9/19/95

My name is David Pearce. I was born in 1953, and first learned of the atomic bomb in school in the early '60s. In fact, it wasn't the atomic bomb that concerned me my family or friends but rather the hydrogen bomb, although I don't think that at that time I really knew the difference. In any case I remember that our neighbors had a bomb shelter. During that period we were quite afraid that the bomb might be used- during the Cuban missile crisis. I think that there was a frightening sense of uncertainty somehow linked toKruschev's shoe. It was only later (mid to late 60's) that I began to fear our own potential for use and/or misuse of the bomb. I did not become aware of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki until much later except for the names which like Auschwitz or Dresden were (even as a child) deeply associate with that time.

Later I read a fascinating book by Robert Jungk: Brighter than a thousand suns, that brought that era and the work of the atomic scientists to life. Yes, learning about the development and use of the atomic bomb changed my view about science and technology, in one clear way and in other less clear ways. It revealed the tremendous power of scientific thought coupled with technological development. However, it leaves the moral/ethical questions very unclear. Between the early 60s and recently I did not think the atomic or hydrogen bomb would ever be used ever again. The risks seemed too high. Now I'm not so sure. Human behavior can be so irrational-- unscientific.-David Pearce

9/17/95

Chris, 27 years, Paris (France) I am born in 1968 therefore, unfortunatelly, as far as I can recall I' ve always known the existence of the bomb. But, as a teen, I was pretty much conviced that if western Europe was not yet ruled by a huge USSR it was thanks to the bomb. I actually think that western Europe has been damned close to catastrophy. But if the bomb &quothelped&quot us to avoid the worst, it is nowadays outdated and a waste of public founds. So, lets just put it where it belongs, i.e to the museum of shame of humanity. I' ve never seen the science as sources of evil. Yes I thought the bomb would be used again. I' m glad I was wrong at this time. For now, I think it is safer thanks to a more responsible conscience and powerfull media medium.

9/14/95

I became aware of the bomb growing up in history classes at school. I am not old enough to have experienced first hand the devestation of the bombings, but I have attempted to understand the devestation that the bombs inflicted upon so many people' s lives. I am a 21 year old college senior in Newport Beach, CA. This subject has interested me since I was young. When I was in grade school someone once asked me what my worst fear was, and I responded that I was terrified of a nuclear bomb being dropped on the US, or anywhere else for that matter. It troubles me that children as young as I was then, and probably even younger today, must worry about such problems.

9/13/95

My name is Jason Kowalczyk. I am 21 years old and am a History student at Illinois State University. I came to know about the atomic bombs when I was in grade school. I did not have any interest in the subject until I was in college. I have studied the History of World War II and learned how the atomic weapons have effected our lives. I feel bad that so many lives had to lost in these incodents, but I thinks that dropping ths bombs were nessary. The best thing about dropping the bombs was that it demostrated to the rest of the world how powerful these weapons are. Because of this they have never been use again. Let us hope that the day will never come when they are used again.

9/13/95

I grew up KNOWING the world could come to an end by MAD anytime we used to make jokes about the &quothold the case over your head&quot drills and the individual bunkers for 1,699 (nuclear Levittowns all ). Some say H & N kept it from happening on a larger scale - who knows . It' s less likely tooday than 20 years ago - I' m glad for my daughter' s sake as well as my own. TK, age 47, NY

9/9/95

My name is Bill Penn, and I live in Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA. I served 10 years in the US Army as a Field Artillery Officer, and I have had extensive experience with nuclear weapons concepts. At first, having grown up in the Cold War era, I thought these weapons were necessary since our percived enemies had developed the technology. But now that I am older, I have come to fear and respect the monster we have created. When the walls of communisum fell I had hoped we might get clear of nuclear wars, but the danger is still with us and nations like France continue the bizarre ritual of improving an arsenal of weapons no sane man would deploy. I am reminded of a Star Trek episode where Kirk and Klingon counterpart where enraged when an advanced race took away their power to wage war on an interplanetary scale. Where is our salvation I wonder.

9/8/95

Birth 8/12/54. I recall those early days in the late 50's, of the talk and no-understanding of what was happening all around everyone. TV, coming into homes with new massive amounts of information, fueled the flames of the miss understanding. Now we use the same tools to &quotWhite Wash&quot the events of those days. I remember the looks on peoples faces when Cuba were setting up rockets with atomic war heads, so close we could almost see the launchs. I remember.......

I was born in 1948 so my association with the bomb has been during the cold war. I remember air raid drills during the cuban missle crisis. I had seen movies showing explosions of atomic and thermonuclear devices and I was old enough and knowledgable enough to have a feeling for the immense power of the bomb. I understood that an all out atomic war would end civilizaton and probably that neither I nor my familoy would survive since we lived near a large urban target. It was quite frightening I had nightmares from watching explosions themselves yet I could not not watch because they were real. I think that unfortunately the world remains as dangerous and perhaps more so now compared to the cold war. The &quotenemy&quot is not readily identifiable. Bombs are smaller and more easily delivered you don't even need a missle just drive into town with one in your trunk (Oklahoma City revisited). I suspect that the next use of the bomb (and I'm sure it will be used by some power) will be limited perhaps battlefield or specific political or strategic targets. And of course there are the other weapons of mass destruction chemical and biologicals they too shall someday be used. I just hope that neither me nor my family are nearby. Jim Rooney

I became aware of the A-bomb during my early teens in the first half of the eighties. The world was then on the brink of an all out war and this situation caused me lots of nightmares that ended when Gorbachev went in power....

My name is Karen Ostertag and I am a 23-year-old grad student in Medieval Studies and Library Science. I first learned about the atomic bomb in history in elementary school and first discussed its effects in depth in high school. We were shown a picture of the shadow-wall in Hiro-shima an eloquent testament against ever engaging in nuclear war again. It horrified me to think that the major world powers could blow up the earth twenty times over. What was the point? My mother told me about growing up during the Cuban missle crisis-- she remembered seeing the forsythia bloom that spring and wondering if she would ever see them again.

My greatest fear during the Cold War was that some stupid politician would allow his memory of history to lapse would forget the profound horror associated with the use of such a weapon and actually use a nuclear missle as a way of &quot proving he meant business&quot -- flaunting his ego and his stupidity more like. I can't blame the scientists for developing the weapon (I' ve read Ten Thousand Monkeys). I blame the politicians who do not pause to question whether having the capability to do something automatically means we have the right to use the technology. &quot We stand on the shoulders of giants...&quot as it is said but we didn' t grow up with the knowledge that a misstep might crush lots of little creatures beneath our huge clumsy feet. Today I think people are more aware of the danger of nuclear war and less likely to turn to it. However the fear remains that people will conveniently forget the past...we have exhibits like yours to thank for making sure that won' t happen. -Karen Ostertag grad at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor

I first learned about it before i can even remember.

Pawel Wiechowski Gothenburg Sweden age 20. Obviously I'm not old enough to have experienced it first hand but I think that it's probably the most idiotic invention of all mankind. No more nukes, for everybody's sake.

Midshipman Gary A. Blumberg, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institue. Age 18.
I was born after WWII, but my dad grew up in the 1940s. He can remember the post-War era. It was him and his recollections that taught me. During the Cold War I can remember statistics such as we have enough nuclear weapons to annilate the whole Earth. That statement right there is ignorant and is out of control. What would be the purpose of doing that anyway? Recently I read an article in the newspaper entitled, &quotOnly nation to drop Bomb...&quot This article simple stated that we are the only nation to drop a nuclear bomb in the time of war, but we are a country trying to protect the peace. We do not want war, but we will fight in a time of war. It gave examples of starting the United Nations, Bosnia, eastern Africa, Haiti, etc. As far as the atomic bomb is concerned here is my own personal opinion. When the bomb was dropped it was done to save more lives than if the war had continued on. If the United States had invaded Japan, what do you think of all the mothers of the dead personnel would say if they found out their sons could have been saved, but the White House chose not to use a certain weapon because it was too &quotbig&quot of a weapon. The Japanese religion would not let themselves surrender. It basically was not in their vocabulary. When we took their islands away they did not surrender. When we bombed their cities, they still did not surrender. When we beat Germany, they did not surrender. We had to bring them to their knees to force them to surrender and we did just that. Compared to the first fire bombings on Tokyo, the Bomb was just a scratch. Compared to the human life killed by the Japanese in China, the Bomb is a toothpick. I do pray to God that no other country is forced into the situation to use nuclear weapons. Since the dawn of atomic energy, there has been so many good things that have come out of something so bad. For example, safe electrical power generation, cancer treatments, medical applications to save lives, etc.

I was born in August of 1942. I remember nothing about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki three years later, but I do remember my mother weeping when she heard on the radio that VJ Day had been declared. My father was a Naval Officer stationed in the Pacific. The use of these Atomic weapons (a necessity in my view and, of course, in my parents' view as well) meant that my father would be among the millions whose lives were spared -- Americans and Japanese and their allies-- by the surrender of Japan. During the McCarthy Era, I was one of those children who were put through the &quotduck and cover&quot drills. The terror of the atom bomb and its use by the &quotCommunists&quot was a presence in my childhood. I was told horror stories about what would happen to me if I &quotpeeked&quot at the light during a nuclear attack. My parents assured me that these horror stories were true, not just idle threats, but no one ever suggested that I read stories or historical accounts of the atomic attacks on Japan.

In October of 1962, I was pregnant with my first child during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I remember feeling that I might not live to see my child born, or, perhaps worse, that I might live to see my child born into a world devastated by a nuclear war. Dr.Edward Teller was my physics professor at Cal. He impressed me as a gentle man, basically compassionate, but forced by political circumstances and the Communist takeover of his native Hungary to immigrate to the U.S. where he would be able to develop weapons of such tremendous power that everyone would be afraid to use them, including us. And it seems to me that among the major powers of the world, Dr.Teller's vision of a nuclear standoff seems to be accurate.

Although I am deeply ashamed of the treatment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, I am, like many of my generation, convinced that the use of the atomic bombs was necessary to end the war with &quotminimal&quot loss of life. But what a lesson to us all. There are no winners in any war, no matter what the weapons used, no matter what the basis may be for the dispute. We are all members of the same race--the human race--and everyone we harm is one of our own family. For my grandchildren--I have 11 so far--I wish a world in which no such terror will exist, and in which forgiveness is the ultimate goal in any disagreement.
K.J.D. Danville, CA

My name is Maureen Sullivan , am 15 years old, and live in San Francisco. I first became aware of the atomic bomb when I studied about Japan in my Modern World Class last year. No, I was not old enough to experience the actual bombing. I didn't experience the Cold War so I really can't give an answer to that question, I don't think the atomic bomb will ever be used again because we saw how much damage we had done and how much suffering we had caused and are not prepared to be responsible for that again.

My name is David C., age 30, a San Francisco resident.I cannot recall a time, an age in my life when I did not know of the atomic weaponry all around the Earth,and the potential for total destruction.It was a simple fact of my life as I grew up in the Seventies.I also was aware of the destructions in Japan during WW2.The shadow, the pallor that these inescapable realities cast over my sense of hope, my sense of a reliable future is hard for me to measure.I have since put into perspective the myriad and conflicting opinions I have surrounding these issues, but my chilhood echos still remain.The awful power of atomic destruction seems to deny all life,all goodness, and make futile constructive human endeavor.I hope now,with all my heart,and all my power to beleive in Humankind that this kind of annhilation of life is never,ever unleashed again in our world.

it was avery sad and unhappy situation to expirience the war its just because of the goverment officers or the higher rank leader alot of peaple were lost im very lucky i wasnt there when it happened i hope the goverment will stop this kind of misunderstanding with diff country.

I am 39 years old and so my knowledge of the atomic bomb was first with Kennedy and Cuba. Even though I was small I remember everyone watching tv alot and seem nervous and uptight more than usual. I hope have an opinion of the war between Japan and the United States but I feel not being there I do not really deserve to say anything about Japan being bombed. I do hope by sseing the picture of the horrible suffering that nuclear weapons are never, ever again used. I do wonder if blockading Japan or continuing the regular bombing runs by air on military instalations would have done it. Iraq is being blockaded partally and suffering badly. I know Japan would have been better blockaded and that should have been able to work but in a longer length of time. Also the regular bombing by air may have done the job more in a way that was more human if anyone can call any killing humane. I do feel that civilians should never be killed and only the military should be engaged in the war activities. The only time I can see it being ok for killing civilians is if your country is being taken over and it looks like your about to lose your country and every thing it stands for. Other than that then I say the killing should be limited to the military.

If the countries on purpose build weopon factorys, anti-battery rockets and so on on hospitals, schools and other civilian places then that is the government that allows it fault. The people in those hospitals, schools and so on should fight against that being done. That is exactly what Saddam of Iraq has done and tried to make the opposing country look like they intently bombed a hospital, school or civilian building but they very well knew there were military weapons on, in or under these buildings. I can not say that my past generation was wrong for the atomic bombs. I have to have been there to know what they felt. I can very easily in the comfort of my home on my computer with my mind at ease crititize someone from back then. I can however ask and wonder why they did not try a total blockade or other options that work and are working today. Thanks for keeping the memory alive and as the Jews an non Jews killed in Germany it should be remembered if not more for just the sake of keeping it from happening again. I just wish there was more video taken to really happen the pain home. The pictures make it look not so harmful. In video you can see the painful movements and expressions that they feel and we can only guess what it felt like. Even the victims say words can not describe deep enough how bad it felt. Sincerely, Mr.& Mrs. Robert K. Barrett

Craig Lancaster, New Zealand, age 26. My first recollections are at high school, where more socially conscious teachers would inform us. It sometimes seemed a way for them to feel they were making a difference to the world by teaching the high school children, and making paper cranes. With the large outcry of fear from students reaching the teachers in the early 1980's New Zealand became nuclear free. A change that nobody has ever been quite sure about, but is unlikey to change within the foreseeable future. Possibly through a change in the times, but more likely a numbing as I have grown older, it all seems less important now. I guess constant reminders are needed, because everyone noticed a change in society's attitudes during the dubious 'Gulf War' to that of the others. ANZAC day will always be more important to New Zealand, because of personal involvement.

I first learned about the bomb at age 9. It scared me incredibly. How do you explain to a child that the human race has the capacity - and the potential - to kill every one of its members? Around this time I read Nevil Shute's &quotOn The Beach&quot, a fictional account of people in Melbourne, Australia waiting for the fallout from the nuclear war that has devastated the rest of the world to move south and wipe them out. IN 1979, that seemed pretty likely to a 9 year old child. People talk about how Ronald Reagan was such a &quotlikeable&quot president. Well, he was elected when I was 11, and I was very frightened of him. It seemed to me that he was obsessed with building more and more weapons and that he wasn't too concerned that children like myself might die from his actions. And in my young opinion, we already had enough weapons to knock out the Soviets dozens of times over - why did President Reagan want to take money away from poor children's lunch programs so that we could kill the Soviets another dozen times over.

As an adult, looking at the pictures of Nagasaki at this San Francisco exhibit, I am reminded of the many pictures I've seen of Holocaust devastation. Many close relatives of mine were killed because they were Jewish and because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Though I undertand that the motives of many people behind the bombing was to end a horrible war, weren't the results the same? Americans had come to hate the Japanese - ALL Japanese, soldiers and civilians and children alike, even Japanese living in our own country - and at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we annihilated them, just as Hitler annihilated my great-grandmother, just because she was Jewish. It still goes on.

Just a few years ago I watched the bombing of Iraq, and listened to Americans whoop for joy. The excited newscasts left out what I thought was the most vital part of the story - what was going on at ground zero? Over half of the population of Iraq at the time of the was was under 15 years old. Yet somehow Americans found it okay to bomb these people, these Iraqi people, without much thought about the matter. At age 11, it seemed illogical to me that it could ever be okay to kill a child simply because they were of a certain race or nationality and happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And nobody has been able to convince me otherwise. This is a wonderful exhibit -- I recommend that San Francisco visitors take the time to go to the Exploratorium and see it. ---Naomi, age 25, Minneapolis, MN, USA

Pravin Prasad, Age 26 yrs, New York. In my childhood days I was told stories of the WW2 and the use of the two bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I wasn't then, able to appreciate the idea behind the atomic mess, which today leads me to think that Science and Technology has done more harm to the Society than it has done good and this is due to the moral build up of humans. I say this because all the advances that have been made for the good of humans can well be reduced to rubble in the hands of a mad man if he so wishes. The question that arises is &quotWhy should a nuclear weapon exist?&quot If there is the capability for nuclear weapons, they will be used sooner or later, and that is my very firm belief. The problem that this issue may face is the need for weapons which mankind has always faced and will always need. Well the answer is, there should be weapons to take care of rebellions and disturbances but it should be kept in mind that weapons which cause mass destruction and have deadly repercussions for many more years should be banned. They are a disgrace to mankind and I feel very strongly against it. To conclude --- If there is one thing that will some day annihilate mankind (other than extra-terrestrial forces) it is going to be nuclear agents. So mankind better watch out. There have always been mad men and there always will so it is better not to have deadly toys for them to play with.

I am 37 years old and my opinion about the A-bomb is that the Americans did well by dropping the bomb because that was the only way to stop the war. During the cold war the A-bomb was a weapon of peace. We must look also the good side and not only the negative results. We don't forget the killed people in Nagasaki but this war had to be ended. Thank you cold war the A-bomb was the major weapon of peace. The A-bomb is a weapon for peace

I was too young to understand WWII. I do not consider the vaporization of a person as inhumane as being burned out of a underground bunker by flame thrower. The A-bomb ended the war. It saved tens of thousands of lives-on both sides. It is just another weapon, no better or worse than all the rest. Mankind must cease being a warring creature. The weapons we develop are incidental to the fundamental problem of settling disputes by violent behavior rather than peaceful negotiation.

I am 30 years old so did not experience the bombing during my lifetime. I first learned about it during high school, but not in any depth. The first time I read about it in any great depth was in college, in a magazine called Sojourners, which is dedicated to the antinuclear cause, among other causes. The facts of the situation horrified me, because as I grew up I had learned the traditional &quotAmerican history&quot approach to the issue that the bomb was a necessary way to win the war. The knowledge that weapons capable of such destruction scared me. I was very afraid that such weapons would be used again. Now I only fear that they will be used by smaller countries rather than the &quotsuperpowers&quot. My image of science and technology has not changed too much, as I feel that scientific and technical knowledge in and of itself is not a bad thing--it is what we do with this knowledge that can be good or bad. B. Szyszkiewicz, age 30, Willingboro, New Jersey, USA

Since I was born in 1978, I do not have any first-hand knowledge or experience regarding the war. However, For as long as I can remember, I have been interested in, and have studied, the history and issues of WWII. I have studied WWII history both in and out of school, and spoken to people who lived through those times, including my grandfather, who served overseas, in the Army Air Corps, during WWII. I have always viewed the use of atomic weapons as a completely necessary and beneficial act to bring an end to the war. The 80,000 people who died in the atomic attack on Nagasaki were no more (or less) dead than the 80,000 people who died in one night of firebombing over Tokyo. The developement of atomic weapons was a simple progression of science and technology, with no moral strings attached. Moral issues can only arise in the use of a technology, and not in its mere existance. And I believe that the technology was used in an appropriate manner.

I have never lived in fear of atomic weapon use, especially the use in a global war (US vs. USSR, for example). All parties knew that such a use would be self-defeating and suicidal. However, there is, today, a frightening possibility (albeit slight) that an extremist group (a terrorist group, or another such illegal and underground organization%) might acquire and use nuclear weaponry in a terrorist fashion. No actual government or state would do so (barring insanity among its leaders), for to do so would surely be answered in the direst of responses by the nuclear-armed super-states. Let us pray that it never does happen. Zachary V. Whitten; 17; Red Bluff, California; Aug. 30, 1995; A subject of great interest.

I remember going through air raid drills when I was in kindergarten. This is my first memory of anything related to societal responses to the coming of the atomic age. Personal images aside (for they really are irrelvant in light of the realities of a nuclear axchange), the knowledge of the existence of such incredibley powerful - and destructive - devices brought me to realize that, sometimes, we as a species can often be too smart for our own good. My image of science and technology remains largely unaffected by the atomic bomb. Humans have used scientific and technological advances for military applications for as long as history has been recorded. For all that is good, there is a dark side. I was too young to fully appreciate the latent terror the Cold War held over the world. However, today's blight of terrorist factions and their activities, and the easy availability of the needed doomsday technologies and materials, coupled with a highly unstable world political structure, point to any possibility. Never say never. Gary 38, PA (A fixation with high technology in all of its permutations.)

I am 51 yearsbold and live in England. My father esacped from Nazi Germany and thus my memories of the war years were, initially involved with the Jewish experince. Howevber during my adolescence and the years of the cold war the threat of nuclear annihilation became incresaingly important and thretaening and I became acive in the CNDS (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament).

I first became aware of the a-bomb as a child when I heard people talking about Hiroshima. I found out Hiroshima was not as big a blast as Nagasaki while reading through my parents encyclopedias. I also read about Japanese experimentation on prisoners of war. Cruelty is what war is all about. I was born in 1968. To me as a child, the cold war was not at all frightening. I think for most people it was like an amusement park ride that some seek out for vicarious thrills. Only two countries could really do anything with nukes back then, and it appeared to be thoroughly under control. Nowadays it's different, smaller countries are advancing the technology, and suddenly a lot more comes into play than just the United states and the former USSR. Maybe it is only because I am adult now that the threat seems much more possible. I guess I just need a vicarious thrill. But the cold war is definitely not over, by any stretch of the imagination.

8/26/95

I was aware of it since childhood, and didn't realized what it meant to all humanity up to now. It brought me scenes of great suffering, images of burning pain, anihilation and colective death. It reminded me of Sodoma and Gomorra and the great dead sea that remained afterall. I dont mean people suffering the bomb were evil, like people from So.-GO were, not even one, but the evil at this time was distributed everywere it was the world war. Yes, I consider that the Bomb could be used again against people, innocent people some of them. Its a matter of statistics. How many good vs how many bad (unconscious), and of the acting of the good ...worldwide.
Claudio C. Garcia Age, 48

I am 29 years old. Today is my 4th Wedding Anniversary. My name is Diane Myers-Lipton. I became aware of atomic/ nuclear weapons at a young age. My father develops them. I have never been able to understand why a nation would want to use these weapons--all people have similar hopes for their children's lives. Laughter. Love. Food. Sunsets. Those images do not associate well with the bomb to say the least. So, as a child, I did not believe that I would grow old, that I would have children. In the 80's, I did believe that a bomb would be used. Today, I do not believe that. But it doesn't matter . . . the technology is here, the possibility of ending all life on earth exists. And prehaps that is what we most need to understand about the bomb. Our technology has surpassed our moral/ ethical abilities. I'd propose our defense budget should be diverted to devleoping our capicaity for compassion. Practice transformation.

I first became aware of the "bomb" When I was four years old in my home town of Graysville, AL. I was born November 20, 1959 for reference. We were inside our house eating some "snow" ice cream which is made from fresh snow, condensed milk and sugar. While we were eating this, the evening news came on reporting about the fallout cloud from the first Chinese atomic bomb blast in November of 1964. We were warned by the ABC news broadcast not to eat snow ice cream due to the fact that the fallout cloud was part of the storm that produced the very unusual early November snow in Alabama. We finished our ice cream.

