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Eliminating Distance, Engaging with History


This year August marked the seventieth anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the end of the American war in the Pacific. Had I not been involved with Global Zero, an organization that works to eliminate nuclear weapons, I would likely have spent August 6th and 9th working at my summer job, socializing with friends on the patio of a brewery, or relaxing on the beach. Through my volunteer work with Global Zero, however, I had the opportunity to spend the beginning of August in Japan with a diverse group of students and scholars studying nuclear history and security. While millions of Americans were going about their daily lives, I walked streets that were incinerated seven decades ago and talked to people whose lives were forever altered by the tragedy of the bombings. Since returning from Japan, I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on what makes it possible for this monumental anniversary to slip by nearly unnoticed on one side of the globe, while on the other thousands of people gather to remember and heal.

US nuclear history occasionally creeps into a lecture or a seminar but is rarely discussed in depth, and almost never acknowledged outside of academia. On the typical syllabus when 1945 rolls around there may be a brief nod to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but always within the context of the end of the war in the Pacific, and always neglecting critical analysis of the connection between the two. In addition to justifying the bombings as the key to ending World War II, the American narrative fails to consider the bombings as an ongoing process. We talk about history as if it were over, whereas in reality it influences our world every day. Even seventy years later, Japanese people face significant personal, environmental, and political effects as a consequence of the United States’s decision to drop the bomb. By eliminating the physical distance between the United States and Japan, travelling to Hiroshima and Nagasaki allowed me to chip away at the temporal distance ingrained in my understanding of the atomic bombings throughout my life and education.

On August 6th, I wasn’t at work, or with my friends, or on a beach. I was standing with thousands of people from around the world in Hiroshima’s Peace Park, less than a mile from the epicenter of the bomb. Honoring the loss and suffering caused by a government that I vote for and pledge allegiance to, I was surrounded by public officials, families, students, nuclear security experts, and survivors. Seventy years earlier, the ground where I planted my feet had been transformed in an instant into an earthly hellscape. Fire, smoke, and the overwhelming odor of burnt flesh replaced its lush greenery and bustling cityscape. Our travelling companion Koko Kondo—who was only eight months old when the bomb exploded above her city—stood in the row in front of me. Like the melted, twisted, and hardened structure of the Atom Bomb Dome, the building closest to the epicenter left standing, her life had been shaped by the bomb. In that moment, the distance between history and the present dissolved.

History is much more than a set of facts; histories are interpreted, and interpretation is an ongoing political action. We construct a comfortable separation between “then” and “now” when “then” is too ugly to confront; separation makes us feel better about that ugliness by permitting ignorance. This distance that we allow ourselves is not only unjust to those whose lives were lost or transfigured in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is dangerous. Today, with over fifteen thousand nuclear weapons in existence worldwide, one need not travel halfway around the world to engage with the less pleasant chapters of our collective past. Nuclear weapons continue to cause dangerous divisions in the international community and they threaten civilian lives on a daily basis. Confronting history is not simply a matter of correcting past wrongs, or even of correcting a wrong idea of the past, it is a matter of setting our present on the correct path and assuring our common future.


Abigail Stowe-Thurston is a senior at Macalester College, where she studies Russian and Political Science. She has received two State Department fellowships for language study abroad and published an essay on the Russian adoption ban in Vestnik: The Journal of Russian and Asian Studies.     


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