Time magazine has a pretty damn good cover retrospective on the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings that I highly recommend. Unfortunately, you can't access it online if you're not a subscriber. I'm actually a Newsweek man myself, but the cover grabbed my attention while I was standing in the grocery store buying hummus, condoms, and spam.
60 years since the bombs were dropped and that seems just long enough for us to have forgotten about it, eh? Nukes just don't seem like that big a deal anymore. Just something else for bullshit politicians in bullshit governments to fight over. Yet reading about first hand experiences from H&N, I started to grasp teh immnse power that we silly little beings have harnessed. 350 miles aways and the pilots coudl still see the mushroom cloud.
I wonder if you could see it from space . . .
Another interesting fact I read from the article is how Truman basically inherited the H&N bombings when he took office. There wasn't one soul who thought twice about using them in WWII. If the Eurpoean theatre hadn't for all intents and purposes been won by the time the atom bomb was ready, it most certainly would have been Berlin that would have gotten decimated.
Now, we talk about "nuclear proliferation," but you might as well be talking about hermit crabs. Nukes just aren't as scary as they used to be because nobody really thinks anyone will actually use them.
I wonder though . . .
