Hiroshima, October 2008. When I last came here, it was the summer of 1995, fifty years after the end of a war our memory factories had worked so hard to keep alive but were now being told to let go of. It was ten years after Ronald Reagan had declared at Bitburg that we had all been victims in that war. It was five years before a millennium punctuation mark would in fact make the twentieth century and its awful histories a base-10 past. And it was exactly that summer when the Smithsonian would put, with great controversy, the restored B-29 bomber Enola Gay on display in Washington for all to marvel at. In 1995 I had made my way in the intense heat of a Hiroshima summer (which made me imagine the heat of that day, as the Japanese say) to Peace Memorial Park, the beautifully groomed center of the city that all of us, worldwide, thought of as Ground Zero.
Closure of astrophysics laboratory blamed on Enola Gay 'fallout'
