Reimagining Hiroshima and Nagasaki ─ Nuclear Humanities in the Post-Cold War

This edited volume brings together essays from the new scholarship about the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and reimagines the harm inflicted and the aftermath of the bombs.

Much of the initial decades of scholarship around the nuclear attacks were trapped inside the politics of the Cold War, and focused on articulating moral judgments, ascribing blame, and either justifying the current Western policies towards the former Soviet Union or enlisting its readers to help "save the world" and avoid a nuclear holocaust. In the past 20 years scholarship around the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki have become freed from this Cold War binary and have begun to approach the nuclear attacks as history, and have brought to bear engaged inquiries that can explore this history without the self-imposed burden of political advocacy. This has resulted in a rich literature and scholarship integrating methodologies from a diverse number of fields of inquiry. However, this scholarship has not been assessed for its historiographical significance, and has not been collected to reveal to non-specialists the nature of the changes in the field. This edited volume fills this void and the authors have re-imagined the nuclear harm that was inflicted, as well as its aftermath. Chapters in the book address the recollection, memorialization and commemoration by officials and states, but also ordinary people’s resentment, suffering, or forgiveness. The work contains a variety of perspectives in order to glean moral and political insights on the full range of vulnerabilities—such as emotional, bodily, cognitive, and ecological—that pertains to nuclear harm.

This book will be of much interest to students of critical war studies, nuclear weapons, World War II history, Asian History and International Relations in general.

Nico Taylor is a research associate at La Trobe University, Australia.

Robert Jacobs is associate professor at Hiroshima Peace Institute, Hiroshima City University, Japan.