genshi bakudan

Today was the 60th anniversary of the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima. A couple of thoughts...

1. On the news this morning, about fifteen minutes was devoted to a respectful reflection, interviews with survivors and present-day residents of Hiroshima, etc. (Made me cry....one of the survivors talked about how she still has a moment of terror every time a camera flash goes off...) Then on to the typhoon in Okinawa and a guy who keeps 300 bugs in his apartment. Now, think about it. If anyone had ever dropped a nuclear bomb on the U.S., CNN would be all-bomb-all-the-time on every anniversary forever after.

2. Fifty thousand people were killed instantly, and another 100,000-plus died of their injuries later. And people have the nerve to say, of Sept. 11, that "nothing like this has ever happened before." Uh, scuse me but, yes, it has, and we did it.

3. And here's what "we," or rather our esteemed leader FDR, had to say about it:

But the greatest marvel is not the size of the enterprise, its secrecy, nor its cost, but the achievement of scientific brains in putting together infinitely complex pieces of knowledge held by many men in different fields of science into a workable plan. And hardly less marvelous has been the capacity of industry to design, and of labor to operate, the machines and methods to do things never done before so that the brain child of many minds came forth in physical shape and performed as it was supposed to do.

This wasn't some reflection in a memoir fifty years later--this was the friggin' press release the day after it happened. How cold-blooded can you get?

4. If the U.S. were anything resembling a "civilized" nation, we would apologize. But no, we can't do that, because that might cause people to have some doubt about our current endeavors in Iraq etc.....

Gotta go.......

More: here, here, and here.