By 1944 Japan was losing the War in the Pacific, but they
became even more courageous warriors when facing defeat. The US General Staff
estimated that one million more American lives could be lost before the final
victory.
Even so, General Eisenhower, several nuclear scientists,
and even President Truman’s own Secretary of War advised against the bomb on
moral grounds. Truman (how he must have agonized!) overrode them all, for the sake
of those one million American lives.
Five square miles of Hiroshima were destroyed, 80,000
lives lost immediately. Tens of thousands died later from radiation burns, plus
cancers taking people twenty and even thirty years later.
And still more war followed in that horrendous twentieth
century…by 2001, we ourselves faced 9/11…and so my question, what is the way
forward, the way out of all this?