Graphic Science: Trinity and the Art of the Atomic Bomb

This essay argues that Jonathan Fetter-Vorm’s Trinity: A Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb (2012) iconizes nuclear science in specific ways. In the first section the essay examines modes of visuality that gives us a view of the scientist, the science and the contexts in which the two operate. The second section examines how the text unpacks a set of values, including those around politics, diplomacy and war, that determine and are determined by the science unleashed at Trinity. In the final section, the essay focuses on the political symbolism of the bomb. Jonathan Fetter-Vorm’s Trinity: A Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb (2012) demonstrates an interesting use of the medium of the graphic novel to study the political, social and scientific history of the Manhattan Project and the first atomic bomb. Candida Rifkin argues in her reading of Trinity and accompanying graphic scientific biographies such as Jim Ottaviani et al’s Fallout: J. Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard and the Political Science of the Atom Bomb (2001): these works construct the figure of the scientist as a visual icon who is also a seeing subject. I propose that we consider scientific graphic biography as a specific genre that installs a biographical eye (as opposed to the auto/biographical I) to convey the complex relationship between empirical knowledge and affective experience that shapes lives caught between science and politics. (Rifkind 2) Rifkind’s focus is on the portrait of Oppenheimer, on his ‘mythologization’ (7). Oppenheimer was the icon of the atomic age and images of the scientist as hero abounded, even during his ‘dark years’ at the hands of the US government. Instances of such iconization, writes David Hecht, allowed people to see him as something other than just a scientist. Interestingly, such contextualization did not stem from an anti-science impulse—Oppenheimer remained very much a scientific icon. Perhaps paradoxically, however, his fans needed to sense a persona outside of science in order to admire him as a scientist. (945) However, Trinity, I suggest, iconizes science as much as it iconizes the scientist, as the present essay seeks to demonstrate. By ‘iconize’ I mean lending a larger-than-life, quasi-mythic status meaning to the scientist and the science. I take iconization to include the semiotic arrangements of texts such as Trinityi, with Oppenheimer depicted as the gaunt, obsessive brooding, solitary ‘hero’, akin to the Romantic and/or Byronic, in many panels. But I also use iconize to signal the political understanding (by America, primarily) of the central role (to be) played by nuclear science itself in the remaking of the world order. The link between a ‘pure’ science project to the political symbolism of the A-bomb that Fetter-Vorm highlights, especially when depicting the American concerns around the Second World War and the putative effect of the bomb, and the subsequent Japanese surrender, are significant geopolitical events that invest the science of the A-bomb with enormous influence and value. It is, in other words, no longer a scientificlaboratory fact but a geopolitical celebrity product and effect – and this new value-adding is the iconization in Trinity. This essay moves from FetterVorm’s visual imaging of science that iconizes nuclear physics and technology, turns to the unpacking of values in the process of visual representation of science and concludes with a brief account of the political symbolism with which Fetter-Vorm ends his ‘graphic history of the first atomic bomb.’ Before turning to the representation of science in the work, a few words regarding the genre of graphic scientific biography are in order. Candida Rifkin argues that Oppenheimer’s representation in Trinity captures the essential ‘unknowability’ of the man, and therefore makes him the ideal subject for graphic biography (3). She also notes that Oppenheimer is drawn with the ‘almost gaunt physical features that fit with inherited visual icons of scientific genius’ (4). Contributing to the image of the isolated, hard-working genius is the separation of the personal from the professional, the private from the public in Fetter-Vorm’s representation. Fetter-Vorm embeds Oppenheimer within the intellectual history of the atom bomb. Throughout the text we are shown laboratories and classrooms where a large team of deeply involved – and bright – physicists, scientists, mathematicians discuss the technicalities of building a bomb. We are given a history of nuclear physics – the Curies, Rutherford, Chadwick and others. He draws our attention to the intellectual history within which the work of Oppenheimer may be situated and, except for occasional remarks about the exiled Jewish scientists, he does not give us insights into the personal lives of the people involved in the making of the bomb. The text therefore approximates to the nineteenth-century model of scientific biography. Patricia Fara has argued that Nineteenth-century scientific biographers separated intellectual histories from personal lives, and created heroic narratives to establish disciplinary forefathers ...