Hiroshima - 80th Anniversary

Although the two bombs were devastating and many suffered, the alternative of an assault on the Japanese mainland given the determination of the Japanese military to resist would have entailed very many deaths of Allied servicemen and of Japanese civilians. Japan was given in advance the option of surrender by the Potsdam Declaration but even after the bombs there was disagreement in the Japanese government about surrendering.

About 40 years ago I held a lunch in my house for a group of people who were on pilgrimage to Bethlehem from USA. One of the pilgrims was a man who was on the plane which dropped the bomb.
Afterwards he left the military and trained as a priest to spend the rest of his life working for peace and for nuclear disarmament.

One would hope that we could work for international peace without ever killing anyone.

This evening I shall be joining a group in Peebles who will be praying for a better world.

Yes, TerriBull, the current bombs are much more powerful, even those rather cosily named battlefield bombs, a name which might have some think that the radiation would be confined to said battlefields. It won't be, remember Chernobyl.
I wonder if these power mad men think about the power of these weapons or do they think about Hiroshima and Nagasaki and believe that future destroyed cities will be able to be restored to thriving metropolises like those two are now?
As for innocent civilians, they're just collateral damage to these people, look at Putin in Ukraine.

I just remember my mother telling me that haunted her for a very, very long time, she was very much against it being dropped, saying the civillians didn't deserve it, do they ever [sad because they didn' tcommit the atrocious war crimes. Others say, it was needed to bring the war to an end in the far east. Very sobering the fact nuclear bombs now are capable of a mass more devastation than that caused by the atomic bomb. Wasn't Oppenheimer full of regrets after Hiroshima?

Sarnia

80 years on and just look at our world. Held to ransom by power mad men with itchy trigger fingers.

Absolutely. What lessons have we learned? Very few...

I found the Peace Park so moving that I couldn't cope with the museum and DH went in on his own.

No it wasn’t necessary. Japan was being defeated. The USA used the bombs unnecessarily.

One wonders if history would have been different if the bombs had not been dropped - arms race etc.

I've visited some places in Hiroshima and found it all incredibly moving but I suppose it was necessary to take action at the time. It was on television recently - horrendous

80 years on and just look at our world. Held to ransom by power mad men with itchy trigger fingers.

It's 5am in Washington, he's probably sleeping.