Sweeping Away a Harsh Cloud : Reacting to controversy, Postal Service will change nuclear-cloud stamp

The U.S. Postal Service, asked by the White House and others to reconsider the controversial design of a commemorative stamp, has appropriately decided to abandon the mushroom-cloud image originally selected to mark the atomic bombings at the end of World War II.

The stamp, one of the commemoratives scheduled to be issued next year to mark turning points in the war, depicted a composite of mushroom clouds created by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings and by postwar tests. Its caption read, “Atomic bombs hasten war’s end, August 1945.”

While it’s factually correct that the dropping of atomic bombs ended the war sooner, the caption and the mushroom cloud-image were insensitive and in bad taste. That imageconveys such a special horror to the Japanese (more than 200,000 were killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki) that Tokyo complained to the U.S. State Department. The White House suggested that different artwork would adequately characterize the historic event.

The new design will show President Harry S. Truman, who authorized the bombings, as he prepared to announce the end of the war. The stamp is one of 50 World War II commemoratives that will have been issued over five years. Next year’s concluding “Victory at Last” series also includes stamps showing the U.S. flag rising over Iwo Jima and the famous photo of a sailor kissing a girl in Times Square on V-J Day. In 1991, a stamp captioned “Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7” showed the battleship Arizona under attack. This too upset some Japanese.

The Japanese revulsion to the nuclear-cloud stamp is understandable. Even in the United States feelings about how the war was brought to an end have changed over the years. The shift to the Truman stamp, while still marking the bombings, will avoid an image that is unacceptable to many, both in the United States and abroad. The decision on the stamp is right.