Atomic bombing of Hiroshima appears in the narrator’s argument not as a narrated scene but as a measure of public, mass violence against which he contrasts private sexual transgression. The passage establishes the event’s moral significance in his comparison, while giving no account of its circumstances or claiming that he witnessed it.

Appearance in the Argument

The narrator names Hiroshima alongside Buchenwald, firing squads, police torture, forced-labor camps, and starving millions. The list gathers distinct forms of suffering into a single counterweight to the condemnation of incest: he argues that these large-scale harms are far more consequential than sexual aberrations. Hiroshima therefore functions as a brief but forceful reference to violence on a scale that, in his view, makes sexual morality an inadequate measure of good and evil.

Nuclear Violence and Moral Scale

The argument returns to nuclear danger through the narrator’s denunciation of scientists who support further nuclear explosions and help prepare what he calls genetic poisoning and atomic terror. He contrasts this public danger with sexual behavior, which he describes as shaking the bed rather than the world. The distinction is not an account of the bombing itself; it is the narrator’s polemical ranking of harms, in which the threat posed by scientific and political power eclipses private sexual conduct.

Limits of the Reference

The passage supplies no date, location details beyond Hiroshima, participants, sequence of events, or aftermath. It does not describe the bombing or present the narrator as an eyewitness. Its evidence concerns how the event is used in his moral reasoning: Hiroshima stands among examples of catastrophic violence invoked to challenge the assumption that sexual conduct is the ultimate criterion of good and evil.