Katy Steinmetz for TIME
Little Susie can sit in George Washington’s boat as he crosses the Delaware. Little Tommy can stand on a scale next to William Howard Taft, our portliest of commanders. And in the room with Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower, they can each take turns dropping nuclear bombs.
Madame Tussauds, the famed wax museum, revealed an elaborate exhibit in Washington, D.C., for Presidents’ Day last week. In it are all 44 presidents, and many come with interactive environments for the kiddies. Granted, anything that gets young people more engaged in presidential history should get oodles of leeway, but let’s take a closer look.
The “bomb barrel” in Truman and Eisenhower’s room, though newly placed in this exhibit, has been Truman’s wax-cessory since 2007 (and came to NewsFeed’s attention with the opening of the gallery last week). Decorated with a nuclear symbol and a big, black button, it now sits in a World War II-themed room. Above the barrel there is a sign with an arrow pointing down that reads, “Could you push the button to start a World War?”
(More on TIME.com: See pictures of the presidents at Madame Tussauds)
The writing on the barrel gives more accurate context, given that this bomb was really ending a World War. It reads, “Could you push the button to attack?” If said kidlet does choose to push the button, alarms immediately go off. There is a nearby bunker to hole up in, but, as one child described the event after making the decision to attack, it’s still “kind of scary.” The same child also said it was “cool,” which is where the inclusion of this kind of element can get sticky —“cool” not really being the ideal reaction to the simulated killing of hundreds of thousands of Japanese people.
Of course, children are unlikely thinking much, if at all, about what they’re doing. And it is the rare child indeed who can resist the allure of the button (as Baby Plucky once so perfectly epitomized in Tiny Toons). Remember The Box, that movie where financially-strapped parents agonize over whether to push a button that would give the $1 million but also kill someone they don’t know? If the protagonists had instead been 7-year-olds, the whole film would have been over in about 15 minutes.
Dan Rogoski, the general manager of Madame Tussauds in D.C., emphasizes that it is on this level that visitors should be viewing the button. “It’s just a fun interactive. I don’t think we should take anything too seriously,” he says. “We do a lot of student groups here, and for kids to run around and press buttons and hear sirens go off, they tend to get a little excited, and it just helps the overall experience.” To paraphrase: Thinking about it being a grotesque exercise is simply thinking about it too much.
Rogoski says the button isn’t necessarily connoting atomic bombs either, given the wording in the sign above it (though the symbols are pretty hard to argue against). “It is part of our history as well, so we wanted to be sure to have that in there,” he says.
Adding more context to that history, to show what dropping an atomic bomb would really mean, isn’t really an option. Madame Tussauds is, after all, a wax museum, not the Smithsonian. And on some level, we should probably just be grateful that they’re spending time and money to make a life-like figure of Millard Fillmore instead of just molding 10 different versions of Justin Bieber. That said, it’s still hard to get rid of that icky feeling one gets when watching kids pretend to use atomic weapons just for fun.
(More on TIME.com: See pictures of a Hitler exhibit in Germany)