It's Hiroshima Week here at WilliamStroock.blogspot.com as we commemorate, celebrate, analyze and deconstruct one of the momentous events in human history.
The atom bomb and the destruction of Hiroshima are uniquely American events. Most European wars end with a treaty and very rarely a decisive victory.* The treaty of Westphalia (1648) bought peace to an exhausted Europe and ended the 30 Years War by resetting things the way they had been.
But American wars (the existential ones) end with a great victory or event , Yorktown in 1781, Appomattox in 1865, and Hiroshima.
Forty years later us kids knew all about Hiroshima and the bomb and counted the Manhattan project as great American achievement, like the Moon Shots.
Back during our professorial days we'd try to get some students to say they opposed dropping the bomb. Only one or two ever did, and even then they seemed uncomfortable with the unpleasantness of the act, not with the act itself. Which is quite right. It was an awful thing. Most sensible people understand President Truman did what had to be done.
*Prussia's triumph over France in 1871 was all the more traumatic for France becuase of it's uniqueness to their history.
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