Remembering nukes: collective memories and countering state history

Abstract

Debating the utility and ethicality of nuclear weapons has often centred on the “unspeakability” of nuclear war, often drawing this silence from the apocalyptic power of nuclear technology. This can manifest itself in greater secrecy in policy decisions concerning nuclear technology and the phenomenon of “nuclear reclusion” in the public realm. This article compares the memorialization of nuclear weapons in Japan and the US, and explores how remembering the attack on Hiroshima from multiple viewpoints could lead us towards different policies or support more open debate about nuclear weapons and power.

Keywords:

• memory
• memorialization
• nuclear
• Hiroshima
• Enola Gay
• World War II

Introduction

The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.

-William Faulkner

Remembering is often a struggle. Memories rise unbidden when we least expect them. A precious memory becomes hard to recall. The voice of a loved one fades into the past, while trauma lingers with an awful clarity years after the event. We have memories we share as lovers, parents, families, nations, and cultures. Each year we pause to celebrate birthdays and anniversaries – our memories of years spent on Earth together with others with reflection on how we will grow together in the coming years. As nations, we gather to remember what we have suffered or overcome: wars ending, and our collective dead.

Our very bodies hold memories in our brain cells and neural pathways; scars are reminders of old wounds. Alongside our personal and collective memories, the Earth’s body remembers, too. Islands echo long-forgotten volcanoes as they rise above the waves. Canyons show the river’s long memory as it flows towards the sea. Oxbow lakes tell the story of an old river too tired to wander any longer, its curves finally meeting and resting in still waters. The Earth keeps a memory of war, too. Craters in the ground, verdant growth in demilitarized zones with those deadly flowers planted by men to explode upon touch, holes dug for mass graves, atolls lost in a blinding minute. War even has its own weather.

As a global community, we have experienced many of these events together – crying out in pain or joy with one voice as we witness love and tragedy: these events are never left in the past, but rather told and re-told to become paths that lead us into our futures, potential and actual. This article is concerned with one such memory: the bombing of Hiroshima with an atomic weapon. Seventy years ago this year, we remember – a global memory – the end of World War II in nuclear fire. How do we remember such a terrible and unique event? The memory suffuses at many levels: those who experienced it, those who caused it, those who desire to take lessons from it, those who want it silenced, those who want to forget.

The less than 10 kg of plutonium-239 (²³⁹Pu) used to build the first two atomic weapons can be imagined with a memory, too. The radioactive material used to build the bomb dropped on Hiroshima remembers: we call it half-life, or the time it takes for one half of a radioactive substance to decay. Plutonium decays, or, to gently anthropomorphize for metaphorical clarity, remembers for up to 24,100 years. Natural uranium, from which plutonium is made, decays for millions of years – well beyond the lives of nations and the people in them.

The weapons made from these radioactive materials have irrevocably changed the world. Of this fact, few argue. The speed and intensity of modern war with thermonuclear weapons has altered military strategy, compressed time, and, importantly, limited democratic accountability for any decisions made regarding nuclear weapons use (Virilio 2007). Yet few contest this transformation. This is in part due to the nature of nuclear weapons and their relation to the state as a protector of civil society. The omnicidal nature of these weapons brings to light the fact that the state fails in protecting its citizens from death – a requisite for modern social contract theory. In most nuclear states, this equals the public not wanting to dwell on nuclear weapons and the state is happy to let nuclear policy be “born secret” and stay that way. Often referred to as “nuclear reclusion” (Deudney 1995), this view argues that we are both unwilling and unable to see the implications of nuclearism on the whole due to the sublime nature of nuclear weapons. The material form of nuclear weapons (their compact and distinctive features) and the “dread and unease” that they engender in the public allow reclusion to be an effective state strategy used to counteract the legitimacy crisis posed by nuclear weapons (Deudney 1995, 103). These weapons – whether in offence or defence – negate the very conditions of life on Earth and fundamentally question the democratic state’s power to regulate this potentiality.

Simply put, nuclear weapons, and specifically, a reliance on deterrence as strategy, hold the state’s citizens hostage to nuclear annihilation at the same time that they offer a similar fate to the other state’s citizens. Reclusion also works in concert with the psychological effect Robert Jay Lifton terms “numbing”. Our fear of nukes is pervasive and repressed (Chaloupka 1992, 172). Of course, as William Chaloupka writes, that day-to-day life still continues and it is easy to forget the radical changes that nuclear technology produced. “Politics finally went orbital; encircling us in the most general way possible, but at a sufficient distance that it seldom interferes very directly in our picnics and softball games” (Chaloupka 1992, 129). This distance is both of our making, and also that of the state working to keep nuclear weapons out of sight and secret. To place this in the context of remembering and memorializing the use of nuclear weapons, it follows that the collective remembering of nuclear weapons, from the state perspective, will be obliged to forget as much as it remembers. At best, memory of this event would have to strongly remind citizens of their obligation to defend and die for the nation-state, and place it alongside other conventional war remembrance.