I remember asking about the "bomb" and found out from my mother and grandmother that we and the Russians and now the Chinese had the "bomb". I remember distinctly that I figured out that the "bomb" could destroy 1/4 of the world. Well that was ok because I knew that with us and the Russians and the Chinese using the bomb that there would still be 1/4 of the world left.

I was always very interested in the "bomb" as a child. I am from a Military family and I found out that various members of my family had been in world war II and how glad they were that the "bomb" had been used. Before I was ten years old I had read the book about Hiroshima that had been written by some Japanese folks regarding what happened that day. I read about nuclear effects and I even got to see cows and other farm animals that had been bread after nuclear tests in the pacific. This was in Oak Ridge Tenessee, near where my sister lived. There was a tourist attraction in Rising Fawn Georgia where some of the six legged and two headed cows and dogs with weird deformities were held. I later found out that they had been obtained somehow from Oak Ridge.

Learning about the "bomb" has not negatively effected my attitude toward science and technology. Indeed, my degree will be in Physics and Engineering here at school. The "bomb" and all technology is is completely neutral. It is man that determines whether it will be used to kill or help, to destroy or build. I am working on technology that will help and to build a better future for us all. I have been far more effected by space technology than by any fear from nuclear technology. I am part of a group of people that espouse that we, working together can offer to our fellow man a positive alternative to death, war, and decline, through the responsible reaching out for the stars which is our true manifest destiny as a species under God.

During the cold war I was brought up in the seventies, that most negative of times for an American, with the stupidity of Vietnam, the rise of the Welfare state, and the overall Maliase that was epitomized by the Presidency of Jimmy Carter. Yes I thought that the "bomb" might be used, and for our entire generation that was a good reason to party our brains out because we feared tomorrow. For better or worse Ronald Reagan was our generation's savior because he brought us beyond death to the possibility of life beyond the darkness of nuclear war. Well is the quote by Washington true that those who wish for peace must prepare for war.

Paradoxically the use of the bomb today is far more likely than ever before. In the end, the leaders of both the U.S. Russia and China where smart enough to realize that if a nuclear war started then there would be no one left around to re-elect them. This paridigm is no longer true today. There are many forces at large in many parts of the world that would relish a chance to strike at either us or some of our former block adversaries. There are many groups that could do this and some are actively pursuing this path. This is the real fear that I carry today, especially since I am in a position to know some of the possibilities.

I do not regret what happened in Nagasaki or Hiroshima. More people died in the fire bombings of many cities in both Japan and Germany and Britian than died there. One of my Uncles was a Prisoner of War in Germany and I have also read about and met many soldiers that were imprisoned in Japan. I think it is far more horrible than any destruction by the "bomb", the treatment of prisoners by individual Japanese soldiers. This was individual horror and torture inflicted person to person for no other reason than one felt superior to the other. It is instructive to think that it was only a mass horror such as the "bomb" that was able to cut through the individual horror and attitudes of the Japanese enough to enable the ending of the war. Think about how many more individual horrors would have been committed between then and the time of a more conventional surrender.

Think about this also. How many millions of lives were saved due to the use of the "bomb" in Japan. We really did have a basis, our political leaders, to make a value judgement on the basis of, "is this principal or incident worth the deaths of millions in minutes and days like in Japan?" How many times were decisions made that steered our two power blocks away from war based upon the visions captured by the camera's such as we see here in this display? I have seen many more horrible pictures such as those from the Holocaust, but that horror builds slowly like a sickness which over the centuries has again and again afflicted our world. the "bomb" is like holding two people holding guns to each others head. Very few are stupid enough to pull the trigger in such a circumstance and by the grace of God we have made it so far.

Dennis Ray Wingo
Student, University of Alabama in Huntsville

8/23/95 I was born in 1975. I did not live during WWII. Nor did my father or mother. In fact, neither of my grandfathers even fought during the Great War. However, it is not for lack of patriotism or courage that my family has not had a grand history of medals, honors, and recognition. The bombing was a necessary, tragic, and fateful decision that saved American lives, American dreams, and American freedom. I can never repay Harry Truman or Albert Einstein for their self-inflicted torment, but I will never let anyone slight their name or condemn their decisions without a word of dissent.

I seem to always have known about the "bomb" but it wasn't until I read about it in the novel Hiroshima that I realized its actual existence. Before that, I had never really given it much thought.

I always think about one scene in the book where a person is in a ditch or just lying on the ground. Someone comes along and grabs his hand to help him up but the outer layer of the skin peels off the hand like a loose glove.

It terrified and sickened me in a way I had never known. I felt guilty and ashamed that the country I had been so proud of could be evil enough to cause so much harm on innocent people. I remeber this was the first time that I ever hated my own country and the first time I ever felt responsible for the actions of it.

I actually never associated the bomb with the technology that created it. I always have associated the devastation with the people who decided to drop it. So, no, I cannot say that it affected my image of science.

I do think that as long as they are around, the possiblity of using them exists - just like a loaded pistol in the house. You may think that your loved ones would never use it on each other or yourself but it happens all the time. It is better to not have one in the house.

Melanie Flores, 23
San Francisco, CA

My name is Howard. I'm 36, Jewish, origionally from Chicago, and am a professional engineer in Santa Clara, Ca.

My father served in WWII, and I am of the 'duck & cover' generation, where school children 'prepaired' for a nucular attack. Even then, I knew it would never happen, and even if it did, hiding under a desk, or in the basement of a school wasn't going to protect me.

War is one of the oldest, and stupidest concepts man has ever devised. I learned of 'the bomb' in school, but have always felt that man's stupidy, while being vast, would never be so great as to allow him to completly destroy the earth. Russia didn't want to nuke us, and we didn't want to nuke them. It was an extreamly expensive 'game' (the cold war).

The bomb came from great scientific minds at a time when the fate of the entire world was at stake. It was a race. Surely the Germans would have used it. So would the Japaneese. Personally, I would have opted for a 'demonstration' or at the very most, used one bomb, not two. But we wanted a 'quick end' to the war and to show 'repeatability'. I hope we have learned that atomic wepons are useless, and have no business in a 'civilized world'. Our biggest worry is with third world countries, or terrorests getting a bomb. A fullscale nucular war will never happen, and if it ever did, no one will remember because we'll all be dead.

For me, the reality of war was elsewhere - which made it all the more glamorous. My friend and I would make-believe that we were American spies infiltrating the Soviet Union on a secret mission (of course, we always had to fight our way out, and always did make it out.). I had never known any other enemy than the Russians. As I grew older, I began to learn, inevitably, about nuclear weapons. I recall, very vividly, attending a veteran's event with my grandfather, who was in the merchant marines in the Pacific during WWII. I stood before a booth there, watching a video about the blast radii of atomic bombs, how to store food, and prepare for a holocaust. For the first time, war involved me. I took a pamphlet from that booth, and kept it in my room. For years to come, I feared a nuclear war (although I still fear it, the impression of this scene made a profound impact on me).

I also caught on to my mother's fear of the bomb. We were eating dinner at the same grandfather's house when Anwar Sadat was assassinated. I had no idea what that meant, or who Sadat was, but when my mom told grandpa, "We may be using that bomb shelter in your basement tonight," I knew what that meant. She also stored fresh water in our basement, which brought things home to me.

The TV movie 'The Day After' also affected me. It showed real people dealing with the after-effects of a nuclear war. The thing that really hit me was the ending, nothing in particular, just the fact that it wasn't a happy ending. I think that until that point in my life, every movie I saw (or my parents would let me see) had a happy ending.

I did not live through WWII, but its events did change my life. Rather, they didn't change my life. As I said, my grandpa was in the Pacific in the merchant marines. Just after he enlisted (or was drafted, I don't know which), he got his orders to report to San Francisco. On his way, he realized that he was late. Although he rushed to get there, he missed his boat. A week later, a Japanese submarine sank that ship, and no one survived. When I think about that, I get shivers - if he had died, my mother wouldn't have been born, and I would not have even existed.

This is what I think about when people start debating about the ethics of using the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I think about all the wonderful things in my life that I have experienced: childhood joys, seeing the sights of 45 states and 3 countries, the feeling of being a Christian, the love of a woman I'm going to marry. A philosopher once said, "Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it." I think that we forget the situation that President Truman and his advisors faced that summer of 1945. They faced another million deaths and casualties from a fanatical army that would die before surrendering. The U.S. had declared war on Japan, and was using every new advance available to defeat the enemy. Truman may not have wanted to use the bomb on Japan, but it was, nonetheless, his duty to do so. Definitely not his duty to humanity as a whole, but his duty to the American people he had sworn to serve. An air force captain who spoke to one of my classes said, "The military's job is to br eak things and kill people - that's not a pretty thing or a fun thing, but that's what we do: break things and kill people." Those who have never lived through combat cannot understand why 'we can't all just get along.' Some will only sit back in the comfort of freedom and speculate whether those who fought did it ethically. To those who do: How can you question, ultimately, the existence of entire generations?

Now, as a grown-up (?) scientist, I have had the opportunity to explore the ethics of the profession. I am often dismayed by science which preoccupy themselves with whether they can do something without asking if they should. While biology takes most of the heat these days, physics, my discipline, had as many dillemmas during WWII. Of course, the difference lies in the circumstances: modern biology is just wandering through genetic engineering, but if we didn't research the bomb, Germany was, and there was no question that the Nazis would have use it on their way to world domination. However, I am not so sure that the Rosenbergs did the wrong thing by giving atomic bomb secrets to the Russians. Too much knowledge tips the balance of power - which is what started the war in the first place.

Even now, war seems distant, because of the security here in the United States. I read about Bosnia, the middle east, Zaire, and other nations in conflict, and while I can imagine their plight and stand for what I think is the right thing to do, I won't probably ever really know war. I pray that nuclear weapons are never used for the mass destruction of populations, but I can never forget that pamphlet with the bright orange cover that I picked up: 'Living in the Nuclear Age.'

Phil Germann, Born 1973
South Dakota

I'm 42 years old, and most of my memories and attitudes about the bomb were "taught" to me by my parents and my schools. Over the years, as I ventured to research the materials available, I found my opinions changing each day, until now it becomes difficult to discuss the subject without undue emotion.

My earliest memories of the bomb were those of a "wonderful invention that saved the world from evil". Since the USA never dropped the bomb on Germany, I never learned much about the original intent to use it against Germany. Instead, I was taught that Japan was trying to conquer the world and we used the bomb to defeat them. Even a child might wonder why we did this, and so I remember being told many times that "Japan would have fought to the last man, woman, and child, and only by dropping the bomb, did we convince them to surrender."

Odd, when you think about it. If Japan were so fanatically driven to fight, why did the bomb make a difference? After all, dying is dying, and fanatics don't quit just because you choose to kill them in a new way.

By the time I got to College, I met ... for the first time in my life ... Japanese students. I had never before spoken with a single person of Japanese descent. I guess you could say that I grew up in a "lily white neighborhood". I had seen blacks, and even met a few, but it wasn't until college that I even got to know any blacks (African Americans).

My Japanese friends and I never really discussed the war. I think this was mostly due to the fact that they all had come from fairly well-to-do families, and the war seemed as distant to them as it did to me. Then again, maybe they just didn't want to talk about it.

After Graduate School, I met and married a woman who had grown up in Los Alamos. Her parents still live there, and soon I found myself neck-deep in discussions about the bomb.

You see, in Los Alamos, most everyone supports the bomb, everything about it. They still want to set off bombs for testing (although I can't figure out anymore what in the world they want to test). And they still feel that we should be producing lots more bombs.

Their attitudes don't differ much from how I used to feel. I viewed the bomb as the ONLY deterrent stopping the USSR from nuking us. Now that the USSR has dissolved, I find myself worrying MORE, not less, about the possibility of a nuclear attack. You see, the USSR had a good reason not to attack. They had power, and using the bomb against us would result in a counterattack. People in power don't want to die.

Now the bomb is spewed about that area, and who knows who is in charge of them. Also, without the strict regulations and monitoring enforced by the USSR, these littler nations are more prone to losing (or selling) their bombs to the underground.

Quite frankly, I was surprised that no one set off a nuclear bomb to commemorate the first test (7/16/45) or the Hiroshima drop (8/6/45). It wouldn't have taken a very big bomb to kill a lot of people and get countries stirred up.

But it didn't happen, thankfully.

Now, there's a bunch of flap about people wanting Japan to "apologize" for their war aggressions. Of course, the USA has never apologized (officially) for dropping the bomb. For that matter, the USA has never apologized for anything.

And so I find myself immersed in propoganda even as an adult. Only yesterday did it strike me that the "sneak attack on Pearl Harbor" is itself propaganda. Think about it. How many times have nations "warned" their enemies that they were about to attack? "Hey guys, we're coming over tomorrow at 4 to bomb you, okay?"

So, I've never heard any of the attacks initiated by the USA called "sneak attacks", but the attack at Pearl Harbot is "glued" to that word, as if people want to vilify Japan for attacking. Hey, Custer never sneak attacked, did he? What about George Washington, as he attacked a bunch of drunk Hessians on Christmas Eve? Was that a sneak attack?

Today, I view the bomb as the ultimate failure of civilization. No one can deny that it HAD to be invented. Science simply must run its course. If we hadn't done it, someone would. But ... that cannot justify using it. Even in hind sight, if one attempts to argue that "they" just didn't know back then what they were doing, it STILL doesn't make it right. Rights and wrongs don't "evolve" over a 50 year period.

Do I think the bomb will be used again? Sure it will, but probably by a terrorist group.

What's my image of technology due to all of this? I'm sure someone will come up with an even worse weapon. If it can be done, it will be done.

What's my view of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? It was the worst war crime ever committed by any nation at any time. People "praise" Truman for "saving lifes", but quite the contrary, I believe he is responsible for increasing deaths. Japan would have surrendered months earlier if we let them. Indeed, if Truman just said, "Hey guys, let's stop the killing. What conditions will you accept for your surrender?", Japan probably would have surrendered long before August. So ... Truman didn't save lifes. He killed both Japanese and Americans by prolonging the war, just so he could "get even with the Japanese".

My view of dropping the bomb is that we did it for three reasons; 1 - to get even, 2 - to show up the Russians, and 3 - to justify spending 2 billion dollars.

I'm not proud of my country for all of this. I'm a white upper middle class male, with no reason to badmouth my own country. I only do so because my country so richly deserves it.

John Pawlak

I first learned about the bomb from history books on WWII when I was 8 or 9 years old in the 60's. I also rememeber "shelter drills in grade school, but I don;t remember teachers talking about nuclear weapons then. I also rememeber seeing movies on possible nuclear war eg "failsafe" around then.

My own personal view of the bombings has been colored by my own personal background. My father was in the USN during WWII. He had an assignment as a Naval gunnery spotter in the event of an invasion of Japan, an assignement with a low expected survival rate. He was and is convinced he would not have lived if the bombs had not been dropped. While I can intellectually understand the arguments relating to Truman's decision, includoing the possibility that Japan might have surrendered without an invasion or the bombing, my emotions are mixed between horror at the effects of the bomb on innocents and my symapthy for the dilemma Truman faced, and the posibility I personally might not have come into existence if Japan had been invaded.

Whoa- This is a BIG topic and deserves a lot more than an email. I'm American, 29 years old (born 1965) and grew up with the usual post-war American POV. I.e. the bomb was an absolute necessity; it saved MILLIONS of American lives; it killed civilians, yes, but was unavoidable.

I've circled 360 degrees since, mostly through arguments with my father, who is a WWII veteran (European theater). He expresses what he calls "necessary deep regret." In other words, he's deeply unhappy that the US used the bomb. But he also deeply believes that the US did not start the war and that the great majority of atrocities (Hiroshima and Nagasaki among them) were commited by the Axis powers.

I've come to his POV.
Alan Miles

My first real awareness of the realities of nuclear war came when my church hosted two young women who came to New York for medical treatment as part of something called The Hiroshima Maidens Project. I was six or seven years old in the early ‘50s, when two very strange looking women began coming to our Sunday worship services. They dressed in a strange fashion, and spoke a strange language. They moved slowly and awkwardly, they spoke slowly, and one in particular seemed to have a good deal of trouble saying anything. But their most conspicuous characteristic was that their arms, legs and faces were covered with the burn scarring, which I had never seen before. I saw them on Sundays for a few months, and then they went home.

The Hiroshima Maidens Project was organized by a group of clergy and others as a humanitarian effort to provide medical treatment to roughly two dozen young women who, for the most part, were so badly burned that they lacked the physical mobility or dexterity required to earn a living. Many were so impaired that they could barely perform daily personal chores such as brushing one’s hair. And, of course, they were horribly disfigured.

Their condition was made much worse because, at the time of their injury, Hiroshima’s medical infrastructure was as devastated as the rest of the city. Much of the work done by the American surgeons was repairing the damage caused by injuries left to heal without proper treatment. Each of these young women received multiple surgeries, ranging from skin grafts to restoring mobility to immobilized fingers and elbows.

As a young child, I did not immediately grasp the extent of their suffering. I saw only their extreme strangeness. But learning to understand that strangeness was perhaps a more effective lesson about nuclear realities than I could ever get from all the stories of megadeaths and physical devastation. If, at that age, I had met any woman dressed in a kimono and speaking Japanese, I would have found her to be more than a bit strange. And I had to learn to distinguish between that “normal” strangeness, and the unique strangeness caused by impaired mobility, damaged speech organs, and burn scarring. I learned. I learned to hate wars and killing. I hate them with a passion which began with these early childhood memories. Mankind's ability to wreak destruction has progressed far more swiftly than it’s ability to resolve conflicts in a positive fashion. And our ability to rationalize is far stronger than our sense of morality.

I don't recall learning about the bomb in grade school. My first memories of learning about the bomb are a pastiche from books and magazines--I've always been a bookworm, so some of the likely candidates for my first sources of information about the bomb are any number of encyclopedias that I browsed through eagerly during the 70's--Cowell's Comprehensive Encyclopedia (a massive single volume), Funk & Wagnalls' Childrens' Encyclopedia, and of course, World Book. Starting in 2nd grade with my first visits to the school library I developed a keen interest in World War II, specifically with the great carrier battles associated with the Pacific War, and anything at all to do with the air war as it was fought in any theater of the war. Mustangs, Zeros, F4U Corsairs (I loved seeing the Corsairs in the Robert Conrad TV series Baa Baa Black Sheep), P-47s, P-38s--I could then and still can name dozens of different airplanes used in the war. Bombers weren't so exciting, but of course, I couldn't avoid learning about them, too, and about that special class of bombers, the Superfortresses, that carried the atomic bombs to Japan. I don't remember feeling, as a grade school child in the 1970s, the fear that has been described by people growing up in the 50's and 60's. The "duck-and-cover" drills that we did were tornado drills because the real 1974 twisters that destroyed much of Xenia, Ohio, were much more real to us in nearby Englewood, Ohio, than any imagined atomic bomb attack. I clearly remember, though, rummaging through some stacks of books belonging to an adult friend of my mother's and finding the book _Trinity_ which was one the accounts about the making of the atomic bomb, preceding by a number of years Richard Rhodes more famous account (which I haven't read). I also remember being confused by an episode of Hogan's Heros (a TV comedy show set, oddly enough, in a WW II German camp for Allied POW's) in which the major plot element was an attempt by the Allied prisoners to keep the Germans from putting through a shipment of heavy water. The prisoners didn't want them to get the heavy water because it could be used to help make a bomb, but I knew then that you only needed two pieces of uranium of the right size to make a bomb, so I didn't understand what all the fuss was about the heavy water (which they depicted as a huge wooden tank with "wasser" painted on the side).

The fear came later. In the Reagan 80's I experienced much more intellectual and emotional input about the bomb. Talk of "windows of vulnerability" and "winnable nuclear war" and "the evil empire" were commingled with those movies depicting the aftermath of a nuclear attack on the US, the most well known being the TV movie "The Day After," but one that really still haunts me is _Testament_. Even now I'm haunted by the voice of the ham radio operator in Kansas trying to contact someone, anyone, after the bombs have gone off. I learned then too of the less publicized effects of atomic blasts--besides the heat and the blast and the radioactivity there's also the EMP (electromagnetic pulse) which knocks out any delicate electronics. Sometimes, when a TV or radio station would go off the air I would think--this is what would happen if a bomb went off near the station. Perhaps the bomb related "media event" that was most real to me, though, was a fictionalized news-broadcast of the events surrounding a terrorist threat in Charleston, South Carolina. In the story, which was broadcast as if it were a real news broadcast, terrorists bring a boat into Charleston harbor and make some demands. Their demands were not met, and they detonated the bomb. I especially remember this show because all of the broadcasts were done from the fantail of the USS Yorktown, which sits in Charleston as a museum. I had visited the museum when I was younger, and remember it quite vividly, and had for many years after that a picture taken of my family standing together with the Yorktown in the background. Now, years later, I remember it as a vivid example of the danger still inherent in a world that contains nuclear weapons--a danger that instead of diminishing has actually become more possible with the end of the Cold War.

Then during the 80's I also got a much better intellectual appreciation of the complicated political context surrounding the bomb. As someone else has pointed out, there was this fascination with the bomb in debate circles, and arms control was one of the topics when I tried my hand at high school academic debate. Then I learned about the terminology of the time--the ABM treaty, what MIRV stands for, and of course, the reigning doctrine of the day, MAD, which had somehow counterintuitively worked out to keep us alive. We learned about START and SALT and the problems of treaty verification by "national technical means." The problem of how to prevent nuclear war seemd like the most crucial yet most impossible problem.

As I learned more about computer science, and about my chosen field of science, chemistry, I read and learned more about the times and the people involved in developing the bomb. Some of my heroes are Freeman Dyson, Richard Feynman and John von Neumann. Dyson wanted to use atom bombs as fuel to send a ship to the stars, and was later a great voice for arms control. Though famous for other great achievements, Feynman and von Neumann were both involved in the Manhattan Project.

As I sit now close to finishing my Ph.D. work in chemistry I'm acutely aware of the legacy of the bomb in so many ways. Some of the funding for research here comes from the Department of Energy, which is the direct descendant of the Manhattan Project (though absolutely none of our work has anything to do with the bomb or nuclear physics). By some accounts, the whole system of big federal funding for science now in place grew out of the great success of the Manhattan project. And I sit typing now just a few hundred yards away from the site where many people in the early years of the nuclear research were injected, without their knowledge or consent, with plutonium and other radioactive compounds as part of that nuclear research. Just several weeks ago, one of the people in charge of trying to clean up the massive amount of radioactive waste from bomb production at Hanford gave a talk here. In beginning chemistry classes, which I've helped teach, one of the best examples of a fundamental idea in chemistry and physics, the kinetic theory of gases, is best illustrated by the method used at Oak Ridge to enrich uranium for the first atomic bomb.

There are so many what-ifs about the bombing. To me, it was both incredibly tragic yet terribly necessary. Sure, people argue that the war could have ended without use of the bomb, but use of the bomb in war was, I think, an inevitability. The taboo against use of atomic weapons wouldn't have developed without the awful display of their power and it was better that that display was done with the only bombs then in existence. I hate to think what would have happened if the first use of atomic weapons in war came when both the Soviets and the Americans had a significant stockpile of atomic bombs.
--Joe Anderson (b. 1968) Rochester, New York.

