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(information that was added subsequent to criticism of its absence when the museum first opened). The story of the atomic bomb’s development and the decision for its use is displayed in several panels. The museum concentrates on the human consequences of the bomb, and the exhibits that display these are not for the faint of heart: visitors see children’s toys and bottles melted and crushed, a bundle of hair that fell from the head of a (surviving) radiation victim, scorched mompei (cloth work pants) and harrowing photographs of shadows cast in concrete by Little Boy’s flash, of the injuries suffered by the wounded, of the incredulous dead. There are t-shirts for sale—it is a modern museum—but their messages are tasteful, for the emphasis throughout the building is on memory, reconciliation, peace.

In the late spring of 2004, as visitors left the formal exhibition space of the museum’s main building and turned right down a window-lined hall toward the exit, they were stopped by several smiling young women who asked them to fill out a brief questionnaire. The intent of the form was evident immediately: while everyone understood that visitors came to Hiroshima to visit the museum and park, to encounter the history of the atomic bombing, civic leaders wanted people to know about the city’s other attractions. The authors of the questionnaire informed visitors about the shopping centers and the baseball team, about the importance of Hiroshima as a seaport and trading hub, about the zoo, the botanical garden, the trolley cars purchased from cities all over the world, and the nearby island Miyajima, a favorite of Japanese tourists for its graceful temples and its red torii shrine, standing sentinel near the island’s busy dock. Above all, the questionnaire stressed, Hiroshima, city of the bombed, remembered its past but had also moved on. It was no longer a city of victims but a cosmopolitan place with an international reputation. The first atomic weapon was the world’s bomb. Modern Hiroshima, in the aspirations of its leading citizens, is the world’s city.

Notes

INTRODUCTION: THE WORLD’S BOMB

1. US Strategic Bombing Survey, Japan’s Struggle to End the War, excerpted in Barton J. Bernstein, ed., The Atomic Bomb: The Critical Issues (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), 56.

2. Thomas Powers, Heisenberg’s War: The Secret History of the German Bomb (New York: Knopf, 1993), 437.

3. Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), 735—6; Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 193; Mahatma Gandhi, ‘The Atom Bomb and Ahimsa’, in Kai Bird and Lawrence Lifschultz, eds., Hiroshima’s Shadow (Stony Creek, CT: Pamphleteer’s Press, 1998), 258-9.

4. Margaret Gowing, Britain and Atomic Energy 1939—1945 (New York: St Martin’s, 1964), 386.

CHAPTER ONE: THE WORLD’S ATOM

1. J. Bronowski, ‘ABC of the Atom’, in Hiroshima Plus 20, prepared by New York Times, intro. John W Finney (New York: Delacorte Press, 1965), 138; Margaret Gowing, Britain and Atomic Energy 1939—1945 (New York: St Martin’s, 1964), 1.

2. Gowing, Britain and Atomic Energy, 5; Daniel J. Kevles, The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995 [1971), 75; Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), 41—2.

3. Rhodes, Making of the Atomic Bomb, 42, 44.

4. Ibid. 50—1; John W Dower, Japan in Wjr and Peace: Selected Essays (New York: New Press, 1993), 64.

5. Laura Fermi, Atoms for the World: United States Participation in the Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 42; Rhodes, Making of the Atomic Bomb, 165.

6. Bronowski, ‘ABC of the Atom’, 143.

7. Kevles, The Physicists, 271; Philip L. Cantelon, Richard G. Hewlett, and Robert C. Williams, eds., The American Atom: A Documentary History of Nuclear Policies from the Discovery of Fission to the Present, 2nd edn. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania