by Tom Lewis
The Decision to Drop the Bomb
This book, aimed at the 75
th anniversary of the Atomic Bombings and the end of World War II in the Pacific, is really out of its time and place. Author Tom Lewis (
The Empire Strikes South) wants to reframe the bombings, picturing them in a positive light. His whole message is really in the title – the bombs “saved” millions of people. There was a time for this argument, in the middle 1990s when the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in the United States sought to put on display the
Enola Gay B-29 aircraft that had dropped the A-Bomb on Hiroshima. Then historians, veterans, politicians, and anti-nuclear activists fought over the terrain of both the act of displaying that airplane and the propriety of using the bomb. Lewis missed that debate. Today, he would have done better to stay out of it.