1 Observers who watched the controversy unfold wasted their energies because they were not permitted to judge the end product for themselves. The opposition forces who brought down the project lost, for history will view them poorly: the resulting literature will see to that. The NASM and the Smithsonian lost, not only for the obvious reasons of wasted effort and loss of prestige but also because the cancellation broke off, irreversibly so far as can be seen, a promising new direction for the NASM. With the cancellation of the original Enola Gay exhibit, everyone lost. In June of that year, the NASM opened another version of the exhibit, sharply reduced in size and radically expurgated in content. During its many years of preparation, the exhibit project became so controversial that the Smithsonian canceled it on 30 January 1995.
To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum (NASM) had planned to open an exhibition centering on the Enola Gay, the bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
