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Further Reads

The literature on Hiroshima is enormous, and this anniversary year brings a fresh outpouring. Of the latest material, perhaps the most striking is the spring issue of Diplomatic History, which devotes seven substantial articles to "Hiroshima in History and Memory," which includes a sobering reinterpretation of Japan's reluctance to surrender by Herbert P. Bix and a fresh examination of America's "missed opportunities" to avoid using the atomic bomb by Stanford University historian Barton J. Bernstein.

Probably the most influential book on the subject is Hiroshima by John Hersey, a moving and beautifully written reconstruction of how the lives of a handful of people were shattered by the bomb.

In Atomic Diplomacy, Gar Alperovitz provides the bestcase for the view that the U.S. used the bomb chiefly to bolster its postwar standing. Alperovitz effectively demolishes the conventional argument that the U.S. dropped the bomb for essentially humanitarian reasons: to bring the war to a sudden end and thus save lives.

Gregg Herken's The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War: 1945-1950 brilliantly details the crass manner in which the U.S. brandished the bomb immediately after the war and the arms race that followed. In By the Bomb's Early Light, Paul Boyer brilliantly portrays the way in which atomic weapons influenced American thought and culture during the same period.

G. Pascal Zachary