Here is a basically sympathetic review, which makes clear that Hiroshima in America merely cribs from other revisionists, and that it goes too far in its psychological speculation. I should make it clear that I consider Lifton a Left wing academic who hides behind his specialty to claim to speak as a man of science:
Hiroshima in America, despite its title, is not a work of history. It's an extended essay into the psychological consequences of the first use of atomic weapons. It is full of keen insight. "For American presidents," write Lifton and Mitchell, "historical memory of Hiroshima cuts both ways. On the one hand, it conveys the idea of nuclear weapons as usable, fortifying the official U.S. first-use policy from which no president has deviated. On the other hand, recalling the effects of the bomb contributes to a sense that the weapons are not usable."
But now and then the book overreaches as it attempts to put nearly everything into a deeper psychological context. In a much-too-long section on Truman, for instance, we learn that his much-praised decisiveness was at least partly rooted in his life-long "quest for vitality." As a child he had to wear thick eyeglasses, which made it impossible for him to engage in rough-and-tumble play. Instead, he studied the piano. But at 13, he stopped because he was worried about being labeled a "sissy."
Eventually, that compulsion to be manly may have contributed to his quick post-Roosevelt decision to use atom bombs. Maybe. But one can just as reasonably suggest--as many historians do--that Truman used the bombs because they had been a major part of Franklin D. Roosevelt's master plan to end the war, and because virtually all of his advisers recommended it.
Sometimes-unpersuasive psychological analyses aside--we learn that nuclear weapons represent some sort of "power surge"--Hiroshima in America is an evocative book that ought to be read by anyone who believes that the people of the United States have never faced up to horror that was committed in their name 50 years ago. Only by acknowledging that an essentially decent nation committed a grossly immoral act can we Americans renew ourselves and take command of our "lethal technology."
We Americans can "disenthrall" ourselves from the "nuclear megamachine" only if we come "to recognize the extent to which that [official] Hiroshima narrative has blunted our senses and subverted our moral imagination. For achieving that disenthrallment, nothing is more powerful than images of the actual Hiroshima experience, of what the bomb did there to fellow human beings."
The United States almost took a step toward "disenthrallment" when the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution decided to mount a major fiftieth anniversary exhibition probing the role of the atom bomb in ending the war, which was to have opened in May 1995. Lifton and Mitchell, in a lively and poignant chapter, chronicle how that effort was dismembered and shredded as it was relentlessly savaged by people who were well pleased with the official history.
That official history has "numbed" the American people for five decades, say the authors, cutting them off literally from important moral truths, and metaphorically from past and future generations of Americans. But if we can someday, somehow, come to grips with the troublesome imagery of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we can finally begin to "divest ourselves of a debilitating sense of futurelessness and once more feel bonded to past and future generations."
Lifton and Mitchell may be right about that. On the other hand, history suggests that human beings have a near-infinite capacity for self-delusion and self-denial, even unto the darkness of the grave.
Mike Moore is the Bulletin's editor.
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