I am a 27 year old physics graduate student at the University of Kentucky. I do not know when I first learned of the atomic bomb. I do not think of it as something that spurred my interest in physics. It has been one of the few things with which I have remained impressed for as long as I can remember, but it remained under the topic of social science until relatively recently. Now that I understand some of the concepts behind it, I am impressed by the fact that I am still impressed by the concept, the production, and the power of Fat Man and Little Boy.

Although I am undecided about some points regarding the dropping of the bombs, and I feel that dropping the bomb was not necessary for an expedient end to the war, I do think that if it had not been dropped then when some other world power developed the bomb, it would have been used to start the next war. I think that the explosion sufficiently impressed enough people to keep a war from starting. During the Cold War, I could not fathom anybody making use of the nuclear weapons. I could understand that it might, but it was too foreign to my way of thinking for me to believe that it would happen. Lately, I am begining to worry about the more volitile countries attaining the technology. I am worried that the youths will not be as impressed by the bombs.

I have heard people argue that more people died in the firebombing of Tokyo than in Nagasaki. I recognize that more and worse attrocities can be done via conventional means. What concerns me is that if people are willing to be so attrocious with conventional weapons, then it isn't a very big step to be attrocious with nuclear weapons, and it is certainly easier to drop three or four nuclear weapons that how many hundreds of fire bombs.

As to how the development of the atomic bomb affects my image of science and technology, I am impressed by the abilities of scientists when they put their minds into solving a problem. I am optimistic about the discoveries that can be made. I am worried by the widening gap between people who use technology and people who understand it. I was once told that whenever somebody asks me the time, I build them a clock. I think that scientists want people to understand what they do and why. I think that it is important for people to understand the technologies around them. I think that this is how the development of the atomic bomb has affect my view of science and technology.

Joe Christensen, Physics Graduate Student

I'm a war-baby, born in 1943, so I was a child during the Korean War. I'm also a Vietnam vet.

I know the bomb will be used again, eventually. I love technology and science. I've spent about half my life either in the military, high tech firms, and, or the defense industry. Hard decesions are often made about creating and using weapons of "mass destruction".

While in the Air Force I've played "games" with Russian bombers flying from the North Pole toward Canadian/US airspace and American interceoptors flying north to meet them. Both sides were playing games--probinbg defense, testing tactics and reaction times. I have found that the military The only reason the bomb hasn't been used yet is that the "super powers" didn't have the nerve to use them and the smaller nations didn't have the ability to. Desperation and technological availability have changed that scenario.

I can remember being a grade schooler and being taught how to Duck & Cover! My hometown, Dayton, Ohio, was (is?) on the Russian Hit List. I've visited The Air Force Museum near that city and seen and seen Bocks Car, the B-29 that dropped the bomb that devastated Nagasaki.

I've just been through, on-line, the display of photographs taken at Nagasaki. Yesterday I was talking with my 14-year-old daughter and my 12-year-old son about the A bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They've been to the Exploratorim on a trip to northern Caliofornia. These images will help them to put things into an historical context that will give them some valid insight.

You've mounted a powerful exhibit. This was a job well done. Those who do not know history are going to be very damn surprised, to misquote Mr. Santayana. Things like this exhibit make it harder to be ignorant or surprised.

We're not out of the woods yet but things like your exhibit make it possible to tell some of the trees that are in the forest. The greartest fear we have to fear uis human nature. When I read the commernts that others had left , I saw defensevness, guilt, fear, justifications, sorrow and a low-grade dread that has nagged at several generations of people. In the mean time we live as best we can.

Horace Coleman
Huntington Beach, CA

I was born in 1954. My father was a USA Marine with the rank of Sergeant during WWII. He was stationed and fought on Hiroshima and Okinawa. Over the years as I was growing up he often spoke of his hate and distaste for the Japanese people. He was at the front lines and at times experienced hand to hand combat. He saw many of his boyhood friends killed in front of him. He himself (thankfully) did not receive any serious wounds of the physical nature. However, his 4 years overseas left a mark on his psychological well-being.

Now, at the age of 73 he seems to recall quite frequently and vividly his experiences of the fighting and dying in those cities. At times he even crys.

It is very hard (impossible, frankly) for me to try to put myself in his place and understand what he and others like him went through. I can only listen to what he has to say and support him as I know how.

I pray that our country and other countries never have to experience something as horrible as WWII again. I would hate to think that my sons and someday my son's sons would have to relive such a horrible rememberance as my father and others of his generation have to do.

How could one not have been aware of the Bomb, any one of my generation? I am 45, born after the War ended, but that war is &quotmy&quot war, I am its product just as surely as I am my parents' child. It is not history, it is part of my life and always will be. I grew up in its shadow.

Images? Brightness, darkness, pain and confusion, death of the innocents. Everyone has seen the photographs -- the forever shadows on the wall, the twisted wreckage of buildings and lives. I will remember -- I cannot forget.

But then I see the photographs of my own family. My grandfathers -- the gentle man who took his daughters on bicycle rides and contemplated the stars and died in the stinking hold of some transport ship, or on the dirt floor of some hut on the way to Burma -- we don't even know; and the old man who baked such wonderful pastries and played chess and, long crippled by stroke, was beaten to death by Japanese soldiers. I never even had the chance to know them.

I cannot forget these things.

And I see my mother, a pretty young woman still in her teens, who with her mother and two younger sisters were being moved from camp to camp, closer and closer to the shore -- closer to Japan? She knew about the sex slaves -- there was a separate barracks just outside the confines of the camp, and the women knew what was going on there.

And my father -- I have a photograph of him, I don't really ever want to see it again but I have it and will keep it safe, as he looked when he came out of the Japanese prison camp: a skeleton with taut skin and haunted eyes.

I cannot forget these things.

And I hear, too. I hear an old friend talking about being taken from his mother at eleven, even though she was a widow and he her only child, because at eleven a boy was considered sexually mature and had to go into the men's camps -- where he was put to work stoking the fires for the cremation ovens. Before my eyes, he became again an eleven year old child, alone in his world, describing how bodies twitch and dance in the flames... I hear an old soldier talk of how a youth, a neighbour, an old schoolmate of my mother's, was thrown overboard because he was too ill to work, and he tried to hold on to the sides, so the Japanese soldiers laughingly chopped his hands off ... his father jumped into the see to try to hold him up, to save him, pleading for their lives, and the boat kept going, leaving them both to drown.

I cannot forget these things.

Please, yes, show the pictures of what an atom bomb can do. There must NEVER be another. But please, also, show the other side. Women and children and innocents died on BOTH sides. They starved, they burned, they were massacred ... Don't make just one side the noble martyrs to the other side's racism. That is a horrible perversion of history and a dishonour to those who suffered at the hands of that enemy.

Yes, those bombs killed. Yes, it was horror. Yes, we must KNOW about these things -- no one should ever be in a position to use those bombs again without KNOWING what he's doing. But he must also know the WHY of it. And so must you.

We must REMEMBER -- but we must remember it ALL, not just selectively to conform to some afterward philosophising and the changed and changing culture of a later age.

The bomb dropped. The Japanese army did NOT want to surrender -- they even tried to deny the extent of what had happened. The second bomb dropped, and the Emperor said hold, enough, and overruled his officers. This was a culture of MILITARISM, and a culture where surrender was shameful, a disgrace one could never erase. Thousands died -- but then it was OVER. Not more and more death over the space of months, hundreds here, thousands there, their side, our side, while their prisoners died by murder or neglect and their soldiers raped and killed with impunity.

Truth is never one sided, nor is it facile. War is all hell.

I can never forget any of these things. Neither should any of you.

I honestly mourn the innocents who died at Nagasaki and Hiroshima. But I feel no shame, no retrospective remorse. I remember too much, and have seen too many & other pictures. Their innocents did not deserve to die. But neither did ours.

Learned of nukes from fallout drills in grade school. Nuclear age probably influenced my becoming an mechanical engineer. I can't say I lived in fear of nuclear war however it was possible and is still possible. Having experience &quotconventional war&quot first hand my current image of nuke warfare is a &quotcleaner&quot, &quotless messy&quot if you will affair. Niether is more or less "horrifying". The horrifying experience is certainly experienced by more individuals at once in a nuke strike, but horror is horror weither it occurs in a matter of second of over months and years. One might question which is actually more &quothumane&quot if the ultimate outcome for those involved is the same should the suffering not be as short as possible? Remember in all out war combat is combat and death is visited upon whoever happens to be there when the &quotknock is heard&quot. No one is truly an non-combatant, weapons are never as smart as we'd like.

I'm 33, living in the mid-west, served in the Gulf War and still hold a Captain's commission in the USAR. I learned of nukes from fallout drills in grade school. Nuclear age probably influenced my becoming an mechanical engineer. I can't say I lived in fear of nuclear war however it was possible and is still possible. Having experience "conventional war" first hand my current image of nuke warfare is a &quotcleaner&quot, &quotless messy&quot if you will affair. Niether is more or less "horrifying". The horrifying experience is certainly experienced by more individuals at once in a nuke strike, but horror is horror weither it occurs in a matter of second of over months and years. One might question which is actually more &quothumane&quot if the ultimate outcome for those involved is the same should the suffering not be as short as possible? Remember in all out war combat is combat and death is visited upon whoever happens to be there when the &quotknock is heard&quot. No one is truly an non-combatant, weapons are never as smart as we'd like.

My name is Lyn. I am a white male born in rural Alabama in the summer of 1940, the summer before the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My earliest memories of the &quotatomic bomb&quot are of pictures that I saw in Life magazine about the Eniwetok H bomb tests. They seemed very awsome and scary. Another very vivid memory is the execution of the Rosenbergs, supposedly for giving the bomb secrets to Russia. I recall listening intently to the radio which described the executions which had just been performed. Somehow, even for one who was almost totally ignorant of all that had transpired, this didnÕt seem right to me. I was unaware of the paranoia which gripped the country and the destruction of the career of Openheimer and other scientists who had worked to build the bomb because they had concerns about its use.

I joined the military in 1959 and went through training in Chemical, Biological, and Radiological warfare. However, I recall little exposure to the effects of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I entered college in 1961 and majored in Chemistry. My freshman chemistry textbook provided the first information that I recall about the mechanisms by which atomic bombs operate. I entered graduate school in 1965 and I lived with physics graduate students. As a result of my interaction with them I became intrigued by the Manhattan project and development of the bomb. I read a book about Lawrence and Oppenheimer and was greatly impressed that Oppenheimer had felt a sense of responsibility, as a scientist who had worked to develop the bomb, about the possible use of such weapons. I also saw that this had cost him very dearly, and in essence destroyed his life because he went against the official government dogma.

In 1966, as first year graduate student, I attended a symposium on photosynthesis and listened to a moving address by Nobel Laureate Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, which I have remembered all my life. He talked about the use of scientific knowledge to further the human condition, in particular feeding the hungry of the world. He also spoke about how primitive is our understanding of the atom and molecular processes such as photosynthesis, and our total inability to really comprehend some developments in physics such as 20 megaton bombs. He noted that we can understand a hot stove, or the loss of a loved one. For these we have a frame of reference. However, our primitive brains cannot comprehend temperatures of millions of degrees or the vaporization of millions of people within a few microseconds. These concepts make no sense to us, we have no frame of reference to understand them.

As a member of the Òsixties generationÓ I became very distrustful of my government and the sanctimonious approach to war and human suffering, which seems to be the typical official American response. I believe this sanctimonius approach continues to this day and was most evident in the recent Persian Gulf war where we plowed tens if not hundred of thousands into the sands. And we invoke God as being on our side in doing so. Are George BushÕs action so different than those of Harry Truman? Mark Twain seems to have captured the essence of this mentality so perfectly in his ÒWar PrayerÓ. As a medical school professor I interact with many young people who seem to know little about the bomb and its history, especially those from other countries such as China and India. I tell them of my former spouse who lived in Gary Indiana, near the steel mills, a prime target, and who had her blood type tattooed on her side. Supposedly this was to help ensure survival in case of nuclear attack. I often show to members of my lab, the movie ÒThe Atomic CafeÓ, which describes the first use of the atomic bomb and the cold war paranoia which followed it. I recommend to them Richard Rhodes outstanding book, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, as reading on development of the bomb.

When I read in Newsweek about the photography exhibit of Yosuko Yamahata I was most interested in seeing his photographs. I found them to be a very moving and objective documentary of manÕs inhumanity to man, and they show most eloquently the human costs of the bombing. I also was able to explore and obtain new information regarding the decisions to use the bomb. I was able to read the minutes of the meeting of Oppenheimer and the ÒTarget CommitteeÓ at which targets were selected, and the ostensible reasons for their selection. Item 8, Use Against Military Objectives, seemed especially interesting: ÒIt was agreed that for the initial use of the weapon any small and strictly military objective should be located in a much larger area subject to blast damage in order to avoid undue risk of the weapon being lost due to bad placing of the bombÓ. Somehow this conflicts with TrumanÕs diary notes of July 25, 1945, in which he states ÒI have told the Secretary of War, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers are the target and not women and childrenÓ. Were Oppenheimer and his group really proposing an experiment to test the blast effects of the bomb? Certainly, there is no question that ÒvirginÓ targets were chosen. I also read EinsteinÕs statement of January 22, 1947 about the responsibility of scientists to ensure the peaceful use of atomic energy, a view which I share about all aspects of science. I also examined Leo SzilardÕs petition from 68 Manhattan researchers to Truman, a petition which I understand was squelched by General Groves so that Truman never saw it. I toured Hiroshima and Nagasaki and saw them immediately after the explosions and again following their rebuilding.

My personal feelings about use of the bomb are conflicted. In terms of the magnitude of killing there doesnÕt seem to be a lot of difference in the fire bombing of Tokyo, Dresden, and other cities and the devastation produced by the atomic bomb, with the exception of the long term radiological effects. By the end of World War II warfare against civilian populations was a well developed art, by both sides. Although this is detestable, it was and is a fact of life wich continues today. I am not convinced that the bombÕs use was necessary to end the war and I remain skeptical about the magnitude of the casualties which were predicted for a land invasion. The inflated casualty estimates seem to be, in retrospect, a justification for what was done. I also believe that the evidence suggests that a major reason for dropping the bomb involved political considerations of the Soviet Union. I believe that there were also concerns about the costs involved in developing the bomb. After spending two billion dollars there was a need by some to prove that the money had been Òwell spentÓ. I am also aware that the US did not ÒstartÓ the war.

I find deeply troubling the response of many of my fellow citizens, most especially the politicians, regarding the display of the Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian. It seems to me that enough time has passed that we can begin to analzye the events involved in dropping the bomb more dispassionately and learn some valuable lessons, for the US, Japan, and others. Unfortunately, I agree with the comments of the journalist Mitsuko Shimomura, that Americans have this simplistic notion that things are always a simple choice between good and evil, and the US always assumes that it is on the ÒgoodÓ side. And usually that God is also on our side, as evidenced by the comments of Truman, and more recently George Bush. However, I would like to believe that displays such as this provide a ray of hope. As more and more people become aware of what has been and is being done in their name, and with their tax dollars, perhaps they will demand more explanations from those who are supposed to represent us.

One can only hope that displays such as the photography exhibit of of Yosuko Yamahata will cause us all to re-think the lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and to resolve that atomic warfare will never again be used again to settle differences between countries. For it is the innocent who bear the brunt of the destruction.

I was born in March 1942. It wasn't until several years after the war with the return of my Father from Europe that I started to become aware of what happened. Several of my class mates in elementary school were recent immigrants and brought stories along with photographs of what had happened to their country. As I grew older and saw some of the difficulties that some of my Father's peers had with their experiences till the time they died did I realize how something like this can have such a negative influence on a persons mental disposition for the rest of their lives. I later became aware of the atomic bomb through discussion with my peers during the North Korean Conflict some time in the early fifties. Upon seeing these pictures I can only feel for those who for not fault of their own end up enduring the pain by the loss of their friends, family, hopes, and dreams, caused by the abusive use of power instilled by so few. It makes me realize that I must take a responsible approach towards the democracy that we have so that those few who might reach a position of power which could lead us into something like this will have a strong enough opposition to keep them contained.
-D. Alex Ross, Greenfield, N.S

I knew about the bomb attack from elders, when I was a child of 6 or 7. For me the atom bomb was a big cracker like thing, at that time. I therefore admired the US for making such a great thing. later when I saw the pictures, got to know more about it from books and publictions, I really felt sorry. I feel that, what happened was some thing should never have. I would also like to impress upon the admistrators that, it is their prime duty to ensure that such a tragedy will never happen in the future.
-Binto George Age 25 Indian Institute of Science Bangalore, India

I was born in the late 1950's to parents who lived through WWII. My father spent several years in the South Pacific in the United States Navy, and used to tell me stories of how he and his shipmates picked up the allied prisoners captured in Singapore by the Japanese who were forced to build a railroad between Bangkok and Rangoon. My father was also in the Philippines after the war ended, and told me about the atrocities inflicted on civilians by Japanese soldiers. I grew up believing that the atomic bombing of Japan was necessary to end the war quickly and prevent the loss of lives of American soldiers and Japanese soldiers and civilians. Of course, this is open to debate. I am horrified at the pictures of children and women killed or wounded in Hiroshima an Nagasaki. However, I am also horrified at the thought of so many people in China, Thailand, the Philippines, Singapore, Indonesia, and elsewhere that died at the hands of the Japanese. It may have been immoral for the United States to bomb Japan with atomic weapons. But I can not separate the issue from Japan's actions during the war. Eric Berube

I watched a series of movies once in middle school that not only gave me nightmares when I was watching them but have instilled in me a sadness that is always somewhere in my heart. I am confused about being an American. Most of the time I would rather be something else but then I may not have the freedom to write a letter such as this one. The dropping of the bombs was and is a terrifing and disgusting solution to Americans not wanting to lose their own lives in war. We (I am one after all) have no sense of others sufferings when we work towards our own gain. For any one to justify any bomb is a reflection of this sick rationalization. Our history is flooded with negative karma. We have commited genocide on the natives of the soil we call home, is it really a wonder that we could drop Little Boy and go to sleep that night or any night sense? I feel the most sorrow for the fact that even now after 50 years most people, a.know nothing about what happened and b. think that we did a good thing. I wonder, Do the Japanese hate us? I am not agians't technoloy but I am agians't the blind whorship that goes along with advancement. I wrote this from my emotional standpoint. Thanks for creating aspace that I could write down some of my thoughts. My name is Carmen Tracey, I'm 24 and I am living in Troy, NY

Atom. At age eight I thought the word was Adam.

When the war ended, my sister and younger brother and I marched around the blcock in Detroit making a commotion by beating on pots and pans. The kids next door from second floor bannisters let fly wads of spit, first proclaiming "This is for the Japs. And this is for the Germans." And we all smiled and laughed. We were glad the war was over for it frightened us. It also meant that our uncles, segregated in the Army and discriminated against in the Navy, would be coming home. Beyond that, we had no idea what those August explosions meant.
-Gerald Lundy

Tim Harvey, 39 Riverside, CA. It has been interesting to me to see how people's perception of the bombings has changed as time goes on. I was born in '55 but many of my aunts and uncles were alive during that time and some of them served in WWII. There seems to be a gradual lessening of their attempts to put emotional distance between themselves and the bombings. When I was a child, many of them referred to the Japanese as the Japs.

I am 44 years old.I am the son of a B25 navigator who fought the Japanese.My most vivid bomb related memory is the regular "BOMB" drills in elementary school on Long Island. We were told to kneel against the wall with our heads between our knees and our hands over our faces. We would stay like this until the all clear siren would sound.

My name is Lar Gand and I remember thinking about big bombs such as the atomic bomb and hydrogen bomb as a child. These were not the dangerous things to me. In fact, as a child with very little knowledge, they seemed to be weapons of destruction, but I really didn't understand the meaning of such things until I moved to Vietnam as a nine year old. Then the &quotlittle&quot weapons like 122mm rockets shelling the peripheral areas of Saigon were way too destructive and violent for my daily existence, let alone the BIG bombs I had imagined playing with in my more peaceful and safe days in the United States.

I am 30, so I didn' t experience WWII. However I learned about the bomb at very early age and got interested in the subject since then. The images of the two Japanese cities destroyed by the A bomb impressed me quite much, but the images of the survivors, and their children, born after the bombing, but also affected by the radioactivity impressed far more. I think that the bomb was developped in an era of horror and fortunately those that first succeded in its development were on the right side. I don' t have nothing against the German and Japanese people, but I think the regimes they were fighting for were not democratic and humanistic. The bomb was probably not necessary to put an end to the war but, by the destructive power it revealed, it provided 50 years of some peace to the world. I beleave the A bomb can be used again, otherwise no country would keep the existing arsenals. I fear the bomb can be used by extremist groups to promote terror. The world is not, and as not ever been a peacefull place. The bomb provided some stability but......... Jose Falcao de Melo Civil Engineer 30 years strong defender of democracy and human rights, also a realist

I have no recollection of exactly when I learnt about the existence of the atomic bomb, but I am pretty certain that I knew it from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki's bombing. Roughly, it was my childhood, before I entered the secondary school (Junior High in American's system). I didn' t even know the existence of the Manhattan project, let alone the detail of it regarding how the bomb was developed, until last month when I saw a documentary on the TV. I don't think the use of the atomic bomb has &quoteconsciously&quote affected my idea image of science and technology until I know the story behind the Manhattan project and hear the very words of some of the American scientists and veterans. I must admit that I feel uneasy, to say the least, about some of the opinions of the &quotpro-bomber&quot.

Even now, I still don' t see any reason to look at science in a &quotmoral&quot context. The word moral itself seem to me too ambiguous to serve as a basis for objective judgments, the interpretation of &quotmoral&quot itself cannot be detached from a concrete context. It's the application of science and technology that is subject to, if any, moral judgment.

To this end, I don't think anyone except the exceptionally cold hearted people would say the bombs should be dropped, granted they have seen the devastation, cruelty and trauma it had induced on the people, INNOCENT OR NOT. I must emphasize that &quotInnocent or Not&quot is besides the point in this issue. Even for someone who has committed a serious crime, it wouldn't justify to exercise and act of ordeal of the person. Anyone who wakes up one fine morning, having his breakfast half way and realizes that someone is blasting the entire city into ashes in the next second will have a good idea of what that mean. Cruelty is cruelty no matter how you glamorize the word.

I didn' t think about the cold war too much, I was too ignorant to know enough about it at that time, being an below average schoolboy in a pure utilitarian British Colony in South East Asia. As for now, I see no reason why the bomb or any weapon that is capable of massive destruction will definitely not be deployed, unless all the countries are made incapacitated in this respect. As a matter of fact, now that China is stretching its wings, unless some appropriate measures are taken, we may end up with another cold war. Epilogue. For those who feel angry about my opinion, or perhaps suspect that I am biased, please be informed that my mother country is &quotthe&quot no.1 victim of Japanese invasion. In term of traumatic experience and casualties, the Nanking massacre is on the par with the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bomb, at the minimum. Nevertheless, I cannot agree with any sort of immense cruelty like the bomb and the massacre, of course. About me? Computer Scientist, 30. Currently living in London.

