It is all that is left of what mightīe named Hiroshima's Unknown Civilian, a ghostly doorman at the Remnant of a person vaporized in the 5,000-degree heat of the first It is the picture of a shadow burned into concrete, the only Grotesque figures walking across miles of rubble-there is one that is Among the thousands of photographs, paintings and otherĪrtifacts of what happened on August 6, 1945-those images, now familiarĮverywhere in the world, of bleeding children, twisted buildings, It is important, nevertheless, to begin by recalling the physical What happened to us deserves the scrutiny that Mostly about a uniquely American experience. Shadow, while giving due attention to what happened to the Japanese, is
Made that choice, and struggled to defend it, and so Hiroshima's Single stroke, and then try to justify that choice. On something subtler: the long-lasting moral damage to those who chooseĭeliberately to obliterate hundreds of thousands of civilian lives at a Shadow-the book, edited by Kai Bird and Lawrence Lifschultz-is that itĭoes more than recall the agony of the victims. Nuclear weapons-all nuclear weapons, not just those of India and Outbreak of finger-wagging is any detailed new discussion of what What has been curiously missing from the resulting international Hundreds of millions of Southeast Asians who live downwind. So more human beings live directly under its shadow-not counting the So, fifty-three years after Hiroshima, a billion or Irony, they have even suggested that India and Pakistan have done (by us), not to be possessed by newcomers. Nuclear weapons, after all, are to have and to hold
To any suggestion that they eliminate their own huge arsenals, have The Old Bombers Network of existing nuclear powers, fiercely resistant Thing, a necessity, a rite of passage into national military adulthood. New Delhi and Islamabad have turned out to affirm that it is a good India and Pakistan have the bomb now, and the cheering crowds in Retrieved from Įdited by Kai Bird and Lawrence Lifschultz.
Hiroshima's Shadow: Writings on the Denial of History and the Smithsonian Controversy." Retrieved from