Hiroshima

Today is the anniversary of the atomic bomb drop on Hiroshima at the end of WWII. Whether or not the a-bomb was "justified" is something we will probably never stop debating as a culture. Sample arguments include this condemnation of the bombing by William Blum and this defense of the bombing by Jamie Glazov. Both pieces do a good job representing the opposing sides.

For a more relevant take, James Carroll draws together the significance of Hiroshima with our current Iraqi preoccupation in an opinion piece in today's Boston Globe. His last two paragraphs are as uncompromising as you will probably ever see in a mainstream American publication:

If we used the nuclear weapon as much to send a signal to the Soviet Union as to end World War II, then all the wickedness unfolding from that use - not only the arms race, but the demonic new idea that national power can properly depend on the threat of mass destruction - belongs to us. If Saddam Hussein wants weapons of mass destruction for the sake of the strategic diplomatic power they will give him, he is playing by rules written in Washington. There are two ways to use the nuke - as a source of world destruction, and as a source of world power. We did the former at the end of World War II, which was the exact beginning of the Cold War. We have been doing the latter every day since. And why should Hussein not want to imitate us?

The bombing of Hiroshima was a great crime. That the United States of America has yet to confront it as such not only leaves the past with unfinished business, but undercuts the possibility of present moral clarity about the exercise of American power and leaves the earth's future tied to a fuse that we set burning 57 years ago today.

Update: Conservative columnist Lowell Ponte draws an analogy between Hiroshima and Baghdad, albeit from a perspective quite dissimilar to Carroll's.