I have looked at the pictures and read the accounts of the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The thing that causes me the greatest sadness are the people in this archive which say &quotThe Japanese got what they deserved for Pearl Harbor. I am glad that they dropped the bomb&quot. Let those people know that &quotThe Japanese&quot included my mother who was a fifteen year old child who lived in Nagasaki. A child that would have been killed if she had not been in the shadow of a small hill. A child who grew up and recovered from her experience enough to come to the United State for graduate school and marry an American. A child who became a mother who never ever spoke to her own children about Nagasaki. A child who grew up to be an artist and a scholar. A child who became a calm, self confident, happy, laughing adult who likes to watch &quotMurder She Wrote&quot. A child who became an Obachan to 5 grandchildren (all only 14 Japanese) that she showers with handmade gifts and presents and books.

If my mother could so completely overcome any hate or bitterness, if she ever harboured any, than what excuse do these people have for still hating &quotThe Japanese&quot for a war that was over half a century ago? It is frightening testimony, because these people hold within them the potential for future wars and atrocities. They are the true enemies within us and around us. My name is Taneil. I am 38, and I live in Colorado, and have always known that I could be any other member of the human race, just as they could be me. I shudder to think that the potential for such callous hatred might lie within me.

I was born on August 6, 1950, five years exactly after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. My daughter was born on August 9th, the anniversary of the dropping of the bomb on Nagasaki. These are strange coincidences that bring the dramatic and tragic human death toll home to me -- odd to be celebrating life as so many others are marking the anniversary of destruction.

I first became aware of the bomb as a school-age child. I was born in 1947, after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but I remember asking my parents about it at an early age. I asked them because I was frightened and wanted to learn more but be reassured. I can' t remember what I heard or saw or read that made be scared, but scared I was. It seemed that the more I learned the more scared I got, and the more helpless I felt as it slowly dawned upon me how vulnerable I and everything and everyone that I knew was.I had a gnawing fear, especially after the Cuban Missile Crisis, that the Bomb would be used again, that it was just a matter of time. As I' ve grown older, I' ve become more of an optimist, perhaps because now that I have children of my own, it's inconceivable to me that any other father, including the military and political leaders of nuclear powers, would permit a nuclear war to happen. I'm more concerned now about the use of a nuclear bomb by a terrorist group, or a political leader with a terrorist agenda, than I am about the use of these weapons as part of a nuclear power's political/military strategy.

The first remembrance I have of things nuclear is a live TV broadcast of a test explosion. I remember watching this some afternoon in the air-conditioned darkness of our family basement. I had a heightened sensation, that this was momentous and something weighty. The black and white stark imagery of ground zero some desert landscape, I can't recall in detail-- more the impression, the countdown monotone of the announcer and especially the pregnant silence between count. That I was about to witness something that made our country &quotgreat&quot. That what I was about to see &quotshould&quot affect me. I can see the cloud, the camera image just lingering there, as if in that slowly evolving explosion there was a story being burned into my retinae. This was power. I never took part in air raid drills. I am a 1977 high school graduate. Currently a veterinarian living amongst many military in Virginia Beach. I learned the standard feed on our country' s use of the bombs. It has been only recently (5-10 years) that I have begun to re-think and take in new ideas on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. During the second half of the 1980' s I became truly frightened, reaching the point of middle of the night &quotscaries&quot, that nuclear holocaust was iminent. Reagan at the helm. Physicians for Social Responsibility's woman leader name lecture at Hollin's College in Roanoke, VA. was a fire starter for my repainting consciousness. --Ronald Ulfohn

I am an artist and I have been making art about the bomb off and on for over 10 years. The bomb seems to haunt me. One of my earliest memories as a child was seeing a bomb shelter on someone's front lawn. I also remember school drills of hiding under my desk in the event of a nuclear war. Though I find the historical events surrounding the bomb to be of interest, I am far more interested in the psychological effect of &quotliving in the shadow of the bomb.&quot I believe that much of the apathy and the violence in our society, especially among the young is an outcry against being robbed of their future. Before the bomb, there seemed to be some natural limits on man's capacity for destruction. With the bomb, we have the ability to destroy most, if not all of the planet in a matter of minutes. My current collaborative exhibition, an exhibition commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the atomic bomb &quotInfinity City,&quot can be viewed at http://www.tmn.com/Community/arose/infcty.html. Please visit us. And thanks for the inspiring exhibit. Ann Rosenthal, 45, Seattle, WA.

I was born in 1950 in Sweden, and I have known about the bomb all my life. To me, it is out of the question to use it. My parents were very afraid that our big red neighbor would use it, and their fear of course has colored my view. We were also taught during my whole school education years about the bomb and its consequences. The pictures of dead and dying human beings of all ages, and of course, the book about Sadako. Sadako wants to live, impressed my whole generation. The book made the whole thing real to us. It could have been we, or our siblings, or cousins - and in a sense it were.

It MUST never be used again. A people have always the right to defend itself, but never to attack another, not even to prevent an attack on itself. How do we know the threat was real, and not made up?

I was born 3 years after the atomic bombings of Japan. My childhood in San Diego was spent worrying about the possibility of a nuclear war with the USSR. I was told by parents, teachers, ministers, etc. that in the event &quotthe bomb&quot was dropped on us -- and it could happen at any time-- the devastation would be immense. The image that remains with me and that brought my fears home, was the sight of neighbors building a fallout shelter in their front yard. Each day as I walked home from school I could see the progress of this shelter. People just doors from me were actually preparing for a thermonuclear catastrophe. In my backyard? I became convinced that the whole matter of science and technology was no longer simply gaining knowledge, but more importantly having the wisdom to use it well. Steve Shepard, 46, Palo Alto, CA.

I was only a child when these events occurred, but I did lose relatives in both the European and Far East theaters. The debate about whether we should have used the bomb has no definitive answer because it depends on one's point of view and personal experiences. One question that cannot be answered by anyone, either critic or supporter, concerns what if. What if Germany or Japan had developed a workable device prior to the US. Given the propensity for surprise and violent attacks, I doubt there would have been the slightest hesitation in deployment of such a device and certainly with much less consideration that displayed by the US government. After all both Germany and Japan committed actions which did far more destruction of human life than the atomic bomb. In respect their actions left marks on whole generations and peoples which are not healed today and yet, except for a few, there is no remorse based on the actions that are occurring in each country today. My real question is did Germany and Japan really learn anything from their attempts to dominate the world instead of blaming everyone else for their problems? Maybe it's true the old saying it's in the genes. I certainly hope not. My name is Manny Glick. I am 59 years old and the question interests me because I fear we doomed to repeat history if we do not learn from it.

I am a fourth generation Japanese American and my grand uncle fought in the 442nd in Italy. Unlike other Americans, who can view the decision to drop the bomb through the distorted racist rhetoric of politicians covering their asses decades later, I must view Japanese as human beings. Therefore, I am horrified and sickened that we dropped the bomb. I am proud to be a &quotJapanese&quot American, but I am not proud to be part of the &quotAmerica&quot that unnecessarily dropped two atomic bombs on an already defeated nation, that put Japanese Americans in concentration camps, that denied entry visas to a hundred thousand Jews, effectively killing them all, the country that tried and still tries to turn men into slaves, my country that segregated even the army's blood plasma during the war so that if an African American soldier was bleeding to death, he would die as &quotwhite blood&quot stood ten feet away from him. I am not proud to be the America that will not admit to its faults, I am not proud of America the lie, America the distorted history textbook, America the damned. I grew up in this country singing &quotMy country tis of thee...sweet land of liberty...of thee I sing.&quot But my heart was broken when I found that this country is a lie. The bomb was unnecessary. The wonderful Roosevelt put my aunties and uncles in concentration camps because of their race. How could I be happy about that? Only the blind could be proud of this America. Only the blind are glad about the bomb. May I find compassion for the blind.

Neus, 28, Seattle. I am not old enough to have been alive when the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan. during the Cold War I was too young to worry much about whether or not the bomb was going to be used again. The images that I have always associated with nuclear warfare are of the mushroom cloud, bodies vaporizing into nothing and navy submarines. I grew up in a navy family and my father captained submarines. I don't remember when I first learned about the atomic bomb and it's being used on cities to end the second world war. my thoughts about nuclear destruction are mostly futuristic, about seeing a mushroom cloud appear on the horizon one day as I'm walking down the street. Some of the dreams that I most vividly remember are about an atomic bomb exploding and killing me. Do I think that an atomic bomb will destroy another city in my life time? Assuming that I live another sixty years or so, yes I do believe that within that period of time I will see another city explode.

My name is Dean M. Deai. I am 33 years old and currently live in San Francisco, California, USA. I am a 3rd generation American of Japanese ancestry and had uncles fighting on opposite sides of the war. My mothers oldest brother was sent to Japan from Hawaii to get a university education. While there, America entered the war. The other brother, second eldest, was active in ROTC in Hawaii. When war broke out, he became part of the now historic and, the most decorated unit in American history.

My earliest memory of the Atomic bomb was from a Hanna Barbera cartoon, &quotBeannie & Cecil&quot. In that episode, an atomic bomb was going to be detonated on &quotNo-Bikini-Atoll&quot and was stopped because of the existence of a prehistoric creature &quotDinah Sore&quot. At the time, I was too young to recognize all of the adult references in the cartoon but, enjoyed it any way. In the eighth grade, I had a very progressive Social Studies class which required us to do presentations on various social issues of the day. We were required to bring in film clips, get speakers and make handouts to accompany our presentations. After the presentations, we debated the pro's and con' s of the issues. In that class, I saw footage of the scenes from Hiroshima and Nagasaki before and after the bomb. I can recall that the most powerful image that remains with me today is the one of peoples shadows imprinted on a wall. The narration said that the people were vaporized and all that remained was their shadows. From that time on, I have been against the use of atomic weaponry but, acknowledged its' usefulness as a deterrence against possible nuclear war. With the end of the Cold War and the advances in technology, I can only hope that the bomb will never be used again. I realize that this view is a bit naive but one can only hope for the best.

I am returning to school and in the SFSU Multimedia Studies Certificate Program and I was interested as to how images contribute to our ability to communicate through this new medium that has been coined multimedia. Perhaps through multimedia, communication will advance in general and we will all understand each other better and eliminate all the hate in the world. However, with the gulf between the have and have nots ever increasing, it will take more than effective communication to make this dream a reality.

I don't think anyone (except maybe come crazy from the middle east) would use atomic weapons. If we survived Cuba and Kennedy, we are probably safe from the bomb. We should strive to dismantle all atomic weapons and destroy all records of the technology, just like a dangerous virus.

I am 28 and have British parents. I Grew up in L.A., but live in Oregon now. My curiosity lies in the actual destructive potential of the bombs used in the war. Because of my British heritage, the emotional charge associated with dropping the bomb is somewhat muted, and also my knowledge of what the bomb did is hazy, and incomplete.

I am 42 now, so I did not experience WWII first hand. As a grade school child, I was aware of the A-bomb, and that Hiroshima was where the first bomb was dropped. As my education progressed, I became aware of what the bomb was, that two Japanese cites were annihilated. In high school I was fully aware of WWII, the atrocities committed by the Japanese (and Hitler) and the rationale for dropping the bomb when we did. I was also aware of the fact that we were in a race to develop the bomb first - that Germany was very close. Only recently did I discover that Japan also was in this race, and that the feeling was that if they had succeeded in developing the bomb first, they would have dropped it on us without any reservations. Science is a good thing, war is not. As a Christian, I accept that man will continue to try destroy himself... I feel that it is only a matter of time until one of the so called 3rd world nations or a terrorist organization detonates a device here in America. It scares me, because I live in a city of military significance and know that a military action would mean that my home lies near ground zero. It also scares me that untold numbers of former Soviet nuclear weapons were targeted at my home town, and I' m not comforted in the thought that these devices are unsecure today. My name is John Graham, I live in San Diego, CA. I look at all of the world inhabitants as one family, and when we act violently against one another we all suffer and loose in the end.

Although born right after the war ended, I was both fascinated by the awesome power of the bomb and repulsed by the gross devastation and loss of life that it caused. Hopefully we will never again see that kind of power unleashed on our planet. I am 49, male, and live in New York City.

I believe I was around six when our school took a trip to the local museum. We were to see an exhibit on the atomic bomb. I probably brought my Sport Billy lunch box, and carried it in my right hand as I shuffled around, looking at all the exhibits with my classmates. One stark image from that trip has stayed with me since. A picture, in a glass case, of some bomb victims, something we moved by silently. The pictures are in black and white, and from the way they looked I was surprised that the pictures were of humans. The photographs had this very medical atmosphere to them, as if instead of people, these were specimens photographed under the cold lens of a microscope. The pictures completely lacked compassion. One picture was of a woman, from behind. Sitting in a chair, her back was bare, and covered with burns, discolorations. She was looking over her left shoulder, maybe at her burns, maybe at the photographers. She looked very sad, as if she had been crying or was trying to not cry. The woman looked like my mother. The thought came to me faintly. I was six.

As I grew bigger and older, I began to feel the bite of racism. Because they would never teach me non-European history in school, I had to find out about America' s concentration camps on my own. I saw the stark racist nature of the American war effort. For instance, the man who was in charge of putting Nikkei (Japanese Americans) in concentration camps, Henry Stimson, was the same secretary of war that advised Truman on the atomic bomb. In other words, the racist, exterminationist policies at home and the racist, exterminationist policies abroad were carried out by the same policy makers. And as I studied Japanese literature and watched Japanese movies about the summer of 1945, more and more the nagging feeling came to me that Japan had already been defeated. That the bomb need not have been dropped.

Why did America kill 100,000 Japanese in a fire-bombing raid less than 10 hours before the surrender, less that 10 hours after Nagasaki? Why did America use two bombs, instead of one? Why civilian areas? The bomb is a penultimate symbol of the racism and genocide faced by both Nihonjin and Nikkei during the war. It reminds me of the constant battle, even after 125 years in America, that I as a Nikkei must face if I wish for equality. Most of all, in a haunting, numb rage, I see that scarred, numb woman, who reminds me of my mother. Jason Rabbitt-Tomita, 18yrs. old, Seattle, Wa., hapa yonsei.

Growing up in the 50s had its anxieties because of the ever present nuclear threat. I knew of no one, however, who felt that the use of the bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was wrong because of the circumstances at the time. The horrors we saw later of those events, however, made most of us determined that it should never happen again. Later, in the 80s, I saved a letter to the editor of one of the Atlanta papers, the author of which had his own perspective, which I will share with you, as follows:

&quotGlad we dropped the bombs&quot

Dear Editor:
This is the time of year when all the do-gooders and bleeding hearts go around bleating about how awful it was for the United States to drop those atomic bombs on those poor little Japanese back in 1945. As one of the millions of combat infantrymen in Europe who were headed for the barbed wire beaches of Japan when V-J day came, I would like to say that I am glad we dropped the bombs. It makes me laugh because all the atomic bomb protesters would not have ever seen the light of day were it not for the bombs. All their daddies-to-be would have joined me -- festooned on the wire in the waves of Tokyo Bay. Let us consider for just a moment what those folks who gave us Pearl Harbor Day would have done to us if they had developed the bomb. Never again. But let's keep in perspective the exigencies of the times and the many more lives that would have been lost had the invasion alternative been used instead.

I was born August 10,1951. My name is Ernest Beabes. My father was on the invasion force to first land in Tokyo. He had his orders the ship had set sail. As a first time combatant his odds of living through the first several hours of the invasion would have been astronomical. I am who I am today because of this bomb. Almost every person I know was affected by someone who was influenced by those two bombs. These are our reality and the legacy that we will hand down.

As a child we did not discuss the bombs. I learned of them in grade school, but we still did not talk of these bombs. In latter years I learned of my father's involvement in the invasion force. His troop became the occupation force of Japan as the Japanese surrendered just as the invasion fleet was entering Japanese waters. Still we did not talk about the bombs, we spoke of the many pictures he had from the occupation and the Japanese people. By this time he bore them no ill, and had no remaining biases. We still did not speak of the bombs. My youngest daughter, finally asked my father if he owed his life to the bomb just about four years ago as she was learning about the bomb. She would have been about eight years old. He thought about it a moment, and then answered, &quotYes, I guess I do.&quot That is the first I can recall his talking about the bomb in the context of his personal experiences. The subject quickly changed, and we continue to touch those we come in contact with in everyday of our lives. We need to look at our lives, how we affect others, who have affected us and our personalities. Is there a person who benefited from the bomb that has influenced our lives so that we may influence the lives of others. I owe my all, and all that follow me owe theirs to the bomb. How can anything with such a positive influence on us all be also as horrendous to us? My father and I still do not talk about the bomb.

I first heard about the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima when I was seven years old, too young to understand perhaps, but still, 30 years after the bombing itself. In many ways, the adults around me, such as my parents, may have had the many years of their won lives to figure out their own analysis of the situation, but any experience of this was not passed on to me. In fact, I was given the cold hard facts, and expected to deal with it in my own way. I have talked to many people of my age group, and the same emotional mess is prevalent for children who were young during the '70' s, and teenagers, and just realizing how to form our own analyses, in the 1980's. During the '80' s, many films depicting modern nuclear war came out. Some were made for t.v., and some were made for the screen. No matter the film, any discussion of this horrified me, plagued my worst nightmares, and became a driving force behind early political ideas.

I also remember, in later years, becoming extremely angry, not only at the invention of the bomb itself, but at the makers of the films. I felt manipulated, and was angry that so many people, seemed more effected by the films, usually set in white middle-class North America, than by the actual telling of history, set across the world, but in reality all the same. The sensationalistic approach of these films appealed to my young brain, and caused me much grief and worry, not that a young brain should be spending it's time celebrating. I am glad that I had the morbid experience of worrying and fretting over something on the television, perhaps it helped in many of our developments, but I do feel that an entire generation was raised blindly to the fact of that history. What was it like to be raised in other decades? Was the destruction discussed more or on a less sensationalistic note?

I believe I became aware of the A-Bomb during the Cuban missile crisis. In 1960, I was 10 years old, and must have associated it with sci-fi.I didn't recognize its awful circumstances until 10 years later, during the Vietnam war when our Arizona state senator, Barry Goldwater promoted its use to end the war. Science as a tool is neutral in its application. In general, most great leaders have been murdered, and this behavior seems to be a great human weakness. They in turn appear to encourage this behavior, or inspire it. The a-bomb always has been in our environmental background, a super weapon of super powers. It now has spread to smaller more extreme nations, and promises a future whose stability no longer bases itself on the bomb but may easily descend to a chaos threatening all life here on earth. I suppose some development of more direct human contact, like the internet, could give rise to enough communication, among the ordinary persons of mankind to prevent such a situation, and rein in the forces of greed and selfishness, I hope. Paul Giorsetti, 44, Oakland,Ca.

I grew up in the Sixties largely numb, not unaware, of the devastating potential of nuclear weapons. When I heard of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I was mostly fascinated in the spectacle of a giant, mushroom-clouding bomb. Somehow it registered unconsciously in me that we had this bomb, and though other countries had it now it was not likely they would use such a weapon against us. I barely remember a few air raid drills - I think we practiced hiding under desks one day in public school in first or second grade, but this could be a manufactured memory. I like the idea that we had the power to stop a war with the Japanese with one big blast. That seemed quite neat and simple to my child-mind. Later I found out about the horrible burnings and radiation sickness. Again, this was &quotgross&quot but remote to me. Later I found it remarkable how quickly the Japanese people were back on their feet again. After such devastation, a complete rebuilding within a generation. So I never truly took the nuclear menace seriously to heart. This was probably sheer denial on my part.

I was not one of the children who had the nuclear nightmares I read about now. As I grew older and learned about the arms race, part of me registered &quotcompletely absurd&quot, and the other connected with the incredibly cool and expensive war toys used to deploy these weapons. So there was part of me, an Upper West Side Manhattan kid of liberal middle-class parents, that simply did not feel the cost of the investment in these weapons - the cost in money and the cost in fear. I just saw it all as a pageant of way-cool fighter-bomber-sub-carrier-missile-rocket technology.

I think that the presence of The Bomb as one of the most significant and visible products of 20th Century technology did have an effect on my image of science and technology. As a youth, I accepted that technology has a lot to do with delivery systems of nuclear devices. My vision of technology was symbolized by computers and rockets. I loved the space race, because the guilt of doing harm was completely removed. But I respected and did not question the suggestion that the space race could not have happened without military use of technology to deliver nuclear weapons, i.e., ICMBs. Occasionally I would imagine a nuclear war, but my attention would not hold on it for long and would wander to other things. I don't recall ever bringing the subject up as any concern of mine to my parents. Only recently did I learn how close we really came to massive nuclear strike and counterstrike during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Those stories made my blood run cold. I still can hardly believe that in the early sixties there was no direct communication link between the White House and the Kremlin, so that we had to rely on Soviet radio broadcasts for information. Or that members of the Joint Chiefs seriously considered a first strike to be a &quotplus&quot and truly wanted to bait the Soviets into war.

My feelings have changed from my initial impression that a nuclear strike is a good, simple way to end a war. -Alex Yourke. New York.

My name is Ed Siebel and I am 56 years old. I was a boy of 7 in Chicago Illinois at the time of the bombing and knew only what I was told - that we had bombed Japan with a big bomb and that the war would soon be over. I find it particularly interesting to look through the &quotlens&quot of decision makers in 1945, trying to realize the pressures under which they labored, the information to which they were and were not privy and, ultimately, the humanity of which we are all a part. Given those realities at that time, I am reasonably confident that almost any set of responsible leaders would ultimately have come to the same conclusion.

I had my doubts that nuclear weapons would ever be used again through most of the Cold War. My parents had a fear of it however and their fear was placed into their children. I first learned of the atomic power in school. It's use as a weapon was decisive in the ending of the second World War. It's power was never in question and it seemed unlikely to me that something this destructive could be used on a whim or by people who did not really know what they were doing. I was taught to trust in their judgment and do still to this day. I know however that not all nuclear powers are not to be trusted, my government included. I remember a worse fear for the effects of meltdowns on powerplants more than the threat of nuclear war. This is most likely due to my learning and watching of the Chernobyl. I come from a small town in Utah, which always seemed to be one of the sights for depositing nuclear waste. I did not want what happened in Japan to happen to me and my family and friends. Three strong images remind me of what nuclear power can do. The mushroom cloud, thousands of feet in the air. The ashes of everything, machines, buildings and people laying on a totally flat plain. The last was the silhouette of a couple, held in each other's arms burnt onto a cement wall.

I don't know when I first learned about nuclear weapons, but I do remember watching &quotThe Day After&quot when I was about 10 years old. I was scared that Reagan was going to drop the bomb on Iraq. (I remember cowering behind a chair in the living room, listening to him address the country, crying because I thought that we were all going to die a horrible death.) Kids should have to be worried with stuff like that. I' m a 25 year old female.