[while] modern biographers and artists often seek to integrate the private and public, the emotional and rational facets of a subject (Fara 87). However, Fetter-Vorm’s although focus is clearly the bomb and the Manhattan Project. While a touch of the heroic is definitely an aspect of FetterVorm’s depiction, the man is subsumed within the biography of the science project and the larger social, political and economic conditions in which the bomb was built, and of course, deployed. Understandably, since the focus of the work is the science of the bomb, the visual component of the narrative lays greater emphasis on this rather than on the individuals. The ‘Visuality of Scientificity’ [1] Adapting the work of Bruno Latour and others, Candida Rifkin argues that the harder the science the more it depends on and demands visual explanations (17). Images are the ‘consensual visual representation of the thing believed to have taken place’ (17). Oddly, however, this visual representation of the atomic bomb and the Manhattan Project, begins not with science but with the scientist, Oppenheimer, who, driving towards the test site (Trinity), enlightens his vehicle’s driver on an ancient myth: of Prometheus. The image of the tower in which the atom bomb is placed is an image, one could say, of contemporary science. But this is preceded by the image of Zeus cursing Prometheus who, chained to the mountain, is having his liver eaten by a bird. The entire top half of this page (3) is taken up by the visual representation of the myth. Following this, we see Oppenheimer toss out the remnants of his cigarette and saying: ‘he [Prometheus] gave humans knowledge for which we weren’t ready’ (3). In the last panel on this page we see the tower that science built, and the text box that seems to label the tower states: ‘another ancient secret was about to be revealed’ (3). Several things arrest us on this page’s visual dynamics. First, it clearly aligns Oppenheimer with the mythic Prometheus and anticipates via the myth, the punishment that awaits the unraveler of the (forbidden) knowledge of the atom bomb: ostracized, ridiculed and even rejected by the power (US government/Zeus) for his science, a science for which humanity is not, ostensibly, ready. The juxtaposition of myth and science on the same page therefore forces us into the proleptic, or oracular, reading of the science and the scientist: this is the fate that awaits him, Oppenheimer. Second, it enlists antiquity and mystery in describing the present-day science: the ‘ancient secret’ is at once fire and the atom bomb. Through this Fetter-Vorm mythologizes and romanticizes science itself: it is a field of inquiry that unpacks ancient mysteries. It is not ‘new’ science, but a science that enables us today to finally reveal the world’s oldest mechanisms of power and energy. Third, the two segments – the Prometheus myth and the atomic tower – are divided in terms of the page’s layout by the image of the vehicle in which Oppenheimer is travelling towards Trinity. The roof of the jeep appears to be either aflame or covered in cloud, roiling down from the abode of the Gods. The Zeus location and that of Prometheus has clouds as their border, but this seems to grow tongues of flame that extend over Oppenheimer’s vehicle. The image is striking because it offers us a mediating link between the ancient myth and contemporary science: fire. Prometheus and Oppenheimer are both drawn on the same side of the page, in a nearly straight line, positioning Oppenheimer as a figurative descendant of Prometheus. Yet again this brings together myth and science: the mythic hero and the scientific hero are of the same lineage, and on the same side, for, as Spencer Clark has argued, the manner in which an author positions the actors vis-á-vis the historical events helps us, the readers, determine the constraints placed on an actor’s agency (2013: 502-03). By locating Prometheus and then Oppenheimer at the centre of the image and its action, Fetter-Vorm clearly aligns the two under the category of historically heroic figures. One final point in this representation of myth and science has to do with the flung-out cigarette. As the cigarette spins away into the clear white space of the New Mexican desert, we see the end is still aglow. I see this innocuous object as central to the page’s rhetoric. Examining the role of objects in visual representations, Joanna Woodall (2012) has argued that even as the human protagonists, frame these objects, the objects frame the human interactions. The seemingly unimportant object in the frame, or even at the margins offers us a way of interpreting the scene unfolding (Woodall). If the tongues of flame on the roof of Oppenheimer’s car serve as a mediating link, the cigarette with its glowing tip points to the human productio