Mushroom cloud

This week's Time magazine has a story on Hiroshima and nuclear weapons proliferation across the world. There are a lot of things I didn't know about what happened on August 6, 1945, and perhaps a few things I'd prefer not to know. One thing I know for sure, I really shouldn't read such things right before falling asleep, as I had a horrible dream about the threat of a nuclear bomb.

What strikes me about this article, and what I was still thinking about when I woke up today, is how blithely the U.S. government made the decision to drop a nuclear weapon on Japan. In fact, it seems, had the weapon been ready earlier, that bomb might have been dropped on Nazi Germany. When the U.S. became aware that the Nazis were working on an atomic weapon, American scientists scrambled to come up with one of our own. There was apparently no question that once it was ready, it would be used. So when it was ready, the mission was to unleash this weapon of great evil on the city of Hiroshima.

Now, the crew of the Enola Gay seemed to only recognize that what they set out to accomplish that day was a feat that would surely end the war. Most of them had no idea of the scope or potential destruction of their mission. Apparently, after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the Japanese figured there was no way the U.S. could have come up with enough materials for more than one weapon like this. They were wrong, and a second one was dropped on Nagasaki a couple of days later, which did, in fact, have the effect of ending the war.

What goes through my head, now, is that surely, SURELY, the leaders who approved such a mission had no idea of the potential destruction of an atomic weapon. The radiation, the mass destruction, the aftereffects that would last years - certainly they couldn't have known what evil they were about to inflict on the Japanese people. One article presents the opinions of Allied leaders:

The discomforting truth is that Allied leaders strode unhesitantly into the atomic age. "I regarded the bomb as a military weapon and never had any doubt that it should be used", Truman later wrote. "[N]or did I ever hear the slightest suggestion that we should do otherwise," Winston Churchill added. Nothing in the record contradicts them. Dropping the Bomb on Aug. 6, 1945, was among history's most notorious foregone conclusions.

The sad thing is that history teaches us that the Allies did the right thing. The war had to be stopped or millions more lives would have been lost. Is this really true? Can we ever really know? I don't know enough about war, or the politics of war, to have a truly educated opinion. But if there was some foreknowledge of the horrid destruction of such a weapon, then certainly, it wasn't the moral thing to do. But we have learned already that what is moral and what is right don't always correspond.

Still, some lessons were learned, I suppose. We learned without a doubt what such a bomb would do to human lives for generations to come. We learned that we could establish power with the threat of nuclear destruction, without intending to drop another bomb. I just hope a harder lesson doesn't come from this - the potential destruction a nuclear weapon can cause in the hands of a terrorist who has the moral turpitude to cause a massive loss of life.