Seventy-Four Years Gone-A Third Atomic Bomb?

There may be ample immediate reasons closer to home, recent outrages to command attention and forgo seventy-four years’ memory.

Nevertheless, I raise up this day when just past 8:00 in the morning, local time, Hiroshima was next-to wholly leveled by the first deployed atomic weapon. 

I am convinced that, and I read well more in Second War History than in others, that Mr Truman made the correct, if deeply fraught, decision. And I say this knowing well the range of domestic and international political and strategic circumstances that made for his decision. Sending up to a million more Americans to die or be maimed in island-to-island, city-to-city, village-to village combat in what would have been a run-up to a sixth year of war would have been, in the face of Imperial intransigence, worse. And worse, in part, because of the countless additional Japanese civilian deaths that would almost certainly have resulted from an invasion, and on every island. 

As I have written elsewhere, had Germany not caved in early May, had held on over summer, after by any objective measure, a nation with even vaguely proper leadership might well have, had I been about and had my opinion mattered, I’d have advised three potential atomic explosions, one over Berlin.