are we all such old dogs?

my grandfather was
wounded in japan. he bears
the folks no ill will.


yesterday stephen walker, author of shockwave: countdown to hiroshima, was on book-tv discussing his work, and he said some things i have problems accepting but no trouble believing. apparently the united states developed the atomic bomb as a precaution against germany developing a weapon of the same caliber. fair enough. but even after it was indisputable that germany was making no attempt to do so (thanks in no small part to hitler's dislike of "jewish physics"), the u.s. decided they still had to drop it somewhere; the president wasn't about to face the american people with the fact that he'd spent millions of taxpayers' dollars on a weapon that was just going to sit around in a storage facility. so the folks in charge selected japan, even though they had no comparable weapons to speak of, either. there was a fledgling atomic program in japan, but nothing had come of it by that time. someone, at this point, will always attempt to argue that it doesn't make any sense to wait around until something does come of it, and i'd concede to that argument, especially when talking about an enemy who had already attacked us once, if we had dropped the atomic bomb on a target where known atomic research or weapons development was taking place. but that isn't what happened.

the united states selected a target that had been more or less untouched by previous bombings, so the population wouldn't be too emotionally dulled. hiroshima was bordered on three sides by mountains that would significantly magnify the bomb's impact. they studied one hundred and fifty years' worth of weather patterns in the region so they could attack at a time of year when conditions would be conducive to a maximum of destruction. it was known that the bomb let off an incredibly bright flash at the moment of detonation, visible for a radius of between fifty and a hundred miles; a memo was circulated suggesting that loud sirens be released alongside the bomb so people on the ground would look up, and anyone who wasn't killed by the blast would at least be permanently blinded.

there was no military base in hiroshima. there may have been a few hundred military personnel among the tens of thousands of civilians in the city. there was a munitions factory, and some of the torpedoes fired by japan in the attack on pearl harbor may have been built there.

the scientists who had designed the weapon petitioned, pleaded, with the coordinators of the manhattan project to halt its production. they maintained that there was no longer any call for it, and they couldn't see any good coming of the existence of a thing so terrible. robert oppenheimer, the head of the project, intercepted the petitions on their way to president roosevelt and stuck them in a drawer.

this was not a preemptive mission, and it was not the only way to end the war. it was vengeance. it was us showing them.

remind you of anything?

people will always see things the way they want to see them, i guess. i think blind patriotism is an affliction, but other people can't seem to get past the good old days of manifest destiny. from an associated press article published this morning:

A group of veterans offered a...message across the park from the more than 500 activists [in favor of nuclear disarmament]. One sign read: "If there hadn't been a Pearl Harbor, there wouldn't have been a Hiroshima."

In Washington, G.R. Quinn, 54, of Bethesda, Md., held a sign across from the White House reading: "God Bless the Enola Gay," referring to the B-29 that dropped the first bomb.