75 year ago, we dropped the Bomb

The Imperial War Museums (there are multiple locations) in Britain seem remarkable institutions. As a younger friend exclaimed after a visit, "that could be a peace museum!" In a way unlike how such an institution might act in the U.S. of A., their culture treats wars soberly, as terrible, anti-human, eruptions, not occasions for bluster and chest beating.

For the occasion of today's anniversary, IWM asks:

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were experiments in a new kind of warfare, whose full implications were not entirely understood at the time. The bombing of these cities in August 1945 brought an end to the Second World War, but at a terrible cost to the Japanese civilian population, and signalling the dawn of the nuclear age. What had led to the fateful decision to deploy these new weapons of mass destruction?

As a confirmed peacenik, I recoil from the atrocity that my country perpetrated to end the war of my parents' time. The scene in the video in which Churchill, Truman, and Stalin appear to be yucking it up appalls. War breeds more war; Hiroshima and Nagasaki only make macabre sense in the context of years of brutalizing, coarsening combat. As well, the Pacific war between Japan and "the West" -- Britain and the United States -- was a race war. Both sides routinely denied the shared humanity of the other.

I also know, I have no business judging. Future generations, if there are any, will condemn mine for our profligate addiction to fossil fuels.

At the annual ceremony at the peace memorial site at Hiroshima this year, journalists report the crowd was diminished. Many survivors have died; some of those who remain alive stayed away for fear of the coronavirus.

"Despite the health risks, a relatively small number of survivors attended this year. They believed that 'they’ve come this far' and 'can’t quit,' Mr. Sakuma said, adding that 'sending this message from Hiroshima is extremely important.' ...

... The United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, who was not able to travel to the event because of the virus and delivered remarks by video, issued a stern warning about the dangers the world faced as international arms-control regimes began to break down.

"'Today a world without nuclear weapons seems to be slipping further from our grasp,' he said, adding that 'division, distrust and lack of dialogue threaten to return the world to unrestrained nuclear strategic competition.'"

After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we no longer have the excuse of not knowing.