In a larger sense, this “forgetting” or “selective remembering” is part of a historical and ideational debate about human relations and modern warfare deriving from the Enlightenment. Campbell Craig splits this debate into two camps – roughly, the optimists and the pessimists. The “optimistic” argument focuses on our ability to use reason, science, and technology to our benefit. Nuclear weapons are only weapons and rational leaders will use them (or not) in rational ways. The “pessimists” argue that, given the “sorry history of modern politics and warfare”, thermonuclear war only exacerbates a climate rife with fear and panic (Craig 2003, 162). Importantly, as Craig points out, the difference between thermonuclear war and wars that have come before is that these debates remain hypothetical, an event that never comes (Craig 2003, 162). If the pessimists turn out to be right and the optimists lose the bet, “a thermonuclear war will have destroyed the human race, and along with it things like discourse and memory. The debate would remain forever unresolved, because those pessimists proven right, along with those optimists proven wrong, would all be dead” (Craig 2003, 162). The ontological horror of nuclear weapons makes reflection unpleasant and rife with moral and ethical uneasiness.

The concept of potentiality also becomes important for understanding nuclear memory; it plays a vital role in securing deterrence as a “rational” nuclear weapons strategy. Nuclear destruction only presents itself as a potentiality and “as long as deterrence does not fail, the gap that exists between security promise and performance is potential rather than actual” (Deudney 1995, 99, emphasis in original). This bares a noteworthy relationship to temporality – it is a moment that never comes, never becomes actual. It is here that Morgenthau, writing in 1961, lays out an appeal to clear thinking about nuclear weapons and their potential and actual destructive power:

It would indeed be the height of thoughtless optimism to assume that something so absurd as a nuclear war cannot happen because it is so absurd. An age whose objective conditions of existence have been radically transformed by the possibility of nuclear death evades the need for a radical transformation of its thought and action by thinking and acting as though nothing of radical import had happened. This refusal to adapt thought and action to radically new conditions has spelled the doom of men and civilizations before. It is likely to do so again. (Morgenthau 1961)

While there is a danger of losing oneself in the absurdity of nuclear war, or in the constant deferral of an event that never comes (Derrida 1984), there is also space in potentiality. Potentiality, and the longue durée of nuclear time (Taylor 2015; Burke forthcoming), can be imagined as a space of meditation rather than absurdity. This is where memory and remembrance become particularly salient and useful. Along with cultivating a reflective view of history and our relationship to the future, memory allows for conversations in these spaces of potentiality about diverse experiences and response to nuclear use – a need that is inarguably necessary for the creation of strong, democratic, reflective pluralities whether in the state form or in some new configuration as yet to be known.¹ The “radical import” of nuclear weapons demands changes in both how we remember and how we plan for the future.

With these introductory remarks in mind, the remainder of the article will explore the memory of Hiroshima in the United States and Japan. Both may be weighed and found wanting in their ability to escape the pull of state politics and framings, but important lessons may be drawn nonetheless. There is certainly little gained from excising these attempts at collective remembering from history, and much to be learned from ensuing debates and closures. The first section will discuss collective memorialization to frame the two case studies. The next two sections will share the two case studies – the Smithsonian Enola Gay Exhibit and the Hiroshima Peace Park and Memorial – in light of these concepts. The fourth section will offer a conclusion in hopes of developing further research. How might we collectively remember, especially on those long paths we must journey in the future, in light of the shared experiences of nuclear destruction? The conclusion reflects upon this question in hopes of drawing a rough map of the future that pauses for ethical reflection upon accountability and use of nuclear weapons, or how we might bridge the apparent incongruity of global nuclear realities and collective remembrance with the creation and recreation of ethical visions of the future.

Remembrance

This section will begin by defining collective memory as opposed to personal memory of an event. Jay Winter and Avishai Margalit provide two examples. Winter uses “collective remembrance” because he believes this best links history and memory. He sees this as a “strategy to avoid trivialization of the term memory…to privilege remembrance is to insist on specifying agency, on answering the question who remembers, when, where, and how?” (Winter 2006, 3). This also means “remembrance is an act of symbolic exchange between those who remain and those who suffered and died” (Winter 2006, 279). Collective remembrance reveals that there are many actors who bring different memories and voices into that which is remembered. Importantly for Winter, it brings affect and multivocality into historical study.

