![]() I was not surprised that the Trinity national historic site also tells a story of scientific ingenuity and American exceptionalism. ![]() Their purpose is to evoke a sense of awe and excitement, drawing attention away from the actual dangers of the high-level radioactive waste that sits so close outside. Signs of “danger” strewn throughout the museum are vintage, from a past that now seems contained. Visitors stand awestruck before the graphite core of the spectacular B-reactor or thrill to sit in the reactor operator’s chair. The Hanford museum tells a story very different in form from the Nagasaki museum, a triumphant patriotic story of technological mastery and industrial genius. The Fukushima nuclear disaster posed that question anew. Yet one wonders how to make sense of the Japanese government’s embrace of a peaceful future that travels through the contaminating path of nuclear energy, which, after all, is the same path that can quickly take Japan to nuclear weapons. It is a story that makes you weep for a devastated past and hope for a more peaceful future. ![]() The Nagasaki museum tells its heart-breaking story through photographs and objects: dented household pots, ripped clothing, bones of a human hand stuck to a piece of metal, a replica of the destroyed ruins of the Urakami cathedral at Ground Zero, pictures of scarred and dead bodies and a city leveled flat. It is a deeply moving story, but one told through a nation-making lens, with barely a nod to Japan’s own war crimes or its uneven redressal of the claims of first- and second-generation hibakusha, the surviving victims of the bombing. Nagasaki is now the site of an elaborate Peace Memorial whose central story is the victimhood of Japan. Fat Man laid a city to waste, quickly killing between 60,000-80,000 people, the death toll eventually rising to over 130,000. I had already visited Nagasaki, where the US military used a plutonium bomb codenamed Fat Man, very similar in design and yield to The Gadget tested in New Mexico. ![]() What I saw there reminded me of all the stories that don’t make it into most nuclear storytelling. Some years ago, I joined an odd group of atomic tourists to make the long trek across New Mexico to visit this iconic site, now made more famous by Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer. On only two days a year, the site of the world’s first nuclear explosion-codenamed Trinity-is open for a few hours to visitors. ![]()
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