No more nuke attacks

The story earlier this month on the aging Hiroshima survivors, the hibakushas, and their lament for not having “screamed loud enough” about never using atom weapons again, was moving. The pictures of the three women gave depth to their survivorship and humanity.

The paper’s editorial on Aug. 6 began on a note of reconciliation, “An awful way to win an awful war,” but ended on a sour note with the line in italics, “The Japanese didn’t surrender after Hiroshima.” As if to suggest, because they didn’t, we had to drop another dirty bomb at Nagasaki.

Historically, it is reasonably wellknown that the emperor was by then moving toward a negotiated end of the war. His subjects were being sacrificed without mercy. Our Air Force had been bombing Japanese cities hard for weeks. This included firebombing of population centers, day after day. It is known that the emperor had already identified those leaders he wanted to negotiate the end of the war for his country. This was all known by our side too, and we were hoping that such movement on the peace-front might cancel the need for an Allied invasion from the sea, which would be very costly. But enough was known that pointed to the war’s end as being very near, enough for the second atom bomb to have been considered unnecessary.

May we all strive to make certain that Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain the only cities to ever have experienced a nuclear attack.

JOHN COFFIN

Little Rock