70 Years Later...

Hiroshima - August 1945

Even 70 years after the fact, I don’t think there is anything the American government or people can do to apologize adequately for the use of two atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki Japan in August of 1945.

It would be futile to even try... and I'm not sure the Japanese people could ever forgive us.  I doubt that I could.

These attacks were violent, horrible and controversial - even within the US government at the time- and were designed "to end the war with Japan at the earliest possible moment"... which they did.

But they were also attacks that were carried out with many tragic and unforeseen consequences we are still dealing with today.  The use of these two weapons… code-named Little Boy and Fat Man changed the world forever.  

As a country America will forever bear the scar of being the first and only country to have ever used nuclear weapons. Just as the Japanese people will forever bear the scar of being the first and only victims of such a “rain of ruin from the air”… as then president Harry Truman said in announcing the attacks.

And like all of human history we can not change what has been done… we can only hope to learn from our mistakes. While considered necessary and triumphant by many of those in this country at the time… these attacks also set the stage for the last 70 years worth of fluctuating political tension, dangerous brinksmanship, financial hardship in many countries and a sense of genuine fear around the globe as people learned to “stop worrying and love the bomb”… growing up as members of the “Strangelove generation”.

If there is any “greater good” (which are horribly ironic and maybe even inappropriate words to use) that could have come out of the use of these bombs it is not the often heard justification that they saved American lives… it may be that they have just saved lives. Millions… if not billions of lives around the world.

Because I am hopeful that the world has actually learned a lesson from the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki... and that this is why we haven’t seen another such weapon used as an act of war or aggression since. The use of these two bombs over Japan in 1945 has hopefully proved to the world that the indiscriminate destruction and horror unleashed by the use of nuclear weapons is beyond the shear comprehension or ability of even most evil of forces or bitterest of enemies to use against one another.

We can hope.