Nation Topics - Hiroshima | The Nation

Discusses the views of people from New York City with regards to what should happen to the site where the World Trade Towers once stood. Modernist buildings; Political need to appease survivors; Liberalism of master builders; Failure of urban planning; Starkness of the Hiroshima Memorial Peace Park; Mourning in civic spaces.

The article focuses on the book "Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada." Most of the poems were originally published in respected journals, their fictional authorship undiscovered, as the work of Hiroshima survivor Araki Yasusada. The book borrows modes, images and forms from both Japanese and Western literatures, complicating presumptions concerning its authorship. Yasusada proposes a radical and a contemporary response to the worst human atrocities and the absolutely unnecessary nuclear bombing of the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the U.S. military forces.

The article focuses on the book "Hiroshima's Shadow: Writings on the Denial of History and the Smithsonian Controversy," edited by Kai Bird and Lawrence Lifschullz. It highlights that India and Pakistan both have nuclear bombs now, and the crowds there have affirmed that it is a necessity and a passage into national military adulthood. The existing nuclear powers have however reacted with dismay. The book focuses on what nuclear weapons actually do when they are used and their long-lasting moral damage. It quotes the first criticisms that began to appear within days of the Hiroshima bombing . According to the book the use of nuclear weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in the war against Japan.

Indeed, the world's first nuclear weapons test was conducted by the United States in the desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, just twenty-one days before Hiroshima. Twenty-four years later, the author finds himself standing on the campus of the University of Hiroshima with Shoko Itoh, a distinguished Thoreau scholar. Itoh looks up at the Science Department Building, one of the few structures to have survived the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. From the old campus of the University of Hiroshima just a few kilometers away from the epicenter of the A-bomb.

Presents several letters to the editor. Information about Hiroshima's army population; Information about U.S. military planners and their civilian leaders; Political situation of the U.S. in 1995.

The facilities where the atomic bomb was built--the entire enterprise and its finished product--existed in a mysterious realm outside the known, visible world. The word secret means "kept from knowledge or observation" and is derived from words meaning "to separate" or "divide off." To be privy to the secret of the atomic bomb was to share in a privileged mystery. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, however, it became more a matter of concealment. Secrecy and concealment are used almost interchangeably, but the latter suggests more active steps to suppress information. It is derived from the idea of covering, hiding and "the underworld."

The article discusses two books: "The Myths of August: A Personal Exploration of Our Tragic Cold War Affair With the atom," by Stewart L. Udall, and "Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939-1956," by David Holloway. Lacking access to classified information, but making a careful study of every memoir and published recollection of all the principals, Udall proves that the decision to drop the atomic bomb on civilians flowed inexorably from the policy of secrecy surrounding every aspect of the development of the bomb. With the end of the cold war and the access to hitherto secret Soviet records, David Holloway has provided an equally riveting account of the origins of the Soviet atomic bomb that demonstrates that it was Hiroshima that impelled the Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin to make the enormous social investment to create a nuclear industry of the magnitude of the Manhattan Project.

The article presents updates from the U.S., as of February 20, 1995. The extraordinary expansion of the U.S. prison system over the past decade represents the regressive socialism of the right: the only expanding public housing, the only growing public sector employment. The resulting prison archipelago is both vaster and more severely overcrowded than is generally acknowledged. According to another update, on January 30, I. Michael Heyman, the Smithsonian Institution's newly appointed secretary, announced the museum's unconditional surrender to a coalition of veterans groups and politicians on the exhibition of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.

The article presents information on various events in New York. Speakers Robert Jay Lifton and Betty Jean Lifton discuss policy effects 50 years after Hiroshima/Nagasaki, Japan, on February 18, 1995, at Westbeth Community Center, Manhattan, New York. Bread and Puppet Theater performs its new puppet play, "Mr. Budhoo's Letter of Resignation From the IMF," from February 8-12 at Manhattan. Bread and Puppet Theater presents this show as a response to the 50th anniversary of the founding of the International Monetary Fund.

This article focuses on the book "James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age," by James G. Hershberg. The book presents biography of James Bryant Conant, Harvard's president from 1933 to 1953 and the man most responsible for ushering America into the atomic era. He vigorously defended the atomic bombing of Hiroshima but supported international control of the bomb after the war. He lobbied for universal military service but fought against the building of the hydrogen bomb and opposed atomic energy plants as not worth the proliferation risk.