Reply #22: Writing from Santa Fe, just down the road from Los Alamos:

[puebloknot]

I have had reason to consider your comment for many years. My father had just returned from fighting in Europe, at D-Day and The Bulge, and was preparing to deploy for preparations to invade Japan. On a personal level, I might have lost my father in that event. And I agree that had the fighting continued, many more troops and civilians would have lost their lives -- perhaps many more than died at Hiroshima.

Looking at the big picture, we truly opened Pandora's Box when we invented the bomb. I have always been bothered that we did not wait longer before then bombing Nagasaki. The rationale is that "they didn't surrender."

It is easy to recoil in horror at the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We should. But I think it is important to take a look at what it was that inspired the making of the bomb in the first place, and that is the history of the Japanese, and their brutality at Nanking, their fanaticism, their treatment of prisoners of war. Then, we were the conquering heroes, we felt. Now, I shudder to think how much our country has turned in the direction of those same practices. And we are the giant with the bomb many times over.

This is a day when ceremonies are held here in Santa Fe and at Los Alamos in memory of that terrible event at Hiroshima. It is a time to consider that humans aren't for number crunching with regard to which horror would have been the worst. Now we need to consider how we may act out that well-used meme: "Never again." This is a splended day to look to the path we are taking as a nation, and wonder if at some future point, we will be looked upon as the Japanese were, as a people, after WWII. In truth, we don't need to wait for the future. *Japan* is, this day, urging *America* to grow up and behave as a leader of nations.

On this day, every year, this soldier's daughter mourns the loss of life on both sides of the conflict with Japan. We, and they, are much more than the weapons we create, the wars we engage in. Much more, we are all people who want to live and love life, and honor differences rather than trying to obliterate them.

The questions will go on. What is moral in war? How do we avoid war? What should we be teaching young people to further peace, so that the unthinkable will not ever be thought of again?

Peace.