical challenges and so yes, welcome to this evening's Central Korean Studies seminar. My name is Omi Miller, some of you may know me, I'm an electorate here at SOAS and a member of the Central Korean Studies. And yeah, so I'm excited that we have a very interesting talk today by Eric Cramer, who is one historian and historian of science and technology. Is that correct to say that? And yeah, Eric did his PhD at Toronto and has since been a postdoc at Cambridge right at the New Living Institute, which is maybe some of you know one of the world famous institute for history of East Asian science. And now he has a new post at the University of Sheffield, so he has become sort of, yeah, the prisoner of the British island. And yeah, it's a very interesting topic, I'm just going to leave it to you to talk for about, you know, 50 minutes or so, and then we'll have time for a little discussion about that. So yeah, please. Thank you so much. Thank you for coming tonight. Thank you for the introduction. Yes, indeed. Statement of the British Isles now, which I would never expect that I was in Cambridge and I thought, oh, this is all flesh goes egg, but I'm going to leave down. I'll never come back. And then by the grace of God and a good thing and just don't look like I got a job at Sheffield. So it's an absolute pleasure to be here. And I have to say as someone who's been in East Asian studies for more years than I'd like to visit publicize. One is always encountering folks from so as PhD students and researchers, folks who even impression and to finally be able to be here to speak with you is a considerable point of pride, which I don't think you can understand being inside of this sort of echo chamber but it is indeed a great privilege. Thank you for coming. So, um, today what we'll be doing is, um, you know, I'm properly as a, you know, Democrat, I want to give us an agenda. We can follow to and just notice that we're not going to vote on it. I'm mandating it for when we do it. I'll give you an overview of my research and we'll talk a little bit about how what I'm presenting on today is basically early Korean accounts of atomic bombings and their erasure in the immediate context of post liberation North and South Korea fits into a broader study that I'm conducting right now on the early histories of the atomic age in North and South Korea within the context of the Cold War in the post colonial world. Okay, so there'll be a project overview then we'll sort of jump into the context of the specific case study early pain counts the atomic age will go through three different manifestations or ways of discussing the atomic attacks. In Korea in the post 45 context accounts of liberation to the bombing stories of this thing called science war will elaborate on, and then this kind of surviving the present specific temporalities and challenges to these aforementioned accounts that are posed by Korean atomic bomb survivors themselves. So, um, as I as I mentioned, what I'll be presenting on today is part of a bigger book project of a new kind of energy atomic science and the Cold War Korea is 1945 to 1965. This project is an attempt to do a number of different things one is to emphasize the fusions between the atomic post colonial and Cold War eras. Often when we talk about these things we kind of book, we kind of bookend each of them. And one of the things I try to emphasize in this particular book project is the ways in which ideas about liberation are bleeding into ideas about the Cold War how ideas about the Cold War are being decisively shaped by ideas about the atomic age that these conversations are happening not only contemporaneously, but also that they're informing each other self-referentially. Okay, I'm in this book. I'm trying to discuss the Cold War as a techno scientific event. So again, often when we're talking about the Cold War we think about maybe ideological contestation between liberalism and socialist ideologies or maybe we're thinking about power politics right that often manifests itself today when we say like this is a new Cold War right that we have different states, different, I would say different hegemonic formations that are just normatively within tension with one another kind of a realist understanding of geopolitics right that's another way that we can eventually understand the Cold War. So what I'm suggesting in my project here is that the Cold War itself is being informed specifically by ideas about atomic age and the new forms of thinking that are introduced by what seems to be a revolution in energy, note that it seems to be a revolution in energy, one that didn't quite manifest itself. And then finally, what I'm doing in this larger project is looking at the contest for the sovereignty of science. So, you know, that sounds a little bit wonky, but essentially what I want to explore is how, you know, Cold War science isn't just a competition to go to the moon or to build a better rocket or to build the internet first. Cold War science and the competition over science is an attempt to define that field itself to say that liberal science substantively theoretically is the real science, or that science based in socialism is the actual proper normative and universal type of science. Okay, so it's not just about inventing stuff, making stuff, it's about defining stuff. If that sounds interesting to you, maybe one day in my book after I've written it, I haven't done any of this stuff yet, right, so it's just a pitch, a pitch for something that you can't even buy. But it might be helpful to just understand how this chapter is fitting into broader projects that I have underway. So before I sort of said, you know, we have this new era, maybe some of you know the term Cold War, does anyone know where it came from? Cold War, that term. First pointed, I think it's your countrymen. Well, if you're from this island, it's your countrymen. It's not my countrymen. Fine, fine. I don't want to get all, I'm fine. Don't be all like, I'm sorry to suggest that, yeah, you come from this island. So the Orange of Orwell, right? It's Orwell. Orwell writes an essay in September of 1945 called View in the Atomic Bomb, and he points the term Cold War, right, it spreads from there. A contribution, I guess, to global culture, right, it's a specific reaction to a techno-scientific event connected to a bunch of other ideas of state formation, of empire, right, we don't have to go into it. But it's an illustration of the broader thing that I'm trying to identify with, which is how this new era is informing ideas in Korea, ideas about national liberation, ideas about historical revolution, ideas of war, right? Famously, the Korean War is the first limited war. Now for anyone who knows the kind of empirical history of the Korean War, that's a pretty wacky thing to say, right? Fine B-29s over Pyongyang, just devastating the entire city, doesn't seem limited, but it is limited within the context of this new mother form of war, which is atomic war, right? Atomic energy and its ways of thinking about energy writ large, right, energy revolutions. And then finally, broader ideas about development. These are the kind of broader themes that I hope to explore. I am exploring my research. I guess if that's interesting to you, you can like look up the stuff I've written and read it and post it and cite it. And yeah, build a little shrine to me in your study, you know, don't do any of those things. Okay, so let's, let's sort of take a step back from the realm of like academic projection. A lot of that stuff I'd like to do and done some of it, but haven't