Tom Sweetnam
Platinum Member
We didn't drop an H-bomb. We dropped atom bombs.
President Clinton's White House staff adviser for issues pertaining to WWI and WWII, Professor Paul Fussell, writes in his essay collection, 'Thank God for the Atom Bomb' about being a young infantry lieutenant on Okinawa while the mainland invasion of Japan was about to get underway. He describes the great storage yards at the port city of Naha where 400,000 coffins were off-loaded in anticipation of American deaths during the first 8 months of the battle for the mainland. War planners believed the battle might last well over a year and could cost as many as one million allied lives.
Also germane are 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb' and 'Dark Sun' by Pulitzer Prize winning historian Richard Rhodes. The first is as the title implies; the second is a fascinating if augural history of the development of the hydrogen bomb. In the latter, Rhodes argues very convincingly that the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan actually saved tens if not hundreds off millions of lives since the events. Humanity has never used them since. It's the very acknowledgement of their existence and our comprehension of what they can do, that's kept wars over the past 70 years only atrociously homicidal rather than outright apocalyptic. It's humanity's collective understanding that an exchange of hydrogen weapons could mean the end of life on earth, that's keeping our suicidal impulses marginally in check.
