Fallout: A Historian Reflects on America’s Half-Century Encounter with Nuclear Weapons

Fallout offers the reflections and observations of historian Paul Boyer on the fascinating and complex impact of the bomb in American life from the special perspective of a person who experienced and participated in the events and movements about which he writes. Boyer provides us with a rich understanding of nuclear reality in American thought and culture after 1945.
The essays range widely, from a discussion of the shattering impact of the news of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on a war-weary nation in 1945 to ruminations on the 1995 Enola Gay controversy, when a proposed fiftieth-anniversary commemorative exhibit on the atomic bombing of Japan at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History generated bitter controversy.