BY SALLY ACHARYA

At 8:15 a.m. on Aug. 6, 1945, a tremendous flash lit up the sky over the home of one-year-old Koko Tanimoto. Moments later, Koko was being squeezed under the rubble in her mother’s arms, crying as her mother reached up a free hand toward a chink of light and dug. After half an hour, as the crackling sound of fire approached, her mother pushed Koko through the hole and then pulled herself out into the aftermath of the world’s first use of the atomic bomb.

“She’s a miracle,” says history professor Peter Kuznick of the baby who, instead of being among the estimated 45,000 to die that day or the 140,000 to die by year’s end, grew up to graduate from AU in 1969 and now speaks annually to students at Kuznick’s Nuclear Studies Institute.

She meets them at Hiroshima, where Kuznick, College of Arts and Sciences, leads a summer trip abroad that is part of a three-class summer institute now marking its 10th year. The institute aims to teach students the historical, psychological, and political dimensions of the nuclear arms race. The North American Association of Summer Sessions once named the institute “the most creative and innovative summer program in America.”

The Japan trip is proceeded by two, month-long courses at AU—Living with the Bomb: American Culture in the Nuclear Age, taught by Kuznick, and Nuclear Weapons and American Democracy, taught by Robert Musil, executive director of Physicians for Social Responsibility.

It’s an institute that grew out of conversations between Kuznick and another AU student with ties to Hiroshima, Akiko Naono ’94, whose grandfather died in the blast and whose mother and grandmother, like Koko, survived. The Japanese don’t use the term survivor, believing it dishonors the dead. Koko and Naono’s family are called hibakusha, or “blast-affected persons.”

In many ways, the whole world could be called hibakusha, since the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and three days later in Nagasaki would change the world so profoundly that 60 years later, students are still opinionated about the issue. In Kuznick’s polls, students vote four or five to one against dropping the bomb. Many now see it as unnecessary and brutal. Others share the common belief of World War II veterans that the bomb saved as many as a million American lives.

But over the 10 years of conducting the institute, the level of passion in the argument has decreased. The further removed people are from the time of the bombing, Kuznick says, the more open they are to assessing it with historical objectivity.

That was not so much the case when the institute began in 1995, the 50th anniversary of the bombings. Fiftieth anniversaries are usually the most contentious, Kuznick says, because “that’s the last time people have to impose their interpretation on events.”

A lot was happening in 1995. Kuznick, for instance, led a petition drive among historians and scholars to urge the Smithsonian to revise the labeling on an exhibition of the Enola Gay, the B-52 bomber that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.

Among their contentions was that open discussion should be encouraged, and that many beliefs that have been taken for granted in fact can be criticized as myth.

The first myth, Kuznick says, is that the United States planned to invade Japan, and that the Japanese would have fought to the death for every inch of soil at a high cost in American lives. Kuznick says that Japanese military leaders had known in 1944 that they couldn’t win, but made the error of thinking that one more victory would win them better surrender terms. Hence they had continued to fight into 1945, but would not, Kuznick says, have fought to the death for every inch of soil at the cost of some million American lives, as many believe.

An invasion was tentatively scheduled for November 1945. But many U.S. leaders, including Gen. Eisenhower and War Secretary Henry Stimson, felt that Japan would surrender beforehand, according to historians who protested the Enola Gay exhibit.

The second myth, Kuznick says, is that the bomb ended the war, when the deciding factor was not the bombing but the fear of a Soviet invasion of Japan. It was known that the Soviets would invade Japan within 90 days of the Nazi surrender.

Some of these contentions were raised in 1995 through an exhibit at AU’s Butler Pavilion. It included a charred school lunch box filled with carbonized peas and rice. (Its owner, a middle school student, died in the blast, and his mother found the lunch box, the AU exhibit informed viewers.) The display, says Kuznick, was the main exhibit on the bombing held outside of Japan that anniversary year.

Ever since then, he has been leading students to Japan to view the site of the bombing. As time passes and passions give way to historical objectivity, students and scholars alike are increasingly able to ask questions about the reasons behind the bomb’s first use. Those are some of the questions the institute addresses, along with broader questions about nuclear policy, the way it has changed over the years, and the way the bomb impacted American culture.

Every year during the trip to Japan, there are interviews by Japanese journalists. And every year, students whose parents were often too young to remember World War II meet with an AU graduate who is a living link to the history they study: Koko Tanimoto, who 60 years ago was crying in the ruins of a bomb-blasted city.