Author: TheConversation

By Sofia Ahlberg, Lecturer in Contemporary Literature, La Trobe University On this day, August 6, seven and a half decades ago, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and – on August 9 – Nagasaki. While early postwar literature registered fear of atomic warfare, there are only few references to the bomb in contemporary culture. Some argue that the bombings have sunk into the recesses of the collective unconscious. According to Hiroshima scholar Greg Mitchell in a book he co-authored with Robert Lifton, Hiroshima in America: A Half Century of Denial (1996), the US...

By Janet Farrell Brodie, Professor of History, Claremont Graduate University The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 75 years ago, is one of the most studied events in modern history. And yet significant aspects of that bombing are still not well known. I published a social history of U.S. censorship in the aftermath of the bombings, Radiation Secrecy and Censorship after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which this piece is based on. The material was drawn from a dozen different manuscript collections in archives around the US. I found that military and civilian officials in the U.S. sought to contain information...

By Amy Maguire, Senior Lecturer in International Law and Human Rights, University of Newcastle On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, on August 9, 1945, the United States dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki. These remain the only two instances of nuclear weapons being used in warfare to this day. The second world war commenced in 1939. While the war in Europe ended on May 8, 1945, the war in the Pacific only ended with Japan’s unconditional surrender to the Allies on August 15, 1945....

By Frank Fuller, Adjunct Professor of Political Science, Villanova University At the end of Katsuhiro Otomo’s dystopian Japanese anime film “Akira,” a throbbing, white mass begins to envelop Neo-Tokyo. Eventually, its swirling winds engulf the metropolis, swallowing it whole and leaving a skeleton of a city in its wake. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – along with the firebombings of Tokyo – were traumatic experiences for the Japanese people. It is no surprise that for years, the devastation remained at the forefront of their conscience, and that part of the healing process meant returning to this imagery...