Robert A. Jacobs

Hiroshima City University · Hiroshima Peace Institute

My book Nuclear Bodies: The Global Hibakusha has just been released by Yale University Press. The book is based on more than 10 years of research on the Global Hibakusha Project with my research collaborator Mick Broderick. This article provides a short overview of the book; you can learn more and watch some lectures at the book's website: Nuclear...

In the fall of 1961, President Kennedy somberly warned Americans about deadly radioactive fallout clouds extending hundreds of miles from H‑bomb detonations, yet he approved ninety‑six US nuclear weapon tests for 1962. Cold War nuclear testing, production, and disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima have exposed millions to dangerous radioactive par...

When the United States conducted two nuclear attacks against civilian targets and primarily civilian populations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 the world was collectively shocked. While the scale of the destruction was not new, tens and even a hundred thousand civilians had been killed in single air raids early in World War Two, the new w...

This article explores how the models of medical risk from radiation established in the aftermath of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are insufficient for understanding the risks faced by people in contaminated environments like Fukushima. These models focus exclusively on levels of external radiation, while the risk faced by people in...

Written as a response to an op-ed in the Guardian. This dismantles advocacy for nuclear power argument by argument. It describes how the decline of the industry is due to its dysfunctions. How claims of any separation between military and commercial nuclear technologies are illusory. How its claims that waste can be recycled are 50 years old and ye...

This article traces the history of the development and construction of the first prototypes and operating nuclear power plants, all as part of the Manhattan Project. Beginning with CP-1, the first self-sustained nuclear chain reaction in 1942, it details subsequent Manhattan Project reactors and then examines the construction and operation of the f...

Online Interview. Editor’s note: this month in India marked 21 years of the 1998 Pokhran nuclear tests, amid an acerbic and jingoist election campaign, resulting in Hindu nationalist BJP’s ride back to power with Mr. Narendra Modi at the helm. Now that the cacophony of the election season is over, and the PM has extended greetings with his Pakistan...

Explores how children were central to both how the US military assessed the lethality of its nuclear attack, and also how Americans came to envision who was really killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Cambridge Core - Social and Population History - War and Childhood in the Era of the Two World Wars - edited by Mischa Honeck

During the Cold War, it was widely acknowledged that the advent of nuclear weaponry had fundamentally altered the nature of war between nuclear armed nations. However, while strategic nuclear war planning was being carried out and implemented in deployed weaponry and personnel by the United States, parallel to this was the continued embrace of mili...

Human beings have never had to grapple with a problem like high-level nuclear waste (HLW). The spent nuclear fuel rods resultant from over 70 years of plutonium production for nuclear weapons, and over 60 years of nuclear power being used as a source of civilian electricity will remain dangerous to future generations of human beings, and to the eco...

This co-edited book examines the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki through a post-Cold War lens. It features contributions from 13 scholars and an introduction by the editors that examines the shifts in nuclear humanities writing since the end of the Cold War.

In spite of the incommensurability of the Holocaust and the dropping of the first atomic bombs, the juxtaposition of Auschwitz and Hiroshima has long been a topic of serious debate. While in public memory on both sides of the Iron Curtain Auschwitz and Hiroshima have become icons of industrialized mass murder, comparative research on this iconizati...

This month the media and social networks are busy remembering Fukushima on the fifth anniversary of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown, but what we are really observing is the beginning of the work of forgetting Fukushima. Fukushima is taking its place alongside the many forgotten nuclear disasters of the last 70 years. Like Mayak and San...

Japanese translation of the book *The Dragon's Tail: Americans Face the Atomic Age*

The history of nuclear weapon testing by the major nuclear powers during the Cold War is intimately tied to the history of military colonialism in the 20th century. For each of the first five nuclear powers (U.S., USSR, UK, France, and China) the process of selecting a site for nuclear weapon testing was driven more by the location of a small group...

This article looks at the initial response of the social science community to the advent of nuclear weapons and their use on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The idea that human society as a whole was not sophisticated enough to responsibly steward nuclear weapons was widespread among American sociologists and psychologists: if society needed to change, man...

When President Harry Truman introduced the atomic bomb to the world in 1945, he described it as a God-given harnessing of "the basic power of the universe." Six days later a New York Times editorial framed the dilemma of the new Atomic Age for its readers: "Here the long pilgrimage of man on Earth turns towards darkness or towards light." American...