For Margalit, it is “shared memory” with the “we” as collective or communal, not a simple aggregate of individual memories, but built instead on a division of mnemonic labour. This shared memory travels from person to person through institutions, or archives, and communal mnemonic devices, or monuments (Margalit 2002, 56). Shared memory produces an obligation on a community; each has a responsibility to keep memories alive, but all shoulder this burden. This, in turn, makes shared memory’s relationship to morality and action different from that which stems from individual memory. This is memory that is based on keeping promises to generations that preceded and those that will follow.

This point is crucial for my argument, and succinctly said by Margalit: “the memory that we need to keep our promises and follow through on our plans is this kind of prospective memory…to remember is to know and to know is to believe” (Margalit 2002, 14). This gives shared memory a special relationship to the future as well as to the past. Our memories become a promise to the future; an ethics based on shared memory is connected to an ethics of belief about the future. Using this insight, the impoverishment of remembrance and wilful forgetting in nuclear politics affects our ability to conduct ethical relations. Join this with a relationship to the future defined by deterrence and with the “unspeakability” of nukes, and it doubly affects our ability to critique nuclear weapons policy and their use. To use the cliché that it could lead to a disaster is a serious understatement. To “not speak” of nuclear weapons and their potential destructive capacity is to neglect human responsibilities to the future, future generations, and future biospheres.

A larger question raised is that scholarship and the Western Liberal tradition privileges a certain conception of time and history. It is linear, progressive, and based on the teleological assumption that “man” moves steadily forwards through time, improving his lot as he goes. In the Western Realist tradition, history is cyclical and based on a view of human nature that dooms us to repeated wars and conflicts. In either conception, nuclear weapons – as an effect or a symptom of modernity – throw these commitments into doubt.

To expand, the end of World War I begins what many would argue to be the modern age. The end of World War II continues on this trajectory of cultural hopelessness and malaise. Broadly, the inability to see our nuclear vulnerability is wrapped up in a particularly modern malaise. Nuclear weapons signal for some a final end to the idea of human potential as progressive and limitless, and brought our faith in human nature radically under question. They signify a loss of belief in human progress and decency. Chaloupka writes:

In short, the presumptions that most of us have lives to live out, that our lives would be followed by other people’s lives, that our rationality and humanity would gradually make things clearer, or even improve them – all were undermined forever by the bomb. A narrative was disrupted, replaced by a fracture. Have your expectations, your hopes, and commitments, the bomb said, but always remember that one wildman, one moment of weirdness, could cancel them out. (Chaloupka 1992)

Winter writes that remembrance and mass mourning became something very different after World War II as compared to World War I. While still overwhelmingly apocalyptic, there are fewer instances of mass mourning.

Other voices emerged, and other cultural forms appeared. Many of them were abstract, and thereby both more liberated from specific cultural and political reference and less accessible to mass audience. Their austere simplicity is powerful and compelling and points to 1945 as the real caesura in European cultural life. (Winter 1995, 228)

It is unclear whom it is appropriate to mourn. “In effect, the search for meaning after Somme and Verdun was hard enough; but after Auschwitz and Hiroshima that search became infinitely more difficult” (Winter 1995, 228).

In reality, our relationship to the past is just as tenuous, just as prone to uncertainties as is our future. Shared memory reminds us that there may not be an event, but an event-story (Margalit 2002). It is important to see the ethical obligations that follow from this event-story rather than to solely create an attachment to a particular identity created by the telling of this event-story. The “truth” or “realness” is less important in this argument than what the current stories bare about the relation between power and memory. As a telling example, Stanley Goldberg, a historian on the Smithsonian board during the Enola Gay exhibit proposal, writes that

the greatest irony of all was the fact that the exhibit was finally cancelled as a result of a dispute between Martin Harwit and the representatives of the American Legion concerning how many casualties there would have been had there been an invasion of Japan. That is, a dispute about events that never happened! (Goldberg 1999, 177)

Let the cries of revision fall on deaf ears and take seriously the idea that “revisionist history is not necessarily deluded history. For all we know we might have been deluded in the past” (Margalit 2002, 111). Or, as another historian concisely writes: “All history is revisionist history” (Goldberg 177, 199). Therefore, this effort is not about recovering knowledge that we once knew, but is, in part, to examine what we refuse to remember and is therefore un-recollectable through examination of the Smithsonian Enola Gay exhibit and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and Museum. In both of the case studies, pieces of the event are treated as not worth remembering and stand as excellent examples of how the same event embodies many purposes and motives when it is publicly remembered.

