VICTOR KUMIN - What-purpose-or-function-do-ethics-have-in-governing-scientific-breakthroughs

Grade Level: High School

Social Studies, English Language Arts, Science

In this lesson, students will engage in classroom discussion and writing assignments in which they must reflect on the nature of scientific progress and technological development and their moral and political implications. Students will begin to see that science and technology can raise ethically ambiguous questions for which there is no single right answer.

VICTOR KUMIN The Making of the Atomic Bomb

Grade Level: High School

History, Social Studies, English Language Arts, English Literacy

PBS Learning Media: Truman and the Bomb

Through newsreel footage, archival photos, and interviews, this video segment adapted from American Experience traces the decision-making process that led President Harry Truman to order the dropping of atomic bombs on two Japanese cities in August 1945. Contributing to his decision were the belief that the Japanese were unwilling to surrender, a concern for American lives, a limited knowledge of the atomic bomb’s devastating effects, and a failure to consider other options that might bring the war to a close. 

LINKS OF INTEREST / Video:

Alamogordo, New Mexico, July 16, 1945

Oppenheimer / The Day After Trinity

ABC News: Hiroshima / Why the Bomb was Dropped

LINKS OF INTEREST / Website:

Voices of the Manhattan Project

We’re History

BOOKS

Hideko Tamura Snider describes the lasting impact of that fateful day when she survived the bombing of Hiroshima.

“Every year when the days begin to stretch and the penetrating heat of summer rises to a scorching point, I am brought back to one sunny day in a faraway land. I was a young child waiting for my mother to come home. On that day, however, the sun and the earth melted together. My mother would not come home..“. Hideko was ten years old when the atomic bomb devastated her home in Hiroshima. In this eloquent and moving narrative, Hideko recalls her life before the bomb, the explosion itself, and the influence of that trauma upon her subsequent life in Japan and the United States. Her years in America have given her unusual insights into the relationship between Japanese and American cultures and the impact of Hiroshima on our lives.

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