Nuclear families

This chapter analyses some of the writings of white middle-class women who were involved in the making of the first atomic bombs in the United States during World War II. ¹ Addressed mainly to the feminist literature on the relationship between gender, war and science, it will also offer a critical deconstruction of the history of American ‘psychic numbing’, its longstanding refusal to confront the ‘full truth’ of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Lifton and Mitchell 1995: xv; see also Alperovitz 1995; Boyer 1994; Griffin 1994). However, one should not imagine – as these sources tend to imply – that there is a single prevailing version of the story. We need to ask about the range of ways it has been narrativised, and what roles women have played in the telling. In this chapter, I examine how the women’s reminiscences serve to document comradeship between women as well as other very positive values, but they rarely try to look at events from outside the perspective of their personal attachments. Consequently, present-day readers may read in them a gender-specific discourse of denial, one shaped partly by the women’s own structural relationship to the Manhattan Project. Thus these accounts may say something about impediments to the adoption of a wider, more critical perspective, to our ability to transform or transcend the limitations arising from our own situations.