In the years leading up to the 50 th anniversary of these attacks, National Air and Space Museum director Martin Harwit and curators Tom Crouch and Michael Neufeld imagined an exhibition that would provide a balanced look at the bombings.

The United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and another on Nagasaki three days later. In 1994, the National Air and Space Museum completed an exhibition script titled “The Crossroads: The End of World War II, the Atomic Bomb, and the Origins of the Cold War.” Over the next year, this script, and the versions following it, would generate one of the greatest controversies the Smithsonian ever experienced.