It is well known that the media likes to make themselves the main character of every story they can, but Tuesday’s PBS American Experience documentary about the atomic bombings on Japan took things to a whole new level. The main takeaway for PBS’s assembled cast of BlueSky historians is not that the narrative we tell ourselves about the necessity of the bombs is true, but rather that it is a coping mechanism to hide any moral guilt from a 1946 John Hersey article documenting the bombs’ aftermath.
Naturally, PBS did not have anyone on to defend the orthodox view. Instead, PBS gave us Vincent Intondi, a man whose website describes him as “the preeminent authority on the intersection of race and nuclear weapons.” Intondi lamented, “The American public took the narrative, hook, line, and sinker, and said, ‘Okay, this is—we trust the government that this is what was needed. Thank God we got it and it wasn't, you know, another country, and that we have this, and it was the right thing to do.’"
Fellow historian Alex Wellerstein followed, “And this is a remarkably resilient narrative to the point where, if you tell somebody this narrative, they'll say, ‘Right, that's the story, right?’ And no, that didn't get really solidified until 1947. So, like, quite a ways after Hiroshima. And in many ways, it's not true.”
