Remember Hiroshima and etc.

In one hour it will be 8:15 in Hiroshima. Morning of August 6 there but its still 1:15 PM August 5 in Colorado. There does not appear to be any Colorado “official” commemoration of this event which 78 years ago eliminated an entire city including perhaps 85,000 civilians including women and children. You could go to www.thecoloradocoalition.org web site and brouse the photos and statements of our fearless leaders. You could check out ,”The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (and the Architecture of an American Myth)” by Gar Alperovitz, which is the single best source of analysis and so a useful deep dive into the issues addressed in “Oppenheimer”.   I share this one item on page 439, a November 23, 1945 quote from conservative editorialist David Lawrence of the US News and World Report (then called “The United States News” ):

“The truth is we are guilty. Our conscience as a nation must trouble us. We must confess our sin. We have used a horrible weapon to asphyxiate and cremate more than 100,000 men, women and children in a sort of super-lethal gas chamber–and all this in a war already won or which spokesmen for our Air Forces tell us could have been readily won without the atomic bomb… We ought, therefore to apologize in unequivocal terms at once to the whole world for our misuse of the atomic bomb.”

I still cannot believe Truman went on the air and told us that God had given us the weapon.