Kuznick said, ''but it must include discussions about the decision to drop the bomb.'' ''It is essential that the plane be displayed,'' Mr. Kuznick, the director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University, who initiated the petition along with members of the antiwar group Peace Action, emphasized that they were not opposed to the display.
''It would be offensive not to put it in context.'' ''You wouldn't display a slave ship solely as a model of technological advancement,'' said David Nasaw, a cultural historian at CUNY Graduate Center, and one of more than 100 signers of the petition. Now a group of scholars, writers, activists and others have signed a petition criticizing the exhibit for labeling the Enola Gay as ''the largest and most technologically advanced airplane for its time'' without mentioning that the Boeing B-29 dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. When officials at the Smithsonian Institution unveiled a new home for the World War II bomber the Enola Gay in August, they had hoped to avoid the kind of controversy that had previously plagued efforts to exhibit the airplane that carried the first atomic bomb.
