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Nuclear Minds: Cold War Psychological Science and the Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Headshot of Ran Zwigenberg; descriptive text (series, talk title, date, time, location); background image of a brain-shaped nuclear cloud
Friday, October 04, 2024
3:00 pm - 4:30 pm
Ran Zwigenberg (Pennsylvania State University)
APSI Speaker Series

In 1945, researchers on a mission to Hiroshima with the U.S. 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. This talk traces these efforts and the ways they were interpreted differently across communities of researchers and victims.

Zwigenberg explores how the bomb's psychological impact on survivors was understood before the invention/ discovery of the concept of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). 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, the denial of victims' suffering.

As a result, very few doctors tried to ameliorate suffering. This does not mean the professions "failed" to diagnose PTSD (a non-existent category at the time); rather, both doctors and survivors understood and experienced psychological suffering and their role in society differently. This is made clear by comparing and connecting the nuclear case with that of Holocaust, military veterans, and other victims. The book sets out, first, to understand the historical, cultural, and scientific constraints in which researchers and victims were acting and, second, to explore the way suffering was understood in different cultural contexts before PTSD was a category of analysis.

About the speaker:
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 AAS 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.