Dropping the Bomb

listening to K-os - Love Song

today is the anniversary of Hiroshima's destruction, nuclear style. How does one celebrate such an auspicious occasion? How indeed, one may set of fireworks or burn a mock-city, Guy Fawkes style. One might take some time, have a moment of silence. Reading Watchmen again a few days ago and realize how hard it is for me to take a position on it. We grew up taught that destroying Hiroshima was the only way to end a bloody war, that it was neccessary. It's true in a way, if Hiroshima hadn't been bombed, and Nagasaki a couple of days later, the resulting casualties from the invasion of japan would have been greater than the loss of life in both cities.

listening to Nirvana - The Man Who Sold the World

That's not all we have to consider. You might call into account the deaths from radiation poisoning after the fact, you might call into account that we introduced the single worst weapon of mass destruction in history. We introduced mustard gas in the first world war and changed the face of warfare. Splitting the atom changed it again, just as radically. There's no real defence from nukes, and we're making more and better/worse ones all the time. If a nuclear war started now, at this late stage, we'd be looking at the collapse of civilization as we know it, literally a man-made doomsday. We unleashed something we didn't fully understand.

listening to Leonard Cohen - Hallelujah

If we hadn't dropped the bomb we would still have nuclear weapons today, they still would have been developed, even if the Americans hadn't done it. If the war had have gone on, where would we be today, I don't know. It may have been another Vietnam. What would we have to become to win the war, what did we become? The people that would have died, would have been mostly soldiers, they knew what they were getting into. The people that did die were civilians, they were "innocent". But really, what's the difference? They're all people. We mourn them all the same. I've never really been able to fully come to terms with whether it was right or wrong, and there's always been something nagging me that says I should know. That we all should know. That if the time comes again to make that decision, that we would make the right decision. It's something we really have to understand, but it takes knowing ourselves for what we really are. It takes looking at who we are (our history defines us) and facing the fact that we may have been wrong. That we may have done something profoundly wrong. I don't know how I should celebrate, or if I should, maybe the only way to honor its history would be to search it out, to find out for ourselves if we were right or if we were wrong.

pipesmokingprofessor