Memorials and museums represent public statements about what the past has been, and how the present should acknowledge it; who should be remembered, who should be forgotten; which acts or events are foundational, which marginal; what gets respected, what neglected. (Hodgkin and Radstone 2003, 12–3)

At this point, it is important to connect nuclear reclusion and shared memory to two examples of memorializing the same event, and then return to these topics in further depth in the last section of the article.

Enola Gay and the Smithsonian

The Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum opened 28 June 1995 and closed 18 May 1998. After 5 years of controversy and debate, the exhibit entitled Hiroshima and Nagasaki: A Fiftieth Anniversary Exhibit became an homage to the “Superfortress” B-29 nicknamed Enola Gay. This plane carried and dropped the bomb dubbed “Little Boy”, the first atomic bomb used in war, on the city of Hiroshima. The exhibit plans around the B-29 became so controversial that the Smithsonian cancelled the original plan in order to assuage various factions involved in the exhibit’s planning.

In 1987, discussions began on what should happen to the Enola Gay – the plane was, at this time, rotting in a hangar in Silver Hill, Maryland. Many groups voiced concerns that the aircraft, as a symbol meaning different things to each interested party, needed to be restored and placed on exhibit for all to see. The Secretary of the Smithsonian Institute and the soon-to-be director of the National Air and Space Museum (NASM), Martin Harwit, agreed that the Enola Gay symbolized a pivotal change in twentieth-century warfare and, doubtlessly, in world history. “Her Hiroshima mission had introduced a nuclear weapon with which the human race could demonstrably annihilate itself” (Harwit 1996, 27). The Enola Gay stands out in this, of that Harwit was well aware, but the question became how the NASM would treat that difference given his, and the Smithsonian’s, views on the role of the museum. Harwit believed that museums tell stories and history is a particular kind of story that museums tell. These are stories about events that actually happened, and museums are responsible for portraying these events accurately and truthfully (Harwit 1996, 53). This was the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb and this bomb had killed 100,000 people. To leave this out would be “distorting history” (Harwit 1996, 54). Harwit felt the best way to achieve both of these goals was to place the Enola Gay in an exhibit about strategic bombing. Harwit also felt strongly that an exhibit using the Enola Gay could not focus solely on the Hiroshima bombing mission. It had to be placed in context with the actions of the Allied and Axis Powers during World War II.

But museums must also take into account as many voices as possible. Early in the planning process, the NASM called in critics, academics, experts, focus groups, and advisors to plan the exhibit. Harwit realized that each group represented saw the Enola Gay in a different way; therefore there was a need for balance and discussion beforehand. The museum also had to be concerned with what the visitor takes way from the exhibit (Harwit 1996, 53). There was much unease reflected in the early discussions on what was appropriate commemoration for the Enola Gay. These also showed a movement away from the belief that we should memorialize technology’s neutrality. The Enola Gay, in these early debates, served as a symbol for the honest telling of the “dark side of aviation” as well as the larger history of escalating total war through technology and the power of nuclear weapons. Especially important in the early debates was that a mission using nuclear weapons against human beings should not be glorified. There should be no pride in this act, and drawing attention to nuclear weapons in this manner might help to control the use of them in the future (Harwit 1996, 33). They all hoped, and communicated to the public in a series of concept papers, that the primary goal of the exhibition should be to provide a public service by reexamining the atomic bombings in light of new scholarship and long-term implications at the fiftieth anniversary of the event.

It was after the release of the first concept papers that serious debates over the role and tone of the memorial began for Martin Harwit and the NASM. By late summer 1993, a group of World War II veterans created a petition with 5000 signatures pressing the Smithsonian to exhibit the Enola Gay “proudly”, and that the current exhibit plans were an injustice to the soldiers who fought in the war. General Monroe W. Hatch, Jr., Executive Director of the Air Force Association (AFA), backed the veterans and wrote a letter to Harwit condemning the exhibit as biased and partisan – not history and fact. After much back and forth between the Smithsonian and the AFA about the images and content of the exhibit, NASM changed and renamed the exhibit: The Crossroads: The End of World War II, the Atomic Bomb, and the Onset of the Cold War. This rewrite resulted in another bout of protest. After the American Legion condemned the “Crossroads” exhibit, the script was revised yet again and titled The Last Act: The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II.

