It was a hot August day in Detroit. I was
standing on a street corner downtown, looking at
the front page of The Detroit News in a news
rack. I remember a streetcar rattling by on the
tracks as I read the headline: A single American
bomb had destroyed a Japanese city. My first
thought was that I knew exactly what that bomb
was. It was the U-235 bomb we had discussed in
school and written papers about, the previous fall.
I thought: "We got it first. And we used it. On a city."
I had a sense of dread, a feeling that something
very ominous for humanity had just happened. A
feeling, new to me as an American, at 14, that my
country might have made a terrible mistake. I was
glad when the war ended nine days later, but it
didn't make me think that my first reaction on Aug. 6 was wrong.
Unlike nearly everyone else outside the Manhattan
Project, my first awareness of the challenges of
the nuclear era had occurred—and my attitudess
toward the advent of nuclear weaponry had
formed—some nine months earlier than those
headlines, and in a crucially different context.
<http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/22243>Link
--
Posted By johannes to
<http://www.monochrom.at/english/2009/08/hiroshima-day-america-has-been-asleep.htm>monochrom
at 8/08/2009 08:45:00 PM
