Seventy-nine years ago today, the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on the city and people of Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later we dropped a bomb of slightly different design on the city and people of Nagasaki. Two hundred thousand people were killed immediately. Survivors, a dying cohort, live on with varying degrees of disability.
The New York Times has produced a sensitive introduction to the remaining hibakusha. Here's a gift link.
The arrival of the Atomic Age had intense impacts on the childhoods of my age cohort, American children of '50s and '60s. We knew we might be blown away if the powers-that-be miscalculated. We practiced absurd "duck and cover" drills in elementary school. Most of us knew these exercises were what we later learned to call "security theater." (Did the adults put us through this to push back against their own secret terrors? I wonder.)
Now we scarcely think about the Bomb at all. The kind of people who specialize in these things fear we're in as great danger of blowing ourselves up as we've ever been.
But the worst hasn't happened yet. Seventy-nine years ...
1 comment:
My Dad used to tell us those "duck and cover" exercises were actually duck and kiss your ass goodbye exercises.
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