by Donald Rosenberry

Created on: August 11, 2009

It has now been 64 years since the atomic bombings of these Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. Most of what we hear about the events these days is either somber reflection on the loss of life, or heated discussion of how necessary it was. Not surprisingly, the majority of the somberness is heard in Japan, while most of the heated debate is heard in the United States. That we as human beings should mourn the instantaneous loss of 210,000 lives is no mystery. The question which always remains is whether those lives truly saved as many others, and was it worth the lingering effects that continued to kill throughout the decades following.

The heated debate is usually framed so that it rationalizes the horror that was nuclear warfare. After all, more Japanese lost their lives in fire bombings and other forms of warfare than died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Mentally, the issue is similar to why the public fears aircraft crashes so much when the loss of life in automobile accidents pales the number of aircraft mishap victims-it is the horror of it, the terror caused by it. In the case of the nuclear bombings, the victims who were vaporized, dying instantly, were the lucky ones. It is those who lingered as their skin burned off and their organs dissolved with excruciating pain both from the burns and the medical treatment who shouldered the most horror. The same fate awaited those who arrived after the attacks to help the initial victims who then found themselves condemned to die. Finally, these were deliberate, consciously-selected civilian targets, and the attack's purpose was to intentionally kill as many as possible while destroying as much of the two cities as could be accomplished in as horrific a manner as possible; pure terrorism.

Sun-Tsu would have been proud, this was the ultimate elevation of his thought "kill one, frighten 10,000." In this case it was kill 200,000, frighten a nation into surrender. Nevertheless, this ancient notion of war completely negates the overwhelming American notion that the United States takes the high moral ground, even in war. By popular covenant, the US doesn't torture, it follows civil rules even while engaged in combat. Standing against these sentiments is the permanent scar that the US is the first and only nation to use the nuclear weapon of mass destruction. WMDs have been used in wartime before, and chemical weapons were banned after World War I precisely because of the horror of their impact. Despite the

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