really followed through and go to what was advertised today, which was early Korean accounts of the economy. So this is the product of a paper that I was able to publish in the Journal of Asian Studies a few months ago, which means that it was a product of collaboration and a product of really helpful review processes. So whatever I advertise here is a collaborative outcome. The mistakes are mine, of course. So we'll start our story of these, we'll start a story of these three individuals. So in October 1945, these three scientists, thank you, took the train to Hiroshima. And the reason it was part of a larger pilgrimage by researchers in Japan to the recently irradiated city that stood as a point of demarcation in global science. Months later, following the repatriation of each three of these researchers to solve an account of the trio's trips of trips of Hiroshima was published in one of Seoul's new, new popular science magazines. And we'll have a picture, a picture of that magazine here. Written by Pop Phillips, includes this quote, the unleashing of the atom is revolutionary, not simply because the particle is cut in two, but because of the enormous energy that's released in doing so. Now Pops account is quite curious, because although he goes to the city, although one of his travel companions went to high school in Hiroshima. And although they saw the devastation firsthand, Pops' attention is overwhelmingly focused on this point right here, the revolutionary potential that is offered by this new type of technology. Not so much the devastation, not so much the loss, but the possibilities that this new technology helped. Pop Tote's intent in anticipation over the transformative potential of the atomic attacks, fit well with the forward-looking character of the day. After decades of Japanese rule, the colonial peninsula unexpectedly encountered the promises and perils of cold war, decolonization and division. So at the risk of being a little repetitive, one of the points I'm trying to establish in my research are the ways that for writers and translators who are dealing with the subject of the bombings at this time, the atomic age and post-colonial era were not just contemporaneous chapters, modern history, but that they fused into a common mode of articulating political and historical transformation. Amalgamated in this way, early Korean accounts of the recently ended Asia-Pacific war fixated on the liberatory utility of atomic weapons with intellectuals suggesting causal linkages between science, conflict and progress. Writers working in this vein tried to stage the bombings as an instance of resolution that prefaced a new era of both national and global history. However, by advancing this story of liberation, they also concealed narratives and temporalities of the repatriated survivors of the Rosemont and Nagasaki attacks, those Korean bomb survivors, right? Their voices are getting lost in this overwhelming anticipation for liberation through a new era of energy. I argue in my article that this is a significant act of erasure. Experiences of Korean atomic bomb victims often undermine the political lines described at the end of empire and resisted a sense of rupture assigned to the post-liberation period. However, rather than take up the challenge to future pose by these individuals, writers and translators from across the Cold War to by and to sidestep the stark violence of the attacks in their aftermath. In doing so, Korean intellectuals participated in the omission of colonial subjects from the story of the bombings, relegating their active and critical anxieties that groups have passed. I'm sorry for reading that. It's really boring. I hate if presenters read from their papers, but this is kind of the analytical intervention that I want to make. So for the specialists in the room who are super interested in this topic, maybe that's an edification to you. For others, if you're not interested in hearing my voice read my own work, then I apologize. In essence, my argument is really simple. People are so excited about reform and revolution that they don't want to hear any other story, and there's no space for other stories. And this is a bit of an intervention in broadly how we think about the erasure of Korean atomic bomb survivors from the story of the atomic attacks. So literature on this topic has generally focused on what has been called a nationalization of the atomic bomb experience, the ways in which the Japanese state, in some cases encouraged also by the Americans, and structured the story of the Roschmann-Nagasaki attacks as a specifically Japanese experience, and in doing so excluded the presence of thousands of colonial subjects who are also subject to those attacks. The work by activists in the 1960s into the 70s, 80s and 90s pushed against this erasure very significantly, and scholarship on that type of activism has really effectively demonstrated the ways in which this nationalization included their voices. But my own work tries to basically bring out how there is this similar type of erasure that's happening in the Korean context within the context of revolution. So let's talk about that context a little bit. So, you know, the 1945 to 1950 period within Korea is very contentious. I tend to understand it as a product of a two-fold process of division. Korea up until 1945 as part of the Japanese Empire, a component of it, had been for decades. With the end of the Asia-Pacific War, Korea is no longer integrated into that political interest, right? So that's where the story of liberation comes from, but it's very disruptive process. In the process, people at this time have a hard time finding light bulbs and paper, right? Blotter ink, simple sort of like biscuit crackers, things that had freely flowed throughout an integrated imperial economy are no longer available. That's the one mode of division. The second mode of division which is much more clear is joint occupation, where the Americans are occupying the south of the peninsula, the Soviets are occupying the north of the peninsula. That's probably many of you know, this is supposed to be a temporary arrangement, one that lives on, lived on, later remanifested itself through division culture, two separate states, and the continued conundrum of national vision of the peninsula. It's kind of ABCs of modern history. It's in this context that you have the emergence of a type of post-colonial science culture. From throughout the Empire, you have individuals like these, a bunch of scientists and engineers, many of them educated in Japan and employed in places like Manchuria or Nanjing or Hanoi, or of course the Japanese metropolis itself, returning to the Korean Peninsula, returning to Seoul to take up positions of administration and research. Like those three guys that I started the talk with, right? Scientific research requires a lot of money, requires a lot of institutional resources, for the most part they don't have any of that stuff, so many of them turn to science writing. Between 1945-1950, there's a whole slew of magazines that are produced popular science texts that are geared and aimed towards encouraging the public to bring a type of scientific sentiment into their everyday lives and into their politics. The whole, in essence, is to construct a liberated nation off of the authority of scientific knowledge. And it's in this genre of text that I'm able to access the types of discussions about the atomic bombings that ground my research and ground my arguments. You know, it wouldn't come as any great surprise to know that the publications on popular