I'm only 23, so obviously born much after the bombing. I believe my first introduction to the bombing came during elementary school, perhaps 6th grade. I don' t fell any obvious affects from being exposed to the knowledge of these weapons, meaning an unsubstantiated fear or panic. However, one could make the point that I have become desensitized regarding this issue. I was born and continue to grow in a world filled with weapons of mass destruction. Much like an inner city youth's ambivalence towards guns, I have accepted it as part of life. I also did not think that any nuclear or atomic weapon would be used during the Cold War, seeing its destructive power assures no winners. I would be much more concerned about a terrorist use of such weapons. Lastly, I love technology, the development of the atomic bomb, I feel, played no factor. I attribute that more to Star Trek, but it is obvious that that series was influenced by the bomb. In that respect, a vision of Utopia was spread to millions as a result. BACKGROUND, I' m a 23 year old male, born and raised in a suburb of Los Angeles. My parents are from Cuba and came here in the early '60s. I went to Catholic school my whole life until college, where I graduated with a degree in Public Administration. I currently work at the University of Southern California as the system administrator of a NASA office.

I interned during the summer of '75 at the Hanford works in eastern Washington. The shells of the reactors that produced the plutonium and test stations still dotted the strange arid landscape of the area. The men who worked at the stations were still fiercely proud of their work, ever defensive about any environmental concerns I would raise. To them the incredible cost and permanent scars the weapons produced in both their use and production were just the cost of freedom. The balance of terror in the cold war may well have saved mankind from another costly major war, but the spectre of annihilating weapons at the disposal of political leaders has haunted my generation.

Jack M. Thav, 57 years, Live in Florida -- originally from Detroit. Recall the enormous relief that the war was over. Heard bits and pieces about the new weapon which had ended the war and which had saved millions of American and Japanese lives. Didn' t know much of the details of the bombing until many years later.

Science and technology is not the reason for the catastrophe of the bomb and its potential for destruction. People and their motives are. Until people of influence can realize that aggression and destruction are not the ways of realizing motives, the potential for other uses of destructive technology will always be a potential threat to the integrity of humanity, civilization and life on earth as we know it. I' m an engineer and microbiologist living in Woodinville, Washington, 48 years old, and amazed of the atrocities that humans still perpetrate on other humans and the environment. It is not apparent that we as humans learn very quickly from our mistakes.

My name is Mitch, 22. I am pursuing my Master Degree at Cornell University and will be entering active duty service in the US Navy in about 1 year time. I first heard of the A Bomb as a kid talking to my parents and listening in during dinner table discussions and later in history classes and books I have read. Needless to say these are horrible images of death and destruction with hundreds of thousands of civilians losing their lives. However, let us not forget the millions of innocent people the Japanese Imperial Army murdered and raped during the Second World War. Also, let's not forget the hundreds of thousands of allied POWs who were murdered by the same army in total disregard to the Geneva Convention. Who speaks for these people? And most important of all, it was the Japanese who started the war, not the Americans. And in light of the fanaticism shown by the Imperial Army during the Island Hoping campaign, the bombing probably saved more lives on BOTH sides than it destroyed. (This is obviously my own personal opinion and do not reflect opinions of any institution or organization)

My name is Chester Campbell. I am 27 years of age and I live in Austin, Texas. My earliest remembrance regarding the atomic bombs dropped on Japan are of pictures in textbooks. Not pictures of the destruction but pictures of the bombs with captions that gave their names. I remember feeling curious about why scientists would name these two things. I understood what happened to Nagasaki and Hiroshima. I understood that many people had died. But I didn't understand why the bombs had names. Of course, now I am able to put the actions in the context of their times. Growing up I never felt "safe" because of nuclear bombs. I never truly felt threatened by Russia or other "enemies" of this country. Likewise, I have never felt the benefits of "cheap" nuclear-produced electricity. Actually, I have felt the tax man's bite for my state's failed attempts to encourage the utility companies to make nuclear-produced electricity. Today I am mostly afraid that someone with no scruples (or should I say, less scruples) will use a nuclear bomb just for the sake of killing. Or for the sake of furthering their "cause" or "religion." I don't wake up from nightmares but occasionally, while walking down the street or enjoying a peaceful moment at home I think ... what if this ended right now. What if my town became the next Hiroshima. The next Nagasaki.

My name is Gerald Harrison; I got exhibit e-address from Newsweek Magazine, 7-31-95 p.8. I am a research technician in protein biochemistry at the Univ. of Penn. I have been an anti-war activist most of my adult life with ties to the teachings of Nonviolence of Gandhi, M.L. King Jr., Tolstoy, and George Fox (one of the Founders of the Quakers) as well as the writings in a book titled "The Urantia Book" (Urantia Foundation; 533 Diversey Parkway, Chicago Illinois). Recently, I have been particularly concerned about the availability of fissile materials (Uranium and Plutonium) to those in the general public who may be interested as a result of the reduced security over the stockpiles of these elements in the former Soviet Union. I am grateful for access to this photo-exhibit and I hope and pray, against the odds, that humanity will never witness these kinds of images again. Thanks to those of you who have made this exhibit possible--Gerald Harrison

As a High School graduate of this year, I can only recall the bombing through knowledge I acquired by speaking with others -- both at school and at home. I recall reading a book in 7th grade called "After the Bomb," which told the story of a town in the midwest which was destroyed by an atomic "Test" by the Japanese. The book was extremely biased, but it very expertly depicted not only the destruction of the bomb, but also the mass confusion and the emotional and physical effects that the bomb has on the affected people's lives. The central character was a 15 year old boy, who attempted to find help for his mother, who was dying of radiation poisoning. The book showed how difficult it was to attain anything in an environment where everyone was in need of such help. -Aaron C. Stewart, Exploratorium, San Francisco, CA.

War is tragic. The use of the bomb saved millions of lives. An invasion of Japan would have killed millions of Japanese people. It is ironic, but the use of the bomb probably saved more Japanese than if it had not been used. I never thought that atomic weapons would be used during the cold war. I believe that some third world country will get one and use it for terrorism and for blackmail. US policy should be that no new entries to the "nuclear club" will be tolerated. All means possible will be used to stop or destroy the offending country's program.

Born in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, I moved about in the mountains. In one place, we had a picture window with a view of the Peaks of Otter, a local geographical landmark. About 10 miles away from that picturesque view, like a boil on a mountain, sat a radar dome, part of the DEW line. From the time I knew what that site was and stood for, I had thoughts of the past and potential horrors of nuclear war. At school we would have the air raid drills, the "duck and cover" and all the other things the government told us would save us if the world was suddenly blown up. This never made any sense to me, we were supposed to arise from the rubble, survive in our home made bomb shelters, and repel the Red Menace invading our homeland. It is little wonder that there are so many paranoid and anxious members of this current generation; we were not expecting to live to become adults.

Suddenly, the Red Menace was gone, the bad guys are now the good guys, and we are free of the threat of a nuclear war. I still think of the thousands of warheads pointed in someone's direction in the new "borderlands" of the wasted USSR, and it still gives me an uncomfortable feeling knowing that we can still, on the whim of one person, be destroyed in an exchange where MAD still rules.

David Higgins

I first became aware of the bomb in elementary school drills. I am too young to have experienced WWII. My images are of global obliteration. The knowledge was very frightening. I have seen that scientists can be coerced into developing items which should not be developed, except that there was Yamamoto and Hitler to consider. Yes. I felt that Kennedy would blow Cuba off the map in 1962. Today? I am more concerned with 3rd world countries and terrorists deploying the bomb. Arnold Tracey 48 years old Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. The subject interests me because "I am human."

Eben Garnett, Age 24. History is the amalgam of many different individual stories. The best representation of history is to be objective and provide a sampling of such stories. Diary entries,photographs, and videotapes of commentary from survivors, politicians, and military leaders can powerfully retell to story. The best examples I have seen are Ken Burn's Civil War Documentary and the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.

I have read some of the immense body of writing that is in the "discussion" section. I too went through a period of intense fear of nuclear destruction. Now I know that with the destruction of the ozone due to the blast, all life ceases. Period. The radiation emitted from the sun compound ground radiation interrupting, corrupting, and destroying all life based on DNA replication. In other words, all life. I have to desensitize myself to that. Like my own death, it is too much to worry about constantly. The fear, however, is healthy. "History doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme a lot." After the sound defeat of Napolean after Waterloo, there was a large peaceful period. Eager nationalists and a lot of "young patriotic flesh" was ground up in the meat grinder that was WWI. Why? People forget the horrors of war. "Memory slips" If we forget the intense fear of nuclear war, I might sadly bid good-bye to the beautiful song that was Earth.

Artem L. Ponomarev, 26. I'm from Russia. As Russki, I have my point of view of what the Cold War was all about. We have always felt isolated in this world and never had any allies. As a result, my country went through a series of terrible wars and devastation's. For example, the Second World War cost us 20 million people and occupation of the most productive territories with the consequent distraction of cities, villages, mines, etc. We had the Pact of Peace with Germany, which was violated. Our allies from USA and Western Europe left us alone for the first 4 years of struggle with the Nazis. The Cold War after that was mostly pointless and longer than enough. But the main goal has been reached -- my country is so stuffed with weapons now that the next invasion is impossible. So, now we are free to be the way we are and to search the Ideal Society or Truth (which we have been doing for 12 centuries).

I am a 75 year old veteran stationed near Subic Bay in the Philipines on August 6 and ff. My immediate job was to supervise "combat loading" an LST for a landing in two months at Kyushu. I had been overseas in the South Pacific for over two years, away from my wife and son. When the word was broadcast over the armed forces radio I was both apprehensive and exhilarated. Apprehensive that the Japs would continue their pattern of suicide, and exhilarated that maybe the end was in sight. I was a witness to the civilian slaughter by the retreating Japs in Manila (which incidentally was greater than the combined fatalities of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I was delighted then about the magnitude of the bomb. Today I am intolerant of the revisionists who claim surrender would have come some other way.

Age 51. Originally the bomb was a scary thing. I remember Korea and the issues regarding using tactical nuclear weapons. Hiroshima is still a terrible thing, but it probably has prevented even worse scenarios by its very existence.

I think the use of the atom bomb was the most heroic thing a president has every done. It took Truman a lot of courage to order it dropped. It saved many lives, both American and Japanese.

I don't remember how I first heard about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; but growing up in Hawaii there were a lot of mixed feelings about it. Some folks, who had lived through the bombing of Pearl Harbor, felt it was justified. Some, who once had relatives in Hiroshima or Nagasaki, were very angry at the USA. And some were simply horrified. My first direct knowledge of the bombings came from reading John Hersey's book, Hiroshima. I was ill for a week after reading it. Now, I think that history is written by the winners, and that we'll never know whether the bombing was "justified." david adam edelstein. Kirkland, Washington, USA. 25 yrs old.

I was born in 1960 and really can't remember learning about the bomb in school, however as I got older, I became fascinated with the Manhattan Project; the scale and the secrecy of it. I lived in New Mexico for three years and one of my first road trips was to visit the Trinity Site. The government has done a very good job of sterilizing the area, but it still had a very strong impact on me. There was a man there who was part of the Manhattan project, and this was his first trip back to the site since the day of detonation. It was fascinating to hear him talk of the excitement in the bunkers on that day. I know my interest in the atomic bomb is scientific in nature and I do separate the physical phenomenon from the destructive component of the weapon.

David Holmgreen, 48. Viet Nam vet, son of a WWII vet (ETO) with an interest in history. A writer, government or museum can only collect the stories as "history" and present them, understanding that they are filtered. Each story will always carry the perspective of the person who lived it, heard it or transcribed it. Much has been made recently of the need for national remorse, an apology, an effort to ask forgiveness. Fifty years have passed. Many who lived through the horror that wars, particularly this war, always bring can not forget and will never forgive. As nations Japan and America must move forward, never forgetting, but accepting what happened is unalterable and may be now unexplainable. Can we continue to permit these same horrors to happen in some obscure place? Does it not still remain our duty to stop the destruction of rights and lives even now. How does Bosnia differ from the atrocities committed in (fill in the blank) of fifty plus years ago?

Like so many children of "Generation X", I don't remember the exact point when I was made aware of the Bomb. We were surrounded by anxiety about it almost from birth. But my earliest recollection is from Mrs. Tudor's fifth grade class at Woodlake Elementary School in Sacramento, CA. We children had just finished going through the "Duck and Cover" drill. All the kids in this gifted class were full of questions about the Bomb. How would hiding under our desk protect us from such an awful thing? After it was dropped, how would we find our parents? Would we get new families? If the Bomb were dropped right outside our window, what would happen to us? I don't remember how Mrs. Tudor responded, but I do remember an awful lot of silence that day. Jay Cee Straley, 29 Oakland, CA

I'm 46, white, male, Jewish. I was born in Pittsburgh in 1949. My father was an American soldier destined for the invasion of Japan when news of the dropping of the bomb changed his future. He always told me that if it weren't for the bomb, I may have never been born. Nevertheless, we grew up in fear of the bomb itself, but thankful that, if any country had to have it, it was lucky that it was us. Now, I believe that the existence of the bomb has actually prevented wars in the latter half of the century. However, I do think that the world would never be able to avoid large scale use of bombs at one point or another in the future unless measures are taken to eliminate them. I can only hope that, once they're gone, we'll be able to avoid resuming our old habit of large scale wars.

I learned about the bomb in Grade 10. The image at first was the same as the movies. However, in Grade 11, the true size of the effect was realized. The knowledge of the existence of these weapons does not affect me. I realize that they were there before I knew about them and nothing changes that.

My image of Science and Technology is not affected as I have learned that everything has it's price. Being in Science myself, I understand everything costs something.

The cold war does not exist anymore! I feel that the bomb will be used again, however it will be in the hands of terrorists or even a terrorist nation. Unfortunately it is inevitable. It is human nature. I am a fourth year university student in Vancouver Canada.--Ashish C. Morzaria age: 21

Born in 1947, I grew up during the beginning of the Atomic age, The power of Atomic Weapons was at once a source of strength and fear. As long as "we" had the bomb we were safe. If "they" had the bomb, we were not safe. Our bombs were, of course, for defense. Theirs were for destroying us. I have always thought that atomic weapons would be used again. That much power is a great temptation. But I refuse to live in fear of the event. Technology can always be turned the wrong way. I have to believe that, on the larger scale, the net gain is positive.

Born in 1947, I grew up during the beginning of the Atomic age. The power of Atomic Weapons was at once a source of strength and fear. As long as "we" had the bomb we were safe. If "they" had the bomb, we were not safe. Our bombs were, of course, for defense. Theirs were for destroying us. I have always thought that atomic weapons would be used again. That much power is a great temptation. But I refuse to live in fear of the event. Technology can always be turned the wrong way. I have to believe that, on the larger scale, the net gain is positive.

My name is Wakatsuki Machi studying at Nagoya University Graduate School.(age 23). I do not deny the fact how cruel the atomic bomb is. But because I had been in Korea for a year and have studied what Japanese people had done to Asian people during the war, I do not think it is good idea that we focus on only the victims of the A-bomb. There were a lot of Korean people who were forced to work in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and they were injured as well as the other Japanese. We should not forget the people and the fact what we had done to them when we talk about the WWII. It is really stupid idea that French government will start the A-bomb test again and we should say NO MORE A-BOMB as well as how horrible it is.

I was not yet born when The Bombs were dropped on Japan, but the man who would become my father was on a ship in the Pacific at the time. His ship was part of the preparing invasion force that might have been used against Japan in November of 1945. Were it not for the surrender by Japan after The Bombs were dropped, I may not have ever been born. Still, I regret that these weapons were used on cities where so many innocents suffered so greatly, and so many unborn met the fate I was spared. I pray for them.

Greg Peterman, 41, New Orleans, LA, USA. I learned of the A-bomb in school. I think these weapons were needed at the time and today they still are needed as a deterrence to the Saddam Husseins of the world. I grew up in the atomic age. It was like a great storm cloud that was always watching, ready to lash down with unending and unstoppable power. As I grew up I watched how children would draw pictures of atomic explosions. At a camp where I worked kids while in the midst of fun would stop and get depressed with the idea that this could all end so horribly. They always assumed there was nothing they could do. We were never direct victims of the bomb but we knew its power and the insanity of those who controlled it. We had seen the pictures of its use on Japan. We grew up with a beautiful world attained by the oppression of obliteration of all that we loved at any moment. This was not the world I wished to pass on to my children. Today, I am more optimistic. Yes, there is still some fear but the constant standoffs between the US and the USSR are mostly over. The dark cloud of atomic destruction is still with us but it has moved over and has gotten a little paler.

My name is Dick, age 55, now living in Annapolis, Maryland. I remember the war all too well, and spent my early years learning to hate the Japanese, who drove my mother and me out of our home in the Philippines in 1941 while my father (then a lieutenant in the Air Corps) had to stay behind and fight. He came close to dying on Bataan, but was able to catch an evacuation flight to Australia just before Bataan fell. After his recovery from near-starvation and several diseases related to his ordeal, my father got sent back to war (mostly in Europe) until the bitter end in 1945. I got to watch my mother frequently disappear from my presence during this period, usually after receiving a letter from my dad. She would be in her bedroom crying. She would return after her cry, and our life would go on, after a fashion. Until next time. I also remember the general social climate throughout the country during this time. Really grim. We ALL perceived ourselves as fighting for our very survival.

Jay H. Zirbel Age:40 Murray, Kentucky Grew up in Milwaukee, WI. I Remember doing the "Duck and Cover" drills during grade school. Some kids seemed scared, I don't recall being affected much. I also remember several neighbors building bomb shelters. I think we will see terrorists getting a nuclear bomb and destroying a major city within the next 5-10 years.

Abandon Nuclear bombs before all the people on the earth are killed. Masahiro Fukuda, 32, Kawasaki/Japan.

I grew up in the 50s/60s as a military brat outside of Washington, DC. The notion of the atomic bomb was a ubiquitous background discourse: films showing atomic bomb tests and Japanese WWII footage; "duck & cover" exercises for schoolroom; daily tests of the Emergency Broadcast System on radio; tests of air raid sirens; jokes about what to do if an atomic attack occurred ("bend over and kiss your ass good-bye!"); news on Soviet arms build-up, Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis; etc. Part of the general foreboding (background "noise") of everyday life. In high school, protesting Vietnam War, the subtext would eventually unravel to the topic of Ultimate Destruction. Looking up at the moon and stars, reflecting with friends about LIFE (as teenagers do, I suppose), the choice seemed to be between First Strike or Silent Spring.

I was born in 1949 in the northern U.S. At a very young age I knew the terror of nighttime air raid sirens and air raid drills in elementary school. I grew up very aware of the bomb, its use in Japan, and the constant expectation that the U.S. and the Soviet Union would unleash nuclear weapons at each other eventually (such as during the Cuban missile crisis). The only unknown was when. The effect of this on me was to instill a seriousness and sobriety to my personality which has carried over to this day. The tangible fear in the night became a part of who I am today. The bomb did not negatively affect my love for and appreciation of science and technology. I have always been able to separate the principles of science to advance mankind and science to destroy mankind. I do not believe the threat of nuclear war is gone. It will only be a matter of time until evil rears its head again and nuclear threat becomes visible again. The new nuclear threat is from terrorism.

My name is Joe Feeney from Arlington, MA. I was aboard a Destroyer in the Atlantic returning from No. Africa when the news came over the radio. I remember a shipmate said to me " You are a high school graduate and took science in school, What is an Atom?' All I could say was " An Atom is the smallest division of a Molecule"

I was five years old when the bombs were dropped, but my earliest memories of the event go back to when I was seven. My father was part of the Army of Occupation in Germany, and we joined him in January of 1947. We were stationed in Bremen. Reconstruction had not yet begun, and the physical devastation was indescribable. These images combined with the fears dominant in the military community concerning the intents of the Russians resulted in a recurrent nightmare for me of a mushroom cloud rising above my home, obviously imaged by newsreel scenes of the blasts in Japan. My experiences in Germany gave me a great sense of the physical tragedy of war, but I had to be older to understand the human tragedy. I now live in Hawaii and have many friends from Japan who lived through the catastrophe or who had family that did.

I'm 13. I learned about the bomb I think in 2nd grade. the Japanese were working on the bomb in the earlier part of the war but the research was destroyed in a fire bombing raid ::: whew! ::: the Germans were also working on the bomb the Japanese were notified before the bomb was dropped, they were given a choice after Hiroshima: surrender or we will drop another bomb the Germans were also working on the bomb.

I first became aware of the atomic bomb as a student in grammar school, in history class. (maybe 6th grade). I was not old enough to experience WWII (D.O.B.: 12-66) But, my parents were old enough to experience the war. My father was a teenager living in the Bay Area when the war ended. My mother was born in Germany and grew up there during the war. She was 12 years old when the war ended. My parents recall not knowing very much about the atomic bomb until many years later. They were part of the cohort that was not informed about radioactivity. In fact both of my parents were exposed to fall-out from above ground atomic bomb testing in the U.S. during the post-war years. My father was in the army in Oklahoma and my mother's first husband was in the army in (somewhere in the Southwest, maybe New Mexico). Subsequently, my father developed cancer of the Thyroid or Pituitary glands (I forget which).I recall during my teenage years, becoming very concerned about nuclear war.

Although I was born after WWII, I do recall the Cuban Missile Crisis and the nuclear attack drills we had to do in school. I recall the feeling that by merely moving into the halls or ducking under our desks, we would be safe. I remember my father sending away for plans on building your own, private bomb shelter. It wasn't until a few years later did I realize how close we really came. I can only begin to imagine how the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki dealt with the annihilation of their city. To walk among the ruins of one's city and see the death all around would have a complete impact on one's reality. I suppose it is through this immediate alteration of your life that draws me into looking back on this terrible event. It may be cold to say but if the bombs had never been dropped would we have the understanding that has since prevented their use? Would we be more likely to use the bombs today (in their more destructive capacity)?

I am only 17 years old, so I am not really part of the atomic age but to see the pictures makes me feel as if I am. I didn't pay much attention in class when they were teaching it to us in school but now I wish I had, I will make it my short term goal to learn more about what happened. Thank you Exploratorium for opening my eyes to this

My name is Eric and I'm nineteen years old. The first memory of the atomic bomb I have is watching a video of it as a child. I've never really done much thinking about the effects the bomb had on the people of Japan. Growing up in the 80's there was a real sense of patriotism and I felt that we, as Americans, could do no wrong. I'm fascinated with science and technology but at the same time scared to death of it.

I learned about the bomb as a 10-year-old newspaper boy, picking up papers for delivery on my route. It was wonderful news because it meant my father, away in the Navy, and my uncles and the relatives of my friends would soon be coming home. I didn't really think about the horror of it. We had been exposed to so many stories about terrible things happening in Europe and Asia that this was just another story of terror. In the '50s, the idea of a nuclear attack seemed possible. Air raids were common. Shelters were marked in the basements of buildings. People even spent large sums of money building shelters in their back yards. And in Chicago, where I lived, Nike air-defense missiles were positioned along the lake-front parks. I went into the service in the late 50s and served with a border-patrol regiment on the Czech/West German border. NATO was vastly outnumbered by the Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces, and we were told that tactical atomic weapons would be used to even things up.

In the early '50's, I rose early to watch atomic bomb tests on TV, broadcast from Yucca Flats, NV. Right after the blasts, large numbers of troops and vehicles moved right into Ground Zero. Now I realize this was part of an effort to get Americans in the early '50's to accept the idea that an atomic war was inevitable, survivable and, presumably, winnable. I pity the soldiers who were marched into the radiation, no doubt with bland assurances from their commanders that everything would be all right.

