Word: hiroshima
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...would be a wide gap in the NATO arsenal between "tactical" or battlefield nuclear weapons, and the intercontinental weapons. The NATO TNF will not be ready for deployment until 1983. Meanwhile, the Soviets are steadily deploying the SS-20, and have about 750 warheads-each 15 times or so Hiroshima strength-in place today. In 15 minutes, these weapons could wipe out most of the major military targets and much of the urban fabric of Western Europe...
...everyone wore in his lapel to prove he'd been in it, had done his part. The awful memories of combat and carnage were bathed away in the great national wash of relief and welcome. Hardly any Americans thought much then, or even afterward, about Dresden blasted, Hamburg gone, Hiroshima and Nagasaki reduced to radioactive powder. All of those American firestorms had, of course, consumed innocent civilians. But, the ceremonies said, never mind, evil went down for the count. Ego te absolvo. You boys did what you had to do. Where were you anyway?the Bulge? Anzio? Tarawa...
...makes sense not to face them head on. There are those who never wish to hear about the Holocaust again, contending that it was too horrible even for language. Then there is the matter of avoiding guilt-Why suffer it?-the guilt of not being among the victims in Hiroshima, and the guilt of identifying with the victors as well, the knowledge that the destroyers of the world never came from any planet but our own. Better to hold all that destructiveness at one remove. The U.S. keeps a plane in the air with the capacity to trigger the missile...
...time to see the bomb as a real weapon again, and not an amorphous threat or a political lever. It is time to look straight at its drab snout and recall quite clearly what it once did and still can do. A new book of drawings by Hiroshima's survivors is called Unforgettable Fire. It is time to remember the fire. Whatever considerable use the bomb once served as a diplomatic instrument is passing very quickly now, at a speed directly proportional to the hope of stemming proliferation. But there is still the hope of stemming madness by invoking...
...their stupidity has not neutralized. The mind made the bomb, the mind denied it, and the mind can stop it cold. If that should sound impossible, consider how impossible nuclear fission must have seemed at the start, or how impossible the Holocaust, or how impossible to the children of Hiroshima that Aug. 6, 1945, would turn out to be anything but another summer...