The Light of a Thousand Suns: The Birth of the Atomic Age
by Have paraphrased the title from a well-known book on the nuclear arms race, but the rest of the article is of my own steam. I am a sucker for the big historical stories, and few are larger than the dropping of the Bomb.
Those two bombs dropped on Japan ultimately changed the world, and has seen the planet teeter close to Armageddon on several occasions, but such an early discharge of atomic weapons ultimately saved hundreds of thousands of lives, and kept the Cold War comparatively cool. During the Korean War, General MacArthur was a keen advocate of the use of tactical nuclear weapons to end the conflict, and only the direct invention (and ultimate resignation of the General) of president Eisenhower prevented it. Would the president have been as wary if the earth didn’t already bear the festering scars of a nuclear detonation? I firmly believe that the spectre of a thousand Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s prevented further nuclear exchange for the forty years of the Cold War, irrespective of how close we came to the abyss.
War is a terrible thing, and terrible decisions have to be made so that good may triumph. I will leave the further philosophical debate on the morality of war to greater minds than mine, but it is fair to say that the world needs to remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and be very thankful that it happened sooner, rather than later.
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