Yellow, blunt-nosed, and roughly the size of a compact car. That is the first thing that struck me, standing before the replica of Fat Man in the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum. It did not look like something that should, by any logic of proportion, have the destructive power to annihilate a city.

On August 9, 1945, at 11:02 in the morning, Fat Man detonated above Nagasaki. By the year’s end, 90,000 people were gone. The museum is quiet in the way that only certain places are quiet — not the absence of noise, but the presence of something heavier. I moved from exhibit to exhibit and the numbers stopped being numbers. They became faces. Schoolbags. A melted glass bottle infused with skeletal remains. A wristwatch stopped forever at 11:02. One survivor, Reiko Hada, was nine years old when the bomb fell. She spent the rest of her life carrying the weight of that morning. “Many hibakusha died without being able to talk about their sufferings,” she said. “They could not speak, so I speak.”

I left the museum thinking about Iran.

Not because the historical parallels are clean — they are not. But because standing........

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