The Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki appear not as a narrated account of the attacks themselves but as the subject of a fierce dinner-party argument in London. Philip Roth recalls defending the decision to drop the bombs and Harry Truman against charges of war crimes, a position that becomes part of the novel’s portrait of political debate, cultural displacement, and his sharpened sense of national identity.

The Event in the Narrative

Roth introduces the bombings while recounting a dinner among what he calls London’s highest literary circles. During dessert, other guests challenged him with accusations about the American president and the United States’ treatment of Black Americans. Against that backdrop, he says he defended dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The novel offers no account here of the attacks’ military circumstances or their consequences; its focus is on the argument that their invocation provokes in Roth’s adopted social setting.

The Dinner-Party Dispute

The discussion did not end with dessert. Roth recalls defending Truman against war-crimes charges until one in the morning, describing the exchange as one instance of the contentiousness he had developed since moving to England. The episode places the bombings within a broader dispute about American power and responsibility, but the evidence establishes Roth’s defense of the decision, not the precise arguments he used to support it.

Identity and Significance

Roth explains that being both Jewish and American in England had made him contentious; before moving there and attending fashionable dinner parties, he says, he had largely forgotten both identities. The argument over Hiroshima and Nagasaki therefore functions in his recollection as more than a debate over a historical decision: it is one of the encounters through which his national and religious identities become newly prominent. The scene’s emphasis falls on the present-day dispute and on Roth’s response to it, rather than on reconstructing the bombings themselves.