Burning Conscience: The Case of the Hiroshima Pilot Claude Eatherly

A collection of correspondence between Claude Eatherly, a former air force pilot, and Günther Anders, a German philosopher.

Eatherly was the pilot who gave the all-clear for the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima: an action the implications of which he had not known at the time. Returning from the mission and learning of the devastating impact of the atomic bomb Eatherly was unable to calmly accept his role. Though he was treated as a hero in the press, Eatherly was morally distraught over his actions and felt that he could not silently accept the accolades.

Over the course of some 71 letters Anders and Eatherly struggled with the problem of taking moral responsibility in a time when ethics were the last thing that most people seemed to want to discuss. Part of what fascinated Anders about Eatherly – and prompted the former to contact the latter – was precisely this way in which Eatherly sought to take responsibility for something which he easily could have ignored as having been a matter of “just following orders.”

Burning Conscience is a fascinating and troubling book – not simply because it provides a first-hand account of an oft untold moral story in the aftermath of World War II, but because the matters being discussed by Anders and Eatherly are as important today as they were during the lives of the correspondents.— Lib. Ship.