science are really interested in this new vista of science has been opened up. And so the writings on the top are quite plentiful. And the vast majority of this writing focuses on the liberatory character of the atomic attacks. And, you know, what I'd like to illustrate in this subsection is the plurality of liberations that come to the fore, right? So the first thing kind of like most common one is an idea of political liberation. So here we have Minseong. This is not a popular science magazine. I have to apologize to note this is a general readership magazine. It's one of actually the most widely read magazines on the Korean Peninsula in the post-1945 period. This is the first issue of Minseong, which of course does give an entire centerpiece towards the discussion of the atomic bombings. And it includes lines like this, it's fear of racial annihilation brought by this new and powerful weapon that led to Japan's surrender. So they dropped the bomb, Japanese, they give up. Lots of articles from this time underscore this type of point, the idea that the national liberation, personal liberation is delivered by the attacks. But there are other modes as well. So another introduction here we have by Pop Tartek, who does a translation of David Deets' atomic energy in the coming era. So the translation itself is kind of a hallmark example of atomic utopianism from the 40s and 50s. Kind of think about like stuff you see in the Jetsons or whatever, like rockets, cars, locomotives, airplanes. Like everything's fueled by like a pea-sized piece of uranium, limitless energy, solving all problems. The book, when we read this stuff, it seems like super campy, kind of funny. But at the time the book is actually taken quite seriously. It's published by Seoul National University. It's forward. It's written by the president of the institution. And Pop Tartek is no joke himself, right? In his separate writings from this time, he's also incorporating ideas about atomic utopianism to talk about not just national liberation, but liberation of the species, right? I think the era when nations will fight over oil has already passed, right? You sweet child. No, right? No. But you can get the idea, right? Which is that basically if we have limitless electricity and limitless energy, this was his argument. If we have limitless energy, we can synthesize whatever we need out of like energy and seawater, and there'll be nothing left to fight over, right? It'll be geopolitical liberation, nation aside, for all of humanity. The argument, the circulates. Other accounts that are translated into Korean at this time focus on liberation as a function of kind of divine intervention. Here we have two John Hershey's Hiroshima and Takashi Nagai's Bells of Nagasaki. Both of them were translated into Korean in 1948. It might be the only country in the world that saw these two works meet in this kind of funky way. In each of these works, the story of the atomic attacks is actually narrated as a type of divine event, right? This sort of sudden rupture between the two Takashi Nagais is the most explicit in this regard. The people of Nagasaki prostrate themselves before God and pray that Nagasaki may be the last atomic wilderness in the history of the world. So Nagai's argument is basically that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are a type of recompense for the sins of the empire, and that by offering these cities up that there'll be a future of peace. It's an event that's defined by the relationship with a deity, right? Yeah, sounds like he looks super-duper Catholic in this picture, right? He dies of radiation poisoning a little bit after writing this book as well. He's also the radiologist, right? So he's writing with scientific authority. He's writing with religious authority. And in the 1940s, that type of hybridity between the two isn't actually so uncommon, right? But again, this is not a political form of liberation. This is not a material liberation. This is a type of immense a patient between humanity's relationship with God, right? You know, folks in the DPRK were less common to talk about things in that light. So the kind of final iteration of liberation that we can look at is through forms that are expressly political in nature. So Dosanbok is one of the kind of famous physicists who, like part of that previous cohort that returned to the peninsula, he's briefly within Seoul for a few months before going to North Korea where he sort of ruffins to the head of the decent scientific community there. He writes extensively at this time and as a physicist is often limited by sheets of energy and atomic science. A great revolution has arisen in the nuclear uranium. In his understanding though, it's basically of, you know, we don't have time. I won't trouble you with it. It's a very specific understanding, but energy revolution means and you'll just have to check out my forthcoming book to read it. We'll skip over it. Probably though, he's associating the potentials of the atomic age to specific geopolitical formations. So the argument that is widely circulated in the North at this time is that basically while the Americans made the bomb, only socialist states are going to be able to realize the geopolitical and developmental potential of this technology. A good example of this argument, which Dosanbok occasionally uses, appears in this piece here, which is Neanderthals of the atomic age. So guess what the Neanderthals are here. The modern Neanderthals are at all levels of society, hold up in their caves. They have no objections to using the atomic bomb or other weapons of slaughter they have at hand for the profit. At the same time, they fear its use for technological independence. So the Neanderthals of the Americans, right, and the idea is that in effect, the developmental potential, the revolutionary potential of atomic technology will never be realized in a type of liberal or capitalist society. They'll always be pushed back, right, the fossil fuel companies or the iron trusts. They'll always resist the potential of this technology because of their own systemic intrinsic orientation, I guess. So in a sense they're imagining someone like, I don't know, in America you have these senators from like Tennessee or West Virginia, and they're just like, we need coal, we need it, we need it, we need it, we always need it. And they apply any number of levers within the political machines to basically result in an outcome that results in coal consumption. This is their critique as well, that only socialism is going to realize the potential. Integrating it with ideas about political revolution and liberation along those lines. It's one of those things. You get really deep into the archive. You start to like fall in love with your materials. And you're like, look at this image. It's going to be so great to talk about it, and I'll tell you guys about it. You'll laugh, and I'll feel good. They have a lot of ideas about, basically this is a North Korean image. It's like Churchill, because we're in England, you know. I don't know what you call this. We're in the British Isles, UK. We're here. We're in London, right? And this is Churchill. The idea in effect is that basically there are all sorts of ways that within the socialist sphere people managed the creation of atomic technology by the Americans. And one of the ways to manage it is that aforementioned argument to say that they'll never be able to actually use it in a progressive way. The other way is to focus on this idea of kind of like the paper tiger or the inflated threat. The nuclear weapons