http://tinyurl.com/6kcyzd

With all the recent nuclear tensions, I think it is important for the world to think a bit on this issue today.

did you mean to link to a picture? I'm afraid you over my head.

JM - today the anniversary of the dropping of the a-bomb on Hiroshima.

I know - but what is the dome?

Ah - Peace Park, got it!

(I was expecting a link to an article on the bomb or something that showed destruction...)

Oh, I see. I was confused as to what the confusion was . . .

I might be a little brain fried.

I was trying to be a little understated. Instead of another preachy article, I thought the image building might be powerful enough.

My younger son surprised me this morning by issuing a well thought out critique of dropping an atom bomb on a civilian center.

Maybe because it's not a multiple of 5 anniversary, there wasn't much educational on the History channel about it.

When we had a Japanese exchange student we learned that it's a BIG deal in Japan every year. We were quite young at the time and we all watched a movie together on the anniversary and talked about it. I feel like America should care the same or more.

My mother gave me a copy of John Hersey's Hiroshima when I was about 11. That is a powerful piece. I haven't read it recently, but it made quite an impression on me. A year or two later, she gave me a copy of Chute's On the Beach. I was already terrified about the prospect of nuclear war with the USSR by then. It's amazing to me how the immanent specter of imminent nuclear war has departed from the cultural consciousness since the 1980s. It's not as if all of the warheads disappeared. Cormac McCarthy's The Road is about the only writing I've encountered in recent years that gave me that same feeling of dread that I remember experiencing back then.

My mother gave me Sadako Sasaki and the Thousand Paper Cranes to read when I was ten. I think about Sadako around this time of year.

Last month I brought my boys to the new Smithsonian Air and Space Museum by Dulles. We spent a LONG time talking about why the Enola Gay was the most important plane in the place.

JTC - I remember my 6th grade social studies teacher (late 70's) requiring us to make a map from our bedroom to the nearest bomb shelter so we could find it if we were alone in the house. In my suburban town, the nearest shelter was almost 3 miles from my house. He also explained how we should pee on a shirt to cover our face if we see the cloud on our way to the shelter. I had nightmares for YEARS about pulling my baby sisters in their little red wagon down the hill as they coughed to death.

Yah. Loved that teacher.

It was verboten in my household to express any sympathy for the victims of the bombs. My grandmother did not even attempt to hide her utter contempt for anyone remotely Asian because of WWII.

About three years ago, she finally got enough emotional distance from what happened to friends and to her husband that she was able to let go of all that hate and anger. I was very proud. (her husband, my grandfather who raised me, so really my dad, was a POW in the Pacific. He was never OK.)

Being raised like it was still the 50s and 60s, we did nuclear drills in my house. I never felt entirely secure in the fact that the mahogany table would actually protect us, but it was the only chance I got to go into the formal dining room outside of holidays, so I didn't argue.

Today's my dad's birthday. He's 71. I just realized that I've heard, several times, his memories about the day the war ended, but never those of his 8th birthday. I'll have to ask him. He had several uncles in the war.

I am so mixed on this issue. The loss of life was immense, but it can be argued that the loss of life if the bomb wasn't dropped would have been worse.

I don't buy the soldier death does not equal a civilian death for the purposes of this argument. Death is death. Civilian or military, how much more of that generation would have been lost?

JTC - RE:Bombs. If the media don't tell it, most people don't know it.

JTC: "The Road" messed me up for weeks. I've read quite a few other post-nuclear-holocaust novels, but none felt so utterly desolate and bleak and terrifying. Felt like a scared kid again, jumping at every mention of nukes on the evening news.

Marissa's Dad- I think that's one thing that makes the discussion about the bomb so tragic for me. It is one of the few instances of a "necessary evil" that I can think of. I really don't like any kind of a calculus involving human life like that, but it seems that that time in history was nearly inhuman.

After laying my grandma's attitude so bare, I feel it necessary to mention that despite her hatred of the Japanese, she never attempted to instill that in me. I think she knew it was misplaced anger, but it was enough to nearly consume her. I'm really not sure how she let it go, but somehow she did.

Some think we were more interested in putting the scare into the Soviets than in really winning the war in Japan. I always thought that the dropping the bomb to save lives argument was a bit of a rationalization.

What I am certain of is that this should be discussed abd not simply treated as a one sided issue, even though I think the Japanese were completely wrong to start the war, and we were right to fight them.