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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
Almost immediately after 9/11, cultural tropes that had long been associated with the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were relocated to new roles as descriptors of the attack on New York City. Where once terms like “ground zero” referred to the detonation points of the nuclear weapons that were dropped in Japan, Ground Zero now refers to the site where the World Trade Center towers once stood in lower Manhattan. This appropriation of framing mechanisms from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to New York City was nothing new: it held true to an American tradition that began in August of 1945. When Americans felt that bifurcated sense of victory and vulnerability upon the news of the bombing of Hiroshima, it was a short journey for the word Hiroshima to take on a second, shadow meaning in American culture–it became shorthand for fears of an inevitable nuclear attack on America itself–and almost always the target of this imagined attack was New York City. While Lifton and Mitchell claim that, “Hidden from the beginning, Hiroshima quickly disappeared into the depths of American awareness,” we have found instead that it became ubiquitous in American culture and remained so throughout the Cold War and beyond, particularly as shorthand for America as nuclear victim, not nuclear perpetrator. This same inclination can be seen in early press coverage of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan last year. A great deal of press coverage in the United States was focused on the dangers of radioactive contamination on the American West coast, on America as vulnerable and a victim. This inversion of the history of Hiroshima and Nagasaki took a firm hold on the American imagination once the former Soviet Union developed nuclear weapons of their own in late 1949. However, even with the end of the Cold War, the 9/11 attacks reinvented notions of an American Hiroshima as the inevitable follow-up to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
1 On transposing and conflating Hiroshima and “ground zero” with 9/11, see Antoine Bousquet, “Time zero: Hiroshima, September 11 and apocalyptic revelations in historical consciousness,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 34:3 (2006): 739-764, and Mick Broderick, “Waiting to Exhale: Somatic Responses to Place and the Genocidal Sublime,” IM: Interactive Media 4. (Summer 2008), here.
2 Robert Jay Lifton and Gregg Mitchell, Hiroshima in America: A half century of denial (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1995): xv.
3 Gary Andrew Poole, “On the West coast, a paranoid run on iodide pills,” Time (March 17, 2011): http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2059408,00.html
Dennis Romero, “Japan Earthquake: Could nuclear power radiation reach LA?” LA Weekly (March 17, 2011): here; Mark Clayton, “Traces of Japanese radiation detected in 13 US states,” Christian Science Monitor (March 28, 2011): here.
4 link.
5 Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986).
6 See Mick Broderick, “Surviving Armageddon: Beyond the Imagination of Disaster,” Science Fiction Studies, 62, (1993): 362-382.
7 Jeff Nuttall, Bomb Culture (London: HarperCollins, 1970).
8 “Here's what could happen to New York in an atomic bombing,” PM (August 7, 1945): 7.
9 Robert Jacobs, “Reconstructing the perpetrator's soul by reconstructing the victim's body: The portrayal of the “Hiroshima Maidens” by the mainstream American media,” Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific 24 (June 2010): here.
10 Nicholas D. Kristof, “An American Hiroshima,” New York Times (August 11, 2004): here.
11 “The 36 hour war: The Arnold Report hints at the catastrophe of the next great conflict,” Life 19:21 (November 19, 1945): 27.
12 “Peace or else,” Mechanics Illustrated (February 1946).
13 Louis Ridenour and Louis Nicot, “Pilot lights of the apocalypse,” Fortune (January 1946): 13-15.
14 Robert Littell, “What the atom bomb would do to us,” Reader's Digest (May 1946): 125.
15 Robert De Vore, “What the atomic bomb really did,” Collier's 117:9 (March 2, 1946): 19.
16 John Lear, “Hiroshima U.S.A.: Can anything be done about it?” Collier's (August 5, 1950): 11-15.
17 “Civilian Defender Clay,” Time (October 2, 1950).
18 “Another job for the Army,” Armed Combat Forces Journal 5:8 (March 1955): 32.
19 Robert Jacobs, “Domesticating Hiroshima: American Depictions of the Victims of the Hiroshima Bombings in the Early Cold War,” in Urs Heftrich, Bettina Kaibach, Robert Jacobs and Karoline Thaidigsmann, eds., Images of Rupture in Civilization Between East and West: The Iconography of Auschwitz and Hiroshima in Eastern European Arts and Media (Köln: Böhlau, 2012) forthcoming.
20 Dexter Masters and Katherine Way, eds., One World or None: A Report to the Public on the Full Meaning of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Federation of American Scientists, 1946).
21 Ralph E. Lapp, Must We Hide? (New York: Addison-Wesley Press, 1949): 141.
22 Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, FailSafe (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962): 262.
23 Burdick and Wheeler, Fail-Safe (1962).
24 Robert Burchard, Thirty Seconds Over New York (New York: Morrow, 1970).
25 Harold Rein, Few Were Left (New York: John Day, 1955.
26 Judith Merril, Shadow on the Hearth (New York: Doubleday, 1950).
27 Henry Williams, The Nuclear Suitcase (Self- published: iUniverse, 2005).
28 Sheldon Filger, King of Bombs: A Novel About Nuclear Terrorism (Self-published: Authorhouse, 2005.
29 Lee Boyland, Behold an Ashen Horse (Self- published: Booklocker, 2007).
30 See this; this; and this.
31 See “Operation Alert” here.
32 Robert Jacobs, “Survival of self and nation under atomic attack,” The Dragon's Tail: Americans Face the Atomic Age (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010): 61-83.
33 Federal Civil Defense Administration, Survival Under Atomic Attack (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1950).
34 Federal Civil Defense Administration, Atomic Bombing: How to Protect Yourself (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1950).
35 Federal Civil Defense Adminstration, Facts About the H-Bomb (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1955).
36 Federal Civil Defense Administration, You Can Survive Tomorrow's Atomic Attack (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1950); Federal Civil Defense Administration, The Atom Bomb and Your Survival (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1950).
37 Roger S. Cannell, Live: A Handbook for Nuclear Survival (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1962).
38 Sewell Chan, “Inside the Brooklyn Bridge, a whiff of the Cold War,” New York Times (March 21, 2006): here.
39 For a complete list, see Mick Broderick, Nuclear Movies (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1991).
40 Mick Broderick, “Is this the Sum of Our Fears? Nuclear Imagery in Post-Cold War Cinema,” in Scott C. Zeman & Michael A. Amundson, (eds) Atomic Culture (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2004): 127-149.
41 See Ferenc M. Szasz, “Atomic Comics,” in Scott C. Zeman & Michael A. Amundson, (eds) Atomic Culture (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2004).
42 Kristof.
43 “An American Hiroshima”: here.
44 Major Van Harl, American Hiroshima?: here.
45 Truth is Treason: here.
46 See “Terrorist nukes are ‘inevitable,’ Rumsfeld says”, London Free Press (Canada), here.
47 Max Page: 4.
48 Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation, (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008).
49 John W. Dower, Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9-11, Iraq, (New York: Norton, 2010): 224.
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