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However, by the summer of 1993, Robert Adams, the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and senior curator Tom Crouch, began to disagree over the portrayal of the Japanese in the exhibit.
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The director of the museum, Martin Harwit believed that the decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan was so significant in the context of the fiftieth anniversary that the full debate of the bombings should be explored. The Enola Gay fuselage in a storage warehouse at the Smithsonian Institution (Photo credit: Wikipedia). The Enola Gay had been in storage for several years because the Smithsonian had no room for the airplane and was in dire need of restoration. Finally, unlike previous years, “the late 1980s and 1990s did not see the emergence of such all-consuming issues such as the Vietnam War, urban riots, or Watergate, which had earlier diverted attention from nuclear issues.” Coinciding with this anniversary, the Smithsonian Institution planned an exhibit that would showcase the fuselage of the Enola Gay, along with several other World War II-era aircraft. Secondly, enough time had passed for these veterans to come to terms with their actions during the war.
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For some, the fiftieth anniversary would be the last time that they would be able to record their stories. First, many veterans who had served in the war were still alive, but realized that they were aging quickly. However, as the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II drew near in 1995, interest over the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki renewed. Awareness of the dropping of the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki diminished greatly. The Soviet Union had fallen and the threat of nuclear destruction seemed to temporarily disappear. "To present this as a technological marvel with no reference to the number of people killed ignores what happened when the bomb hit the earth.In the early 1990s, public attention concerning nuclear affairs was scant. This is a "lie of omission," said the writer E.L.
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He said there was much more public discussion between 19 about the wisdom of the bombing, "there was a lot more openness, and a lot more doubt." "We've just broken ground in our history with a pre-emptive war," said Jean-Christophe Agnew, a cultural historian at Yale University. They want the bomber to serve as a catalyst for national debate on nuclear weapons. The intellectuals and activists who are lining up to oppose this "celebratory treatment," say it is particularly dangerous at a time when the United States is displaying its military might. The Smithsonian, which is heavily supported by federal money, increased the estimate to 1 million, which then drew historians' complaints of "historical cleansing." A compromise was reached for a pared-down exhibit in 1995.Īs it was before, the argument is as much about politics as history. Truman's decision to approve use of the bomb. The groups also took issue with the number of Americans - 30,000 to 50, 000 - military officials anticipated would have been killed in an invasion of Japan and which has been cited as the crucial factor in President Harry S.