actually aren't too geopolitically useful. And so we see that sort of demonstrated here that the bomb has no sort of use, that it's kind of just an inflated mannequin of a source of power. So those collection of accounts focusing on liberation are all consistent, at least in their end conclusion, that regardless of the cost, the invention of this new type of technology, the discovery of this new mode of energy is progressive by whichever metric you examine. This is one way of looking at it. Another distinctive way of understanding the emergence of atomic technology at this time is to frame it within the experiences of the recently ended war. So this is where we kind of encounter what's called science war, science war discourse. It finds its origins well before 1945 within the context of the Japanese Empire. Early Japanese accounts of the First World War actually tended to understand that event as a point of an instance of conflict that's determined by science and technology in particular. Science war discourse essentially argued that the world is made up of these actors and states, each of them have individual kind of scientific and technological attributes. In instances of war, it's actually not a question of economies or armies. It's a question of science, science battles. And then the winner is the one with the best science. Right. We find different illustrations of this idea, the one in the middle starting from the 1930s. This is, this is the Science Museum bulletin. The first, sort of, regarding to be the first Korean language popular science magazine also frequently forwarded this view and then a later one from 1945. So a version of this idea that appears in that earlier issue that we're talking about by a really famous popular science writer named Andong Hyuk. The victory of the war is a victory of science. The world's scientists were brought together and nothing spiritual material was spared for the research. This is America's victory and the establishment of the world. So you get the outline of that item. Take it. Give me a second. It's a nice tension today. Otherwise, you know what, I can just send it to you after the talk. So Andong Hyuk, you know, is generally understood to be type of liberal academic, maybe bordering on the conservative. I don't want to put him in a box, but basically he stayed in Seoul and never goes to Korea and continues to write well into the 50s and 60s. But we do have folks who are more aligned with the socialist or Marxist movements at the time. Yuheng Jun is an example. An economist, as a matter of fact, who contributes to the popular science magazine, a science for the masses in 1946. In his accounts as well, though, of the Asia Pacific War, he focuses on the role of science. One look at this unprecedented conflict shows that it shows that it was a science war and that the allies' great victory was won on that front. There's a whole bunch of histories of defeat that emerge after 1945, not surprisingly, right, where Korean authors and translators are grappling with the experience of the Asia Pacific War and trying to come up with accounts for why the war went the way it did. And these also frequently focus on the role played by science in the outcomes. These are really particular works, because on the one hand you'll have forwards that are written by Korean authors, but it's a kind of a bricolage of translations from Japanese texts, from American texts, from Russian texts, all brought together into this kind of meta narrative of the empire's defeat and the allies' victories. This, again, as I said, will fixate on the question of science and technology and the role played there. A lot more to be said about it, but I'll immediately leave it at that. The general logic, though, of a science war argument results in some particular conclusions. One of them we can see right here. It's just like the Americans said, the outcome of Japan's defeat is actually their liberation from oppression and feudalism. And for that reason, the burden of the war is actually happening to Japanese people. So this is kind of a funky statement, but we can think through it a second. So science war is basically qualities. The theory of it, right, is that qualities are duking it out with their individual systems of science. And if you win and I lose, your science is better than mine, but guess what? If I don't get killed, I just enjoy your science, right? And so even the Japanese now have liberation through science available to them. It's a happy thing. It's a very kind of bizarre twist where the former colonizer is also able to enjoy liberation. But it's not a twist in understanding the rule of science and society, right? It's just that, you know, we're looking to new vistas, maybe Washington or Moscow, as a source of developmentalist authority. So we have all these kind of accounts of emancipation, right? Political emancipation, religious emancipation, revolutionary emancipation, emancipation through warfare. The through line in all of it, though, is this consistent discussion of liberation. And in a sense that just, that tracks, right? That makes sense. It's Korea. It's 1945, 46, 47, right? You're living in a society that's defined by the politics of decolonization. And so these ideas about science and technology fit really well with the overall climate and mood of the day. And it's within that broader discursive climate that we have a type of silencing of stories that don't fit. And one of those types of stories are accounts by Korean atomic bomb survivors, right? So, you know, it's one of those things where you'd like, you know it's there somewhere, but you can't find it. So empirically, like we have rough numbers, right? There's 70,000 Koreans in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the days of the attacks and of these 40,000 are killed. 30,000 survivors, 23,000, it's estimated return of Korean peninsula, right? I think about 7,000 go to the north, the rest go to the south. So as a historian, you're kind of looking at those numbers that were generated later on, right? In the 80s and the 90s, we talked about earlier that Korean atomic bomb activists, those movements where they're trying to get into the story, have their voices included. And empirically, we know that they're there, period that I'm looking at, but I can't find their accounts. And you're digging around, you're looking, you assume that it's somewhere. So I don't want to be like, defending. I spent a long time looking for Korean atomic bomb survivor accounts from right between 45 and like 60. And I found two. One of them is super short. And the other one is this piece right here. So maybe they're out there. Maybe one of you will find it. If you do, write a, write a, write a rejoinder. I don't know. A significant one though, a widely circulated one is this one. Paroshima's Last Day. So Paroshima's Last Day was published shortly before the start of the Korean War in Simcheonji, which before the cult was really like widely circulated general leadership magazine, one of the most popular in the pre-Korean war period. And it's an account of the bombings written by a Korean survivor who writes under the pseudonym Student Why. So it's a collection of memories and of scientific accounts dealing with the experience of the bombings. And it's one that both undermines some of the binary logic between colonial power and colonized. And it's one that also questions some of the temporal understandings of liberation. And this guy's not optimistic about the future, to say the least. So the account itself opens with Student Why at home on the morning of the