Among the elegies for the inhabitants of Hiroshima, there exists an especially arresting and resonant example authored by an Australian poet. Reflecting on the impact of the blast on one of its young victims, Bruce Dawe recounted the morning of August 6, 1945, when a "single plane loosed a single bomb" and the city below — but also the very prospect of posterity — "became suddenly phantasmal". A suspected "human shadow" left by the vaporisation of a person at Hiroshima. ( Wikimedia Commons: Matsuhige Yoshito ) When humans first split atoms, they also split history. "The atomic bomb," wrote its...