As the Manhattan Project shows, history changes over time
According to the old saying, those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. (That’s George Santayana. I had to Google for attribution: forgetfulness 1, remembrance 0.) Of course, before we can remember the past, we’ve got to decide which past to remember. Every history is a narrative, inherently selective, foregrounding certain characters and themes, while sidelining others. Whose story are we telling, and why?
Take the history of the Manhattan Project: Is it the story of the greatest assembly of minds since classical Athens uniting to stop a genocide through the power of science? Or the story of cities full of innocent civilians, on their way to work, to school, obliterated in an instant? Is it the tale of the “downwinders,” whose claims that nuclear testing sickened their families remain unanswered? Or is it an origin story, the birth of the Military Industrial Complex (that one’s Dwight D. Eisenhower, no Google required), the National Security State, and America’s superpower heyday?
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Months before the atomic bombs were dropped, 70 years ago, the Army enlisted a New York Times reporter named William Laurence to pen an official history, one that in meaningful ways established the language and themes we still invoke when we talk about the Manhattan Project today. The Pentagon understood the old publicist’s creed: to control the conversation, you have to get ahead of the story. In fact, they referred to their impending date with Japan, internally, as “Publicity Day.”
For a long time, the strategy worked. Before the fallout had settled, J. Robert Oppenheimer emerged as a kind of intellectual pinup-model, plastered on the covers of Life and Time. (If the bomb was Oppenheimer’s greatest invention, Oppenheimer himself was a close second: an ectomorphic, Jewish New Yorker who remade himself as a Sanskrit-quoting, martini-shaking cowboy-poet-physicist-monk, he gives Jimmy Gatz a run for his millions.) America had unlocked the secrets of the universe to beat back the Axis; Hiroshima wasn’t a graveyard, it was the cradle of a new era, henceforth known as the “Atomic Age” (that one’s vintage William Laurence). Of course, the bombings occasioned some apocalyptic hand-wringing, but according to a 1945 Gallup Poll, 85% of Americans approved of the use of the bombs on Japan.
Seven decades have whittled that number down to 56%. What should we make of that sea change in public opinion? Just four years after the shock of Pearl Harbor, did we believe, in 1945, that we had repaid a debt whose trauma has long since faded from memory? Did history offer up a lesson? Did we learn it? Have we told ourselves a new story, dressed up in modern clothes, about the ethics of weapons of mass destruction in the age of terror? And will we respond to the next trauma differently?
It’s up to the historians of the future to answer that question for our kids. But the kids may need a refresher; according to a recent poll, only 46% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 even knew that the U.S. built the first nuclear weapon.
Sam Shaw is the creator and showrunner of Manhattan on WGN America.