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

How researchers understood the atomic bomb's effects on the human psyche before the recognition of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

In 1945, researchers on a mission to Hiroshima with the United States 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 in which human minds were affected by the advent of the nuclear age. A trans-Pacific researc...