The NASM received detailed responses about the exhibit from the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Retired Officers Association, the Military Order of the World Wars, and the Disabled American Veterans. The areas that these organizations, and the AFA and the American Legion, demanded to have deleted were mainly concerned with the portrayal of the Japanese as victims, not aggressors; too many pictures of Asian casualties, including “emotional” and “graphic” photos of Ground Zero; imbalanced analysis of the decision to use the bomb; the postwar nuclear arms race and proliferation; and, ultimately, the most important complaint was that the exhibit did a disservice to those who served in World War II (Correll 2004). General Tibbets, the pilot of the infamous B-29, said that the

“proposed display of the Enola Gay is a package of insults” and that the Enola Gay should be glorified as the first plane to “drop the bomb. You don’t need any other explanation. And I think it should be displayed alone”. (quoted in Correll 2004, 12)

Senate Resolution 257 was passed 3 September 1994, denouncing the exhibit. The Senate drove this message home with a threat to cut funding to the Smithsonian – 85% of the annual budget originated from the federal government. By 30 January 1995, the Smithsonian bowed under the pressure from the various groups and cancelled the exhibit. Martin Harwit resigned in May 1995 and the final exhibit with the forward fuselage of the Enola Gay opened 28 June 1995. The Air Force Association praised it as a “straightforward historical exhibition” and noted that “Within a year, it draws more than a million visitors – making it, by far, the most popular special exhibition in the history of the Air & Space Museum” (Correll 2004, 26).

Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and Museum

The main criticism repeated against memorializing the victims of the atomic bomb by the public and scholars in Japan is unwillingness to accept responsibility for wartime aggression by an imperialist Japanese army against Korea and China. Many dwell on the fact that memorialization of the nuclear attacks does not view the atomic bombings as part of a policy of escalating total war, imperialism, and colonialization. Severed from this historical trajectory, and breaking with the history of Pacific War, many argue that the only responsibility most Japanese will accept is their place as the first victims of the atomic bomb. Benedict Giamo wonders if this focus calls into question whether or not the Japanese can still have “an ethical and moral claim for world peace and antinuclearism” if they excise the history of Japanese imperialism and colonization and the atrocities it created (Giamo 2003, 714). Others call it a form of empty pacifism that only serves when needed. On the other hand, Roger Jeans writes, “perhaps it is unreasonable to expect a museum to dwell solely on its own people’s ‘sins’” (Jeans 2005, 173).

These debates are reflected in public discussions around the experience of the bombs dropped on Japan. In 2007, Defence Minister Fumio Kyuma said that he thought the atomic bombing of Japan “could not be helped”. While this may have been taken out of context, the backlash against the minister is telling. “‘The US justifies the bombings saying they saved many American lives’, said Nobuo Miyake, 78, director general of a group of victims living in Tokyo. ‘It’s outrageous for a Japanese politician to voice such thinking. Japan is a victim’” (Hippen 2007). Kyuma resigned shortly thereafter.

The government has wavered in its conviction in taking responsibility for its wartime aggression. At the fiftieth anniversary of Hiroshima/Nagasaki, the government changed its stance on history and admitted to a larger role in the war. But, in 2005, the Japanese government changed the words of this resolution in order to (re)minimize Japanese aggression. “Invasion” and “colonial rule” were removed (Editor 2005). The government continues to whitewash the history of “comfort stations” for the military and the forced mass suicides in Okinawa (Hanai 2007). At the sixtieth anniversary of Hiroshima, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi did not speak to A-Bomb survivors after the 6 August ceremony, as prime ministers have done in the past. Osamu Fujiwara, associate professor of peace studies at Tokyo Keizai University, said “there is no political debate over this cancellation” and that “the ceremony itself has become history, and the A-bomb itself has become a thing of the past” (Onishi 2005). Dr. Hiroshi Maruya, a hibakusha (a survivor of the atomic bomb), describes the government as “very cold”. He adds: “It’s as if the government is saying, ‘It is no use listening to you’ … Power politics is the theory of the new world” (Onishi 2005).

But even with the government’s attempts to control the narrative, there have been shifts in public opinion about the official story of the end of World War II. This is in part due to the efforts of the hibakusha and their commitment to calling out the danger of nuclear weapons to global peace and stability. The complexity of the debate and eventual focus on the larger issue of global nuclear vulnerability can be seen in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and Museum.

