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¡ Kai Bird is a former journalist who now describes himself as a historian. In 1965, he said the evidence “strongly suggests” that “the bombs were used primarily to demonstrate to the Russians the enormous power America would have in its possession during subsequent negotiations.” He is a senior research scientist at the University of Maryland and the author of The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, published in July 1995. ¡ Gar Alperovitz is a founding father of revisionist theory about the atomic bomb. Revisionist scholars, peace activists, writers, and others are pressing their counterattack in books, journals, and statements to news media as well as through various public programs and platforms. Veterans’ organizations have praised the Enola Gay exhibition now running at the Air and Space Museum, but those who backed the original exhibit plan are now up in arms. Harwit, director of the museum, resigned May 2, saying that nothing less would satisfy the critics. The fire never really went out, though, and Dr. The Smithsonian canceled the ill-fated exhibit last January in favor of a straightforward exhibit that would display the Enola Gay without political trappings. More than 30,000 letters poured in to the Smithsonian, and patrons and subscribers quit in droves. Other veterans’ groups, Congress, and the news media picked up the issue and scrutiny became intense. It was the Air Force Association that exposed the museum’s plan to use the Enola Gay as a prop in a politically rigged program about the atomic bomb. The previous exhibit, “The Last Act: The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II,” was canceled when it became an intolerable political and financial liability for the Smithsonian Institution,of which the Air and Space Museum is a part. This program - as all the world must know by now - is not the one the curators originally had in mind. More than ninety percent of the comment cards turned in by visitors expressed favorable reaction. The exhibit opened June 28, and by the end of July, 97,525 people had gone through it. Every morning, a long line forms at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., to see the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima fifty years ago.