Event

In 1945, researchers in Hiroshima with the US Strategic Bombing Survey canvassed survivors of the nuclear attack. This marked the beginning of global efforts—by psychiatrists, psychologists, and other social scientists—to tackle the complex ways human minds were affected by the advent of the nuclear age. Nuclear Minds traces these efforts and the different ways they were interpreted across communities of researchers and victims. The manuscript explores how the bomb’s psychological impact on survivors was understood before the idea of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). In fact, psychological and psychiatric research on Hiroshima and Nagasaki rarely referred to trauma or similar categories. Instead, institutional, and political constraints—most notably the psychological sciences’ entanglement with Cold War science—led researchers to concentrate on short-term damage and somatic reactions or even led, in some cases, to denying victim suffering. Very few doctors tried to ameliorate suffering. But the professions did not “fail” to diagnose PTSD (a non-existent category at the time). Rather, doctors and survivors understood and experienced psychological suffering and their role in society differently. This is clear by comparing the nuclear case with those of the Holocaust, military veterans, and other victims. This book analyzes the historical, cultural, and scientific constraints under which researchers and victims acted. And it explores how suffering was understood in different cultural contexts before PTSD became a category of analysis.

Ran Zwigenberg is associate professor at Pennsylvania State University. His research focuses on modern Japanese and European history, with a specialization in memory and intellectual history. He has taught and lectured in the United States, Europe, Israel, and Japan, and published on issues of war memory, atomic energy, psychiatry, heritage, regionalism, and survivor politics.Zwigenberg’s first book, Hiroshima: The Origins of Global Memory Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2014), won the 2016 Association for Asian Studies’ John W. Hall book award. His latest book, Nuclear Minds: Cold War Psychological Science and the Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2023) deals with the psychological aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. For more information on this and other projects, please see https://pennstate.academia.edu/RanZwigenberg

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