Like a bolt of divine vengeance, the pinnacle of human particle-physics achievement descended toward a large city at terminal velocity. In a matter of moments, more than 60,000 souls were erased.

To those present in Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, it must have seemed less like an act of war and more like the cruelty of a spiteful god.

But it was not divine punishment. It was a vindictive act of man — against humanity.

Memorializing the Hibakusha Experience encourages those who live in a world still breathing in those ashes to pause and remember the human element of the story.

The exhibit “offers a timely reminder of the extreme actions governments will endorse in moments of intolerance, when dehumanizing perceived enemies is accepted without protest,” Ora Hirsch Pescovitz, president of Oakland University, said.

If the reward for watering the garden of injustice is these fruits, perhaps the world needs an eternal drought.

Walking into the exhibit is deeply uncomfortable.

In popular culture, the mushroom cloud is almost always viewed from above. “Godzilla.” “Oppenheimer.” Fallout. This is the mushroom cloud that is remembered: the triumphant, postwar, mid-century ball of hellfire. A symbol rendered abstract by distance.

It is an unjust depiction.

To those who were most affected, the mushroom cloud looked nothing like that. It was a tower of smoke that simply went up — a towering monument to slaughter.

A chilling photograph taken at Ujina, one of the islands that make up Hiroshima, roughly 20 minutes after Little Boy detonated, pulls the mind into a different space. It triggers a kind of empathy from hell.

It is often asked how Japanese culture and media developed such uniquely dark ideas. “Berserk.” “The Ring.” Junji Ito’s entire career. Resident Evil. Silent Hill. Even The Legend of Zelda is often rich in post-apocalyptic and nihilistic lore.

Death, decay, despair and rot — present even in a children’s game. Why?

This exhibit lays out the receipts for how those cultural instincts were purchased.

Hiroshima represents the kind of shared trauma that, historically, civilizations have built religions around. In the modern age, however, it has created a memetic itch — a compulsion to confront humanity’s ability to manifest hell on Earth.

“This is the human experience of a very violent human story,” Chiaoning Su, director of the Barry M. Klein Center for Culture and Globalization, said. “I am very happy that, 80 years removed from World War II, we can bring this example of human suffering to the university, and all share the feeling of ‘never again.’”

The bomb represents all four horsemen of the apocalypse at once.

This exhibit traces the footprints left behind by each of those wretched stallions.

War gallops in first, showcased by scorched artifacts — human-made cockroaches that endured anything. Relics that survived hellfire bearing scars. The objects themselves have become scars.

Pestilence follows, breathing a long radioactive sigh as its hooves strike Oakland’s campus. The ground itself becomes poison. Its accounting is laid bare in rotting flesh and the nightmarish rashes of radiation sickness.

The so-called “Hiroshima head,” infamous for appearing in nightmares, inspired this metaphor.

Famine gazes merrily upon his brother’s destruction, carrying scales and weighing the ever-diminishing calories consumed by emaciated figures throughout the exhibit. The land, the water and all of nature’s bounty became contaminated. Black, oily rain tracked nuclear fallout through every ecosystem it touched.

Finally, Death rides in, wielding his sword. Photographs capture the full desecration of the human form — imagery more fitting for “Hellraiser” than a history textbook.

DNA itself, the code that makes us human, was violated by radiation. Death did not stop with those present at the detonation. Even descendants of the Hibakusha carry its grim touch in their veins.

The Hiroshima-Nagasaki Peace Mask Project stands as a macabre manifestation of this legacy.

By capturing the faces of three generations of Hibakusha and their diaspora, it demonstrates that long after the bodies are removed from the streets, nuclear detonation continues to send shockwaves through time — waves whose duration remains unknown, but terrifyingly long.

This is the first time the exhibit has ever left Wilmington College. While housed there, it served as an emotional catalyst for the Peace Resource Center, founded in 1975 by Barbara Reynolds to promote peace-oriented education within the American curriculum. Its board has included figures such as Noam Chomsky and John Hersey.

For decades, the Peace Resource Center has acted as a beacon against nuclear deterrence culture, lending resources that document the bomb’s havoc to institutions nationwide. In doing so, it has carried the “never again” message more meaningfully than slogans ever could.

It is now the responsibility of the Oakland University community — and the surrounding community — to absorb that message. It is a unique privilege to examine this level of destruction so thoroughly.

In an increasingly tense and multicultural world, the specter of nuclear war looms larger than ever. All it would realistically take is a limited nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan for billions to die deaths too horrific to belong anywhere but the underworld. This is considered a best-case scenario.

Does anyone honestly believe that if satellites detected nuclear weapons airborne, the world’s great powers would sleep?

That no colonel would sweat in a bunker?

That no paranoid statesman would panic?

Game theory does not support this optimism.

A problem gambler who wants to keep his home must eventually learn when to leave the table. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the table. For more than 80 years, nuclear deterrence has been a poker game rich in bluffing, tension and hatred. If every player decided to show their hand at once — the most likely outcome under rudimentary game theory — the table would be flipped.

The original ending of this article read: “Otherwise, the whole world would be this exhibit.”

That undersells the reality.

Weapons have grown unimaginably in scale and number. To compare what would follow to this exhibit is an insult both to those who built these weapons and to those who have fought to abolish them.

The world will not become this exhibit.

It will be far worse.

There will not be a soul —
or even a cat —
left to curate it.

The exhibit will run at Wilson Hall through April 5.

See it. It’s free. Missing it only taxes our potential futures.