Return to Hiroshima

As we learned after Hiroshima, a number of the scientists who had worked on the bomb were concerned about its implications from the outset. After 1945, many people in various countries sought to reorient their way of thinking about war and conflict, to take account of this new weapon which, science fiction become all too real, could end life as we know it. A few went to Hiroshima and wrote about it; others helped survivors; still others studied radiation damage and related matters. The survivors both of Hiroshima and of its somewhat neglected sibling in disaster, Nagasaki, also took a hand in the enormous effort to assimilate the consequences for their own personal lives, for the civic life of their cities, and for mankind. The psychiatrist Robert Lifton, who had lived and worked in Japan intermittently since the Korean War, undertook the task of interviewing survivors, leading and vocal citizens as well as less articulate ones, as part of the larger effort on which his book reports, to discover what sorts of damage the bomb did to personal well-being, social fabric, and the sense of continuity or immortality with which people live.

Lifton possesses some unusual qualifications. He had examined after the Korean War some o...