What Do We Forget When We Remember Hiroshima?

On August 6, 2025, the world marked the 80th anniversary of the American destruction of Hiroshima. As in decades past, Hiroshima Day served to honor the first victims of atomic warfare and to reaffirm the enduring promise that their suffering would not be in vain, that they and the residents of Nagasaki, devastated three days later in 1945, would be the last places to endure such a fate.

Within that commemorative framework, Hiroshima has been effectively rendered an abstraction and reduced to a ...