Completed in 1954, the Park was built on the ruins of the Nakajima district in Hiroshima. The Peace Memorial (Genbaku Dome) was the only remaining structure after the explosion. Ran Zwigenberg recounts that, like the rebuilding of the city of Hiroshima, the debates about the memorial included the desire for a “forward-looking recounting to visitors a story of resurrection and promise” that emphasized Hiroshima’s unique status as the first city destroyed by a nuclear bomb (2014, 52–3). Some believed that the entire city should be preserved as a memorial and that it was not appropriate to build on ground where so many were killed (Zwigenberg 2014, 53).

Zwigenberg goes on to tell the history of Tange Kenzō, a young Tokyo architect, who was chosen to plan and build the memorial in 1949. As discussed above, the modern and forward-looking design of the memorial many felt tried to hide Japanese fascism and aggression as aberration within a story of progress, transformation, and new beginnings (58). Many thought the money would be better spent on the hibakusha.

When the Peace Museum finally opened in 1955, Hiroshima was also transformed from a place of destruction to a modern city. The museum itself holds a collection of materials related to the atomic bombing, and in 1994 a new wing was built in the museum that serves as a place to tell the stories of the hibakusha and highlights the dangers of the current global nuclear culture. A section for Sasaki Sadako and her folded cranes was added, and this memorial was meant to stand as a hope for peace, especially for children.

After the 1994 renovation, Yuki Miyamoto, in Beyond the Mushroom Cloud, writes that the new wing of the museum, with its video testimony of the survivors, depiction of wartime culture, and a level dedicated solely to the problem of global nuclear memory, counters the nationalist narrative of innocent suffering and makes this nationalist agenda impossible (2012, 72–3). The personal memories of the bomb, and the continuing testimony of the hibakusha, are a large part of the public’s ability to understand a contextual and nuanced history of World War II, rather than one that hides a history of aggression with progress and victimization. Through the 1990s, polls showed public opinion did not support the “nationalists and conservatives, in and out of government, who prefer to downplay Japan’s war record” (Jeans 2005, 193). Indeed, many of the changes to the museum came at the behest of the survivors, and additions and changes were viewed critically. In 2002, the National Memorial Hall was proposed and the hibakusha refused to support the addition, which acknowledged that “the atomic bomb was the result of the nation’s ‘wrong decisions’ (ayamatta kokusaku)” (Miyamoto 2012, 75).

Countering state narratives

What lessons can be drawn from these narratives of the same event? One clear message is that memorialization controlled by the interests of the nation-state fails to bring to the fore our nuclear vulnerability. In part, this is due to the ability of omnicidal weapons to cast doubt on both the state and broader Western conceptions of social order. As mentioned earlier in the article, nuclear weapons broadly question a liberal’s progressive theory of human potential – this is also clear in Japan’s official story of progress and peace – as well as the realist’s belief in a cyclical nature of time. Specifically, thermonuclear war makes recreating the state (the Leviathan) after war impossible in Hobbesian theory and Lockean theory. As Craig writes, “if war occurs no one may be left to point out how bad the war was, and then call for the construction of a state that could have prevented it” (Craig 2003, xvii).

Beyond the challenge to the state, for Morgenthau, nuclear weapons made even death and time irrelevant categories. Nuclear death is a difference in kind rather than degree: the scale of nuclear destruction takes away the individuality of death, rendering it meaningless. It destroys immortality and “meaning of life by throwing life back upon itself” (Morgenthau 1961).

There is, then, a radical difference in meaning between a man risking death by an act of will and 50 million people simultaneously reduced – by somebody switching a key thousands of miles away – to radioactive ashes, indistinguishable from the ashes of their houses, books, and animals (Morgenthau 1961).

Morgenthau stresses that thinking and acting as if nuclear death were no different than other deaths and as if “it has no bearing upon the meaning of life and death” reduces our “noble” words to “absurd clichés”. Humans must come to understand that one cannot defend “freedom and civilization” with nuclear weapons, as these weapons negate the very possibility of society’s survival (Morgenthau 1961). Schell echoed these sentiments in 1998, writing that stopping nuclear proliferation is a pressing moral issue only made more important by the end of the Cold War. Danger lies in additional countries beyond the US and the former USSR “thinking the unthinkable” by creating or expanding nuclear weapons programmes (Schell 2001).

In both cases, the state counters the legitimacy crisis, or unthinkability, posed by nuclear weapons by leading the debate away from nuclear weapons to hide this fundamental questioning of the basis of order itself. The state relies on an unrelenting formation of what it means to be a citizen of a nation-state, not as a human vulnerable to nuclear destruction. Unfortunately for this vision of the future, the nation-state is ethically deficient. The nation-state, based on sharp boundaries between “us and them”, creates violence in its very existence (Fishel 2013). It is naturally divisive, and focuses on a destructive account of hypostasized forms of ethnic identity that keep different political communities from forming. It divides the world into mutually exclusive opposing forces armed with thermonuclear weapons that are many times more destructive than Fat Man and Little Boy.

