Word: bomb
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...remember vividly. I was in New York City when the Bomb fell. I had returned from the South Pacific and was stationed at the Bureau of Aeronautics, 50 Church Street, doing legal work on military contracts. I remember very clearly that I was going home that night in the subway, and I saw a newspaper with a headline. Something like MASSIVE BOMB DROPPED ON JAPAN. I didn't give it much thought because we had heard about the buzz bombs in London and the other new weapons that were used during the war, and I said, well, this is just...
...summer of 1945 may have been the last time in his life that Nixon had the luxury of paying casual attention to the Bomb. Nuclear weapons were to color politics from that time on, and Nixon's political career was to extend from Congress in 1947, to the Senate in 1951, to the vice presidency under Dwight Eisenhower from 1953 to 1961, to the presidency in 1969 and again in 1973. His view of Hiroshima is that the bombing not only brought nuclear weapons into international diplomacy but that it brought America into the world. What he saw in Hiroshima...
...Should the Bomb have been used against Japan? There's no simple answer. [General Douglas] MacArthur once spoke to me very eloquently about it, pacing the floor of his apartment in the Waldorf. He thought it a tragedy that the Bomb was ever exploded. MacArthur believed that the same restrictions ought to apply to atomic weapons as to conventional weapons, that the military objective should always be limited damage to noncombatants...
Should nuclear weapons be abolished? Impossible, he says. Without nuclear weapons the U.S. would always be a superpower because of its economy. But the Soviet Union would not be a superpower without the Bomb. In any case, the point is moot...
...looking at it another way, in terms of whether or not the bombing of Hiroshima saved lives in the long run, most observers agree that it did. If we had invaded the main islands, it would have cost perhaps a million American casualties, certainly more than a million Japanese. How many civilian deaths did the nuclear bomb cause? Well, it cost a total of 200,000 in two places, and that's terrible. But it may have saved ten times that number...