When you stand in its skeletal shadow, it is hard not to be moved by the silence and utter serenity of the Genbaku Dome. Originally built as an industrial product exhibition hall near the beginning of the last century, it was one of the only buildings in Hiroshima to partially survive the world's first atomic bombing. Hiroshima city council, in the postwar years, debated long and hard whether to demolish the structure that was, for many survivors of the attack, a visceral reminder of the horrors they had endured both during and following the explosion which ushered in the nuclear...