Said General Arnold: “Although there now appear to be insurmountable difficulties in an active defense against future atomic projectiles similar to the German V-2 but armed with atomic explosives, this condition should only intensify our efforts to discover an effective means of defense.” The only defense now conceivable against a rocket, once it is in flight, is illustrated above. It is another rocket, fired like an antiaircraft shell at a point where it will meet its enemy. Once it had been launched, such a rocket might detect the attacking machine with radar and make its own corrections. When it came near the enemy rocket, it could be exploded by radio proximity fuse, a development of World War II. But inevitably it would miss some of the time.”
-Life Magazine November 1945
The above quote and photo come from Life Magazine, published 1945. The latter half of the 1940s was an environment of growing realization of how powerful atomic bombs were in the United States. By the 1950s public outcry against nuclear technology began to spread in small pockets across the States. These anti-nuclear sentiments were exactly what the American State Department wanted to avoid; so when in 1955 twenty five atomic bomb victims who would come to be known as the “Hiroshima Maidens” arrived, they sought to control the story. The state department wanted to use their surgery and recovery, which were free for the women, as a sign of American altruism to Japan while anti-nuclear groups attempted to use the scars of the Maidens for their own anti-nuclear agenda. Both authors David Serlin and Paul Boyer, believe that the Maidens’ scars and rehabilitation were used by American pro and anti-nuclear groups, but the extent and direction of the usage differs between the two authors.
In 1945 atomic weapons were used against a civilian population for the first time in history on Hiroshima and Nagasaki Japan; the effects of weaponized nuclear technology were unknown at the time leaving many to speculate what the far reaching consequences would be. However, the results were immediate and over the years following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the extent of the destructiveness and lasting effects of nuclear weapons were realized, but not by the general public. Author David Serlin points out this disconnect of information in Reconstructing the Hiroshima Maidens “Photographs of people killed or maimed were not published in American newspapers or magazines until late in 1952” (Serlin, 66). The US State Department feared that the gruesome effects of atomic radiation would lead to lack of support and funding from the American people. As a result, when twenty-five Hiroshima burn victims were brought in to the United States for Surgery and recovery, the State department attempted to downplay the atomic part of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One of the creative ways that the State Department attempted to accomplish their goal of directing attention away from the nuclear destruction was to photograph the Hiroshima Maidens and juxtapose their photos with other victims from across World War II. By making it seem like the victims of Hiroshima were equal to other Axis and Allied war causalities, as well as highlighting the rebuilding of Hiroshima, the danger of nuclear radiation could be mitigated.
On the other end of the nuclear spectrum were the anti-nuclear groups which at the time were protesting the creation and testing of the Hydrogen Bomb. Writer Paul Boyer explains the fears that were mounting for some Americans in his article Exotic Resonances: Hiroshima in American Memory
“As U.S. and Soviet H-bomb tests pumped strontium-90 and other poisons into the atmosphere, protesters warned not only of nuclear war but also of the immediate hazard of radioactive fallout. The test-ban campaigners again invoked Hiroshima, now as an example of the lethal effects of radiation and as a benchmark to demonstrate the escalating nuclear threat” (Boyer, 302).
Fear of what had happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki happening to American cities drove these anti-nuclear groups to spread an image of a destroyed and radiated America, like the one shown in the above image.
Both Serlin and Boyer wrote their articles more than fifty years after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While Boyer focused more on how anti-nuclear groups reacted to the Hiroshima Maidens and Serlin focused more heavily on how the State department, reacted, both authors agree that Hiroshima Maidens were used to spread agendas of various parties. In addition the tone of the authors suggest that they want to convince their readers that the surgery and rehabilitation of the Hiroshima girls was not an act of altruism by the American people, but the selfless work of Reverend Tanimoto, the man who made the journey of the Hiroshima girls possible, a work that was exploited by both pro and anti-nuclear groups in the United States. In an age of fear and mystery concerning the future of nuclear technology, the journey of the Hiroshima Maidens was used to further advance and spread the ideology of both pro and anti-nuclear interests in the United States.
