Thank God For The Bomb?
An editorial from the August 12, 2005 issue of The Week Magazine by Editor-In-Chief William Falk:
It’s quite possible that I owe my existence to the A-Bomb. Sixty years ago this week, my father was on a troop ship off the coast of the Philippines, awaiting the order to invade Japan. He’d seen heavy combat in Europe, with the 86th Infantry Division, and was among the first U.S. troops to cross the Rhine into Germany. But every available American soldier — more than 750,000 — had been summoned for the final battle of the war. In the first wave of the invasion, 14 combat divisions were to land on Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s main islands. Another 22 divisions, including my father’s, would land three months later on Honshu, and fight their way through Japan’s formidable defenses to Tokyo. My father, then 21, did not have a high expectation of returning home.
Then the U.S. unveiled its doomsday weapon. Historians are still debating the morality — and necessity — of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But among the soldiers who were to be part of the Invasion force, there was only gratitude. "We cried with relief and joy," wrote former soldier Paul Fussell, in a book about his war experiences. "We were going to live. We were going to grow up to adulthood after all." Their lives — and mine — were purchased at a price. To shock the enemy into submission, the U.S. deliberately targeted civilians, incinerating more than 200,000 men, women, and children. And from that day forward, we’ve had to live with the knowledge that a single madman, with a single bomb, could turn entire cities to ash. Nine nations now possess nuclear weapons, with more to come; we can only wonder if the world has seen its last mushroom cloud.
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