In the wake of that decision I resigned as the museum's director and left the Smithsonian. Michael Heyman, in office only four months at the time, scrapped the exhibit as requested, and promised to personally oversee a new display devoid of any historic context. Correll, War Stories at Air and Space, At the Smithsonian, history grapples with. The Institution's chief executive, Smithsonian Secretary I. Correll, The Three Doctors and the Enola Gay, 8 John T. The Smithsonian tnstitution, of which the National Air and Space Museum is a part, is heavily dependent on congressional funding. The history wars in Australia is a term which is used to describe the public debate about the interpretation of the history of the European colonisation of. Fifty years later, the National Air and Space Museum was in the final stages of preparing an exhibition on the Enola Gay's historic mission when eighty-one members of Congress angrily demanded cancellation of the planned display and the resignation or dismissal of the museum's director. World War II was over and a nuclear arms race had begun. No war had ever seen such instant devastation. A collection of essays by eight historians address the controversy at the Smithsonians National Air and Space Museum in the early 1990s over the display of the. There it exploded, destroying Hiroshima and eighty thousand of her citizens.
For forty three seconds, the world's first atomic bomb plunged through six miles of clear air to its preset detonation altitude. At 8:15 A.M., August 6, 1945, the Enola Gay released her load.