[mburbank]

We didn't even attempt a demonstration. We could have invited the Japanese to watch as we obliterated an atoll. We could have dropped the bomb on a rural section of Japan.

We chose to drop the bomb on a city. We chose to obliterate non combatants, the elderly women and children. We did this for among other reasosns to impress upon the Russians that we were more than willing to use the bomb on civillians.

We are, to date, the only nation that has used a nuclear weapon on another nation. We have never even attempted to examine the ethics of this act. To this day, the very idea of even looking at the question at the Smithsonian caused a public relations disaster.

If, and almost certainly when Nuclear weapons are used against civillians again, we will have been the ones who opened that door. No matter how many lives it may have saved in the long run (and that is always pure speculation) the United States set the precedent for atomic warfare, the wholesale destruction of life in a single, easy moment. We had other options and we chose not to pursue them. As victors we have excorcised the right not to evaluate our actions ever since.

I think our use of the Atom bomb is without a doubt the worst thing we ever did as a country, and is perhaps the worst thing mankind has ever done. I mean that quite seriously. In the scope of history, very little time has passed since the day we destroyed Hiroshima. The ripples from that stone in the pond are still spreading. Our current adminstration is actively persuing the developement of so called 'mini' nukes, a sure indication that the idea that just possessing these weapons is a deterent in and of itself is already fading and being replaced by an idea that nukes could be tactical, just another level of battlefield ordinance.

Wether or not this is a pandora's box that would have been opened by someone sooner or later, we will always be the nation that opened it.