Hiroshima Day.

America is in a commemorative mood. The recent D-Day ceremonies captured the attention of the entire nation. Soon we will mark the fiftieth anniversary of many other World War II milestones, from the fall of Berlin to the liberation of the concentration camps. The U.S. military's sweep across the Pacific will be memorialized at Leyte Gulf and the Philippines, on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. But these occasions, unlike those related to the war against Hitler, will be haunted by awareness of what comes next: Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The stories of the American soldiers who invaded Normandy were deeply moving. There were tens of thousands of these GIs; they fought with unreliable, low-tech weapons; they killed only soldiers on the other side.

Now consider Hiroshima: one bomb, one plane, 100,000 civilians dead. It will be interesting to see what America--the media, the President, the average citizen--makes of this contrast next summer.

The truth is, America has never come to terms with the atomic bombings, so some soul-searching is not only desirable, it's unavoidable. It will be a time for taking stock, for reflecting on the fact that half a century ago something revolutionary happened and it changed everything. No matter what we think of Hirosima, it has affected us deeply.

This wrenching reexamination, in fact, has already begun. For years, technicians at the National Air and Space Museum have been reassembling the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the bomb over Hiroshima. Next year they will finally put the front section of the B-29 on display. To its credit, the Smithsonian Institution (which runs the museum) plans a comprehensive exhibit that includes not only the bomber but the bomb victims.

The show hasn't even opened and already it's drawing flak. This reveals how raw the wound remains. A group of Air Force veterans have seen a copy of the proposal for the show and are "feeling nuked," as Hugh Sidey tastelessly put it in Time magazine not long ago. Sidey's remark itself shows how completely most Americans have insulated themselves from Hiroshima.

The Enola Gay exhibit will feature a Ground Zero room, reproducing a wasteland of rubble, ruins, and heat-fused material. This is the usual Hiroshima landscape and generally upsets no one; among other things, it testifies to the success of the mission. But this Ground Zero goes a step further, including in the panorama charred bodies and items belonging to dead schoolchildren.

The veterans complain that the exhibit pays more attention to Japanese casualties at Hiroshima than Japanese atrocities earlier in the war. The Air Force Association charges that it is "a slap in the face to all Americans who fought in World War II" and "treats Japan and the United States as if their participation in the war were morally equivalent." Senator Nancy Kassebaum, Republican of Kansas, sent a letter to the Smithsonian calling the exhibit (which no one has seen yet) "a travesty."

Smithsonian officials responded diplomatically, explaining that the treatment of the atomic bombing would be "objective" and would make no judgment on the morality of the decision to drop the bomb. The two curators appear angry, however. One of them, Tom Crouch, asserts that critics of the exhibit have a "reluctance to really tell the whole story. They want to stop the story when the bomb leaves the bomb bay."

From the start, American officials attempted to keep the human side of Hiroshima hidden. They discounted radiation effects, and obscured the extent and identity of the casualties--mainly women and children. (President Truman's initial announcement referred to Hiroshima, a city of more than 300,000, merely as a "military base.") They curtailed access to the atomic cities, censored articles, and seized photographs and film footage that showed the human effects of the bomb.

Suppression was so complete that just months after the atomic bombing, novelist Mary McCarthy was already calling Hiroshima "a hole in human history." Thirty years later, physicist Ralph Lapp, who worked on the bomb, asked, "If the memory of things is to deter, where is that memory? Hiroshima has been taken out of the American conscience, eviscerated, extirpated."

But there is another reason, besides an approaching anniversary, that Hiroshima has special resonance right now.

Since last December, the Energy Department, prompted by an award-winning newspaper series, has released thousands of documents revealing shocking details about the U.S. Government's radiation experiments. Among other things, patients were injected with plutonium without their permission, and radiation was deliberately released from nuclear plants. Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary has won plaudits for promising a full investigation.

But why should we be surprised by any horror story related to our fifty-year experience with nuclear energy? Secrecy, reckless endangerment, and death were there from the beginning--even before Hiroshima. The same organization that built the bomb, the Manhattan Project, simultaneously conducted hideous medical experiments. Thousands of workers in the bomb project were also exposed to hazardous levels of radiation. When the atomic bomb was tested at the Trinity site in July 1945, project leaders feared that a radioactive cloud would sail over populated areas, but rejected evacuation plans. (Fallout would indeed drift one hundred miles downwind.

