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Dailey, USMC (Ret.), to meet with scholars to plan an exhibit that places the aircraft in historical context. The petition asks Smithsonian Institution Secretary Lawrence Small and NASM's director, General John R. Doctorow, Daniel Ellsberg, Jonathan Schell, and Kurt Vonnegut writer-producer Norman Lear actor, director, and activist Martin Sheen and filmmaker Oliver Stone. Among the many other signatories are several prominent activists, authors, and other public figures including Noam Chomsky and Robert Jay Lifton authors E.L. ) The committee's Statement of Principles (also available on the web site) declares that displaying the Enola Gay as a technological achievement reflects "extraordinary callousness toward the victims, indifference to the deep divisions among American citizens about the propriety of these actions, and disregard for the feelings of most of the world's peoples." A number of historians signed the statement, which was delivered to Smithsonian officials on November 5. The Committee for a National Discussion of Nuclear History and Current Policy charges that the proposed exhibit will be "devoid not only of historical context and discussion of the ongoing controversy surrounding the bombings, but even of basic information regarding the number of casualties." (See the "introductory letter" on the committee's web site at. The new exhibit, scheduled to open in December 2003, will, as a NASM press release (available at ) notes, identify the Enola Gay as the aircraft that "dropped the first atomic weapon used in combat" and describe the B-29 as "the most sophisticated propeller-driven bomber of World War II," but will not otherwise explore the historical context of Hiroshima or nuclear weapons.
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Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles International Airport, which will also feature other aviation artifacts too large for the main facility on the National Mall-such as the Space Shuttle Enterprise, an SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance aircraft, and the Dash 80 prototype of the Boeing 707. The museum had earlier announced plans to display the restored and fully assembled aircraft at its new Steven F. The controversy never died.A group of historians and activists has delivered a petition challenging the National Air and Space Museum's proposed exhibit of the Enola Gay, the B-29 Superfortress used in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. In December 2003, the museum put the Enola Gay on permanent exhibition at its new Steven F. Visitor comments were overwhelmingly favorable. From 1995 to 1998, the museum displayed the forward fuselage of the Enola Gay in a depoliticized exhibit that drew four million visitors, the most in the museums history for a special exhibition. Under new management, the Air and Space Museum returned to its mission to collect, preserve, and display historic aircraft and spacecraft. The exhibition was concealed in 1995 in response to public and Congressional outrage, and the museum director was fired. When the museums plan were revealed, initially an article in Air Force Magazine in 1994, a raging controversy ensued.
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It depicted the Japanese more as victims than as aggressors in World War II. In the 1990s, the Smithsonian Institutions National Air and Space Museum laid plans to use the Enola Gay as a prop in a political horror show. Fifty years after Hiroshima, the airplane flew into controversy of a different sort. The bombing of Hiroshima was a famous event, a defining moment of the 20th century, but the aircraft that flew the mission was largely forgotten and left to deteriorate, until restoration finally began in 1984.
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By eliminating the need for an invasion of the Japanese home islands, the atomic bombs prevented casualties, both American and Japanese, that would have exceeded the death tolls at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. However, these missions brought an end to a war in which 17 million people had died at the hands of the Japanese empire between 19.2 Until the atomic bombs fell, Japan had not been ready to end the war. At Hiroshima, more than half the city was destroyed in a flash, and 80,000 were killed instantly. 6, 1945, the B-29 Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima.