Well, we picked up Harry Truman floating down from Independence
We said, "What about the war?", he said, "Good riddance."
We said, "What about the bomb, are you sorry that you did it?"
He said, "Pass me that bottle, and mind your own business."
The Rainmakers, "Downstream"

Back in 1984, my high school band marched in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. We flew into New York on Wednesday, stayed up all night (performing a practice run at 3 or 4 in the morning) and then started marching a little after 8 a.m. After the parade, we spent a couple days doing the tourist sites: the top of the World Trade Center (we stayed in the Vista Hotel, which was part of the WTC complex), the old Federal building near Wall Street (where we saw Gene Simmons of Kiss hanging out in a limo), the American Museum of Natural History and the U.N.

At the time, the U.N. had an exhibit of artifacts from Hiroshima, along with a large number of pictures. The horror of the devastation cannot be exaggerated: children walking around with half their skin melted off, steel warped into shapes by unimaginable heat, entire swathes of a major city turned to white ash. The horror of mankind's darkest moments is never pretty.

I've always been on the non-proliferation side of the nuclear weapon debate. We have enough, we don't need more, etc. And I've always maintained that Nagasaki was an unnecessary bombing--this position becoming stronger given the release of certain Soviet documents detailing Japanese communications immediately after Hiroshima.

But Hiroshima itself is troubling. At some point, someone was going to use an atomic or nuclear weapon. Tests and the like just don't drive the point home like the real thing. Had we not dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, we might well have felt more inclined to go along with a widely-circulated (within the government) plan to perform a pre-emptive strike on the Soviet Union in the late 1940s, dropping dozens of atomic bombs on major Russian cities in the hopes of derailing the nascent Soviet nuclear threat.

Had we not dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, we might well have had to invade the main islands of Japan, killing hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of Japanese civilians with conventional bombs even before the invasion commenced. Or the Japanese might have capitulated beforehand--we took a different path and we just don't know. That's why I think Hiroshima is a tough call, even 60 years down the road.

Dresden, of course, was a far deadlier bombing. More people died, more buildings were destroyed and the cumulative total of the bombs's power was larger. Indeed, I've always felt that Dresden is a far greater crime, given that it was perpetrated to slightly accelerate a process that was almost complete. The Allies didn't need to bomb Dresden, but they did so to punish Germany. It might well be true that the U.S. needed to bomb Hiroshima--with an atomic bomb--to prove to the Japanese leadership that they were, indeed, beaten. I don't see anything in the historical record that proves the case either way.

Bombing Nagasaki three days later, though, was a crime. It had been planned before Hiroshima, and depending on whom you believe, did or did not get separate approval after Hiroshima. Many people say the two blasts were always planned to be done as a set piece, that no one expected a Japanese capitulation in two days. There are some documents that seem to show that Truman approved Nagasaki separately, though they may have been signed at the same time as Hiroshima or they might even be fake (though this is unlikely). Many documents from that time are still classified, and the fact that so many papers are still under seal does mean that someone, somewhere, is still a little nervous about how those events transpired.

And so my parents and I and my children live in the nuclear age. My parents were told to duck and cover. My generation watched The Day After, listened to "99 Luftballons" and learned to simply kiss our asses goodbye. My sons will learn to fear a terrorist strike (maybe a nuclear blast, maybe just a "dirty" bomb). And their children? Who knows?

Hiroshima may have ushered in the Nuclear Age, but it wasn't the cause. More to the point, without a Hiroshima, the anti-nuclear movement would have been stillborn. Those pictures and artifacts from Hiroshima are enough to make anyone sick. Without them (or something like them), all we'd have are these pictures of beautiful mushroom clouds without the human knowledge of how terrible they really are.

I'm not saying we should be thankful for Hiroshima. I am as conflicted about it as I've always been. But every cloud, even a mushroom cloud, has its silver lining, and we must learn the lessons of Hiroshima. Beginning with the fact that mankind has a dark side, one that must be recognized as such. That the lusty desire for mortal conflict is evil. Period. And no amount of speechifying or testifying or flat-out lying can change that. We must march to war painfully, with deep contemplation and regret. To do otherwise betrays the principles of democracy and makes us the tyrants.

Jon Worley thinks the "atomic ballet" at the end of Dr. Stranglelove is frighteningly beautiful.