Then, in the weeks after Hiroshima, officials denied that radiation disease was killing large numbers of Japanese. General Leslie Groves, director of the bomb project, claimed that, in any case, this was a "painless" way to die.

Experimentation and subterfuge have played a major role in America's nuclear program ever since. It all traces back to Hiroshima and the bomb.

It would be fitting, then, if America, as part of its fiftieth-anniversary commemorations, marked the death of the first peacetime victim of the bomb.

On September 21, 1945, The New York Times published a brief Associated Press item headlined Atomic Bomb Worker Died From Burns. Officials at Los Alamos revealed that six days earlier a "worker" had died "from burns in an industrial accident." His name was Harry Daghlian, age twenty-four, identified only as an instructor at Purdue University who had joined the bomb project in November 1943.

That was it. There was no information about the nature of the "industrial accident," when it had occurred, or why the fatality was being reported five days after the fact. This wire service report would be the only mention of the incident in the American media. Only years later would details of the accident emerge.

Daghlian was, in fact, no mere industrial "worker" but a scientist intimately involved with the bomb project. He had even helped assemble the core of the Trinity bomb. Daghlian worked at what was known as the Omega Site, where technicians experimented with pushing hemispheres of plutonium together, then waited for a chain reaction to begin. The trick, of course, was to not let the chain reaction get out of hand. That was why this row of buildings was built distant from the main facility at Los Alamos.

On the evening of August 21, Harry Daghlian was conducting an experiment at the Omega Site when he dropped a thirteen-pound tungsten brick on top of a cabin which held a sphere of plutonium. This caused neutrons to reflect off the critical mass. The air surrounding the cabin started glowing purple--the effect Daghlian had observed around the mushroom cloud at Trinity. In a panic, Daghlian attempted to control the reaction by tipping over the table, but it refused to move. Finally, with his bare hands, he tore away the bricks surrounding the plutonium, allowing the neutrons to escape.

Believing he was not seriously injured, Daghlian left the Omega Site, but within hours he felt sick and went to the hospital. During the following days, Daghlian exhibited many of the symptoms of radiation disease then being reported in Japan (and dismissed as "propaganda" by General Groves and others).

The ironies are tragic and profound. Across the globe, thousands of Japanese lay dying from radiation expelled by a bomb produced at Los Alamos, which now had a victim of its own. Anyone interested in studying what the bomb had wrought in Japan only had to visit Daghlian in the hospital. Anyone who doubted the stories of death-by-radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki could have watched it transpire right at Los Alamos.

Daghlian would hang on for twenty-four days. Then his death would be attributed to "burns" from "an industrial accident." Suppression of the real cause of death was so complete that one year later, when Daghlian's former boss, a scientist named Louis Slotin, died after a similar accident, Time magazine referred to Slotin as "the first peacetime victim of nuclear fission."

Once again the Government had attempted to obscure the cause of death, but was forced to acknowledge the truth about Slotin after Manhattan Project scientists protested.

In just this way, a policy of downplaying the dangers of radiation--what the Manhattan Project officially referred to as its "special hazard"--was established in the United States. For decades this would have severe implications for workers in the nuclear-power and nuclear-weapons industries, for residents of communities adjoining those installations, for soldiers and civilians subjected to dangerous fallout from nuclear tests. Now the results are sadly evident in Energy Department revelations about radiation tests.

Rather than going too far, the Smithsonian's Enola Gay exhibit doesn't go quite far enough. To really convey the impact of the first atomic bomb it should include another display, this one called America Ground Zero. There we'd find Harry Daghlian and Louis Slotin, atomic soldiers and nuclear workers, medical guinea pigs and downwinders--the legacy of Hiroshima.

Greg Mitchell is writing a book with Robert Jay Lifton about the impact of the Hiroshima bomb on America, to be published by G.P. Putnam's next year. Mitchell writes about Hiroshima every August in The Progressive.