blast. And it kind of follows a lot of the sort of narratives of the atomic bomb that were produced at this time. Sort of attention to the minutiae of a household thrown into disarray, searching for family members, trying to, you know, going from the assumption that your home was destroyed to the realization that the whole city was destroyed. These features are all present in Student Why's account. The kind of collective shock that the bombings solicit, the faces of surprised and shocked neighbors, or the site of a group of soldiers who were caught in a flash with their shirts off. Or the fires that follow the bombs or the fires that follow the bombings or the embers that are the size of fists. All of these populate the early early sections of Student Why's account. And he repeatedly depicts, you know, survivors in kind of grotesque or non humanistic form ways. So he'll often describe, you know, burn victims as looking as this as if they're goblins, or he'll emphasize how the trees are kind of like doing dance macabre. In the story itself, Student Why's kind of moving around a lot. He's in the city for the blast, and then he goes to a nearby village, like many survivors to escape, you know, to find shelter, to find refuge. And then he returns to the city later on. So the narrative follows that movement. Midway through the article is very kind of personal and a reportage type of account does a big shift, and that shift is informed by the arrival of scientists and researchers in the city. So people like those three or four mentioned Korean scientists, this broad pilgrimage by scientists and researchers that also appears in Student Why's story as well. And it's a moment in the account where he starts to talk about radiation. So halfway through the story, he starts to provide information about the effects of radiation, the ways in which radiation burns would affect individuals depending on their proximity to the center of the blast. He provides a broad introduction along those lines, borrowing from the voice of scientific authority to talk about biography itself. We're also at that moment where the question of Japan's defeat emerges. So to quote from the story, university professors from Tokyo and Kyushu, along with chemists, physicists, doctors and newspaper reporters, all gathered in Roschland started to produce interim reports. It was around the time of Japan's render in the end of that tedious war that until then healthy people started to die miserable deaths, radiation poisoning. So it's significant that radiation in the story appears at that moment, that it's at the moment of liberation in Student Why's account, the end of that tedious war, that radiation comes to stage, both through the death of people and also through the arrival of scientific authority to decode radiation, decoded as a mystery. And in Student Why's account radiation is often displayed, not as kind of like this facet of science, but it's written about almost like a person or character itself. So another quote when they're in the village, right, starting on the 28th, a strange dead body started to visit our village. At every home there were people affected by burns and wounds. Yet after coming to the village, even those healthy people fortunate enough not to be harmed by the bombings, randomly began to lose their hair, bleed from within, grow pale and die. So surrounded by death in this very particular way, Student Why starts to take on a kind of affected and frustrated tone, right. By a fluke, we avoided death on that day, but we don't know when we're going to die. Like, we never know when we're going to die though. But the point that he's bringing out here is that while many writers, many of his contemporaries are looking at a future of revolution or liberation of many different brands for lots of atomic bomb survivors, the question is when is the other shoe going to drop. It introduces some like temporal angst that is really at a step with broader culture of the time. And it expresses itself often in the politics that Student Why brings before this morning. So, later in his, later in his, in his piece, what would have happened if Japan had not surrendered from city to city atomic bombs would continually been dropped. Tokyo Osaka Kyoto Kobe. In this way, most lives velocity Tom bomb disease, only an extremely small number of individuals remain through this kind of process of fate that these survivors really bring the nation back to life. It's a funny comment to make in writing in Korean in a Korean journal read by Korean audiences in 1950. What nation is he talking about in that piece. Right. In other parts of the end of student wise account he vocalizes frustration of the lack of government funds for atomic bomb survivors. That's actually Japanese government funds. Right. And a concern about the overall well being not of national subjects but of atomic bomb survivors. It's an unclear type of political position. Right. It's actually one I can't quite make sense of. I'll take your question afterwards. Right. It's not clear to me if it's interpolation or type of voluntary type of solidarity. Student wise still colonial subjects when he's irradiated like that. I never actually don't know what to make of it. But but it stands out clear. And it is very clearly out of step with a broader understanding of post colonial kind of politics where like we've been liberated and the Japanese are now separate, you know, former colonizers separate timbers that faded. So, you know, broadly. Yeah. So probably I guess like, first, like, I'll go ahead and just sort of reiterate that broader point, which is that like, we can understand the, the, the temporary mid century disappearance of Koreans from early atomic bomb accounts as being a bright product of a kind of a core order where the Japanese with new American patrons are really eager to forget about imperial legacies to nationalize the history of the atomic attacks and to understand the new alliance between the United States and Japan along those lines. And it's really clear in a number of different ways that that this is something that was sought after politically pursued it's not my scholarship that's kind of like what the field concluded that was my starting point. It's also clear that there's something else at work domestically within Korea, where there is a culture of aspiration, looking towards the future looking towards the duration that's understanding the past certain ways, and that doesn't provide voice for for folks whose experiences don't fit. Right. I, you know, understand this to be in a sense of lost opportunity. Because, you know, this is the cusp of a cold war culture of developmentalism aspiration for tomorrow is pursued over developmental success is chasing after the laurels of science right so much what characterizes the politics of development the politics of science is politics of the cold war is predicated off of this inflation between science and liberation is a political force of universal power and emancipation. Right. And these individuals are very clearly stating that this is not what's happening. Right. They've been irradiated, like something's wrong with them, and they don't know what they don't know when they are going to die. One kind of broad conclusion that I try to reach in this piece. The other is just the broader salience of early cold war cultures the atomic age and Korea. They all kind of like settle into kind of these leisurely careers of pop side writing, and that kind of seems like oh that's probably where your career is going to end that. Not at all right the individuals who