This week marks 79 years since the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II, devastating the two cities, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, and opening a new era of apocalyptic warfare.
Our reading list this week collects pieces from our long archive on the legacy of the bombings, movements for disarmament and against U.S. militarism, and what Elaine Scarry—a frequent Boston Review contributor and 2024 honoree of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War for her work opposing nuclear weapons—calls “the contradiction of nuclear democracy.”
In a special issue on the nuclear threat from 1981, psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, author of the National Book Award–winning study Death in Life, reflects on the lives of survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Christine Kane tracks Massachusetts’s significant contributions to the nuclear weapons industry. And H. Bruce Franklin, who resigned from the Air Force in protest of the Vietnam War, examines the pursuit of American hegemony in the arms race.
Plus, Randall Forsberg—founder of the Nuclear Freeze campaign—leads a forum on a path to the end of war; Vivian Gornick reads the rivalry between Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller; Stephen Phelan and Estelle Jussim look at movies and artwork of nuclear apocalypse; and more.