Summary

Chapter 3 opens with small talk between Dr. Cohen and Alicia, before he again asks about her father. He asks if any of the scientists he worked with, to Alicia’s knowledge, later entered therapy. Alicia declines to answer definitively. She reveals that her father died about four years after her mother, when Alicia was fifteen. Asked if he felt guilt about his work on the atomic bomb, she says, flatly, that he did not. But, she offers that he was “one of the scientists who went into Hiroshima after the war to report on the damage,” and that he was “sobered by what he saw” (61). She describes her father’s stance on the atom bomb as pragmatic: he thought more lives would have been lost in a land invasion of Japan, and that the bomb actually allowed Japan to save face, given that...