
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, December 13, 1994                   TAG: 9412130033
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: ELLEN GOODMAN
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

POSTAL SERVICE CLOUDS THE HOLIDAYS

YOU WOULD think that the folks at the post office had enough on their minds, shoulders and backs this time of year without adding a mushroom cloud to their burdens.

But right in the middle of the holiday season, they dropped a bomb on the public. They announced that the stamp to commemorate the end of World War II would carry the image of the A-Bomb exploding over Japan.

I am not sure exactly what public they had in mind. It's unlikely the average American would post a birthday card or a love letter with an atom bomb in the corner. Perhaps it was intended for letters to bill collectors or the Internal Revenue Service.

But even in miniature, this mega-weapon created an enormous controversy. Not just because of the image but because of the caption that proclaimed in carefully chosen words: ``Atom bombs hasten war's end, August 1945.''

What was this? A positive ``spin'' on the bomb? An attempt to treat the bomb as a morally neutral, historic fact? Either way, it brought volatile mixed feelings back to the surface.

The controversy echoed the furor this fall when the Smithsonian Institution was forced to redesign its exhibit on ``The Last Act: The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II.''

In October, the Smithsonian was widely criticized for emphasizing the devastation at ``Ground Zero.'' In December, the post office was widely criticized for having its head in the cloud.

The museum exhibit seemed biased against the American and wartime point of view. The post office seemed ignorant of the Japanese and postwar points of view. Both proved that it's impossible to treat the atomic bomb as a military artifact, a bigger and better rifle.

During the long and horrific struggle against German and Japanese aggression, millions of people lost their lives. The world became numbed by numbers. Indeed, near the end of the war in Europe, 1,300 Allied planes firebombed Dresden leaving 35,000 dead in one night. The news that one bomb could kill 140,000 in Hiroshima must have seemed dizzyingly different in scale, but not in moral weight.

After the war, many became conscious of, and often conscience-struck by, the death of Japanese civilians. Many became haunted by the children of Hiroshima. But these ghosts don't block out the other picture, the young Americans waiting to invade Japan, the men who heard about the bomb and said, ``Maybe now I'll live.''

Nevertheless, to my generation, the atom bomb can never be something that just hastened ``the war's end, August 1945.'' It will always be the image of the next war, the Cold War.

The duck-and-cover generation of schoolchildren grew up with the arms race, with strontium 90 in the milk and mutually assured destruction in the air. To us, the mushroom cloud is a central recurring nightmare, not an etching. To our descendants, it will remain the potent symbol of the worst we can still do: end the world.

In the post-Cold War era, we have tried to push the bomb out of our minds, beyond the edge of the envelope. We have turned the hands of the doomsday clock back, comforted ourselves with treaties that START to disarm, changed the targets of Russian and American missiles.

In what Boris Yeltsin calls the cold peace, we pay the bomb terrible, chilling but too-short bouts of attention - nowhere near the priority that we give to crime. We haven't maintained the sense of urgency, the need to get further arms reductions while the getting is good.

But we haven't forgotten either.

We think of nuclear war when we hear about the possibility of atomic weapons in North Korea or Iraq, Libya or Iran. We stop for a minute when we read about missing plutonium in Russia, smugglers in Germany, terrorists anywhere. And we flinch when the post office wants to trivialize the icon of death. The bomb is in the mail.

The postmaster general learned this the hard way. He was forced to disarm his stamp. He tipped his hat to what he labeled Japanese sensitivity, as if Americans had embraced his mushroom cloud with peace of mind.

The new stamp will bear the portrait of Harry Truman announcing the end of the war. The A-Bomb image will remain where it must - stamped indelibly in a corner of the human mind.

The Boston Globe

by CNB