I first became aware of atomic bombs when I was in first or second grade. Private Catholic schools and remember all going out to the corridor and covering our heads in a fire drill for bombs. I also remember viewing a film in school which taught you what to do if you ever see a bright flash in the sky. Take cover and stay away from windows. Kennedy times, I believe. Very scary. Always thought there might be a war. That feeling has since subsided. Thank you Bill Pedroza, b. 1954., Chicago.

My name is Lachlan Forrow. I was seven years old at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, living in a suburb of NY City, worried about whether our house and neighborhood would survive. In 1981, as a second-year medical student, I became involved in the founding of an organization called International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), which united US, Soviet, and many other physicians united in working to convince our governments that the only way to survive the Cold War was to abandon any fantasies that either country could survive nuclear war. (In 1985, IPPNW was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for our efforts to spread authoritative factual information about the dangers of nuclear weapons on both sides of the iron curtain.) Even though the risk of all-out nuclear war is lower than at any time in many years, there are still 40,000 nuclear warheads and it would take about 20 minutes of software reprogramming for every Russian missile to be re-targeted at the US.

In elementary school we learned what to do in the case of a missile attack; it was during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I remember learning about the effects of a bomb in 7th grade. I woke up in cold sweats for weeks, even years later I grew sick thinking of it. It didn't take a genius to figure out what kind of destruction laid ahead for the human race. I am now a 5th grade teacher and each year I read the story of Sadako and her battle with "The bomb disease." Each year we mourn her death. When my son was 3 there was a movie that showed a bomb and he covered his ears and said, "This is a bad thing, Mommy." He said it well. This is a bad thing. K. Kimpel, 39, Midland, TX.

My name is James Beahn from Orlando FL. I was not old enough to witness WWII, Vietnam or Korea. I learned of the Atom Bomb as most kids do, in schools. They try to pass the bomb off as a "god-send" to save us and that it was good to use the bomb. The atom bomb may have saved us now from war in the fear of nuclear war, but it will be the end of us. Nuclear weapons, I believe, will be used in the end of the world, the Battle of Armageddon. Read the wisdom of the Bible and try to fit in modern weapons in the description of the end.

I am not old enough to have experienced WWII; I was born in 1956, when this was a fact of existence. All through school, in North Carolina, we did readiness drills, preparing us for a nuclear attack. It was frightening. I look at these pictures and think about the absolute suddenness of atomic warfare. One moment, all is normal, the next it has ceased to exist. I don't really know if the use of atomic weapons was either necessary or justified at the end of WWII. Perhaps the bombing of Hiroshima, at least, was important. My image of science and technology, in the wake of this, is one of awe. We now understand the forces that we are using, and hopefully understand the responsibility of controlling them. Science and technology should be considered friendly forces, though, despite a use such as this, because of the positive contributions they have brought. During the Cold War, the possibility of the use of the bomb was drilled into children. I can remember believing that it was bound to happen.

Kevin Arlyck, 22, elementary school French teacher. I first became aware of the atomic bomb through school -- learning about WWII in history class. Growing up on the 1980's one could not avoid discussion about and fear of nuclear weapons; my earliest recollection is of going to an anti-nuke rally where Pete Seeger sang. I have specific memories of debate over MX missiles, Star Wars/SDI, and the TV movie The Day After. I always associated nuclear weapons with mushroom clouds and devastated landscapes, but I never really worried about nuclear war; it seemed too far removed. Nuclear war was something for politicians to talk about; I don't think I believed that it would ever actually happen. The collapse of the Soviet Union has made me nervous about the future; all those unemployed ex-Soviet scientists out there just waiting to bump into someone with a cause and paycheck. I try not to think about it too often.

I went through several phases of being morbidly fascinated or dominated by images of the Bomb. Born in 1963, I came of age after the Cold War had begun to thaw. In high school, I was involved in debating -- this particular subculture, for various reasons, has a strong fixation on the subject of nuclear war. I felt, in high school, that the end of the human race by an accidental or intentional nuclear exchange was merely a matter of time. I resolved to move to Australia upon finishing my education in the States. In college, I investigated previous plans for fallout shelters, and found the blueprints and explicit plans of the 1960's quite horrifying.

I don't remember any one time that I was made aware of the bomb. I think I was always aware of it as a child from comments my parents made and from the news media. My dad was a "news freak" and we always had some news channel on. I know that my father was stationed in the Pacific, and that had the bomb not been dropped, the war might have gone on for another eighteen months to two years. If that had been the case, my father might have faced more active duty and been killed in the resulting battles. I have the disquieting realization that had it not been for the atom bomb, I might not now be alive.

I came from a depression-era working class family who lived in Akron, Ohio when the first atomic bomb was dropped. I was 13 at the time and had a daily suburban paper route. I remember carrying the "extra" editions on "VE Day" (Victory in Europe), VJ day (Victory over Japan). I don't remember a news "extra" concerning the atomic bomb drops. The American people were very tired of what seemed to be an endless World War II. At 13, I did not realize either the long-term historical impact of these weapons nor their effective closure of Japanese military efforts. The Cold War was different thing. In the 1950's, war hysteria was constant and rampant. Many people were persuaded to dig holes in their back yards (bomb shelters) as a psychological crutch to help deal with their terror of impending war. The "Russians are coming!" was the certainty of the times, only the exact time remained to be established.

My name is Nicholas Candau. I am 13 years old. I live in San Francisco, California. I think that the atomic bomb will never be used again because it is too big of an ecological threat. I learnt of the bomb in school when we were studying the second World War. The part that really interested me was the effects of this powerful weapon.

I am librarian and was born in Peru, in 1963, far away from all the main scenarios of the WWII. However, the first time I saw a photograph of a victim of the Atomic Bomb (at 6-7 years old) I was so scared. Then I hoped it would never happen again. I don't think that American people should feel guilty of this war action as I don't think that there are any justifications for bombing these cities. No human being deserves to die in such a way. Maybe we all should feel bad because we have not learned anything after 50 years: how many people are dying now in Bosnia? Africa? Central and South America? We don't use atomic bombs ... but what is the difference? We only keep on destroying each other. Two weeks ago I saw this exhibition at the Ansel Adams Center and it impressed me (and scared me) as when I was a child. I do not think that only American or Japanese people should feel concerned or affected when talking about Hiroshima or Nagasaki, we should not regard to this theme just as a episode of the WWII.

Ernie Putt, age 42, Chesapeake VA. I learned about the bomb at my grandparent's house when I found and read a book or magazine - maybe it was a Civil Defense publication - which was full of pictures showing the effects of the bomb. I think what I remember most were the pictures and articles about bomb shelters. I was about 8 or 9 years old. And YES, it scared me! The images which associate with the bomb are: Heat and blinding light, pain, slow agonizing death, total destruction, desolation, and the end of the world. The same goes for nuclear war. The knowledge of the existence of these weapons used to make me feel like the Sword of Damocles was hanging over my head, that it was just a matter of time until these weapons were used. I don't feel as threatened these days. The only thing that comes to mind when I think about the use of the bomb as related to science and technology is that it seems to me that if science can make a weapon possible, then the technology to build it soon follows.

Am am white, 56 yrs.old, married 35 years, live in Ga. I read about the bomb and it's aspects and was interested in both human and physics aspects of it.
I am still confused about many things.

Michael R. Pfeifer, 45. Yorba Linda, California. I first became aware of the atomic bomb when I was 5 or 6 years old when my parents told me about World War II and how it ended. My father is a veteran of that war having fought as an infantry soldier across France and Germany. My uncles participated in the Normandy invasion and also fought in the Battle of the Bulge. My mother worked in an ammunition factory during the war and had been asked to volunteer to work on the Manhattan project but declined. At that young age and on various occasions thereafter I was told about how horrible the war was and likewise how horrible the atomic bomb was but that it ended the war and that they were very grateful for that and wholeheartedly supported the bomb being dropped. I was also told stories about Pearl Harbor and the Japanese atrocities committed during the war and came to believe that the Atomic Bomb was necessary to end the worst war in the history of the world. I also remember my parents telling me about the occasions when they visited Las Vegas Nevada during the late 50's and early 60's when bomb tests in the Nevada desert were conducted and their reactions to them.

I have very vivid memories of the arms race with the Soviet Union and seeing newspaper photos of each country's missiles compared to the other's and how huge the arsenal's of each were growing. I particularly remember, at the age of about 12, how my family firmly believed during the Cuban missile crisis that we would soon be involved in a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. We stored food, water, and valuable possessions in our basement and for several days we practiced duck and cover drills at school. At that age I knew nothing of the politics but totally believed that I would soon experience firsthand what the Japanese had experienced at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I was totally terrified all the time for several days had nightmares and cried a lot. As a teenager, the cold war and the existence of so many nuclear weapons pointed at us caused me to have a very fatalistic outlook on life and my future. I and my friends all believed that nuclear war was more or less inevitable and there was nothing we felt we could do about it so extreme cynicism was justified. I can remember thinking dozens if not hundreds of times where I would prefer to be when the bombs fell, who I wanted to be with, and what I wanted to be doing at the moment of my death. We all agreed that it would be better to die in the blast rather than linger around and die a slow death from the fallout. So in a perverse sort of way, we almost welcomed the huge build up of weapons since it meant that when the war happened, we would all go out in a puff of smoke.

The existence of &quotthe bomb&quot has overshadowed my entire life in one sense, but in another, I guess I always believed that because &quotthe bomb&quot was so powerful and dreadful and there was nothing I could do about it, it was more or less like something within the power of God, so the best thing to do was just live as if it was not there. I have always believed, however, that had the atomic bombs not been dropped on Japan I might not ever have been born. My father had been told that he would be transferred to the Pacific theater from Europe and, as a combat infantry sergeant, he could very well have died in the war. Now that I am an adult, with children of my own, I believe that as horrible as the bombs were, and as many innocent people as they killed, as many or more innocent lives were spared. I believe that discovery of atomic/nuclear weapons by humanity was inevitable and that the only way we will ever prevent them from being used again is to find a way to understand why we have the capacity to hurt and destroy each other and learn how to better love, value, and respect each other and the planet on which we live. Whether it is because I grew up in the shadow of &quotthe bomb&quot or not I do not know but I am not optimistic that we will be able to accomplish these things. I believe nuclear weapons will be used again in my lifetime.

I was born in 1954 in time for the Atomic Age and the Cold War. I remember retention drills the &quotduck and cover&quot antics that were supposed to protect us in the event of an attack. Although even in first grade I remember wondering what good would my coat and a text book be. My first memories of learning about the bombing was in school. My mother wanted my father to build us a bomb shelter. My father served in the South Pacific during WWII. His memories are what shaped my earliest images. To this day he believes that the dropping of the bomb was necessary and may even have saved his life. He says he would have been involved in an invasion on Japan. As I grew older I began to read about the history of their development, the proliferation and power of these weapons and the countries that now have access to them. I began to understand the potential for destruction. Those weapons scared me then, they scare me now. Susan McQuiggan age 41. Willow Grove, PA. My father is a living historian of that time. My interest is in trying to understand how history will judge that period of time and my father's perspective.

I first learned of atomic weapons in elementary school through history class. However when I was in the sixth grade I viewed the British film THREADS which scared the living hell out of me. Since then I cannot recall feeling even slightly good about nuclear weapons. It has not affected my image of science and technology but it has affected my image of the human race, particularly in this country the only country to ever use nuclear weapons.

There was a period in my childhood in which I was worried about the use of nuclear weapons. Today the fear has become smaller but I do not feel comfortable about their existence. Dave Saulnier. I study war, genocide violence and politics. It is very difficult subject to stomach at times.

I am 30 years old. I know the story of Hiroshima and Nagasaki from school books and newspapers. I cannot understand why this happened. Why? This is as unbelievable as Polish Auschwitz. I have now a small one year old daughter. Not so far ago she was like the small child at one of the photographs of Yamahata. That is why I cannot understand. Krzysztof Gozdziewski. Torun, Poland

I find it frustrating that there is so much focus on the dropping of the bomb

I am 51 yrs old - and was born before the bomb was dropped. I come from England and have always been aware of WWII - my father fought in Europe and the Far East. As I was growing up I was scared of the confrontation between the Great Powers and the Cold War. In the Fifties and early Sixties I was sure the bomb would be dropped again - especially during the Cuban Missile Crisis. My image of science and technology is not good. Will the bomb be dropped today? Maybe the great powers know better - but do terrorists or smaller states with an ax to grind? Fodir.

My name is Bruce Leonard. I read about this in the current Newsweek. I am 37 years old. I am the son of a veteran who served immediately after the end of the war. I have always been interested in the war. The first books I remember reading were about the carrier war in the Pacific. I am continually impressed by how the war affected the course of the events of this century and the world we live in.

The current attention on the war is interesting in that many of the first hand stories are dying with the generation that fought. The commemorations of this time are necessary for the survivors as well as those who have no experience or real understanding of the war. This exhibit is important to me because it is first hand information. Believe it or not, I've never seen these pictures before. I appreciate your efforts to post them. Bruce Leonard

I first recall talking about the atomic bomb with friends playing in the neighborhood where I grew up in Anaheim, California in the early 60's. In playful arguments we would talk about &quot...I'll use the atomic bomb.&quot Then somebody else would say something like &quotI'll use the H-bomb.&quot That statement was the most powerful statement you could make. I remember practicing duck and cover drills in our classrooms when I was in first or second grade (1961-2). I recall that the threat from earthquake and a bombing attack were on par. The teachers told us to make sure that we didn't face the wall that was comprised of windows because the glass would shatter and hurt us. People were into building bomb shelters at home. In fact, a family across the street from the school built one in their back yard. I remember being very afraid of the air raid siren that we would hear once a month. When we heard it we were to duck and cover again.

The air raid drill must have stopped by the time I was in junior high school (1966). The movie &quotFailsafe&quot was intriguing yet frightening and helped me become more aware of the intricacies of our defenses and the madness of Mutually Assured Destruction. It wasn't until much later in life when I realized how absurd it was to think that anyone could survive a nuclear attack by ducking and covering.

It wasn't until the mid 1980's until I fully realized the destructive power of the world's nuclear arsenals by seeing a presentation by an anti-nuclear weapons activist. He dropped one bee bee into a drum to show the explosive strength of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Then he poured what seemed like an endless stream of beebees into the same drum to demonstrate the global nuclear destructive capacity.

Do I think we are safer today from the use of nuclear weapons? I think the Oklahoma City bombing makes it clear that we are in more danger of this happening than every before. Russell Frank, 40. Sonoma, CA. It's interesting to see Nagasaki spotlighted here instead of Hiroshima. We have family movies of my father visiting Nagasaki in 1958.

I learned about the war, especially about the atomic bomb, through my history class in Boston. However, we were not taught by the traditional lecture method but rather through a debate. My classmates and I were divided up into groups of four and researched the War through the perspective of the six most &quotimportant&quot men in the war (Hirohito, Roosevelt, Stalin, Hitler, Churchill, and Mussolini).It was partly because of this method, in which we studied the war, that I have become very interested in History and am planning to minor in it in college.

I first became aware of the atom bomb and the idea of nuclear war when I was about eight years old, that was around 1980 in the middle of the cold war. On route to school (I was in third grade) I used to cut through an abandoned parking lot where rows of those round concrete portable fall-out shelters were lined up for sale like used cars bright price tags dangling from the wind vents on their roofs. My friends and I learned to make a game of it. We'd climb inside them and play war. Whoever was left outside the shelter after the &quotbomb&quot usually a water balloon was dropped was &quotnuked&quot. You had to be quick and tough to secure a place for yourself inside before there was no more room. Usually I was among the more unfortunate. The idea of nuclear war really started bothering me around age 10. I spent age 10 and 11 in a kind of fever. Really, for a while I thought about it constantly. I can remember sitting on the edge of my brother's bed one afternoon staring at my reflection in his dresser mirror vaguely aware of the thunderclouds in the sky behind the hall window. I sat there and stared into the mirror dreading the end of the world and grieving for myself with all the hot force of a child's worried imagination. Somehow I grew out of that fear, I'm glad to say and I've never dreaded anything so much since then although I know there are numerable other horrors to think about. Basically my experiences with the atom bomb came as a child's nightmare that vanished with time. Lisa Lishman. Starkville, MS. Age 24.

I am not old enough to know how the cold war started but I grew up in it. No during it but in it. I was taught that we had a bunch of missiles Russia had a bunch of missiles and we needed them to keep their missiles from hitting us. This was in the 70's. Thoughts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren't as important to me because I was told that I needed to worry about the nuclear crisis that exists today. Today. Today was all we had to worry about and how it might affect the future. Today I think more about Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Knowing the issues involved has shown me that they are more important than the unrealistic worries that overly zealous teachers tried to teach me. I never did believe that there would be an all out war. Politics and Tactics were all that I saw. It was all a bluff. The Cold War. Nagasaki was real. J. Robert Oppenheimer was real. Los Alamos was real. Nagasaki was good and bad. It caused us to worry. That was good because it kept us from doing it again. It was a tough decision but the best one all things considered. Lawrence M. Steinke. Physics Teacher. Gonzales, California.

Joe 23 St Paul, MN USA. I like most in my generation learned about the bomb through the movies. I remember the time in the early eighties when Reagan was busy convincing the nation that the Soviet threat was real and nuclear war could happen at any time. I watched movies like Treads and The Day After on television and talked to my parents about how to survive a nuclear exchange. It was a frightening time to grow up in. I know it was not as bad as when my older siblings would practice air raid drills but I think the level of dread was not there. In the 50's there was a sense that a nuclear war could be survived. When I was growing up my friends and I decided that if it ever came to a war like that we would try our hardest to make it to downtown Minneapolis before we were hit. It was unanimous amongst us that we would face the end of civilization together rather than suffer slowly and painfully through the nuclear winter.

Over the next few years I became accustomed to the bomb or maybe desensitized is a better word. I began to no longer fear it or rather I no longer feared its use. I had decided in my own mind that the bomb would never be used. The total destruction of western civilization was too high a price to pay for petty problems. And compared to that prospect everything became petty. I felt that no sane leader would destroy the society that he/she was leading. No one in my opinion was dumb enough to end their job in that way. Today my childhood doubts have begun to resurface.

While in the Cold War I felt our nuclear arsenal would deter the Soviets from using theirs and vice versa. Now with the dynamics of that stagnant political age rapidly and in most cases completely coming undone, there is a new nuclear chill picking up speed. Isolated rouge states or fanatical anti-western, anti-Jewish, anti-Indian, anti-Pakistani, or just plain anti-everyone regimes are rapidly becoming the real nuclear threat. That is what I find truly scary. At least during the Cold War I knew where the threat was coming from but now it could come from anywhere at anytime and any place. My deepest fear is the thought that the bomb could fall into the hands of terrorist. A lone man working alone or with help from other terrorist who decides to take out a small city or the heart of a major one. In the aftermath of such an event, in the hatred and fear spawned in glowing embers of what was once a city, the sparks of the long feared WWWIII would be found. That is a day I hope that we will do everything in the world we can to prevent.

The bombing was highly justified.

The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were absolutely essential to stop the spread of human suffering and death due to the fanatical nationalistic ravings of an imperialistic, non-elected, totalitarian regime. The countless millions who suffered and died at their command, and certainly the millions who would have been wounded or killed had an all-out invasion been carried out, were spared this by the use of the bombs. As humans interested in the well-being of our fellow man, we should be eternally grateful for what Hiroshima and Nagasaki accomplished. Yes it occurred at a cost. But in terms of killing and human suffering, the cost of a full invasion would have been far greater. Bruce Miller

When I was eight years old I read &quotHiroshima&quot for the first time. The stories found therein touched and horrified me to the point that I could not sleep. Especially terrifying to me was the story of the Japanese soldiers who had been looking directly at the bomb blast and whose eyes had melted down their faces. I can never view a movie of a mushroom cloud without seeing the face of a Japanese soldier, sans eyes, superimposed over it. I realize that those who chose to use the atomic bombs felt they were doing so for the good of their own people and the people of Japan. Nonetheless, I wonder about the motivations of these people, that they were willing to unleash such a gruesomely destructive force on the world in order to stop a war. I often wonder what the U.S. and the international community may choose to do in Eastern Europe, in the name of stopping another bloody war.

The atomic bomb was a tragic event that took the lives of thousands. Even worse was bomb 2, perhaps unnecessary in any way to convince Japanese leaders. Having said that, many of my relatives died in the Pacific war and I do believe EVERYONE thought the invasion of Japan would claim the lives of tens of thousands of Americans. The Japanese were fierce fighters and the US was exhausted by war. We must judge decision to drop that bomb in the context of the times, and in the context of these times remember everyone lost due to that bomb, lost to the conventional bombing of Tokyo and other cities, and those lost during fighting, island by island in the war. God have mercy on us all.

I am a child of the 1950's who grew up on military installations. My father was a career Air Force officer. At some point in my high school years I realized that if there were to be a nuclear war, we would be among the first to be vaporized. Strangely, that thought both terrified and comforted me because the only thing I could imagine more horrible than dying in a nuclear war was surviving one.

I have never been a proponent of nuclear weapons but I became vehemently opposed to them after reading a book called "American Ground Zero." It became clear to me that our Government had been (and possibly still is) aware of the incredible human cost that our nuclear program had inflicted on the Japanese civilian population and our own citizens, especially those in Utah.

What was done cannot be changed. However, how we as individuals and as a nation conduct ourselves is another matter. We should never be proud of the fact that we used nuclear weapons on two largely civilian populations any more than we should be proud that we used the same terrorist tactics, albeit with conventional weapons, in Europe.

I do not hold science or scientist responsible for the horror of nuclear weapons. Scientist seek knowledge. It is most often others who abuse or exploit that knowledge.

My name is John English, I am 37 years old and I live in Birmingham, Alabama.

I was born Dec. 18, 1945, just a few months after the bombing ohatred and fear iroshima. My father fought in the war and was stationed in England. He was a bombardier and flew in missions over Germany and France. I have always been very aware of the war because he would talk of it. I remember sitting on his lap when something of historic significance happened and he told me to remember it. I only remember that the headlines were about 2 inches tall and they were in red. I think it was some final papers of surrender, but I don't know for sure. I am a history teacher and have also read a lot about the war. I think John Hersey's book Hiroshima is absolutely incredible. I also have an interest because I had a cousin who died of leukemia in 1953. He was six years old. I think there could be some connection to the high quantity of radiation in the atmosphere at that time. Deaths from leukemia were high during that time period. I lived in Kansas during the 1950's.

Donald B. Bechtel. Manhattan, KS. Having been born in the northeast in 1949, I missed WWII and don't remember much about the Korean War. My first recollection of the bomb was through magazines that I read in grade school. Most of my info, however, came about when we had to head for the basement of the junior high school during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I also remember not being allowed to drink much milk because of the atmospheric tests that were contaminating the forage. But the most striking memories, are the ones that touted nuclear weapons and power as good -- digging new canals, endless power, etc. How so much change has occurred in the last 30 years on our views of Atomic Power!

Dave Beachley. Denver, Colorado
My mother-in-law's cousin piloted the B-29 that dropped the bomb.

I am 25 years old now and I have no experience whatsoever about the WWII. However, I was brought up in the city called Sasebo, the second largest city in Nagasaki prefecture. When I was a kid, on August 9th every year, we had to go to school during the summer vacation to hear about the tragedy in Nagasaki in 1945. I visited the atomic bomb museum in the city to see all those horrible pictures when I was 9 years old. Those pictures are still frightening to me even today. My sister's best friend died when she was 15 years old because her mother was in Nagasaki at the time of the bombing. The atomic bomb does not just kill people who happen to be there, but also pose a threat to their offspring.

