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More than 50 years after the Enola Gay dropped its atomic bomb, Hiroshima continues to evoke a powerful response in the United States. By attempting to keep the public insulated from horrific imagery, Washington officials orchestrated one of the most important responses: they encouraged Americans to forget. Forgetting is a crucial act that requires as much organization, determination, and psychic energy as remembering. Forgetting is rarely an accident. And official forgetting was initiated in the immediate aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the days that followed, a Japanese film crew documented the impact of the bombing on hospital buildings, transportation vehicles, rice fields, and, of course, on people. But the film was shipped to the U.S. classified "Top Secret," and locked away for 22 years until it was finally pried loose. An official history, focusing on the alleged necessity of using the bomb to bring about the end of World War II, was quickly constructed, and the mythologies connected with that campaign also contributed to the process of forgetting the true reasons why the bomb was used.
For the entire Cold War period, indeed even for the decade that followed, it has been U.S. policy to rely on the threat to use nuclear weapons first. To remember the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to tell the story of what happened to a specific person or a particular family, is to invite a human sensibility that weighs against that first-use policy. After all, a country that considers itself a moral leader cannot dwell upon its reliance on a security policy that targets innocent people. For Washington, nuclear weapons must remain distant and abstract. The more we remember, the more we know what happened under the mushroom cloud, then the more difficult it becomes to live with nuclear weapons. In this context, the 1995 cancellation of the planned large-scale exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution, a presentation that would have included material from Japan showing the devastating effects of atomic bombs on human beings, is only the most recent chapter in a concerted campaign to forget the fact that a single atomic bomb vaporized, cremated, and poisoned approximately 200,000 people.
But forgetting Hiroshima-and Nagasaki as well-has not been the only response in the U.S. On some level, Americans...