are writing these sorts of things in the late 1940s end up having pretty significant careers of administration by the late 1950s and early 1960s. So, for example, goes on to become foundational in the establishment of North Korea's sort of institutionalized atomic research institutes right. He's often in the 1990s he was referred to as the father of the North Korean nuclear weapons program. Likewise pop to say after writing kind of translating David Deets is worth in saying all this kind of wacky stuff about like, you know, atomic utopianism, he goes on as well to to head up the South Korean atomic research Institute that's established in the late 50s as well. The ideas that are formulating that are in a percolating within print culture of Korea in the post liberation period also, you know, stretched beyond it, and can maybe for those of you are not interested in any of this stuff and just interesting kind of brought you political questions can be helpful in framing how we think about the issue of nuclear proliferation and created today right. It's plugging into a much deeper and complex history of science and liberation. It's not just simply sort of like political actors waiting up one morning and deciding like I want to build a nuclear bomb like what what what can we do to make that happen. So this is this is this is one of the kind of broader, broader conclusions that I can reach my work. So, you know, there's probably more that could have been said at certain points but this is I think you could put to wrap it up. And so I thank you for your attention, and you have any questions you might have. Okay, time for questions and so on. Just gonna I might station myself over here in case there are any questions from the. Right, so yes, this is the first question for you. Well, I don't need from the problem to. Yeah. Yeah. Did you get it? I have two questions. One is when after the bombs were exploited, the Yankees are using special differentiating the perpetrators from Bolivia and it's Brazilian. And they were claiming that people who died simply died from the bomb blast. It was an Australian journalist Wilfrid, the convergent, who actually got into the devastated area and was seen the the the symptoms are the dreadful symptoms of these people and he managed to get into a breast converse when he returned to Tokyo to denounce, you know, the lies that were being told. So my first question is, when did the knowledge of this special way of death reach Korea? First question. The second question is about the Japanese surrender. In your talk, you mentioned that, you know, the bombs were dropped and then they surrendered. But the Japanese actually offered to surrender beforehand on worse terms than they were eventually offered. And the conclusion that many people have is that the ones who dropped as a warning towards the Soviet Union at the time was an ally. I know the other I know more general point talking about one of the more general themes of your talk. And I've just come up from Slovakia in every town almost every village in Slovakia. There are memorials to the Red Army and the two liberated countries from analysis and the Party Sands who also nationalising against the Nazis. And I tried with 10 more times which is true that the war was not one nearly by technology but by the people who gave their lives in millions. Oh yeah. So I should disaggregate my kind of view of the science war from what they're talking about. So I also agree that basically wars aren't decided by scientific prowess. Vietnam War would be a great illustration at that point. So it's simply a broader assumption though about the relationship between science and geopolitics. And then importantly the relationship between the nation and science. So the assumption that basically like oh Canada is a country and in the same way that Canada has an army there's Canadian science. This thing called Canadian science. Which is of course absurd right like scientists scientific knowledge even in place like North Korea if you look at journals from the late 50s right you go to their footnotes you see the degree of cross pollination that those scientists are engaging in the types of circulation knowledge. So I'm with you with that. The earlier sort of questions about the decision to use the bombs and the politics around that fast library of literature on it. And of course like the, you know, I think what what is pretty. Pretty clear is that basically they are like it's in a sense the decision was made in like 41 right like when they started right they just it's like this machine starts to turn. And you know that there's no stopping it like it like any food look at the logic of the aerial bomb like the aerial warfare campaigns that were already set out by 42 and 43 that that it's sort of taking on a life of its own. It's maybe beyond geopolitical intervention. And he's a first world war. Maybe we're different from the same. Well, the final question though about the empirical question about radiation, like when do people know what. So that that's actually a great question one that I've struggled with, basically sooner than we thought much sooner than generally accepted. So one of the reasons why atomic bomb survivors don't want to talk about their experience actually doesn't have anything to do with a broader sort of assumptions about a ratio that I'm suggesting. So they felt people wouldn't want to marry them because they get home and there's like I was in Russia during the bomb dropping that this concern that they wouldn't be able to find spouses. Right, so these these sorts of dimensions that are already percolating at the level of the village in 1946 there's rumors about Brady rice circulating in the peninsula. The Americans have their own rumors that there's a Japanese atomic bomb in like one time. And then the Russians got it. So the Russians have a bomb because of the cream like. Yeah, yeah, the Kansas City Gazette or something breaks the story right so you have all this kind of broad angst and anxiety that's connected to weapons to radiation. And this is all preface by understandings about what this technology is going to do. Right. The first article about an atomic bomb that I ever read was published in like 1939. When it's theory. And so the ground is kind of set for that sort of. Any other question. Yeah, one question there and then perhaps if you have a question. Yeah, so we could take maybe take like two or three just a quick question. Yeah. So my grandfather was actually a general in the British Army and he was stationed in the Allied operation of Japan. And I'm a number of points coming to play in relation to the references that you gave just with regard to the letters. I'm not going to be telling other cities that would be atomized if the Japanese didn't soon. Is this actually documentable in reference to the allies and the reason I asked that is because there was evidence to suggest that Nagasaki and Hiroshima were uniquely dispelled of any precisely because they had been here for atomization. And of course, that wouldn't have worked if they would have then carried on atomizing the rest of Japan because they wouldn't have been getting the science and the science is also for the scientific idea is also reinforced by some of the kind of Churchillian references because you know there's suggestions that he would imagine that the Japanese had some kind of biological specification that was radically different to the rest of us. And the other part which is kind of connected is also that during the Allied occupation, the very notion of having medical conditions or