If the nation, due to its interest in hiding its impotence in the face of nuclear weapons and covering up past aggressions, fails in creating stable and ethical communities, will Hiroshima and Nagasaki be claimed as a global memory? Can they be used to aid in shaping us into a community of memory based on thick relations of caring – using the nuclear attacks “as warning signposts in moral history” (Margalit 2002, 71)? It is the contention of this article that contextual, collective remembrance can imagine a future where we are not hapless victims, but rather a global collective aware of its vulnerabilities. This collectivity needs to be less concerned about consolidating identity – personal or national – and focus on the “eruptive force of remembering otherwise” (Simon 2005) and what this can mean for ethical relations and the future. As shown, to focus on simple, dualistic debates that serve nationalist agendas loses the power of multivocality in collective memory and also supports future war fighting which adds more categories of “acceptable” collateral damage. Atomic victimization and wartime aggression both forget “the causes and conditions of total war” unless coupled with robust public debate (Giamo 2003, 705).

In the US, this led to a patriotic backlash that only allowed the commemoration of the airmen and those who served and died in a “good” war. The exhibit plans provoked evasion and resistance in the US and the eventual exhibit evades the bombings completely – Enola Gay is just an airplane. Martin Harwit concludes in his book on his history of the exhibition that the driving force behind the protest was a group of individuals “who feared that the exhibition could cast into doubt a hallowed, patriotic story that they believed was essential to our national self-image” (Harwit 1996, 426–7). He also adds that the American Legion and the Air Force Association suppressed the newly declassified information questioning the necessity to use the bomb to force Japan to surrender. They wanted the traditional story told: millions of lives were saved by the decision to use the bomb. It is important to stress that the new information about the decision to use the bomb was evidence, not revisionism as the critics cried:

The Air Force Association’s simplistic account, in which dropping the bomb was motivated by nothing more than a desire to bring a quick end to the war so as to result in a net savings of lives, can’t begin to cope with the complexity of the evidence. (Goldberg 1999, 179)

This simplistic dualism of remembering victimhood/forgetting aggression does its own violence to what can be gained through remembering Hiroshima/Nagasaki in multiple ways. There is no denying that civilians in Hiroshima were and are victims of a powerful weapon dropped in the middle of a bustling city centre. It was a singular, horrific event that is still unrivalled, let alone surpassed, in its toll on civilians. This US action went against customary and binding international law concerning civilians during war² and, furthermore, the “aggressiveness” of a state’s military is never a legal or moral reason to harm the civilians of that state. This privileging of the Enola Gay and its role as “just an airplane” downplays US aggressiveness and the war crimes committed in aerial bombing campaigns. It aids in glorifying a military history unconnected to the realities of nuclear weapons. This was dangerous, and has become even more dangerous after 9/11 and years of rhetoric about the so-called “War on Terror” (Noon 2004; Boehm 2006). While we know that our own personal memories can fail us, collective memory failure can have potentially fearsome consequences. Recent estimates of the death toll in Iraq and Afghanistan are at least 1.3 million, and this does not take into account casualties in Yemen and Somalia, the wounded, the grieving, or internally displaced (Carasik 2015).

In Japan, the official narrative often centred on transformation, and supporting the national narrative meant believing that the bomb saved Japanese lives and ended the war: the loss of Hiroshima was to be remembered as a sacrifice for peace (Zwigenberg 2014, 34). In the nationalist story in both the US and Japan, the hibakusha’s testimony tended to be seen as “biased”, and attempts to insert their lived experiences of the bomb into commemoration are seen as unbalanced. The US’s view of the bomb as necessary to save the lives of American soldiers – and future Japanese civilians – and Japan’s view of transformation after the explosion suppress the experiences of the hibakusha in order to see the bomb as a “savior” (Miyamoto 2012, 178).

A focus on the moral horror of war – with all its atrocities – has been the strength in the work of the hibakusha.³ The hibakusha’s memories are vital to remembering both the atomic attack and our connection as humans through mutual suffering and strength. Their efforts have attached victimhood (and aggression) to humanity and the humanity of the victims, while being able to shoulder the blame for other wartime atrocities committed by the Japanese Imperial Army. Their voices cannot be ignored, and, as Miyamoto urges, they also do not need to be offered a “place of privilege over the sufferings of victims of other atrocities” (Miyamoto 2012, 179). The hibakusha bring a true realism to the memorialization debates and “their message emerges from a genuinely self-critical process: I too have done wrong, and I am not justified in condemning others” (Miyamoto 2012, 4).

