The Bomb was published by City Lights Books in 1995 — appropriately, given that imprint’s association with radical dissent. It is a short book (under 100 pages) but an intensely personal one: Zinn served as a bombardier in the US Army Air Forces during World War II and participated in one of the war’s final bombing raids — the destruction of Royan, a French town, using napalm, weeks before the German surrender. That experience — dropping incendiaries on a civilian population for no discernible military purpose — radicalized him permanently against the logic of aerial bombardment.
From this personal experience, Zinn builds an argument against the orthodox justification of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. He challenges each element of the conventional narrative: that the bombs were necessary to prevent an invasion of Japan; that they saved hundreds of thousands of American lives; that Japan would not have surrendered otherwise. Drawing on diplomatic history, he argues that Japan was already seeking to surrender, that the bombs were dropped primarily to demonstrate American power to the Soviet Union, and that the decision was made by a small group of men without democratic deliberation.
The book’s power comes from the combination of personal testimony and historical argument: Zinn is not an abstract moralist but a man who dropped bombs himself, who knows what it means and what it costs, and who refuses the comfortable evasion that “it was war.”
Collecting The Bomb
First edition (City Lights Books, San Francisco, 1995): Trade paperback original (City Lights “Open Media” series).
Market values:
- First edition, signed: $50–$150
- First printing, very good: $10–$25