A Thousand Cranes

One event that will be forever associated with August 6th is, of course, the dropping of the first atomic bomb in warfare. What's eerily significant about this date for me is that my great uncle Joe worked on the Manhattan Project, and according to their guest book, he was at my grandparents' house the day the Enola Gay dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima.

I'm not going to get into a debate about whether dropping the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs was moral. I have the hindsight of history and frankly I won't condemn a people for operating within their historical frame of reference, despite my revulsion at their actions. That said, I can't help but wonder at the moralizing that goes on when people discuss Saddam Hussein today. The oft-repeated mantra, "He gassed his own people!" always sounds hollow to me. I'll just note that our nation has killed literally millions of people since August 6, 1945, including hundreds of thousands directly and indirectly in the only nuclear war this planet has ever known.

A message from Pope John Paul II is inscribed on a stone at the entrance of the Peace Memorial Museum in Hiroshima:

"War is the work of man.
War is destruction of human life.
War is death.
To remember the past is to
Commit oneself to the future.
To remember Hiroshima is to
abhor nuclear war,
To remember Hiroshima is to
commit oneself to peace."

ntodd  ¶ 12:02 AM