Conclusion

To conclude, I will focus on how nuclear commemoration can lead to positive consequences and outcomes. If remembrances are contextual, material, and focused on the suffering of the victims of nuclear attack without forgetting, or discounting the many crimes against humanity committed by both the US and Japan, then memorialization can have an ethical role in public discourse and debate (Miyamoto 2012, 2). If nuclear reclusion makes this an uphill battle, how do we find the solution set, cure, or countermeasure to official state amnesia and aphasia? One answer is that ethical and nuanced memories can help us, as global citizens, imagine different and more robust regimes to control the spread of nuclear materials and technology.

As shown in both of the cases, the temptation of falling into comfortable dichotomies instead of facing existential questions of species survival is a danger. The Hiroshima Peace Memorial and Park fares better in finding the “we” who will “anticipate and preclude any future use of nuclear weapons” (Giamo 2003, 705) than did the public who visited the Enola Gay fuselage at the National Air and Space Museum. To gaze backward, in Japan, “the immediately dead, forever maimed, and slowly dying of that moment have occupied an important commemorative place in the postwar imagination” (Biswas 2014, 6). In Japan, Hiroshima and Nagasaki led the Japanese to ratify the Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1976 and support universal disarmament, while the generation surviving World War II in the US created a deadly nuclear arsenal (Biswas 2014, 6).

The continuing role of survivors who press for solidarity with all victims of nuclear radiation, not just as citizens of a particular country, can aid in creating stronger control regimes and a possible nuclear-zero world. A lack of reflection on the bombings, and the refusal to listen to the hibakusha, has led to a disconnection from “the lingering effects of nuclear waste generated from the production of the commodity that wrought devastation” on American soil (Biswas 2014, 14). To add to this, the long-term effects of nuclear weapons and nuclear policy are only beginning to come to light 70 years after the bombing of Hiroshima. These include both tangible and intangible effects: the monetary cost of creating and maintaining nuclear weapons, the political cost of secrecy, the ecological cost, and the health risks posed by increased radiation due to the detonation of thousands of nuclear weapons during testing, to name but a few.

This is especially crucial in a world that is turning to nuclear power to decrease reliance on fossil fuels. Post Three-Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, and other victimizations by nuclear power, another pressing question, as Shampa Biswas asks, is how to think about the future of nuclear power in “ways that honor the effects of nuclear pursuits on all its victims, past, present, and future?” (Biswas 2014, 7). These questions gain even more importance as deterrence and mutually assured destruction (MAD) no longer control the international peace (if they ever really did). Interpreting the atomic age and shedding light on the secrecy surrounding it is of paramount importance if we mean to meet the challenge that nuclear weapons pose in a multipolar world with no reliable controls on their use and proliferation.

The importance in memorializing Hiroshima lies not in assuring ourselves that we have certain versions of the past correctly represented, but in what these representations allow us to remember, and, conversely, what they allow us to forget. Every nation-state in its formation will re-tell its stories, and in particular, its war stories; however, how we re-tell those stories is neither politically nor institutionally neutral. Remembering can arrest a nation in the perdition of nostalgia, or demand of its citizens robust and thoughtful democratic engagement focused on the future. If the experience of Hiroshima and other nuclear catastrophes are remembered with all of their context intact, apologies are offered for wrongs done in the past, and the path to the future can become a different one: perhaps even one that leads towards global nuclear disarmament.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Anthony Burke and Ben Meiches for comments on early drafts of this article.

Notes

1 This way of framing the potential in absurdity, and of the space gained in stretching out time, can be used to productively speak of another crisis folding out on a geologic time scale: the Anthropocene and the coming changes in Earth’s environment due to fossil fuel use.

2. Additionally, the United States’s use of the atomic bomb on civilians should be remembered as part of a larger trend that has seen an increase in civilian casualties during conflict. War has largely lost its legal meaning (war has not been declared in the US since the end of WWII, but the US has been involved in violent conflict since the Korean “police action” began in 1950) and, during this time, in all of the cold and hot wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, civilian casualties and increased “collateral damage” have become the norm in modern conflicts.

3. Of course, it is important to remember that the hibakusha are not a homogeneous group. Some declare the criminality of the use of the bomb, others call for remilitarization of Japan and the creation of a nuclear arsenal, and still others press for an ethical remembrance of Hiroshima and give testimony of the experiences – the kataribe (Miyamoto 2012, 179).