any kind of biological effects of radiation or atomization is precluded because it's against press code to actually have any information and describe your condition. Anybody who wanted to describe their condition or their circumstances only could only do it retrospectively they couldn't do it. To give an example of this shocking example, the example which I've never met a single person who knows but this is documented in the Hiroshima archives. A girl who was about eight years of age was traveling to school on the train in Hiroshima and as she stepped on the train, her brother was a step ahead of her and she watched him being captured by the flash and watched him melt away. And in her letters, she asked the question she's still wondering and by this time she's willing to her adulthood. She's still wondering whether at the time when he was melting away, was he feeling any pain. And of course she couldn't address that issue at the time because it was unlawful. So I'm going to, there's a lot to say about this, so that we can kind of get a core. Think of that because there's a lot to follow on that question. Yes, yeah. I had a similar sort of question. It was kind of slightly, maybe slightly kind of like, have you considered, I mean, I'm sure you've considered everything because you've been hunting through the archives, but you know, Korean accounts, Japanese, there are none of those. I mean, that's quite astonishing, really, but there are no Korean accounts in Japanese. That's kind of a similar question. The last question is kind of like how this way that this is kind of like official discourse of science and liberation when I think like in your case you mentioned like in student wise account that those affected by the radiation did want to look to science to like also, you know, like why there were something for radiation poisoning and like on the same point kind of like following the view, I'm kind of wondering like, you know, because of like this dominant nationalist discourse that was kind of like denouncing collaborators, especially with the Japanese that would have prevented publications or writings by people like student wide except in like magazines like the shinchon to magazine so like this is the like possibility of looking into like non-archival sources like or street interviews. Yeah, so the description might work, we'll work our way back. So basically, I'm actually not convinced that student wide is in Korea when he's writing this, I think he might be signing to Japanese or Korean just in Japan itself. That's actually quite impossible. I don't know, I can't figure that out. And in terms of kind of proliferation of accounts. So it's there eventually there's a ton of announcements that are produced both by folks in Japan, a lot of the political interventions that we're talking about in the 60s are in 70s are led by by Koreans in Japan. The, the accounts though that tend to be more broadly translated and circulated or produced a little bit later. And I was really looking for things that were produced in the kind of context of this broader conversation that's circulating. And so I think, you know, the sources like diaries or letters where maybe is there, if I could find it or if I was harder working or something I could get it maybe, but it wouldn't be circulating in the way that I wanted to see kind of circulation of knowledge. And kind of this broader popular in this broader popular culture. I think they're probably they're out there, but I wasn't able to go down. Maybe that kind of captures the question about narratives by Koreans who are in Japan. But it maybe leads into a broader question of just censorship. So there is like just a ton of writing in Japan about the experience of the bombings and it's automatically having political implications. It's interesting to see the ways that the Americans censored this and often shaped the contours of the discourse of bombings, which they did in a number of ways. But the one that stands out most clearly to me is through paper allocation of paper. So generally when I think about censorship it's like, okay, right, get up my marker and just like, you know, cross stuff out. But the way that the Americans controlled this course was this huge paper supply throughout the Japanese Empire already really 1942 and 1943 and it continues after the post liberation period. The Americans roll in with just like their stuff, got a lot of it, including paper, and they choose which kind of works are going to go into mass publication. So it's not always the case that these narratives that maybe are telling stories that are highly critical of the bombings, don't make it to press. It's just that they don't make it to press in a considerable amount to shape a popular discourse. That's certainly the case with Takashi Nagai and his account. Why did this happen? Divine will. Like, we really mad really bad during the war and we should like pay reference. That was clearly supported by the Americans through allocation of paper, going into translation. So that that's, yeah, and maybe it doesn't get every every nail that's brought up by your question. Yeah, more questions, please. Yes. Just a really quick one. I'm sure you mentioned kind of, and I just missed it, but what year was student wise writing published in 2015. This is right before the war started. It's in a special issue about the atomic age. So it's mostly translated text pieces by basically science writers, which are getting not not uncommon. I am the, the, the, in my own research, I think the frequency of this force on this new body of science and technology was a lot more of it than I expected. And the creativity translation stood out that kind of mixing translations, ending them putting in a lot of editorial oversight. Some of the earliest introductions to radiation followed the tests on the kidney tests. Yeah, that's a great question. I don't know how soon my story itself would have changed after 49. I think the 49 event is interesting because actually, well, it's like, it's like a moment of fate. Right. So Truman never thought that Truman didn't believe it. Famously, I think even into his retirement, he sort of said like, I'm not even sure they even have his weapons, right. The 49 tests very famously is announced by the Americans, right, because they're doing flights between Hokkaido and Alaska, and they have these Geiger counters and they're picking up isotopes and they come to this conclusion. So Truman announces it even before Moscow. And so this is in a sense kind of the big coup or one of these big sort of PR events in the Cold War, but Truman's message is actually no news to report here. Right. We knew this was going to happen all along. It's not a surprise. So the early introductions to that term Cold War in Korea come well before 1949, and it's predicated off the belief that if the Soviets don't have this weapon now, this will happen. So I don't think it actually that year itself changed the discourse. I'm curious about so all this past Korean science magazines, to what extent were they political in the sense that they would say, would they say things like Korea should have nuclear weapons because then they won't be attacked or should we, you know, be more different with the US or something like that. How political are you? I always forget this. Everyone thinks that they should have nuclear weapons. Even in Korea today, South Korea today, like the idea of having nuclear weapons is not profoundly unpopular. I think it's always bold as a pretty like, not a bad idea. Oh, kind of delicate issue. In the 1940s and late 1940s, early 