Rebecca Robbins, 18. I first heard of the atomic bomb in school. Images that I associate with the atomic bomb are death of thousands of children and families. Knowing that my country had these bombs is a little unnerving, but to also know that there are other countries with the same technology is also a little scary. What bothers me the most is that we, the U.S. have actually used our bombs. I feel Science is a good thing, but people base a lot of hope in its technology. That can be bad when no cure or time capsule is made. I feel in the future bombs will be used again. Its the way of the human race. Destroy the competition.

Chris Karcher, although born as a post WWII child I remember the terror of the cold war during the Cuban missile scare. As a citizen of the US, I don't believe that anyone has the right to use nuclear weapon on another society. Past wars should have taught us that there truly are no VICTORS in battle, only relocation of territorial lines and change of beliefs.

I wasn't old enough to experience the war or the aftermath of the bombings, and the events leading up to the actual events, but my feelings towards the use of the bomb (and war) are simple, there is no excuse. As I can't possibly know all the circumstances all the involved countries dealt with in the latter part of the war, I often weigh in my mind the balance of the death toll had the war continued, compared to the toll taken by the bombs. I am anti-war, and while this might sound contradictory to what I said previously, I believe the bombing was maybe necessary, (and the sooner the better). It was so very necessary to show the horrible destructive power it unleashed so that those others that later produced the ability to create nuclear devices would never do what was done in Nagasaki (and Hiroshima) again. It also makes it that much more important that countries come together and stop other countries with very little regard for life and death (i.e. Iraq) from possessing that ability.

I visited Hiroshima 26 years ago. Even though the museum was obviously designed to portray the Americans as the evil empire and the Japanese as innocent victims, it was a powerful presentation. I was traveling in Japan as a civilian working for the Navy - preparing for the withdrawal of the Marine Air Corp from Vietnam. In 1969 it was still considered likely that a World War III was inevitable and would involve nuclear weapons. With all the unpleasant things happening in the world today, we forget that nuclear war is less likely today than at any time over the last 50 years.

Walter Dunaj, 37 years. I live in Reading Berkshire, England. Both my parents have instilled in me the atrocities of war and hopefully there will never be a need to use the bomb in the future for all our sakes.

The unseen. That which is around us and our normal sensory organs cannot detect. Like an idea of our culture shaping our politics that manifests itself in our advertising and our conditioning, the fallout, which could be originated anywhere in the world, is unseen, but that unseen ghost wreaks havoc upon our fragile biology. The unseen is what scares me, because it's there and we don't know it and we can't control it. Like the ideas that shape our lives, the toxins from our environment shape our bodies. The mutations and the sickness which "fall out" upon us without warning, until it is too late, these are the nightmares I have of nuclear devastation. I can run from the blow-up area (theoretically), but even now, I do not know if I have already been affected, and would be if any explosion were even thousands of miles away. This scares me, because surely it is in our atmosphere still. Do people realize how long the half-life, the time in which nuclear waste disintegrates?

I was twelve years old when the A-bombs were exploded in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At that time, I believed what my parents said: it was a good thing because the bombs saved lives and put an end to the war and allowed the world to know that we were the most powerful nation in the world. But before long, I heard about the horror: the Hiroshima maidens who came to our country for medical help. And then I read John Hersey's book Hiroshima. I became very frightened about the terrible use of technology and the fact that we had created a monster. During the Cuban missile crisis, I was afraid that the end of civilization was at hand. Presently, I continue to be absolutely against the use of nuclear power and, in fact, have become against the idea that any armed conflict can bring lasting peace. I feel such compassion for all those who suffered in Japan because of the nuclear bombs. I pray that nothing like that happens again. I am an teacher in a parochial high school in the mid-west.

My earliest memory of the bomb is when as a small boy I was terrified that large planes flying over my house were in fact Russian bombers. My brother was in the Navy and had called home in tears saying good-bye to my Mother during the Cuban missile crisis. He, and my parents, were convinced we were going be in a nuclear war. A few years later I was scared witless when an air-raid siren was randomly tested while I was playing nearby. I ran home screaming and crying thinking this was IT. I was pretty sure that some day the bomb would be used. Today I don't think it will be the global holocaust like that depicted in Hollywood movies. More likely some small country will use it against another small country or terrorists will use it against a significant site somewhere.

I remember during the Cuban Missile Crisis my parents convinced a neighbor that they should take me into their shelter should the threatened exchange take place. Even at age 11 it seemed that life in a hole was not necessarily preferable to life without your parents and friends. Ryan Herz, age 47.

My first awareness of the bomb was in elementary school. We periodically had drills complete with air raid sirens and quiet orderly filing of ranks down into the bowels of the school there to kneel on the chilly concrete clasp our hands over our eyes and wait for the all clear signal. As I grew older (born 1952), I became intellectually aware of the bomb and its consequences and I think had a reasonable fear of it. I have grown to feel great shame and sadness that America was the first and so far only country to use the bomb in anger. We shall long be stained by that guilt. I used to have bomb dreams fairly frequently as a child as well as dreams of immense tidal waves. Also common were dreams of alien invasions often by spaceships of immense size. I no longer have such dreams or at least very infrequently--certainly none within recent memory.

I can't remember when I learned about the Bomb - I think it was just something that was there. I was born in 1962 and, like other things in life that are just there, I knew about it. At a young age I became interested in Einstein and the Manhattan Project that developed atomic capabilities. There was some vague feeling about Einstein and others who were Jews who were involved in the making of the Bomb. Being Jewish this was something that hung very heavy over my head. At San Francisco State U. I took physics for non-majors (I was a Photo major by that time). The class was taught by a man who had left the Manhattan Project in protest against the development and use of atomic capabilities. I would stay after class and pick his brain. I was fascinated. How do people make decisions like that before their time so to speak? How did he know how devastating thing could be and then stand up against the tide? I only hope that if I ever am in such a situation I could do the same. My name is Molly Strange and I am 33 living in San Jose. I am a film and video maker.

During elementary school I was subjected to frequent &quotDuck and Cover &quot exercises as well as training films about post-nuclear-war survival. I so firmly believed in the inevitability of nuclear war that I enlisted in the submarine service because I thought it was the most survivable platform. We didn't and weren't allowed to see images such as those presented here. We were taught to love the bomb. Teach your children well. These images will burn in the mind of my child forever. Thank you. Darryl House.Chico, CA.

My name is Rich Whitehouse. I am 42 years old and I live in Connecticut. The beginning of my awareness of the Atomic Age was in grammar school. We would occasionally have these peculiar &quotfire&quot drills. The teachers would have us close all of the windows and doors and close the window shades. They would then have us climb under our desks. There was no other explanation given. It would be years before I realized the absurdity of this behavior. How bizarre to think that closing the windows and doors and climbing under one's desk would protect a body from the devastation of a nuclear blast. If you will forgive the commercial reference, I think the effects of a nuclear explosion were accurately depicted in the movie &quotTerminator II&quot although the effects of the shock wave would be much much quicker.

I am only nineteen years old so I have no real recollection of the cold war much less WWII. I do however recall watching movies like &quotFat Man and Little Boy&quot to learn just what happened in the creation of the bombs and &quotDr. Strangelove&quot taught me about the paranoid absurdity of the Cold War itself. In sixth grade I first learned about the August 6 bombing of Hiroshima...my teacher read to us out of the book entitled &quotHiroshima&quot and now the images I see when I consider the horror of the bomb being dropped is that of men running about with the eyeballs melted out of the sockets. I associate the aftermath of the bombing with the book by Eleanor Corr... &quotSadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes.&quot All in all I was taught to look upon the slaughtered Japanese as victims rather than as the enemy that deserved it as my parent's generation was taught.

I have always been torn on the bombing of Nagasaki. My mother is Japanese and she lived a few miles outside of Nagasaki when the bomb was dropped. She tells me she remembers the sky lighting up and feeling the ground tremble as if an earthquake had struck. Her memories of that day are very short and not as vivid as they once were. As an American, I do support the dropping of the bomb because of two reasons. First, it saved many more lives in the long run and helped accelerate the end of the war. Finally, if anything go can come out of a bomb that causes so much death and destruction is that it showed the whole world what this weapon could do. As human beings we have a responsibility to learn from our past and to prevent atomic weapons from ever being used again. Frank Benedik. Falls Church, VA

I feel very bad that the United States dropped the bombs but not ashamed. The estimate to take the shores of Japan by troops would be over one million Americans dead. People sometimes forget we were at war and war is never pleasant for either side involved.

Greg Williams. Born May 1950 to a father who would have been among the soldiers who would have invaded Japan in 1945 if Japan had not surrendered first. I do not however think that the bombings caused Japan to surrender. Rather it was the Soviet attack on Manchuria that was decisive. On the other hand if the bombings had not occurred and all the world had not seen how terrible the effect would we have been more likely to have had a full scale nuclear war later ? I do not know. I hope we soon eliminate all nuclear weapons.

Arnold Daitch, age 56, Lafayette Hill, PA, USA. We must all be interested in this subject if the world is to survive. Sadly, I cannot disagree with the decisions made 50 years ago to use atomic weapons. The same decisions probably would not be made today, but in those days long ago, for the Americans, it was the lesser of all evils.

I am a 37 year old layperson, working on a sermon to be given August 6, 1995. I am too young to have experienced anything about Hiroshima or Nagasaki, and I am not arrogant enough to believe that I know what "should" have been done in 1945 after the U.S. had been through 4 years of war, and had begun to see what the Germans had been doing. I have always felt that I would have at least chosen a military target, and waited longer after Hiroshima for Japanese surrender. Besides mourning for the lives lost, (or looking at the other side, mourning for the war victims before the bomb, also.) I am most saddened that people often see this in such a black and white. "Of course it was right!" or "We unleashed the greatest evil in the history of the world! We should be ashamed!" I believe that good people will express both views. Steve Miller -- Omaha, NE

War is just plain stupid. -- Aliza, age 30, Washington DC

Atomic warfare is horrific. I am old enough to remember WWII and the impact on my family.

I was born in 1943, so I have no personal memory of the event. However, growing up I remember a profound sense of thanks that the Manhattan Project at Chicago, along with the folks at Los Alamos developed the means to end a long war with an enemy that was responsible for Pearl Harbor, the Bataan death march and numerous atrocities and fanatical devotion to crushing lesser races, as they saw it. I believe the Japanese deserved every Roentgen! We didn't even know about such cultural quirks as the prostitution of hundreds of thousands of Korean women then.

Later, we feared the Russians after the Rosenbergs smuggled the secrets of the bomb to them, and I kind of assumed one would go off somewhere, sometime.

Use it again? Maybe. The right situation could come up again. It's just another way of making bad guys dead.

Dear Larry,
You have to say what you are saying to survive. It must be too hard to know that your father was the one to drop the bombs that changed the world for ever. That made so much fear into the mind of every child. War is always a crime no doubt. But the atomic bomb is some thing more than immoral. It not just kills, it changes the genes and makes people sick for many generations - and you know that the bomb is there and we have to make it never happen again. We all know what it is about, we fear it all. So I can't understand why the French want to start the bombing on Muroroa again that's such a disrespect to all the dead and suffering people from Hirochima and Nagasaki. And a crime to the people on the islands around Muroroa and to all living things on this planet. How can we stop it?

I'm Alejandro Pelaez. I was born in Mexico City, Mexico in 1955. I'm now 40 years old. I'm a biologist working for a government agency dedicated to the knowledge and use of biodiversity. I knew about the atomic weapons in the 60's when there was a missile crisis in Cuba. I was 6 or 7 years old then and the teacher would talk to us about the possibility of the end of the world. She was not a progressive woman, nevertheless, and she blamed both sides. I didn't understand then what each side was. Since then, it keeps in my mind as a probe of human stupidity - the fact that in the interest of a very few persons all the rest of the humanity have to die. It was a very traumatic experience. While there exists a single atomic bomb in the world we have to remember and talk about all the Japanese who die as a shame to the human beings. I keep them in my heart I keep also in my heart all the people who die fighting for justice and freedom for all the people.

Some things about these two events we know, others we do not. We may disagree about what they mean or how. In the matter of the bombings, we know they did much damage and cost many lives but did they end the war and thus save much more damage and save many more lives?

My names Peter and I'm 27. I was born on Aug 9, 1967 - the anniversary of the detonation of the bomb on Hiroshima. From an early age I studied the history. Just before the bomb, Japan was trying to surrender to the Americans through the Russians in what was known as the Potsdam Treaty. A mistake by one of the American interpreters caused an ironic twist. Within the Japanese documents there was a word which, I cannot at this time remember, but it can either mean ignore or to wait - the word was translated as ignore. Thus, the Americans believed that the Japanese wanted to continue hostilities in the far east. Possibly without this error the bomb may never have been unleashed.

My name is Tana Brinnand. I was born on June 12, 1946. I was conceived directly after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I remember air raid drills in grade school. We would hide under our desks, on our knees, with our heads in our laps. This was supposed to protect us from atomic bombs. Later, we would go to the inner hall of the school, away from the windows. This was considered an improvement in technique. I remember fall-out shelters for sale and discussions of public shelters. I had nightmares as a child of the world blowing up, with only a space ship to take me away from the destruction. I read a book about "The Third World War." In it, someone lost their feet in an atomic explosion, and ran down the street on bloody stumps. When I saw the motion picture, "On The Beach", I realized for the first time, that I was not the only one who was terrified of the possibility of atomic warfare. It sickens me that governments still insist on testing nuclear weapons.

I am from France where President Chirac decided to allow 8 more nuclear tests. I really hope he would soon change his mind.

I'm Bob Kubala. I was 5 years old when the bombs were detonated over the Japanese population. My first recollections are of something terribly ominous, something distant and not immediately threatening to me or my family, but something to reckon with in the future. In later years I was influenced by American servicemen who were in the war - many were pilots and work friends of my parents. From them I learned a fear of future Japanese intentions, but I also recall having some reservation about those judgments. As years past I became interested in Physics and learned the views of scientists such as Albert Einstein Robert Oppenheimer and Leo Szilard. Today, I simply feel that current governments are not responsible cannot be trusted and that real world-wide participatory democracy now has to be built by humanity to end the artificial psychological divisions between our national populations and decentralize real control over human institutions to establish a lasting peace and real world-wide economic prosperity.

I first became aware of the use of atomic weapons as a young boy. After reading the discussions on this topic, I can't help but comment on the over emphasis on &quothuman suffering&quot. The Atom bombs were no more destructive than most conventional bombing raids. In fact, the bombing of Tokyo by conventional weapons statistically overshadows both A-Bombs. Did people not suffer there too? Was it not as much as an &quotatrocity&quot? In fact both Tokyo and Hiroshima are equal displays of the human will, not to kill but SURVIVE. The scientific community has always been exploited for it's value to the military but really one cannot be effective without the other. Have we not learned from the lessons of WWII? I think most have, but as some forget, or fail to remember, we and our posterity are destined to encounter the same situations again. I have no doubt that someday nuclear weapons will be used again. The more complacent we become in our military strength the greater the likelihood of nuclear war. It's MAD you see. Mutual Assured Destruction. My name is Christopher Record. I am 19 and I grew up in Up-State NY. I currently live in Southern Utah. The Second World War took much from me... more than I'll probably ever know. But it has given me much to. Much to learn from.

My name is Scott and I'm from Monterey. I have friends of all types that know that when you get in a fight with someone pain may be inflicted on both parties. When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor they in effect started a fight in which they did not know what pain they would suffer. BUT let us not forget those on DEC. 7, 1941 that died while they were sleeping or peacefully going about their day. We had a bigger gun and we used it. If they got it first we may all be speaking Japanese right now. Think about that.

I'm a 23 year old graduate student in mechanical engineering working towards a Ph.D.. at Duke University. I first learned of the atomic bomb in a history class in my early days of schooling. I imagine most people born after WW II learn of it this way. Curiously enough popular media and the entertainment industry have taught me more about the atomic bomb and its effects then formal schooling. I recall vivid images of destruction from such television programs as &quotThe Day After&quot. There was another show which caused quite a stir which I don't remember the name of. However the plot revolved around a terrorist group demanding some political objective while they sat in a ship in a port somewhere in the southern USA. The thing that was so unusual about this show was that it was presented in a news flash format. Something like We interrupt the regular scheduled broadcast to bring you this special report. Fake anchor people sat at desks giving the latest updates forecasting what an atomic blast would do to the region around the port etc. The clincher was that after the authorities subdued the terrorists the bomb squad went in and attempted to disarm the bomb. They failed. The feeds from at the scene cameras went to static and one of the anchors began to cry. This provided a stunning commentary on nuclear weapons. Basically even in the right hands these weapons are truly weapons of mass destruction. In addition to contemporary images of the bomb I've seen some interesting historical films if you want to call them that. &quotFat Man and Little Boy&quot

For example. Has learning about the development and use of the atomic bomb affected your image of science and technology? My grandfather was a professor at Harvard during WW II. He choose to go with a group and work on radar in England. A college of his went to Los Alamos. I've always been fascinated by advances in technology and the people who make these advances. The creation of the first nuclear device was truly a remarkable accomplishment. It was the state of the world that that device was a bomb. The pop singer Sting has a curious lyric in a song of his called &quotRussians&quot. I think he wrote it during the cold war. He refers to the bomb as Oppenheimer's deadly toy. Scientists frequently get blamed for the negative consequences of inventions. A theme that is as old as Frankenstein. The creation of the nuclear bomb didn't do much to improve the image of the scientist. As long as they exist they can be used.

My name is Ron Smith. I'm 46 years old. I was in Japan for Expo 70 as part of the Canadian Exhibition performers. I met several survivors. The memory is visually strong. Throughout the 50's and 60's I recall feeling that the bomb was a part of my world. The thought of it being used was constant but not something real for a 10 year old. Being able to meet survivors put a face to the horror I can never forget. I am glad to remember but sad to know it was real.

My name is James Seo and I'm a 23-year old Korean. I was born in Seoul Korea and grew up partially in Manila Philippines, receiving an American education. Attending grade school in Korea I was taught only of the horrors of the Japanese occupation of Korea before and during WW2. Of the atomic bombings all I knew was that they had put an end to the war - and that the Japanese deserved it for all their sins in Korea and other places. The latter observation was naturally not something taught in school but I believe it is a fact that any a boy or girl accepted growing up in Korea - the Japanese did bad things and they got what they deserved. As I grew up, I learned more about the war as well as the bomb's effect on not an abstract evil nation but the daughter and the mother left clutching rice balls in burned cities. Yet when I view these pictures or see shots from movies showing nuclear holocaust for a long time I've had trouble reconciling the lessons I was taught as a child and the conclusions I'm trying to arrive at as an adult. It's a difficult process and it's easy to pity these victims it's easy to mourn or blame or feel sorry. I'm more interested in the thorny questions of relative justice, distortions or omissions of history, interested in what mix of feelings these images bring out in me. And I thank the exhibit for doing that for providing an arena full of burning ruin as it is for my thoughts to roam uneasily.

I first heard about the bomb in primary school back in Norway.
Sven Ingolfsen.

My name is Charles Ditzel and I live in Seattle Washington. I was born in 1955. A full 10 years after the end of the War. My awareness of the bomb was gradual and over time... the more I read about it the more horrified I became about our use of the atom bomb. I have tried to understand our past - namely our use of the bomb in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My basic belief is that we have formed a -national excuse- about our first use of this weapon. We have blocked out the act by forming the big excuse or the big lie. We not only understood the ramifications but we used the weapon on a civilian population. Children included. We were indiscriminate in our killing.

One can point to various war atrocities - but Hiroshima and Nagasaki were whole-scale murder of a defense-less population. The defense that it ended the war quickly doesn't wash. We could have easily demonstrated this weapon on a dramatic and uninhabited area or on military location. Our act was criminal. Would we have been as forgiving if Germany or Japan had ended the war early by incinerating Seattle, Phoenix, or New York? We would call that genocide. We would call that a crime against humanity. It broke every civilized convention we hold sacred. The 60's 70's and 80's were years where &quotthe bomb&quot was part of the general culture. It embedded itself in American culture through politics.

The image I think of most when I think about the bomb is a medieval image of the black death or bubonic plague. The bomb is only one in a number of weapons. The use of biological and toxicological agents is another area of concern. The recent nerve gas attacks in Tokyo highlight the problems facing all of us. I expected use of nuclear weapons during the Cold War simply because I didn't trust the abilities of the leadership in both countries. The development of pre-emptive first strike scenarios - SDI, Star Wars, technologies battlefield, theater nuclear weapons, neutron bomb - winnable nuclear war scenarios all were symptoms of poor political judgment and an over-paranoid sense of self-defense. Today we are back to the same 1980's thoughts on defense. This subject is of interest because it should concern all of us. Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki are paranoid mistakes on our part. Our future should be devoid of similar crimes. It's interesting to note the two separate but distinct paths that Japan and the United States have taken. Who won?

Chinh Ho, I am a 18 years old senior at Tokay High. I truly empathize for those who suffered in Japan and I wish this tragedy never happen. I can't tell you truthfully America made the wrong decision on dropping the bomb because I believed many more lives would have been lost if the atomic bomb wasn't dropped.

Nicole, 16, San Francisco. The only time I ever learned about the bombing was in sixth grade after reading &quotfarwell to manzenar, &quot but it was only mentioned and the vast damage that was done by our country was never told or could have been expressed until seeing these pictures.

My name is J. Michael Trogolo and I am a Cornell University (Ithaca, NY USA) student working in the Detroit area for this summer. My first memories of knowing about the atomic bomb were connected to the former USSR and how they could wipe out our entire country with all their bombs. The only comfort was in knowing that we had the same ability. This did not scare me at all in my blissful young ignorance.

I first became scared at Mutually Assured Destruction when I saw pictures of the devastation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the first time. I had had no sense of scale before this and seeing the extent of the destruction through photographs gave me that scale. It frightened me to my core. Then I realized that this destruction was only 1/1000th of the destructive capability of our present nuclear weapons and then I was truly scared. The images I associate with the bomb and nuclear war are simple - death and destruction on a scale that is incomprehensible. Vast stretches of ruin and desert. No more of life as we know it.

During the cold war and today I believed that the US and the USSR were smart enough never to use the bomb again. It would simply mean the end of the world as they knew it. But today with smaller countries able to use smaller bombs I am more afraid than ever of the threat of nuclear bombs being detonated around the world. The bombs the US and USSR had were so big they could only cause total destruction. Now the smaller countries threaten to use smaller bombs which poses more of a threat to the whole world. My image of science and technology has never suffered because of the use of atomic bombs. My image of human beings has.

The mushroom cloud is a dangerous sight. Japan surrendered with fractures in its homeland. The bomb may be used against somebody who is trying to rule the world. Morgan Harris Kocher, age 8, North Bend Ore. PS - Morgan is quite the student of WWII history (papa)

I was born in 1959, so I have no memory of WWII, but my father was part of the occupational force. Dad had a very high opinion of the Japanese. He found them to be friendly, kind, and intelligent. Dad also felt that the Japanese were ready to surrender, before Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If they hadn't, he would have been part of the Allied invasion force.

