Why War?
The Causes of Conflict

The exhibit is sequenced so the same handful of risk factors, territory, rivalry, power shifts, domestic turmoil, reappear in every zone. (These labels are the exhibit’s own compact distillation, informed by Cashman’s survey of war-causation research; his book is far broader and does not present them as a taxonomy.) They appear first as a static diagram, then in eight historical cases, then as levers the visitor pulls in a simulation. The five-zone grouping is this page’s reconstruction from the designer’s photo sequence, not a documented floor plan; the exhibit is about 2,500 square feet with several distinct rooms, and the physical route is the museum’s.

A sage-grey wall of printed graphics: coloured discs for each cause of war, connected by dashed lines and arrows that all converge on a dark disc labelled WAR. Opposite it, a black quote wall sets historians, generals and novelists against each other on whether war ever settles anything.

The centrepiece: a run of floor-to-ceiling touchscreens, one war per station, in a darkened room. Every station has the same anatomy, a sage header band, then stacked lenses: Geography · Causes of War · Main Events · Pivotal Figures · Technology · Pop Culture. A vertical WARS tab slides out a strip that lets any station jump to any of the eight wars.

A lit hangar bay with full-size Fat Man and Little Boy replicas and an authentic, disarmed B57 thermonuclear bomb under an environmental super-graphic. Copies of the Einstein-Szilard letter and Capt. Robert A. Lewis’s in-flight Hiroshima log hang on the wall. In 2017 Allen owned Lewis’s original log and a signed but unsent alternate version of the Einstein letter (Szilard’s note on it reads “Original, not sent!”); the version delivered to Roosevelt belongs to the FDR Library. A portrait-orientation kiosk, the Nuclear Heatmap, visualises decades of testing and stockpile data, and ends on the exhibit’s question: Are we safer now than ever before?

Angled console tables inside an abstracted 1950s war room, tactical line-graphics on the walls, a glass partition etched with flight paths. Visitors play head of state in factual and fictional crises, with a countdown clock, three advisors, and one panic button per round to reverse a decision. At the end they get a leader archetype.

The exhibit slows down. Wooden touch tables under a wall-sized sepia mural (the Herald photo at top) and a propaganda-poster gallery. Visitors pick a theme, then a person, soldiers, women, children, key figures, and read a scrapbook-style biography built from personal archival images. Trench-art sculptures made from WWI artillery shells sit in the same room.

Belle & Wissell’s early pencil-and-wash renderings. Worth keeping next to the finished photos: the entrance ribbon, the timeline wall, the bomb bay and the touch table all survive from sketch to build almost unchanged.

Sampled from the photographs. Treat the hex values as close matches, not brand-spec numbers.

Photographs are © their credited owners and reproduced here for private reference only.