1950s, the idea of having nuclear weapons was often suggestive question of sovereignty, the viability of national sovereignty itself without these weapons, how can we ever stand on two feet. It's funny because like Churchill thought the same thing. It was just like, oh man, we need to get this immediately. So, in terms of that specific question, there's a kind of a broad consensus that for the nation to basically prosper and succeed, they need this new body of science and technology, they need some science and technology. In terms of the question of politics, it's very tricky. There are so, yeah, they're all very political. I think there were, in the immediate 1945, post-1945 context, you have like the People's Committees, right, and there's People's Committees that form in laboratories and in research institutes, and they start to produce these kinds of things. And some of them take different political orientations, right, and engage in politics in different ways. Some of them just move north wholesale. And there's a body that also basically take the most sort of political position of all, which is to say like, we're not politically engaged, we have no interest in politics at all, right, which of course the ones that survive into 1949 and 48. But the notable thing about the kind of pop science literature at this time is that it kind of explodes inside of Seoul. And then by 1948 as the Civil War violence starts to really take root, it emerges in the north. And so you kind of have this blossoming of writing in the south and it diminishes and then this reemergence of writing in the north. And there's authors that are starting in one place and moving to the other. You knew that. It's just a quick comment. It's interesting this thing about countries wanting to have nuclear weapons. We sort of, I think we kind of forget that we live in the post-NPTA, the age of bomb proliferation, which becomes a thing that is normal, right, and that comes from late 60s, 70s. So many countries had a nuclear weapons program. Switzerland had a nuclear weapons program. I assume it was fairly advanced. Italy had a nuclear weapons program. I mean, you could probably count, you know, I think some of the Scandinavian countries as well, but we live in this sort of later period of the NPT in which sort of, in which the idea that there's a club of only a few countries that should have nuclear weapons than everyone else does and it's kind of the norm. So there's a nuclear proliferation of historically grounded understanding of North Korean nuclear proliferation has to have that in mind that, you know, you'll be looking at a student, like, solar day, like student, student society, like magazine from like 1949. And they'll have like a double cartoon, right, of campus life, what's happening. And in the corner, there'll be this like crestfallen student working on an atomic bomb project, right, as a joke, right, but the idea of proliferation isn't something that pops into Kim Il-sung's head one day, right, it's kind of everywhere. This idea, like for us to be sovereign, we need to have it. There's these great rumors that like Korea is like an uranium rich country that that he could be uniquely endowed with in nuclear weapons. So it's just super broad question like so the climate around like scientific racism is kind of like all centered around like atomic technology. And a lot of that isn't about like nuclear weapons necessarily, right. A lot of this science is about like the other uses of the atom, like how much of that is actually published in scientific magazines, obviously, but how much of that was actually founded? Like how much of that actually came into being later on? Yeah, I mean, well, Korea has a very active power acceptor energy comes from it. But the, yeah, I mean, the broad kind of focus and a lot of these works is energy. And I didn't really mention in the top but for Gil Sung-ro, it's not, he's in North Korea, he's identified with Marxist politics. But if you like get into the fine print of how he understands historical transformation, he doesn't think it's a class struggle. He thinks it's like energy revolutions from coal to oil to electricity to atomic power. And it's linear and it's techno deterministic. I mean, in the short term, the realization of all these potentials by the late 1950s is mediated through Cold War relationships. So the, you know, whatever types of, you know, irradiated fruit or like the cutting edge x-ray machines are all coming either through relationships with the Americans or the Union or within those broader Cold War spheres. And that's where you see that tension over science. There's contest over in development. Thanks. Slightly like off piece sort of comment or all that just came into my mind when I was when I was listening to you, which is, you know, how much the bottom line is, is just returning entirely to the science or thing. I guess the narrative I haven't really thought about it, you know, but it's entirely that. Yeah. The Second World War was determined by a bunch of clever guys in, you know, in the U.S. And a bunch of clever guys in Germany fighting it out. Yeah. And and the clever guys in the U.S. Many of them happened to be exiles anyway, but they were the ones who won out in that competition. And it's just the science. That's that's one way of reading. Yeah, indeed. So in like, in so far as it's kind of cool for like a big movie to be made about the thing you're researching, it's fun to watch. But in so far as you're interested in historiography of science, it's it's a bit of a tough pill to swallow, because it's not just that it's basically focused on the individual intervention of one guy. It's within science historiography, you kind of have, it's rough, it's kind of rough already, but there's the idea of like little science or big science. Big science is defined by kind of corporate or state capital heavy institutional heavy interventions in research. And then little science is kind of like, you know, these Edison like people tinkering around that they're like, in their workshops. And it's sort of project that epitomizes the shift from little science to big science. Again, this is really broad strokes. It's actually kind of, but that shift is the Manhattan project. So for the story to be told about the size of intervention of often higher as the sort of unique misunderstood genius is is like the kind of really historiographically off the mark. And also conveying some of the politics that you want to say. And also it was it was criticized precisely for the erasure of Japanese victims. I mean, they let alone great things, but it was it was criticized quite a lot. And again, it's just a really retrograde. Feels like a really retrograde depiction of the whole topic. Yeah. And so, you know, in the early chapter of the Cold War in those first years there's this broad idea about scarcity. There's not a lot of weapons. And there's this idea that there's actually not a lot of uranium. It's like this real proper rare earth. And so the green radiance by were like hot news for a short period of time, because they thought they couldn't find it anywhere else in the world except for like Canada and like, you know, parts of parts of parts of Africa and then the understanding of the weapon was framed more by that broader campaign of aerial warfare. And the aerial bombings and the violence that prefaced the usage of the weapons itself, which is completely unbridled. I have a last opportunity for any final question before we wrap up. I take it everyone is as good as that supply. So let's let's let's make their case again.