As a child, I became aware of the atomic bomb from Saturday morning cartoons, and of the two cities from a 1945 or '46 encyclopedia yearbook which had pictures of the dead. Strange, some people find that pictures affect them, but I find pictures impersonal. I wish that we hadn't nuked the Japanese. What a waste. But then all wars are a waste. Then again, how do you deal with an aggressor? Imperialist Japan and her allies could not have been reasoned with. Still, the United States should not have used The Bomb.

I understood fairly early what the Cold War was all about. That just as the Japanese were a good people but their government wasn't, the same was true of the Soviet Union. My mental image was of the Sword of Damocles hanging over our heads, ready to destroy us all, but necessary to avoid war. I would say that the American Cold War strategy worked. It has been fifty years now since The Bomb was last used. Lets pray that it never does get used again.

And speaking of swords, science and technology have always been a double-edged sword. The same fire that cooks our food and warms our homes can also burn us and destroy our homes. This too is true of nuclear technology, though we have just got to do something about nuclear waste disposal.

I was too young to remember the Cuban missile crisis, but I never saw relations between the USA and the USSR being so strained that the Soviets would let loose their ICBM's. One of my physics professors checked into moving to Australia when Reagan was elected. I never did understand his fear.

So you want to know something about me? Look, I program computers for the U.S. Army, and if I thought that our government wasn't totally committed to world peace, then I'd be out protesting in the streets. The Army officers that I know hate war, and don't relish the idea of dying on some battlefield. There's not a hawk among them (only politicians are hawks).

Thank God the Cold War is now over. My belief is that now that our nuclear arsenal has served its purpose, it should be dismantled. But this will not contribute anything to world peace. There are just too many Third-World nations lusting after The Bomb. In the arena of nuclear non-proliferation, an ounce worth of prevention is worth several megatons of cure. John D. Curry. Yuma, Arizona

Mi nombre es Gustavo Rojas naci en San Jose Costa Rica America Central. Con respecto a si fue afectada la imagen de la ciencia y la tecnologia con el fenomeno tecnologico de la bombas atomicas pienso que la tecnologia la cual no pertenece a ninguna ciencia si no es una parte de la filosofia moral fue la afectada mayormente. La ciencia desperto de su letargo de que su conocimiento la verdad solo pia conducir al bien. Mentira lamentablemente la vida se compone no de verdades sino de actuaciones humanas. Hemos avanzado mucho en la razon pero en el corazon estamos en las cavernas. Que mas muestra de canibalisno cavernismo nos los dan estas fotografias. Espero que las palabras de un poema titulado Hiroshima de un poeta de mi tierra no se cumplan nunca y comenzaron a nacer los ninos con los ojo enormes como si to lo miraran desde siempre aun cuando no existian los horizontes (Jorge Debravo).

[translation] My name is Gustavo Rojas, I was born in San Jose, Costa Rica. Central America. In relation to the image of science and technology and how it was affected by the creation of the atomic bomb, I believe that development of technology must be attached to a philosophy with moral and responsible values. Science has evolved our search for truth with the intention of guiding humanity towards good. Unfortunately, life is composed of lies and truths, and the only thing that counts ultimately is our actions. We have advanced within the realm of the rational, but in the matters of the heart we are in the stone age. The proof of our cannibalism is shown in those photographs. I hope that the words of a poem entitled &quotHiroshima&quot by Jorge Debravo, a poet from my country, will not become a reality. He describes children that were born with enormous open eyes, as if they were seeing forever but without horizons.

Christian Doering age 44, resident of Eastford, CT. I learned about the bomb from school -- air raid drills, talk about bomb shelters, and films of atomic tests and of the aftermath in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I remember being very worried about the bomb when I was growing up because at that time my family lived in New Jersey across the river from Manhattan. I always assumed that Times Square would be a ground zero in the event of nuclear attack. I used to wonder if the bomb blast might possibly be deflected by the cliffs of the Palisades but I was pretty sure that I and everyone I knew would be vaporized if the Russkies dropped the big one.

The bomb taught me that science and technology have a dark side. My father an organic chemist was a concerned scientist who subscribed to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists -- the one that had the clock reading about 5 to midnight every cover. During the Cuban missile crisis my father explained to us that the clock had moved to about one minute to midnight and that meant that we were in grave and imminent danger of a nuclear war. The certainty that life on earth was about to cease was extremely depressing for a young adolescent. Today I worry about Third World dictators who believe that the power of absolute destruction will compensate for their lack of inner wholeness. Every stick has two ends and so the uncontrollable power and destructive force of nuclear weapons has forced many of us to look into our own nature and seek to balance the forces that can lead to destructive behavior. The consequences of ignoring those forces until they erupt are now too great.

I was born in 1967 and I can't remember learning about the bomb or nuclear weapons for the "first time." It just seemed like one of those pieces of my mental landscape that was always there. Once I became old enough to understand how these devices could be used, I learned to bury my awareness of their potential deep down in my subconscious. I suppose most people do.

I never thought the bomb would be used on purpose during the Cold War, but I felt confident there would be an "accident" at some time that no one would be able to take direct responsibility for. Now I worry about the proliferation of these devices to "unstable" nations, especially the middle east. I believe a nuclear device will eventually be used by another power, though I couldn't say when, why or how.

I'm in Japan this summer, visiting from Texas. While I'm here I am going to go to Hiroshima for the 50 year commemorations. Maybe it's a morbid curiosity that makes me want to go there, maybe its a sense of disbelief, or just wanting to acknowledge the experience in some small way.

Could atomic/nuclear weapons are ever used again? Who can say. People's memories are pretty short.

My name is Les Charles. I live in Long Beach, CA and I grew up in Whittier, CA. I am 43 years old. I grew up aware of the bomb mostly by T.V. I thought it was cool and to this day i would have liked to have witnessed a test. I must admit also that I always expected to see a bright flash outside my window one day. The threat of all out nuclear war today is much less, but if I live a normal life span I expect to see the bomb used either in limited warfare by a country advanced enough to develop a bomb or by one wealthy enough to buy one. The threat of a terrorist bomb is probably nil, but there is a definite risk of terrorist contamination using plutonium or some other fission material on water supplies etc. Science and technology are not the villains here - political craziness, extreme nationalism, and fear are the villains.

Sam, 32. Tucson, Az. I believe that science has demonstrated that it is truly amoral with its assistance of the military in the creation of these horrific weapons. Never again should a scientist naively believe that he or she is merely investigating for knowledge sake.

My name is Baden Hall and I live in Johannesburg South Africa though I was born in the coastal city of Durban South Africa on 20th September, 1957. I am the youngest of a family of 5 children and my parents both lived at the time of the WW2. As an avid science reader from a very early age I think I read about the newly embarked upon space age. During this time my parents used to scan the skies each evening to try and spot the Russian Sputnik I began to read about other inventions. Amongst the many books I read were by Winston Churchill Leonard Cheshire VC who was present when The Bomb was dropped and he gave the vivid account of all the he saw. This started my inquisition into the Nuclear Age. Whilst the principle of Nuclear Energy does not worry me it is the idiots that have access to the hot Buttons that worry me. Invariably it is the guys with the money ie The Golden Rule...He who has the Gold Rules, That is the real problem. Invariably the guys with the money are the guys that couldn't give a damn about the lives of all living things let alone the principle of co-existance with nature that we have to worry about. I keep a very close eye on the developments in world affairs and especially the latest French intention to continue their nuclear testing in the South Pacific. I think that is absolutely disgusting. If they want to test then test in their own back yard not 10,000 kms from their home. Like everything in life. Things must be done in moderation including moderation. Personally , I don't think in the doomsday prophets. I just believe that people must become more responsible and listen to their hearts rather than the jingling of money in their bank accounts. With Greenpeace growing by the day I do believe that their are certain checks and balances starting to put into place, albeit long overdue.

I was born in 1978, so I did not experience the horrors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima when they occurred. I do however specifically remember the first time I was told about the atom bombing in Japan. I was a fifth grader at a school in San Francisco. Our class read a book about a little girl dying from leukemia.

Bruce, 30, Ottawa. The destructive power scares the hell out of me.

I first became aware of the event through history class but I can't say that I remember what grade or how old I was. I have always been interested in science and technology but early on after reading about this and learning about it made it very clear to me as how not to use technology. I have, in the past, associated an atomic weapon with instant death and until this pictorial hadn't given it any further thought. As a youngster I remember being awed and frightened by the atomic bomb and the mass devastation it caused. Before I learned about these weapons I used to be like every other young boy - I had my toy guns and my GI. JOE toys. But when I began to realize what war was really all about I stopped playing with those toys. I still believe the sciences and development of technology is important but would rather see it used to help build a society rather than destroy it. The cold war never really meant anything to me. I understood what &quotbalance&quot of power meant and how no one could win a nuclear exchange. But now that the technology is so accessible, via the breakdown of the Soviet juggernaut and the Oklahoma City bombing, I worry a great deal more whether or not we will be alive by the end of the millennium. My name is Don Zielke. I am 28 years old, married and have a 2 year old daughter. I live in Columbus, Ohio, third largest data-processing city in the world and a very likely first-strike target. Thank you for making this exhibit accessible via the internet.

I first became aware of the atomic bomb sometime in elementary school during the 1950's when we regularly had drills to drop under our desks. My husband 's family was personally affected by the bombing of Hiroshima. His paternal grandparents lived near the epicenter of the explosion and were evaporated. His maternal grandparents, uncle, and aunts lived outside the city . They saw and lived the horror and tragedy. A nuclear holocaust could happen at any time. Only people committed to a civilized world can make life on earth a continuing possibility. Marsha Nakanishi, 46. Los Angeles.

I was born in 1969. I think I first became aware of nuclear weaponry around when I was 5 or 6. I believed for some reason that only one bomb had been used until I was about 12. The existence of nuclear weaponry and its strategic applications to international and domestic policies and economics gave me a pessimistic view of the human race (no future, no hope, complete loss of innocence, general depression) so I tried not to think about it. I do not blame science and technology completely because it is only a tool. War and the dehumanization of others has been around long before science and tech. There is a feeling of great disappointment about the people who worked on the manhattan project that they did not have the foresight to realize that maybe the human race is not ready to handle the atom with responsibility. After all the people who worked on the project were smart people. They were thinking about this responsibility. Maybe they were just real bad strategists. I didn't think about whether the bomb would be used too much because a person with a real understanding of this, I think, goes mad. I accepted that it would be used much the same way. I try to accept death.

I 'm John Perry age 34. I learned in elementary school that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was necessary to end the war. I do not know if that is true but I don't think it matters. They were available and they were used. They worked and the war ended. I am glad that happened. I thought this pictorial was well done. It told a story of horror and anguish. That I was moved by it is different from saying that I was filled with remorse because I live in the country which caused all of that damage. The United States did cause a lot of damage and pain and death in Japan. We didn't start the war. Blame those who did for the damage they caused to happen.

My grandfather fought in the South Pacific and would have been included in the planned Japanese invasion. But the Bomb didn't just save his life. It saved the lives of thousands of U.S. soldiers, victims of the horrendous Japanese atrocities of the war, and countless Europeans. Germany was developing the Bomb too, and they would not have hesitated to decimate Europe with it had they finished it first. Use of the Bomb was a moral and strategic solution to a war that brought only pain to all those involved.

The atomic bomb. Well I first learned about it from my dad who was in WWII. He never really talked about it but I asked him once and he said that he did not regret the fact that the atomic bomb was used because if it had not been used then he would have most likely been part of the invasion force into Japan. To me this means that my dad might have died or been seriously wounded along with thousands of other American soldiers. Am I happy that the atomic bomb was used, the answer is no. Am I happy that my dad is alive, the answer is yes. John Pruitt, 22. Atlanta , GA

Richard Bent, Age 43. I am trying to discover for myself the context in which this act took place. And how or what were the determining factors. For example, was a demonstration of the bomb considered rather than actual battle use?

I first became aware of the A-bomb in school - perhaps middle school in South Carolina. I was not old enough to experience WWII. I remember images of the mushroom cloud as well as film footage from several films I saw on the pilot and the Enola Gay. I was very frightened of such weapons but it does not influence my view of science and technology. I believe the bomb could have been used in the cold war or even now. My images have also been shaped by my foreign exchange experience in Japan in 1991. I was part of a delegation of US and Japanese students sent to Hiroshima from the nuclear-free city of Yawata in Kyoto prefecture. It was a very sobering experience.

I currently live in Nevada City California, but grew up in the greater NYC area. I was born in 1948 well after the Second World War but was in elementary school during very tense days of the cold war. I still remember air raid practice in school when we learned to get under the desks and to cover our heads in case of attack. I remember lining up in the halls along the walls- another safe place. Safe from a blast but not from radiation. I also have memories of being terrified during air raid siren tests. Fearful that I would die. Edward Hobson.

Darin Wayrynen, 29. I grew up during the Space Race and felt constant fear of the Cold War. I went to sleep at night totally afraid of nuclear war and what it could do to my life and those that I care about. It 's only been in the past two years that I have grown less fearful almost complacent about the fear of Nuclear War. Visitors to this memorial should walk away not trying to justify if Americans were right or wrong for dropping the bomb but with the knowledge that war in our technology based society will and can destroy earth as we know it.

Even though I was born in 1979, I learned about the atomic bomb and nuclear wars in 2nd grade when we were doing a unit on the USSR, now known as Russia. My teacher told us explicitly what would happen and that image of what would happen has always been in my mind and I still worry a little bit about it even though Russia has disarmed their nuclear bombs. Then as I read Pat Franks book, Alas Babylon, the images that I thought were written in this book made me think more, since I do live in an area where if a nuclear bomb were to arrive near me I would be killed instantly. I also saw the movie The Day After and I didn't know what that was about until I saw the missiles being launched to Moscow. Then I saw the images of what could happen when a missile lands and spreads over the land. I take Japanese and German in HS. So we have talked about WW2 in classes. Reggie.

My name is Bob I am 38 years old and live in Hawaii. My first knowledge of the atomic bomb came as an elementary school student, when we would hear alarms and rush into the hallways placing our heads between our knees. The drills implied there was a chance of survival after an atomic bomb attack, though the megatons available at the time would have negated our efforts. At the time I was living in Columbus Ohio. I've spent the last 20 years in the Navy and have been fortunate enough not to have to face the nuclear question posed in Crimson Tide. Nuclear deterrence is a nasty game where once played both sides lose. Nuclear weapons are now falling into realm of a terrorist weapon. Though this is a particularly nasty possibility, it is good to see superpowers move away from MAD and the nuclear weapon's role in politics begin to change. Eventually they will evolve to history.

I'm not sure how I first became aware of the bomb which is a little ironic, as my mother is a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing. Or perhaps this makes sense -- she has always spoken of it as matter of factly as most people talk about being in a minor car accident. She says that when you see such things when you're very young (5 years old) you don't really know, understand, or realize how horrible they really are. So the images I had then were from her - of the bright light, the cloud, the people -- burned terribly their skin coming off like it does cooked chicken. This is how my mother described it. She was not harmed at all -- but lost a cousin and an uncle. Bodies by the edges of the river, the dying were thirsty as burns tend to leave one dehydrated. Many fell in when they died and so there were bodies in the water too and the black rain.

It never seemed completely real to me. I think my mother's matter or factness had something to do with that. It wasn't that I didn't think it was horrible -- I knew and felt that it was -- it just seemed very far away -- very far removed from my existence and the things I felt were real (I am speaking of the time when I was about 5-6 ).

That changed in the sixth grade though. Our teacher Mrs.**** showed us a film of the bombing. Or I should say of the immediate aftermath. It was very graphic. I have yet to see anything like it on TV or anywhere else. I think very very few people would show that film to 30 twelve year olds but I am very grateful that she did. I will never forget it. When I was 16 (I think) I got to go to Hiroshima with my parents. My father and I visited Peace Park one afternoon. I got to see the famous building with the sheeting of it's top blow off revealing the curved steel frame under it. And I got to see the shadow on the side of it , where a person stood and disappeared in an instant. The ironic thing was there is a beautiful green park around the building and coincidentally it was some sort of holiday that day and there were people picnicking, kids chasing each other on the grass, balloons....

It's interesting how this has been woven into my life -- I majored in Physics (studied at U.C. Berkeley, graduated in '93). Several years ago 50 of all physics BA's went to work for the military. That's changed now though, there aren't any jobs at all, but I am not so unhappy. And even if things were as they were back then I would not work for the military. I will refuse to use my talents creativity and knowledge in the pursuit of finding ways to kill people. I know that many things are potentially critical components of weapons. All I can say is that I will and must do my best to be aware. Most of the Physics students, graduate and undergraduate, were very good people -- very good human beings and I believe that many of them live by philosophies similar to mine. M.R., 26 years old. Sebastopol, CA

All my life has been haunted by the threat of atomic destruction. All my childhood I was awakened at night by siren sounds worrying about atomic destruction. All my days and evenings are spent unconsciously neurotic about atomic destruction. All of this distraction from contemplating the beautiful sky is a menace. All the love of all things by all things would extinguish the threat of atomic destruction. All atomic destruction proponents are totalitarians who were abused as children - poor totalitarians. I wish they would allow the world to help them. All development of weaponry designed solely for killing must cease - even if revolution against industrial and corporate and banking interests are required. All my existence has been a battle against the disease of loneliness I see the poisonous signs in everyone - distrust, dishonesty jealousy, greed. Hatred and evil thoughts then acts finalize the blooming of the deadly virus LONELINESS, a silent ethereal organism composed of ages of energy run amuck. LONELINESS kills one then all using tools like the bomb but in the end the beginning of the end stems from the very first rejection of an outstretched hand in need of love.

I was 15 in 1945. I was thrilled the war was over. As I reflect on the time...we killed the nasty Japs and they deserved it. It never occurred to me that they were people who loved, had personal ambitions, hopes and fears as much as I did. 50 years later I look back, and still feel it was the right thing to do because it definitely saved American lives. Although it several hundred thousand Japanese died in just the two bombings it saved the balance of the population from death and destruction. The infrastructure was NOT destroyed, and thus recovery and true modernization were able to occur much more rapidly than Germany. As an ex defense contractor employee involved in the development of the minuteman ICBM I never really felt the bomb would ever be used again. However it was a deterrent. That's my thoughts. I live in Chantilly, Virginia and have in the last 4 years. Prior to that, almost all my life I was a California from the bay area. I am now 65. My name is Robert Brill.

I have just viewed the Exhibit of Yosuke Yamahata 's photographs. I was born in April 27, 1941 in Roanoke VA, USA. My earliest memories revolve around WWII. It is and always has been horrible for me to see my fellow citizens complacency toward war and bombing. Exhibits such as these provide a means for the necessary revisiting and knowing of events and conditions that profoundly shape our lives. Thanks. Jacquelyn Smithers Ann Arbor , MI.

I was born in England in 1954. Although they did not say a lot Amy parents made clear to me the suffering of the people of Europe during the war. In American schools I learned that the atomic bombs brought an earlier end to the Pacific war than might otherwise have been possible. Perhaps saving millions from both sides. Maybe so but the cost was almost unspeakable. I have thought of those who died. And of those who did not. But I can t reach any satisfactory conclusion. And I 'll never feel right about it. I just can t.

I can remember many sessions in the midwestern US school that I attended where we had to practice drop and cover. I recall the designated bomb shelters and their respective signs being posted. I vividly remember the spectre that loomed then and to some degree still does of the potential for mans continued inhumanity to man. I'm 47 years old and have a daughter who is 18. I hope she never encounters the atrocities that are latent in a greed and egocentric driven culture.

I grew up in Los Alamos New Mexico and my father worked at the Laboratory there, although not on weapons research. I left in 1980. I have become more and more aware of how immense the repercussions and personal affect there was to the creation of the bombs. I recently journeyed on business to Hiroshima where I saw Japanese children by the thousands visiting the Peace memorial there to reflect on what happened. I was surprised to listen to them and find that in such young children there is an overwhelming desire to use this as a lesson to never let our societies get to that point again. The basic feeling was that man must keep himself from War at all cost.

My name is June Meyer I was born in 1934 in Chicago, Illinois US. I was only 11 years old but I remember the horror I felt. I could not comprehend how civilized people could do this to other human beings. Nothing much has changed when you consider the world events today. I am a humanist and have tried to use my belief in the goodness of man during the 32 years as teacher of Art in the public school system in Deerfield, Illinois where I have lived the past 35 years. I do fear for the future of my two grandchildren. Will they have to fear the War to end all Wars.? I mourn all those innocent people everywhere.

Sharon Clavell, 36, earth science teacher, single parent. In the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis came my first awareness of atomic weaponry. In elementary school, we had a civil defense shelter and safety drills where we crouched down under our desks or in a line by the lockers in the halls. I was acutely aware of human suffering and the human capacity for destruction. I was, and still am, a ruminator and worrier. I used to figure that between Camp David to the west and D.C. to the south, and also being a port city that Baltimore was a very likely target or would at least receive fallout from D.C.. The images I have of death and destruction are full of human suffering. As to my image of science and technology, I teach science, however, I feel obligated to introduce topics for reading, writing and discussion that involve ethics. Examples include bioengineering of plants and foods, use of Project X to discuss use of animals in research, and use of Jurassic Park

My grandfather died in Bataan as a prisoner of war. When he was no longer able to keep up with the forced march, having a gangrenous infection of the shoulder that made him feverish and delirious, he was shot to death. I was five years old when they finally found something we could bury. How can we call the bombing of Nagasaki an atrocity? People who think it was are grossly mis-educated. When we look at Pearl Harbor, Wake Island, Bataan, how can we say that the decisive blow that broke the Axis was an atrocity, civilian targets, you say Look at what the Japanese did in the Philippines, the medical experiments, the forced incest, rape of families, fetal disembowlement these are all well documented. God bless the men who had the courage to bomb Nagasaki.

Do you have any pictures of the Bataan Death March and of Japanese live dissections of humans? Chinese humans? Boyce Griffith age 50, Tennessee

I am a 23 year old mixed race woman. I learned about the atomic bomb growing up through television and school. The source of information that had the greatest impact on me was the movie The Day After which I saw when I was 12 years old. It terrified me. For weeks I woke up glad the world was still here. The threat of total nuclear war seem very real and possible to me. I cannot say in which ways growing up with this fear has shaped my view of the world, politics or person. I do know that knowing that we are capable of such destruction has made me staunchly anti-war.

I first learned about Hiroshima and Nagasaki from a movie called Atomic Cafe which I was shown in High School.

I guess I learned about the bomb as a kid cause my dad was in the Navy. It was one of the first examples I learned about how to deal with trying to understand whether the means justified the end It seemed like it had when he first told me about it. But now I see that the end hasn't come yet. If perhaps we actually learned, which I see that the French still haven't that we can never do this again, then maybe it's ok. Now I think that it is everyone's duty to make sure that nobody uses one ever again. This requires protesting actions that might lead to this end and making laws to mandate dismantling of the bombs and healthy rational discussions that keep people informed about the issues.

As a 26 year old I've only had secondhand accounts or weird group history ideas about the bombing...the most prevalent is that the bomb ended the war and was therefore justified. I don't really agree with that thinking because there are other ways to have ended it.

The MEMORY Exhibition