Hiroshima Day, August 6, 1945. And now, 71 years on, what are your thoughts?

By 1944 Japan was losing the War in the Pacific, but they became even more courageous warriors when facing defeat. The US General Staff estimated that one million more American lives could be lost before the final victory.

Even so, General Eisenhower, several nuclear scientists, and even President Truman’s own Secretary of War advised against the bomb on moral grounds. Truman (how he must have agonized!) overrode them all, for the sake of those one million American lives.

Five square miles of Hiroshima were destroyed, 80,000 lives lost immediately. Tens of thousands died later from radiation burns, plus cancers taking people twenty and even thirty years later.

And still more war followed in that horrendous twentieth century…by 2001, we ourselves faced 9/11…and so my question, what is the way forward, the way out of all this?

http://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/bombing-of-hiroshima-and-nagasaki    

Not an easy question to answer.

The horrors we witnessed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the lessons we learned there have done much to change our perceptions but we have the benefit of hindsight -- a privilege denied to those who made the decision in 1945.

Yes, it was atrocious but the Japanese had themselves perpetrated many atrocities during WWII. Gladys Aylward, in her autobiography "The Small Woman" (later "The Inn of the Sixth Happiness" starring Ingrid Bergman) said that she could not believe the brutality of the Japanese in China when they had been such gentle folk before the invasion.

In 1945, the war had been dragging on for six long, weary years (almost 4 for America) and the world was tired. Most people linked to the Allied nations would have welcomed almost anything that would help them get back to some kind of normality -- and who could blame them?

So the bomb was dropped.

Of course, not everybody has learned the lesson and while the major nuclear powers understand the meaning of "deterrent" the rogue states do not, and could well precipitate a nuclear holocaust.

But of the major nations, not all politicians are in sync with the rest of the world. Two of the most infamous -- men who stated their willingness to use nuclear weapons -- were Senator Barry Goldwater and now ("If we have nuclear weapons, why can't we use them?") Donald Trump.

Cold War I has passed. Cold War II beckons. It almost makes Matthew 24:6 tenable.

I don't think there is a way out of this cycle Virginia. War has always been and will always be. Kind of makes you ashamed to be a human being. We slaughter each other for wealth, for land, human bondage, in the name of a god. We have one on one killings for cell phones, money, sex, drugs, etc.

I don't have an answer or a cure.

I'm with Hippy on this. 

Our nature is such that we are prone to destroying ourselves. The great contrasts in our disparate cultures and values have to be overcome -I call the sources of most wars- but I question who is really the one to administer the party line. We can be sure there will always be bad guys in need of vanquishing. 

It would take an unprecedented revolution, a worldwide shedding of the old ways that only worked for the privileged few. Sadly Virginia, I can uncomfortably predict: The beat will go on....