Word: hiroshima
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Certainly almost all who were involved in the Hiroshima decision believed at the time that the Bomb would be effective and that its use was necessary. Both presumptions, applied initially to Japan, were soon to shape all nuclear diplomacy after the war, since the presumptions of necessity and effectiveness would make threats to use nuclear weapons believable. Nixon inherited those presumptions, though he came to question them. He did not believe that the bombing of civilian populations wins wars. Eventually the whole problem was to be made immaterial, once Soviet and American nuclear weapons so grew in numbers...
...missiles as an unfortunate necessity. "Anyway, nobody's safe from 'em anywhere." He does not spend his days worrying over nuclear war but he is almost certain one is coming. "You've got all those toys around. Someone's going to fool with them sooner or later. Look at Hiroshima. The Bomb was already used once. Things are building all the time. The Middle East, Central America. I listen to the radio a lot when I drive my tractor, and they were just sayin' the other day that there was--what was the name of that country? Pakistan--they were...
...potential significance of Hiroshima was never lost on Americans. Even bathed in the kissing and weeping at the end of the war, people realized that the remarkable Bomb that felled an empire and brought the world to rapt attention was not going to be a gift without a price. In the Aug. 20, 1945, issue of TIME, James Agee looked ahead: "With the controlled splitting of the atom, humanity, already profoundly perplexed and disunified, was brought inescapably into a new age in which all thoughts and things were split--and far from controlled." Agee was anticipating an opposition between people...
Forty years now we have been living in that age, no longer new, yet nothing has replaced it. Those born in the atomic age most likely will die in the atomic age, if they do not die because of it. What people saw in Hiroshima was not only the suffering of people; the devastation of a city; the conclusion of a long and deadly war; the development of a scientific-military partnership; a new set of rules for U.S. Presidents and for international politics. It was a vision of the future, a forecast of the world's destruction...
...therefore went about the business of accommodating that unhappy vision, and avoiding it at the same time. Both ends were achieved in the culture, where the collective consciousness could make its fears decorative. Ever since Hiroshima the Bomb has been at the center of films, books, plays, paintings, songs, intellectual life. It has not always played the same part. In the years immediately after Hiroshima, the public seemed not to want to confront the Bomb directly, and so created a culture in which the end of the world was given a sidelong glance. Lately, we cannot seem to get enough...